Didyabringyagrogalong?

If you were passing Station Pier this evening, and thought you were seeing things, don't book your emergency optometrist appointment just yet. For the "New" Spirit of Tasmania was indeed loading up some two hundred "shitbox" cars, with pirate-dressed drivers, on the final leg of their charity rally to Hobart.

Decked out with crazy paint jobs and sporting cheeky team names like Trough Lollies, Two Dicks Outback and Didyabringyagrogalong, the officially sub $1000 cars had driven the road less travelled from Mackay to raise money for the Cancer Council. And with almost $1.5 million banked, it looked like there'd be plenty of well deserved celebrations going on overnight.

En Garde

Port Melbourne is hardly famed for its farmyard animals, so the sight of a portly chicken freely wandering the pavements of Rouse Street must surely raise many a neatly plucked eyebrow.

Although this hen actually seems convinced that it's a guard dog, as it barks a warning to passers by of what is presumably its home. Along with the private fish market next door, this is a delightfully nostalgic corner of town.

River of rosé

Drivers heading into the city over the West Gate bridge have had a bit of a spectacle to their left this week, with one of the lakes of our very own Tiger snake haven turned pink. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was Pink Ribbon day, or perhaps that there'd been a discharge of some noxious chemical from the landfill site buried beneath Westgate Park.

However Parks Victoria offered a surprisingly natural explanation for the salt water transformation. With the completion of bridge works it's now possible again to cycle through the park and (twice) under the bridge to reach the, still subsidised, punt. You might want to hold your nose as you pass the pink pond though.

Clarice Road

As desperately antiquated sources of community information go, the town's mustard yellow Civic Guides are, right now, blisteringly up-to-date. Well insofar as the advertisers of "local services" appear to all still be trading anyway. It's a little hard to be sure of this point as half of them are from South Melbourne, the reach of the map having been extended accordingly. It's a somewhat amusing indication of the update interval of these "guides" that Bank of Melbourne can have died, gone to heaven, and been resurrected since its appearance on the previous incarnation.

Still, it's a whole lot better than this guide to Port Melbourne which, aside from containing the kind of overtly flattering language that the business association likes to peddle, contains a list of what appear to be phantom restaurants. I can't say for definite that the Komeyui Japanese restaurant on Bay Street (which was for a long time prior a French restaurant) never traded as Amber Indian Restaurant. However I am confident that we've never had a Clarice Road Sandwich Bar, largely as we don't have a Clarice Road ... on this matter the Civic Guides and I agree.

Precious memory?

There can be few cities in the world where couples routinely go out of their way to have official wedding photos taken in front of the long distance ferry terminal. Admittedly Port Melbourne is easier on the eye than most (including, it has to be said, Devonport on the opposite site of the Bass Strait), but it's still remarkably incongruous seeing brides stumbling awkwardly across the beach, whilst simultaneously flicking sand into their trails.

Today's happy couples were treated, not just to near perfect weather, but also to the backdrop of a second maritime monster in the form of Voyager of the Seas. Apparently the 3,800 cashed-up passengers aboard the mega cruise ship were estimated to spend a million dollars during their day-trip. However, unless they were very well camouflaged, none of them seemed to make it as far as Bay Street, let alone Gasworks park where they could've sat in the sun enjoying a free concert from The Twoks.

Snail pace

It's not just Grid Maps that seem to believe that Bay Street shopping heaven starts somewhere around seven:am. This tourist-oriented sign on the corner of Rouse Street continues a Port Melbourne trend for bizarre estimated walking distances given that Miishu, and a dozen other shops, lie literally within feet.

Perhaps the likes of Thomas Dux et al weren't there when this sign was installed, but the same surely can't be said for the few remaining Victorian shopfronts on the other side of Bay Street.

Let's do the time warp

If you get off the tram at the Graham Street stop, you'll find a sign pointing towards Bay Street suggesting an estimated walking time (downhill it would seem) of four minutes...

...then approximately 2 minutes later when you're beside the beautiful overpass, having walked in the indicated direction, you'll come past this mathematically puzzling sign (and the sky may suddenly cloud over)...

So the inevitable questions are: What route did the person who came up with the 4 minute sign take to achieve that time? Was there once a little skate board beneath the little man's feet? Did the powers that be worry that an accurate 8 minute estimate might deter visitors drawn to the shopping Mecca that is Bay Street from actually disembarking? Or is this one of several wormholes lurking within the district?

You should see us now

What's with all those cheesy banners along Bay Street? I suppose they're meant to help us identify with the individual personalities of local businesses, and in the process somehow enhance the sense of community. At first glance it seems that they've received universal support, however if you look closely you'll see that there's actually only 7 or 8 faces repeated along the strip. The community 'face' of faceless corporation Nando's is particularly amusing...

On the bottom of each banner is the tag line "You should see us now" (albeit in a font too small to be readable from ground level). Stripped of its advertising agency wrapping, this seems to translate to "Port Melbourne - it's not the dump you remember". Let's look forward to a time when the town is a little more sure of itself ... and not publicly represented by a chicken burger.