The Australian Impressionists

I spent a couple of days hiking around Melbourne, seeing and learning as much as I could about the city and its history. On the second day of my wandering, I found myself captivated by the National Gallery of Victoria. I go into some detail in my book about the history and development of painting [...]

Melbourne

Melbourne is the most European of Australia’s cities. This is due as much to the sudden, stunning wealth generated by the Gold Rush in the 1800s as it is to Melbourne’s settlement history.
Melbourne was settled by free men, not by convicts. It started as a village for cattlemen, and grew at a comfortable pace—until the [...]

Mark Twain in Melbourne

The day after I returned to Adelaide from Kangaroo Island, I departed from South Australia. I would return later in this trip, and I have visited SA each time I’ve returned to Australia, but this first visit was at an end. A Greyhound bus carried me across the miles, and I had soon crossed into [...]

Sheep and Seafood

There is the usual range of jobs on Kangaroo Island that one would associate with a small town near a geologically significant tourist destination—workers in government, retail, hotels, and restaurants, park rangers, scientists. But the majority of the non-tourist income is from sheep ranching and seafaring—or, more specifically, fishing. I was too early for the [...]