MelbourneStaycation.com

Here are the 2012 dates for some of my favourite Melbourne festivals.  I will be sharing more with you about these festivals as the year unfolds.  I hope these dates help with planning your year!  If you click on the festival name, it will give you a link to the festival.  If I’ve blogged about [...]

There is a magical quality to the Nicholas Building.  It isn’t the architecture or even the location.  It is a feeling that you are about to discover something new.  I thank all the artists who have lived and worked in the building for that.  Because I think their personal voyages of self discovery must have [...]

On sultry Summer nights we would cycle in, and prop our bikes at the end of the lane.  On dark Winter evenings, we would pile into our housemate’s little white van, and park it in the grounds of the nearby church.  It was our reward at the end of a day of study: jazz and [...]

Sixteen years ago, the mighty red brick Substation building was like a slain dragon. Its once shiny scales were gone – every one of its windows had been smashed. The guts of the building were in a state of decay. However, local resident Darren Williams had a vision. A group of artists shared that vision. [...]

Frivolous, flirty and fun describe Madame Brussels, a bar in Melbourne’s CBD.  Emerge from the lift, and into an English garden party, with a twist of Oscar Wilde.  You are in a lounge of pink, green and white.  It leads to an outdoor terrace.  Staff step by in their little white tennis shorts and skirts.  [...]

A Sydney photographer explores a different suburb of her city each week in the blog @52suburbs. She discovers a microcosm of the world in her own city. If you’re having a staycation in Melbourne, you can do the same. In this vein, I visited Bikaner Cafe in ‘Little India’, Dandenong. Named after a Rajasthani town, [...]

Hidden up some stairs and ’round a corner in the Athenaeum building, there is a 170 year old library.  A sense of history pervades the Melbourne Athenaeum Library.  The Athenaeum is said to be Melbourne’s oldest cultural institution and was founded in 1839 as a Mechanics Institute. One of its objectives was to further literary [...]

One of life’s little pleasures is relaxing in a hot tub when it’s cold outside.  The Japanese Bath House in Collingwood is a great place to do this.  Like all traditional Japanese bath houses, there are separate rooms for men and women.  The baths are not to get clean – you wash yourself before entering [...]

  Do you ever get cabin fever?  I find it sets in if I am at home for too long.  It comes on suddenly and then I really need to get out – to somewhere I want to go, rather than somewhere I have to go.  On a recent afternoon like that, I headed to [...]

We expected Harry Potter and his classmates to file into the dining room and take a seat at the long tables with their sturdy wooden chairs. However, if these wood panelled walls could talk, it would not be of wizardry, but of deals done and laws negotiated. We were at Parliament House, where all Victorian [...]