MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: Botanical Garden and Veterans Memorial

Flowers in the Royal Botanic Garden, Melbourne, Australia

In honor of Veterans Day, here is an excerpt from my diary of our three-month stay in Melbourne, Australia in 1999.

On Saturday we drove to the Royal Botanic Garden which is on the other side of the city center.  This huge park has extensive walking paths and all sorts of  native and exotic trees and flowers.  We saw several new birds and we are told that this is the place to go to see the fruit bats.  These huge bats, which have wingspans of four feet, apparently love to eat the fruit on all the carefully planted specimen trees and are a bit of a problem.  We were told that you can’t see the bats during the day, so we’ll have to go back sometime at dusk. 

Veterans’ Memorial

Shrine of Remembrance

At one end of the park is a large memorial to the 20,000 soldiers of Victoria who died in World War I.  When you realize that the population of Australia was quite small back then, you can see what an impact this had on the society.  The memorial building is approached on all sides by banks of steep steps, reminiscent of a Mayan temple.  At the top one goes inside to a room where a memorial plaque is embedded in the center of the floor.  The amazing aspect of the building is that it has a small hole in the roof placed exactly so that each year, on November 11, at 11:00 am, a ray of sunlight moves across the plaque, highlighting the word “love.”  During the rest of the year they simulate the light ray once an hour to demonstrate to visitors how it works.  It definitely has a powerful, almost mystical effect.

Floral Clock and Art Museum

Floral Clock, Melbourne Botanical Garden

We then walked to the other end of the park, passing numerous wedding parties having their photos taken, and took our picture in front of the huge floral clock at the park entrance.  Then we crossed the street to visit the Victorian art museum where we did a quick tour of the Australian collection.  The pictures from the 19th century are a fascinating peek into the hardship of pioneer life in Australia as well as a view of the vast, forbidding, but also beautiful, landscape they encountered.  (Note: There is now a new art museum at two sites, one in Southbank and the other at Federation Square.)

Back to the Botanic Garden and the Flying Foxes

Grey-headed Flying Fox (a kind of fruit bat)

A week later we finally got to see the fruit bats in the Botanic Gardens.  There are hundreds of them and you can’t miss them because they make such a racket.  We went late Sunday afternoon and found them hanging from the branches of tall trees in a place called Fern Gully.  It was a hot day so they were fanning themselves with their huge wings and even flying about a bit.  Last week, when the park ranger told me that you couldn’t see the bats until dark, I think that my mistake was asking about bats--I should have asked to see the flying foxes, which is what people call the large fruit bats here.  Those that live in the park are grey-headed flying foxes and have pointed snouts that make them look a little bit like foxes.  The term bats is used here for the little insect eating bats, and those don’t come out until dark.  We found a group that lives in a tree near our apartment and watched them one evening as they emerged from a hole in the trunk and flew off to catch bugs on the golf course.