Death by Water

I've been re-reading our Phyrne Fisher collection (by Kerry Greenwood). Comfort reading at its best in spite of involving plenty of murder, theft and other crimes. I'm not aware of being stressed, though on some level I probably am, however when stressed my brain seeks familiar territory. In the past I've read the print off Mom's and my Dick Francis collection. I'm now so familiar with the Harry Potter books the words don't make a movie in my head anymore. But I haven't got every plot of the Phryne books memorised yet. 

At the back of Death by Water I found not only a recipe for a 'Perfect Champagne Cocktail' but some post-it notes where I'd scribbled passages I particularly enjoyed - or had no idea about - in a previous reading. If you're like me you read through all sorts of things you don't know exactly what they are about but just guess from the context. It was rather satisfying to look these things up. 

Description of their cruise ship:

"...screens by Tiffany, furnishing by Liberty and William Morris, light fixtures by LaFarge..."

Illustrations on the Tiffany screens:

"...flowering gum and... a pohutukawa" (a New Zealand tree)

Bedspread:

"dark blue morocain" - A fabric; so far as I can tell this is another spelling for Moroccan and may refer to a distinctive print.

Terminology:

"So what were the on-dits?" Definition of on-dit: a piece of gossip or vague rumour.

"Fribble": Noun - a trifle, a frivolity; Verb - to waste something away, to fritter; to waste time.

"Keas" (a New Zealand bird - a very smart parrot) 

a Sou'wester

Chicken Veronique

References:

"Phyrne was in complete agreement with Oscar Wilde about people who were witty before breakfast."

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

                                                               - Oscar Wilde


"She may look like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth but as they said in the eighteenth century, I'll warrant that she wouldn't choke on cheese".  - 'butter wouldn't melt in her mouth' refers to someone who is very cool in their demeanor. Couldn't find any reference to choking on cheese other than literally.

And now, what you've been waiting for:

The Perfect Champagne Cocktail

1. Chill a bottle of dry champagne. It doesn't have to be expensive - in fact this is a great way to dress up cheap champage - but it must not be sweet.

2. Take a big glass and swill about a teaspoonful of Cointreau around to coat the inside. 

3. Drop a cube of sugar in, place three drops of bitters onto the sugar. If you like sweet tastes, put in two sugar cubes but don't add any more bitters.

4. Very gently pour in champagne and fill the glass. Garnish with a thin strip of orange peel.

5. This is the only champagne which can be drunk through a straw. To make a champagne cup, dilute this half and half with Schweppes lemonade. It's worth getting all hot and tired playing deck tennis if there is champagne cocktail in prospect.

Phryne Places

The Block Arcade. 

My photos don't do it justice; too many people,

too much to see.

Better you should look here.  See what I mean?


Windsor Hotel (where Phryne stays before buying a house).  For a better view, see this.

Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital . 

This is where Phyne's friend, Dr. Elizabeth MacMillan, works.

Now the Queen Victoria Women's Centre. 

Collins Street I've already shown you, though there is much more there to see.


We could see the Theosophical Building from the roof of our hotel (where we visited the defunct swimming pool). 

It wasn't particularly remarkable, but I had to look up the term to find out what it meant.  I have to admit I'm not really any the wiser having done so.

Regent Theatre (first opened 1929)

Town Hall.  Turns out there are several...

Toorak.  Another place we've already visited.  Phryne is invited to a party in Toorak, where some of the best and worst people are to be found.


The Cathedral on Swanson Street  is likely St. Pauls with the spires.

Flinders and Spencer Streets.  I can't remember what Phyrne is doing there on page 74 in Cocaine Blues (and in any case that might give away the story.  You've seen Flinders Street Station and I can tell you that Spencer Street was named for the 3rd Earl Spencer (ancestor of Princess Diana).

Little Lonsdale Street.  There isn't much of note there now.  In Phryne's day it will have been terrible slums, all torn down and redeveloped now.  I just included it because of the interesting naming convention of 'Little'.  Whereas in Britain they have 'back' streets (Bill loves that Tynemouth has Back Front Street), in Melbourne they seem to call these 'little'.  They aren't alleys at all but are often just access to the backs of large buildings, parking garages and the like.  BTW, that evil bath house where Madame Breda sold her wares between Russell Street and Little Lonsdale?  That's the Victoria State Library now.

Little Bourke Street is still Chinatown,

where Bill and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner in The Crane.

And walked 'home' in the rain.

Miss Phryne Fisher

If you've read here for very long, you know that I drool over Kerry Greenwood's books about female detective Phryne Fisher.  The stories are set in the interwar period and if anything Bill drools even more; he's certainly read and re-read them more than I have...yet.   

Phryne wears velvet and fur...

Would you believe Phryne is the reason we went to Melbourne?  Well, one has to have some sort of curiosity about a place, some reason to go. 

Phyrne's friend Dr. MacMillan is far too young and too chic,
but the trousers are correct.

Having established that the street names really did exist and wanting to explore further afield than Sydney, Bill made a list of Phryne places - which of course he forgot to bring.  Still, he remembered a good many).



Imagine our delight when Jane told us there was a television series of Phryne adventures! 

Can't remember this character; Madame Breda perhaps.  But isn't she exotic!?

Bill complained that they added characters not in the book and fairly well butchered all the original stories. 

Essie Davis is a perfect Phryne, I think.

I don't care; I love the clothes, the architecture and even Bill agrees that some of the casting is spot on, if not all of it.



Miriam Margolyes must just have been in town when they were filming;
her character is nowhere in the books.

We were able to watch four of the six programmes, one on the internet which is where I snatched these photos. 

Off to a party; great clothes AND great architecture.

I've checked the ABC website to see if the programmes are out on DVD and I think they may be, but our DVD player can't manage Australian DVDs, so I need these programmes to air in the US or Britain....must figure out how to lobby the BBC or ITV here.



Dot the maid is spot on, except she's not that terrified of phones in the book.

Any whiff of Miss Fisher's shows turning up in the States? 

Sasha, Phryne's Russian lover.

I think you'll agree from these photos that it would certainly be worth watching!

{Heavens, this is my 1,000th post...and I'm nowhere near out of what to say!}

Como House

Como House was built in 1847 for the barrister Edward Eyre Williams and his family.  It is named after Lake Como in Italy, where it is said he proposed to his wife Jessie.  It originally had only a single storey, but stood on 54 acres of land extending down to the Yarra River.  Barrister Williams grew 'sick of travelling into town' and sold the property in 1853 to John Brown,  a wealthy wine and spirit merchant.

Brown added the second storey and had the garden landscaped, which was then surrounded by orchards and farmland.  Our tour guide told us that Brown entertained extravagantly, inviting all the 'best' people from Melbourne who graciously accepted his hospitality and gave him the moniker 'Como Brown' (any relation, I wonder, to The Unsinkable Molly?).  However, because he was 'in trade', he was never admitted to the prestigious Melbourne Club.  Not only did he fail to enter this exclusive level of society, his extravagance eventually led him to bankruptcy.  During the family's tenancy one of the daughters, Susan, scratched her name on a window with a diamond ring. ( Have you noticed it's always a diamond ring?  What a popular form of graffiti - the Mitford girls did it, Southern belles did it, I've encountered this quite a few times.)  In this case Susan's brother followed her signature with '...is a fool.'  (I wonder if he, too, had a diamond ring?)

In 1864, Como House was purchased by Charles and Caroline Armytage, wealthy pastoralists, to be used as their their Melbourne town house.  Now, I've always thought of 'pastoral' in religious terms, but of course there is the link between Christianity and sheep in the Bible, isn't there?   Charles Armytage was a 'gentleman squatter' - also a member of the Melbourne Club.  With 700 square miles of land and the wool his sheep produced he was part of the early aristocracy ('squattocracy') of Victoria.  Many squatters were city gents who ran their vast pastoral properties from the town houses, leaving managers to oversee the country estates. 

The Armytage's had ten children, five of each gender, with four of each reaching adulthood, though only two sons and one daughter would marry, which seems rather strange to me.  Charles Armytage died in 1875 leaving Caroline a widow at the age of 44 with nine children, the youngest of which was nine months old.  Our tour guide said that she sent her eldest sons out to manage various pastoral estates, but that she held the reins of power at Como House.  This website describes what a remarkable woman she was and gives a glimpse of the amazing lifestyle she and her family enjoyed.  The women seemed to spend large amounts of time in England.  The tour guide said that the last two Armytage daughters who lived at Como House, Constance and Leila, were spinsters.  In fact, Constance had been married, a bit late for the time at 36, to a Captain Arthur Fitzgerald who was aide-de-camp to the then Governor of Victoria.  One website I found wittily remarked that soon after moving to England he decamped with her £70,000 dowry, and thus ended the marriage.  She lived as though single from then on, remaining in England for several more years until the death of one of her brothers.

In 1959, after 95 years of Armytage family ownership, the last survivors of the Armytage family, Constance and Leila, sold the Como estate to the newly formed National Trust of Australia (Victoria).  Como House was the first property acquired by the National Trust of Australia, in fact the organisation was formed for this very purpose.  The Armytage ladies had heard of properties like theirs being demolished or re-developed into nursing homes and the like.  Their aim was to have Como House preserved as their family home. 

I couldn't help but feel that the National Trust was surprisingly lacking in entrepreneurial skill:  the gift shop sold no picture books of Como House, no specific memorial trinkets, no postcards...not that I likely would have bought them, but without being able to take photos inside, I found this frustrating.  Internet to the rescue!  This website has two posts showing the interior, though not entirely as I would wish.  Never mind.  See the photo of the servants' bells and tell me you don't think of Downton Abbey! 

My notes captured quite a few images for me:  the exquisite crocheted curtain in the Nanny's room, a knitted bedspread, the friendship quilt on the guest bed where guests' initials were embroidered on a square by a servant after the visit, the chaperone's chair at the end of the sitting room that provided a window into the ballroom, the art deco furnishings of the two daughter's rooms used after the rest of the house was closed including a beautiful pink depression glass candelabra.

Como House is often used for vintage clothing sales and - what took us there - was the setting for one of the Phryne Fisher television shows.  We saw a camera crew in the outside kitchen and wondered if another episode was to be filmed there.  More on that later!

St. Kilda and Toorak

Have I mentioned before that this was a Phryne Fisher trip?  You'll have to accept that we dip in and out of reality pretty regularly at our house and Phryne's world is a popular escape.  I believe I made introductions here.



St. Kilda and Toorak are two Melbourne suburbs often mentioned in Greenwood's books. 



Bill had made a list of places to visit, and left it at home of course, but fortunately he could remember quite a bit as he reviewed maps of Melbourne and the free tram circled the city.

Lest you make the same error I did and say TOO-rack, I can tell you since Chris told me that it's actually something like 'Track'.  Given my struggles to pronounce 'chook' (chicken) properly - or perhaps Chris was playing with me, he does that sometimes - it's probably somewhere between Toorak and Track; Teh-RACK.   Whatever.



I noticed in hearing the place names on the train journey that Australian's muffle their vowels more than I do, but almost anyone swallows their vowels more than those of us with a Southern drawl.

I loved St. Kilda:  gorgeous houses with verandas, flats with balconies, all trimmed with lacy ironwork that reminds me so of New Orleans.  



Bill was continually astonished at the use of corrugated tin for roofing, even on quite substantial structures. 



St. Kilda was a Victoria seaside playground, perhaps similar to Whitley Bay near us.  If I were to live in Melbourne, I think I'd want to be located in St. Kilda, not necessarily overlooking the sea, but within a few blocks. 



As if.  The median house price there is $940K and $823K for a 'unit' (flat).

One thing that struck me was that on our way down to the seaside from the tram, we passed a man wearing a t-shirt with the slogan 'Eat the Rich'.  I was thinking this was a more violent take on Occupy Wall Street, but it turns out this is the name of a band, also of an Aerosmith album.  Who knew?

Toorak was another story.  The houses looked more like museums or office buildings than homes. 



I kept looking for the brass plaque identifying which country's embassy I was seeing, all surrounded by six to eight foot walls.  The houses were completely out of scale, being built to within a few feet of the lot boundary.  They made me imagine a life lived in air conditioned rooms, mincing across miles of marble.  Not my cup of tea. 

Wikepedia says that the name Toorak is synonymous with wealth and privilege, one of Australia's most expensive and prestigious suburbs.   If one walks through Nichols Hills in Oklahoma City the police come along and inquire about your business (I had a girlfriend who lived there); I kept waiting for the cops to come talk to us!   The internet gives a median house price of $2.6 million, but in the recent recession housing prices were tumbling.  Not at all surprising; one pays dearly for prestige.

However, there was one house in that area that we paid to enter, because we'd had a glimpse of it on TV the previous Friday night.  More about that next time...

Gosh, Melbourne!

Where to start?  Melbourne is an amazing mix of old and new architecture.  It's frantically busy with people and there seems to always be something to do.  We stayed pretty close to the CBD (Central Business District) and the toughest thing was to figure out how to prioritise to get the most of our days. 

Tram passing Federation Square

I must admit I was pretty tuckered out by about 4pm, walking and standing most of the day.  It's not a matter of just striding out to get to a destination, but of dodging people and prams, waiting for lights to change, watching for the very high curbs, for cars, trams and buses, keeping one eye on Bill while trying to stop and snap a photo. 

St Paul's Cathedral

The hotel was a slight disappointment.  The rooftop pool was out of order and I could have shown the cleaning person a thing or two, which is worrying. 



The Forum Theatre

The first thing I did was to trip over the tiles that raised the threshold of the bathroom, bruising the ball of my foot.  This meant wearing my trainers for added cushioning, not very stylish with my skirts, but there was nothing for it but to get on and see the sights.  Each night I pulled the bathmat over that threshold to remind me to lift my feet during any night time excursions.


Three Melbourne businessmen

It rained a bit while we were there, but mostly it was sunny and in the 80s or lower 90s, so I generally happy with the weather.  We went to a proper restaurant in Chinatown one evening, but the rest of the time we had room picnics with grocery bought foods.  Not very low calorie food, sadly, but the walking took care of most of it.



Public Art; public purse?

Melbourne has had to battle to save her older buildings from the wrecking ball (or is it all just dynamite these days?).  In one exhibit relating the rescue stories of various buildings, it was interesting to note that even the demolition workers had a view about some of them and went on strike rather than to participate in their 'downfall'.   We saw one instance where a facade was being supported while a modern building was being constructed behind and observed a few examples where this had been done elsewhere.  Not ideal if the interior is still original, but many buildings not historically protected have been trashed anyhow and the facade is perhaps better than nothing.

Mitchell House, at Elizabeth St and Lonsdale, built 1936

There was a surprising amount of things to do for free:  a tram that circled the city centre, the galleries at Federation Square, an exhibit at the library, the Victorian Women's Centre.  We chased down all things Phryne Fisher and pretty much walked all the cross streets of central Melbourne, laid out on a lovely grid.  The street names echoed out of Kerry Greenwood's books and Bill was in seventh heaven. 



The Flinders Street Station



has to be seen to be believed.  It's so....yellow.

I would happily go back to Melbourne, to spend more time exploring the coast and further afield. 


I'm certain we've only scratched the surface, as has this post...more to come!