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The White Hat Melbourne Newsletter
Archived
Newsletter No.127 - 20 May 2005
Contents
This weekend at the Exhibition Building is a beer festival with over 400 beers. If you don’t want to pay the entry price for the festival you could always have your own festival. Buy a slab, invite your wine snob friends around and have blind tastings. You don’t need more than one variety – they will still give you a different and detailed description for each one you put in front of them.
After the beer festival it is time to indulge in some belly dancing. Slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh. Actually, you don’t have to dance yourself – just watch. This weekend there is a theatrical entertainment based around belly dancing in Prahran. Details at Dance in Melbourne.
In which the varying levels of knowledge of Melbourne are revealed to our incredulous and gullible subscribers. Three Dimensional MelbourneIn 1851, with the gold rush, Melbourne rapidly grew and became ‘the working man’s paradise’ as well as a centre for enterprise and opportunity - a place where someone with initiative could start a business from scratch regardless of their social or financial status. After the gold ran out, it was many of these start-up businesses that were to create the prosperity and employment and their names are still part of everyday Melbourne life. Melbourne became one of the great new commercial cities built from scratch in the nineteenth century along with others like San Francisco, Vancouver and Seattle and ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ became one of the three great cities of the British Empire. Much of Melbourne’s infrastructure, services and cultural institutions were set up by private enterprise and philanthropy. We often get history graduates, many with a specialisation in Melbourne history, enquiring whether there are employment opportunities at White Hat. On further investigation it often proved that their studies were in specific areas of art or architectural history but they knew little of the commercial world because this was somehow ‘dirty’ and little of the sciences because these were ‘not part of studying history’. Any study of Melbourne which does not entail an understanding and appreciation of the sciences, engineering, business, sport and the various other factors that built and form part of the fabric of Melbourne ends up as merely a three dimensional portrayal of ‘the nice bits that we all approve of’. This three dimensional Melbourne is an advance on the one and two dimensional versions we mentioned in previous newsletters and is well catered for by many books and tours out there. However, gentle reader, we know you want more. So in following weeks we will look at four and five dimensional Melbourne.
Tonight (Friday) there is an exhibition opening in Highett. The exhibition which continues for a month is based on taking rubbish and turning it into art. (It is a pleasant change from the [occasional] process of taking an arts grant and turning it into rubbish). Details at Exhibitions in Melbourne.
Next week is the St Kilda Film Festival which specialises in Australian short films. Details at Film Festivals.
In a previous newsletter we had a lengthy piece about hidden tunnels under Melbourne. At least two organisations took chunks of that information (unacknowledged) and used it themselves. Unfortunately they did not notice the date – April 1st – and did not click through on the link at the end which explained it was an April Fools Day hoax. As a result it formed the basis of an article written by a “professional journalist” and published by a local newspaper (who printed a retraction the following week). The “facts” later formed part of a history assignment from one of our local universities. On being alerted to the problem, the assignment was withdrawn. Both organisations acknowledged their error so we won’t mention their names. However, the moral for you subscribers is this. Be careful where you leave the newsletter lying around – it is capable of changing the course of history.
There are all sorts of activities at your local library this week as part of Library Week. You may have to wear a false wig because of those books you didn’t return in 1997, but it is worth finding out what is happening at your local library.
“Thank you, thank you! Whenever I'm feeling down and out after a long hardworking week you get me back up with the best update. This is a not to be missed newsletter--great humour Well done. Love it and by the way yes I do go to some events, activities etc and pass on info also!!!!!!!!!
Regards Janet” “We followed your suggested day out last Sunday and had a wonderful time. I must admit we had no idea that the Docklands was such a large development and so advanced. The gallery is wonderful and we hadn’t been to the new one. We’ll certainly be going back for a full day. We still don’t like the outside of Federation Square but we are still excited by the performances we heard that afternoon. You are right. Melbourne has wonderful things to do for free and thanks for alerting us to some new ones.
Steve & Linda” “You said that the White Hat Guides were not idiot proof and we proved it. How do you get Saganaki cheese off a barbecue without any barbecue tools? When we realized the problem we rang friends who live in the city but they didn’t know where Docklands Park was. When they eventually found us and our black triangles of charcoal we all went off to the concerts at Fed Square. What a blast! We have paid big money in the past to see performers who weren’t half as good as these. Thanks for a great day!
Joe & Jo”
The Bell Shakespeare Company has condensed the Henry VI trilogy into “one evening of two remarkable parts” called War of the Roses. I believe they are also working on a rewriting of Hamlet in which Ophelia shuffles off her mortal coil and then the Prince of Denmark meets a beautiful young woman from an island on the other side of the world. Details on War of the Roses at Theatre in Melbourne.
How well do you know Melbourne?
We thought we might start a little quiz to test your knowledge of Melbourne. What is the prize? None – except the opportunity to walk about the workplace or the supermarket or the nursing home or the schoolyard or the prison yard knowing that for a short time you are a superior human being to those mere mortals around you. Is it trivia? No - life is too short and important for trivia. Although the questions may seem trivial, the facts gleaned from this quiz will help build up into a greater understanding of Melbourne. Like flies gradually building up on a strip of flypaper or dust building up on the filter of a computer fan they help to build an agglomeration that is greater than its mere individual parts and if only we could only forget our petty differences and were all to bring together our own pieces of flypaper and computer fan filters and put them all together we could create something even greater . . . sorry time to go and check my medication. That’s better. Time for this week’s question. Around many of the back lanes of central Melbourne you will find metals plates on the street labelled “Hydraulic Service Power Department”. What was this hydraulic service and what was it used for?
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