Consumer guide for sexually active Melbourne guys

Apparently there are two areas in Melbourne with a number of gay venues, one north and one south of the river. We had only time explore the northern one, around Smith / Peel and Gipps Streets, plus a short walk around St Kilda on the beach.
Dave showed us Melbourne's "gay beach", a stretch of sand next to the port but it was unappealing. Melbourne being situated on a lagoon-style bay cut off from the ocean doesn't make for great wave action. Of course we're biased because of our attachment to Waiheke beaches, but I couldn't see the appeal of spending a Summer's day next to container shipping and traffic. St Kilda proper is an old-style resort, complete with luna park, but it was cute and the food excellent (as it was in all places we dined). Acland Street is just what a beachside resort main street should look like: little traffic, outside dining and entertainment and a tram down the middle of the street.

The gay venues we went to were The Laird (149 Gipps Street, Abbotsford - train station Collingwood), an old-style pub with various bars and theme nights such as pool competitions, boot shining and leather parties, etc. The Sunday night we were there the local gay rugby team, the Chargers, was fund raising with a social BBQ. A friendly and laid back local pub, popular with more mature men. There is accommodation too but we heard it was quite noisy on weekends - perhaps you don't need or want much sleep then anyway.
Club 80 (NSFW link) (8-10 Peel Street, Collingwood - Smith Street trams) is a refurbished multi-storey warehouse designed as a social and cruise club, including a large (non-porn) movie theatre, internet cafe and social space. The upper floors are extensive cruising areas and spots for specialist sexual activity. There are regular theme nights for which you can dress up or down. The night we went it was Nud night, where the ground floor was re-created as a mosh pit. It was far too dark to be pleasurable or agreeable but obviously a lot of men like it that way considering there were about 150. Pricey entry at $18.50 but with those number of punters it'd be a surprise you came away with nothing.
Another popular venue just around the corner from Club 80 is Sircuit (103 Smith Street, Fitzroy - Smith Street trams), which some nights isn't exclusively male. A large cavernous pub with multiple pool tables and occasional theme nights, with upstairs cruising and cinema areas. The Monday night we were there was ButtNaked (check website for dates and entry conditions), which was quite fun seeing all those blokes - of all ages and sizes - play pool and have a swell time au naturel. The upstairs cruise area doesn't really work that well: there is a limit to the demand for glory holes and way too few R&R areas. But it was quite sociable and chatty, and there was an amazing turnout for a Monday school night.
Final word about our accommodation. We stayed at OzGuys, a gay homestay run by Mike and Mark, situated in a new South Melbourne apartment block 10 floors up and a great view over the city. Not extremely cheap in NZ$ but close to everything, walkable from town and includes breakfast. Highly recommended! (disclaimer: we paid for our accommodation)

Victorian excursion

Our Kiwi friend Dave, who lives in Melbourne, kindly took us out into the Victorian countryside (remarkably scruff looking grass they have here, I pity those cows and sheep that have to chomp on that) to Mount Macedon on the way to Bendigo. The mountain, about 1,000 metres high, has a war shrine and cross on the top but also a great view over the countryside all the way, on sunny days, to Melbourne. It was, helas, a semi-cloudy, windy and chilly day on the top which had us shivering and sheltering soon. The upside, of course, was that no snake was to be seen.
We soon legged it down to another landmark, Hanging Rock, a massive volcanic outcrop in an otherwise quite featureless landscape. The place is famous for being the setting of Australian novel and film "Picnic at Hanging Rock". It's a steep climb up and it's easy to get disorientated in the crags and boulders at the top plateau. It's an eerie place and you can see why it would make such a good setting for a mystery novel.
On the way back to town we dropped in on Daylesford, a charming country spa town reminiscent of Martinborough, and it even boasts its own gay festival called Chill Out.

Melbourne: walk the town

Melbourne is eminently walkable. The city centre and most of its attractions worth visiting are all easy to reach on foot, and it's a great help the city isn't hilly. Along the waterfronts on both sides of the river it is largely pedestrianised with quiet places to sit and expensive places to eat and drink. There are two marvellous footbridges across, one where you can check out Australia's multicultural make-up and the number of foreign nationals that live here ranged per nationality.
There is a large array of walks available on the tourist website. We did four:

Secret Gardens: taking in most of the Royal Botanical Gardens and areas around the riverfront. Gardens are not really my specialty but I was happy to tag along and we saw some spectacular plants I hadn't come across before, such as the grass tree (pictured left). There was also some unusual wildlife in the Botanic Garden such as turtles on the search for new nesting places. The Gardens are right in the centre of town, which make them a popular refuge from the bustle, and a popular jogging tour (but why you would want to run in high temperatures is a mystery to me).
On the edge of the Botanic Gardens is the large Shrine of Remembrance, a memorial to the Australian war dead, pretty much standard issue, but you could freely walk up to a balcony and the view over the city was spectacular. War memorials always have a schizoid nature of wanting to both glorify the dead (and by extension, war) and to be a place to contemplate peace (or any alternatives to war). This one certainly bended towards the glorification side, what with very little individual names of dead soldiers on show and concentrating more on the various battles and wars the Australian forces have been involved in.

Arcades and Lanes: a real treat in the Melbourne urban landscape are its myriad of little lanes between broad avenues and arcades linking them too. Too narrow for traffic and expressly conceived as upmarket shopping areas with beautiful architecture and flooring, it's a pedestrian paradise. Alfresco dining (even if it was slightly too cramped during busy times) is popular and tasty, if somewhat pricey. Niagara Lane was my favourite, devoid of any commercial activity but looking very much like Amsterdam without the canals.

The Cosmopolitan: very much a trek through Chinatown, the Greek precinct and the upmarket Collins St shopping area. One financial centre had a sumptuous (if somewhat gauche) ground floor entrance complete with indoor water pools, gold leaf walls 5 metres up and an array of corporate art - i.e. meaningless but expensive looking sculptures.

Elegant Enclave: definitely my favourite walk taking us to the eastern side of the CBD beyond the Government buildings and parks to a largely intact, lovely restored and sensitively built quarter with Victorian, art deco, gothic and modernist architecture. Many upmarket early Melburnians lived here, and it was remarkably quiet and leafy. The George Street Cafe was fantastic and surprisingly affordable for lunch.

Melbourne: more art

Spending a week in Melbourne was probably not enough with digesting the terrible news from New Zealand putting a dampener on the planned proceedings. Visiting many attractions had to be postponed until next time, such as the Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. But we tried to get in a lot of art and a sense of the city.

First up was the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, housed in a magnificent building - a former brewery - in a redeveloped former industrial part of South Melbourne.
It stages temporary exhibitions in one room each, with Joseph Kosuth's installation, inspired by the play "Waiting for Godot", an outstanding piece. In a darkened room, excerpts from the dialogue ran on the high walls in illuminated lettering but it was illegible head on, you had to stand in the corners to be able to read them at an acute angle. Quite disorientating in the dark but you could let the text be your guide.

More contemporary Australian art was on show in the National Gallery of Victoria Australian section on Federation Square, with the exhibition "Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography" my favourite. Some truly outstanding pictures of (Australian) landscapes expressing the ravages on the land by the country's weather and climate. Murray Fredericks "Salt" (pictured right) were just stunning and eerie, where the salt plains merged with the skies.

Further out of town in a suburb incongruously called Heidelberg, the Heide Museum of Modern Art sits in a parkland besides the Yarra River. It used to be a farm whose owners got into modern art, but has now been engulfed by suburbia. A new building conceived as a house and art gallery to live in was built down the hill. It has very few windows as many walls were needed to hang art on. It comes complete with a 1970s conversation pit. The pieces on show were all drawings, but they suffered from being on sandstone colour walls, which did nothing to set them off. It would have been better to hang them on darker backgrounds.
A third building housed the gallery shop and spaces for temporary exhibitions. The grounds were turned into a kitchen garden, park and outdoor sculpture exhibition space.

Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria International

One is starved of European art in New Zealand and you have to travel a long way to get a fill, but luckily Melbourne has a quite marvellous but not overwhelming collection of Western (and Asiatic and Pacific) art. It took 2 days to visit most of the National Gallery of Victoria International and Australian venues.
The permanent collections, mainly purchased as the result of a 1904 bequest by a local benefactor, Mr Albert Felton, are quite a nice introduction to all periods, countries and schools and art forms in the Western canon, with an especially lovely Flemish and Dutch painting collection (including Rembrandt). Not only paintings and sculpture but also beautiful glass work and modernist furniture (such as Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld).

The temporary exhibitions included a small selection of drawings and paintings by Gustave Moreau, which was interesting if you are into highly decorative, symbolic and scantily-clad feminine figures from history and myth. My favourite was "Hercules and Omphale" (pictured left) because it's so wonderfully rude with him, while obviously sexually aroused, being forced by her to stare at her barely veiled private parts. The painting was not available in poster form in the Gallery shop, unfortunately.

A very different kettle of fish was on offer next door with a travelling exhibition from the Queensland Art Gallery on New Zealand art called "Unnerved". It's a ramshackle collection of mainly non-pakeha art by artists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, purportedly telling a nervous story about being in New Zealand, from black and white short films about growing up poor in a Pacific household to larger than life full colour photographs of Maori mythical figures. It's supposed to "unsettle" us but I was mainly offended instead of amused, especially by a series of photograph/collages showing state houses and their tenants (their heads replaced by photos of anonymous mental health patients cut out of a medical text book). If their portraits had been non-white there would have been an outcry.
There were two pieces that were brilliant: the seal balancing a piano on its nose, and a short film of two "brothers" sharing a piece of chewing gum.
Even the Gallery coffee shop staff (mostly New Zealanders) thought the exhibition was terrible.

Melbourne: public transport

Visiting a city for the first time as a tourist, nothing is more important than clear, concise, accurate and omnipresent information about public transport. On my first trip ever to Melbourne, noted and famed for its European atmosphere combined with an Australian easy-going-ness, this is the one aspect it badly failed me. All the integrated ticketing and environmentally friendly trams and trains did not detract from the fact that information about where to go, what lines to use or how to obtain and validate tickets was basically non-existent. It had us asking the (ever so friendly and helpful) tram driver where to buy a ticket and whether to use the validation pods or not. Official information, which I tried to find online, on routes is woefully inadequate. On the tram network diagram all routes have the same colour, and the map must rate as the worst in the world. The train network diagram isn't any better, and worse, at Flinders Street Station, even this map was nowhere to be found on the station concourse or platforms. It made travel really a chore because trains don't stop at all stations, which may make for a bummer journey if you're not careful. This map is actually far better but it is nigh impossible to print out due to its size.
That said, the trams and trains services were excellent in frequency and range. The A$3.70 fare for unlimited 2-hour travel was not too bad (considering the NZ$ is at a decade-low against the A$).