107, 108 & 109 – ANZAC Day, Monteith’s Zesty Radler Bier and “Two Up"

107. ANZAC Day

ANZAC Day is a great Australian tradition. It’s been running since 1918 and celebrates the lives and sacrifices of all the Australian and New Zealand soldiers that have served and given their lives in the wars these countries have been involved in. It’s held on the 25th April and gives people a chance to reflect on previous and present sacrifices made by these brave people. However, whenever I asked anyone about ANZAC Day and what people did on this holiday I always got the same answer – “You go to the pub and play Two Up and get pissed”.

I assumed that there must be something more to the day but no matter how hard we looked we really didn’t find anything out of the ordinary going on. There was a big Dawn Service being held in Sydney but we slept in and missed that. In fact we ended cruising the Mall in Chatswood for a couple of hours buying various items from the few shops that were open and finally landed at the cinema watching a crap Bruce Willis movie and it wasn’t till we were on our way home that we saw anything ANZACy. Acutally it was just one old lady walking home from the train station in her old WW1 outfit but at least she looked like she had been at something remotely sentimental.

108. Monteith’s Zesty Radler Bier

Cost 4
Smoothness 5
Piss-Factor 4
Aftertaste 3
Coolness 5

What a surprisingly brilliant NZ beer. Isla and I decided not to wade through the supposed crowds of pissed up Aussies in bars on ANZAC Day and came home with a sixer of these and played “Two Up” in the comfort of our own home.

109. Two Up

Two-up is a semi-legal gambling game involving 2 coins. I say semi-legal as the Government relax the gambling laws on ANZAC Day to allow all the pub patrons to play this WW1 trench game. It involves putting you bet into the pot and throwing 2 coins. You bet on either 2 heads or 2 tails and the winners of the toss divide the cash. If it lands on one of each then the pot is untouched and people add more cash for a second round of bets and so on. As we had spent the whole day in the shops we didn’t have any cash to bet with so we used Jelly Babies instead.

After a very unremarkable National Holiday it was a great way to finish up an otherwise run-of-the-mill day.

106. The Ned

This wine was a worry. In Scotland a Ned is a “Non-Educated Delinquent” and a catch all phrase to describe teenage yobs that hang around on street corners drinking alcohol and causing trouble. Their favourite tipple is “Buckfast” – a fortified red wine made in the south of England by Benedictine Monks full of alcohol, caffine and badness – and I worried that this was a white version of it.

I actually bought it for Isla for a laugh more than for the experience of drinking it but surprisingly it was very palatable. Very zesty and a bit to easy going down – the bottle lasted about 30 mins.

105. Spaten Munchen

Cost 5
Smoothness 3
Piss-Factor 4
Aftertaste 4
Coolness 4

Met my friend Nicki from a few drinks in the CBD. She was passing through on her way to a job in Perth and it was a good opportunity to catch up with her. We started an a courtyard bar right on Circular Quay and then moved to a great Italian in the Rocks for lunch. Then we went to the ever popular Lowenbrau pub in the Rocks where I had a glass of this. Quite a find actually, very creamy yet still a lager and although it was a hot day it was real thirst quencher.

104. The Hyde Park Barracks Museum

It seems in Sydney they can make almost anything into a museum. This particular one is a testament to early Sydney life. The Barracks building in which the museum is now housed was built in 1816 and was originally used to hold male convicts. Later it housed women and was also used as a courthouse. The building is actually quite small and when you consider that it used to hold 600 people then the dimensions become quite shocking. Although it looks fairly large from the outside the later picture of the hammocks will give you an idea as to how difficult it must have been to live there - and that doesn't even include the beatings from the prison guards.

When you walk through the gates of the grounds you are greeted with the attractive façade of the Barracks. Inside there are three floors dedicated to the life and times of those people who lived there. The first floor talks about the building itself and shows you the various features of the structure and the various masonry works that have taken place over the years. They have several rooms with cut-away sections of the walls and floors so that you can see the original designs and fittings.

Further down the corridor from this is 2 galleries showing some of the items from the era. There is convicts clothing, personal belongings, guard outfits, cat o’ nine tails and a whole host of stories and writings from the early nineteenth century. It’s very well laid out and at first glance it looks like there is not a great deal in either of the rooms but beware, there is a lot of reading to be done if you are interested.

The second floor talks about other people of the age including the women that were involved with the building and the later female residents of the Barracks. This floor also has the best feature of the museum which is an interactive database of thousands of convicts that were sent to Australia. You can search through the names of your relatives and see if your great, great, great grandfather was sent to Oz for buying stolen glass or stealing eggs or using confiscated flour to bake his bread with!!! I found a few possibles from both my Mum’s line and Isla’s Mum’s line. I wonder how those families are doing now in Australia.


The top floor was really quite eerie. It mainly focused on the prison aspect showing you how the people were crammed into the hammocks and how they guards kept and eye on them all. There is also a huge open room with some life-size silhouettes in the windows so that from the outside it looks the room is busy. That room was particularly freaky as it was so barren in comparison to how packed it would have been 150 years ago. I could feel the heckles rising and thought that it was about time we left.

Outside the courtyard is wonderful. There is still some of the old features but with lots of modern upgrades. The sun was shining and the on-site café looked particularly good so we stopped in for cappuccinos. They were great and even though the café is not part of the actual museum it is in the grounds and makes for a very peaceful and relaxing place to stop for a drink. It also has one of the best views of the Sydney tower which was a stark contrast to the 200 year old building we were sitting outside.

As with the Australia museum, the Barracks only costs $10 to get in and there is a great deal of information for the visitors but it’s probably not for everyone. If you have an interest in the local area and the history of Sydney then it’s worth a visit.

103. The Australia Museum

At $10 per adult, entry to this museum is a steal. It’s quite a small venue but they have managed to fit in several exhibits onto the three floors. The first exhibit shows the skeletons of a whole bunch of animals from snakes to humans. There is also a whale skeleton and one of an elephant which are very dramatic.

Moving on, you find yourself in the most interesting “Indigenous People” exhibit which is equally fascinating and shocking. It covers various aspect of the life and times of the Aboriginals and the Torres Straights Islands with a big focus of some of the atrocities that have occurred in the last 2 centuries. It’s really quite a moving a display and they way these people have been treated over the years leaves a bit of a lump in your throat.

Upstairs you reach the Mineral Collect which is amazing. Some of the crystals are spectacular and with a bit of patience and a digital camera with macro focus you can take some great photos of the rocks. There is also a area which shows how all the different rocks are formed but this is in a narrow corridor and makes it difficult spend any length of time reading the information.

The last display features hundreds of stuffed birds and several insect displays. It’s relatively interesting but by the time we got to it we were more concerned about where we were going to have lunch than what an albatross looks like up close.

For $10 is a worth while morning out especially for the Indigenous People exhibit.

102. Sydney’s Royal Ea(s)ter Show

If you’ve ever been to a county faire or a highland games then you’ve got an idea as to what this is. This annual event is a big deal in Sydney and for the two weeks that it’s on for it draws several hundred thousand visitors a day. It’s held at the site of the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the whole place is filled with rides, food stalls, demonstrations, animals, music and beers tents as well as the usual amount of purchasable tat.

We arrived in the morning started to explore the grounds of the Show. Our first stop was the Fresh Food Dome which showcased foods grown around Australia. It was a celebration of farmers from all the different states in Australia and they had put together some huge displays of their produce. There was also several stalls selling honey, wine, juices, leather goods, fudge, coffee, chocolate, ice-cream and also the kind of cooking and household product demonstrations that you would expect to see at the Ideal Homes Exhibition in the UK.

All that food got us in the mood for some eats. We didn’t have to walk very far to find some deep-fried badness as there are eateries everywhere. The day turned out to be a terrible one from the diet point of view as we felt the need to sample something from every stall. This will make you boke but over the course of the day we had sushi, deep fried hotdogs on a stick, deep fried cheese on a stick, pizza, corn on the cob, ice-cream (twice), 3 beers, donuts and smoothies. I could feel the old coronary arteries hardening as the day went on and for the first time ever I was actually craving fruit and vegetables by the time that we got home.

After lunch (not that there was a specific food stuff that I could identify as lunch) we went to watch the wood-chopping event. I really wasn’t sure what to expect but it was basically a display of wood chopping and sawing in the format of an international competition between Australia, USA and New Zealand. It is one of the highlights of the Easter Show and it was certainly entertaining. The best bit was where the blokes had to chop into a pole and jam a board into the hole then climb up onto the board and repeat the action two more times until they are standing on a flimsy wooden board about 5 metres in the air where they then chop half way through a log at the top of the pole. Then they jump down and do the same again on the other side. First one to chop through the log completely wins.

After some more food, Isla dragged me to see the animals in the kiddies corner. We had missed most of the animal displays so I relented and she was in her element petting horses, camels, sheep, lambs, piglets and chickens. It wasn’t really my cup of tea but I was amazed how soft the camel’s coat was. Luckily it didn’t do any of the biting or spitting that they are famous for.

We grabbed some pizza on route to the rodeo which was to be our final stop of the day. The pizza was disgusting and since the heavens opened before we started eating them they were also sodden and cold as well as tasteless. If nothing else, at least they made us not want to eat anything else that day.

While we were sitting in the rain eating soaking wet pizza waiting for the rodeo to start we had to watch the finals of the dog trials. It consisted of ten teams of eight people and their mutts doing some very amateur exercises like “sit and stay” and “fetch the toy”. They were mostly rubbish at it and as far as I could see not a single dog carried out all the tasks without making a mistake. I was glad when they left the grounds but unfortunately we still had to wait for about 30 more minutes while the fences and pens were set up for the rodeo.

It seems that there was a competition running between Australia and the USA for the duration of the Easter Show and this was the 4th heat in the trial. The rodeo consisted of different events with points awarded for the winners of each. There was the steer wrestling, women’s barrel horse race, bare back horse riding and the finale – the bull riding competition. It was very exciting and there were several edge-of-the-seat moments with riders almost trampled by enraged stallions or nearly getting kicked in the head by livid bulls.

Drenched but pleased, we left Olympic Park and heading home after a great day out. I’m still not entirely sure of the point of the whole thing and I guess I would sum it up as a glorified fun fair that lets the “city folk” see some aspects of rural Australian living from the safety of paved roads and plastic seated arenas.

101. Vanilla Slice

I love food. Everyone knows that. However, I’ve not really got that much of a sweet tooth and I much prefer curries, Dominos, nachos and all manor of savoury gastronomic indulgences.

I was watching the news the other morning and there was whole segment devoted to how there is a national annual competition for “The Best Vanilla Slice” and there was an interview with the family owned patisserie who has won it for the last few years. It seems that there is a huge following of vanilla slice eaters in Australia so I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about.

There is a cake shop near round the corner from the flat so I strode over and bought myself my first vanilla slice. The slice was massive and I was impressed with the cheapness of it. I carried it back to the apartment in a little brown paper bag and was initially surprised with the weight of it. The taste was great; creamy vanilla custard sandwiched between flaky, icing sugar covered pastry.

Even though I’m sure that this particular slice was mediocre in comparison to the famous championship winning ones it was still pretty good.