Working in the Lab Late One Night

Bad timing this morning meant that we failed yet again to get to our new favourite vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant for breakfast. In Vietnam, any self-respecting pho shop would be open from around 6am, but in laidback Melbourne, nobody seems to have breakfast until 10am. Still, the neighbouring café had opened already and promised us a vegetarian phở, despite the fact that this did not appesr on the meat-focused menu.

Phở surprise

Despite my doubts, a most excellent bowl of noodle soup arrived that threatened to defeat us both with its sheer size.

Melbourne was set up on Port Phillip at a time when it was illegal (according to the Sydney-based colonial government) to set up a new colony there. John Batman was the enterprising individual who signed 'treaties' with aboriginals of the region to claim territory and landed with 350 people from Tasmania to set up the new colony. Capt. William Lonsdale was dispatched from Sydney to govern the new settlement and the rest was history.

To discover this origin story as well as the rest of Victoria and Australia's history, we headed to Melbourne's Immigration Museum. Here we learned that what started out largely as a British penal colony naturally presented opportunities to people from all over the world, not just from Britain.

However, the resident white folk soon took against the influx of other people and put in place a series of measures to 'disincentivise' further unwanted immigration. In 1855, a £10 tax on Chinese immigrants was introduced as just such a measure. In 1888, the term "White Australia Policy" was coined to draw attention to the tacit whitening of Australia, while in 1903 the Naturalization Act prejudiced against the settling of any non-Europeans or Asians. A 'dictation test' was set, ostensibly to ensure that any immigrants would be able to integrate well, but in practice was used to excluded 'undesirables' at the discretion of the enforcers. The test could be set in any European language, and in one tragically comic situation was used to bar a political activist and polyglot, who was repeatedly retested and eventually failed under one of the few languages in which he was not conversant, Gaelic.

The emphasis on maintaining "British values" in the colony and giving incentives to white British immigration was unashamedly apparent well into the 1950s. 1949's Naturalization and Citizenship Act aimed to level the obvious bias, but British immigration was still clearly favoured.

On second thoughts...

In 1970s, Australia took refugees from Lebanon, Chile, as well as the Vietnamese boat people who arrived at their shores. Today's Australia is much more multicultural, but the museum still had many examples of modern-day racism against non-whites.

Hello Bruce!

After the museum, we took a walk along the developments on the Yarra river. Southbank and the wharf development aim to capitalise on the warmer weather. Today it was windy and cloudy, but the mugginess meant that we still indulged in an ice cream on the way back.

We returned to St Kilda and the Local Taphouse for a 'meet the brewer' event that we saw advertised on our visit yesterday. The guys from local KAIJU! beers were putting in an appearance at what turned out to be a regular event and a club where everybody seemed to know everyone else.

Monster Bros.

KAIJU! are largely two brothers, Callum and Nat - the former the business head, schooled in the wine industry, while the latter is the duo's Heisenberg, mixing up the crystal (malt) to create big, malt- and hop-forward beers - the kind that were described by the folks at the event as "dank".

The history of the brewing duo is an interesting one. Callum originally started trading as a cidery under the name Monster Mash, producing the cider himself. Meanwhile, Nat was inspired by USA's Green Flash brewery and
Mike's Organic double IPA from neighbouring New Zealand and was plying his very successful homebrew using a modicum of knowledge from his science degree. Together, the brothers started brewing with a couple of fermenters at Cavalier - "it's more nomadic brewing than contract" - and haven't looked back.

Despite an arsenal of seriously good beers, the cider - originally branded as "Sirius Cider" but later called "Golden Axe", the game reference apparently being lost on Callum - still makes up around 60% of sales and "pays the bills". After a run-in with the lawyers from Monster Energy Drinks, the outfit was also quickly rebranded to the much cooler KAIJU!

Name changes aside, the relatively young operation has produced some excellent beers, four of which we sampled this evening. Nat is a self-confessed hophead - Chinook is a favourite, but Citra is largely a "no go" - and the enterprise is finding favour ploughing this particular niche. Everything we tried, whether it be black, red, golden, big (Cthulhu) or bigger (Where Strides the Behemoth), described itself as an "IPA". Sours, stouts, and other styles are apparently "in the pipeline" but Nat brews unabashedly to his own tastes. Popularity is eating up their capacity, and so they are currently expanding into their own space in Dandenong South to meet the demand. Next on the cards: an imperial version of Hopped Out Red - oh boy!