Westworld Alberta

many others, is now heritage-listed. At the gorgeously baroque carousel, a gilded stam- pede, four rows deep, turns endlessly. After a ride on the Ghost Train (we pass scores of naively ghoulish dioramas: severed hands playing the piano, headless dolls and all manner of horrors rendered hilarious by virtue of the clearly visible mechanisms) we stroll along the bayside boardwalk. St. Kilda Beach has the perfect promenade; a wooden boardwalk lined with palm trees and restau- rants that overlooks a golden beach and millpond-calm water. The crisp morning has kept all but the bravest sunbathers firmly planted behind steaming cups of coffee in the boardwalk cafes. A newlywed pair poses for love-struck photos, as the bride's wed- ding dress fi lls in the breeze like a jellyfi sh. On Acland Street we embark on another of St. Kilda's rituals. Crowds fl ock to window- shop at the old-fashioned eastern European pastry shops that line the street. We park ourselves outside one of the most popular, Monarch Cakes, which has been torturing dieters since 1934. The window is fi lled with preposterous treats, such as kugelhupf, a doughy delight whose name fills your mouth before you've taken a single bite. On the surface, St. Kilda may seem sweet, but its unsavoury past as a red-light district has imbued it with a grittiness and fl amboy- ant charm that is perfectly in keeping with Luna Park. Today the neighbourhood is a popular spot among locals to come for brunch, take a cooling dip and browse hole- in-the-wall vintage stores. Back in the car, we make a beeline for Dendy Street Beach in Brighton, just a cou- ple of kilometres south, to check out the famous Victorian bathing boxes. Yes, in the prurient 1800s, a swim required more than a suit; it required architecture. We descend a small dune covered with yellow fl owers and kick off our shoes to amble through the sand, admiring a sentry-line of 82 colourful bathing boxes, decked out in designs from the Australian fl ag to a seagull mural. Today they store beach furniture for private lease- holders. From the southern end, we look back toward the city: the jaunty bathing boxes contrast vibrantly against the stately steel-and-glass skyline of Melbourne. We splash through the shallows for an hour and then, from Brighton, head south roughly 50 km through sprawling suburban Melbourne to Moorooduc and Red Hill, a formerly agrarian area quietly reinventing itself as a prime producer of Pinot Noir. The road meanders through soft green hills punctuated by the kind of gourmet stores that seem to spring up around vineyards: microbreweries, artisanal bakers and providores are around every bend. Through tunnels of stringy bark eucalyptus trees, the bay sparkles brightly. Gentlemen farmers have long called the Mornington Peninsula home. We stop in to meet one such chap, Moorooduc Estate winery founder Richard McIntyre, a former surgeon who swapped scrubs for oilskins and never looked back. "On the Peninsula there's 'up the hill' and 'down the hill' vineyards," he explains, designa- tions that allude to the gentle snobbery of the higher-elevation winemakers. When we retire for the evening it is to another grand home, Woodman Estate, set on 20 hectares of rolling pasture. Our lake- side chalet overlooks a pond atwitter with waterfowl. Stephanie Woodman, who owns the place with husband Rick, shows us around, pointing with pride to photos of their racehorses. When I ask whether they're all winners, she shakes her head and 38 WESTWORLD >> NOVEMBER 2011

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