Team Hubbard is the latest invasive species to plague Australia — at least the more seasoned half of the family, i.e., Julie and me. I’ve been here since August 12, 2025, when I flew to Melbourne from Auckland. Meanwhile, Julie went back to the US with Cassie and Lydie to help them get started on their third years of college. This left me unsupervised for a few weeks. Fortunately, I had quite a bit of work to keep me occupied, including a couple of great meetings with some folks from the Australian National Transportation Commission.

Even better, I was excited to reconnect with an old friend of mine, Chris, who lives in Melbourne. The last time I saw Chris was at my wedding more than 20 years ago. Chris was a wonderful host and showed me around a bit. The highlight was an Australian Football match between Collingwood (which is a part of Melbourne and where my apartment was) and Melbourne (which is a kind of a confusing name given that there are 9 teams in the Melbourne area).

Australian Football is a crazy, wonderful game — free flowing with little stoppage and great strategy and athleticism. I wouldn’t have understood any of it if I hadn’t had Chris there to explain. The oval-shaped field is absolutely massive – about the same size as four American Football fields.

I was particularly amused that a player can be penalized for an “unreasonable attempt.” (I’m tempted to give such penalties to my colleagues at future faculty meetings. Maybe I’ll keep it to myself).

On September 6, 2025, Julie arrived. To help her stay awake, I’d planned a full day. We started by poking our way through the Queen Victoria Market, where we particularly enjoyed the broad array of Asian food stalls. Next, we strolled through the Melbourne Botanical Garden, where we took a couple of short naps in the sunshine. We ended the day with an early dinner at the Stomping Grounds Brewery, which was just around the corner from our apartment.

On our last full day in Melbourne, we went to the Melbourne Museum. I’m sure we could have learned a great deal about the city, the state of Victoria, and other meaty academic topics. But we went the museum because they have a pretty incredible exhibit on Lego Star Wars.

The scale of the entire display was amazing – with custom-built displays formed from more than 8 million plastic bricks. Design and assembly took more than 25,000 hours. Some of the figures were life sized.

Other displays were sized to the little Lego figures but bonkers in scale, like this one with more than 180,000 pieces.

Just making legos into a sphere is impressive, but the detail was next level.

I know this really doesn’t have anything to do with Australia, but it was such a good exhibit.

Per usual, I kept most of my excitement on the inside.

The last part of the exhibit let you build your own Lego lightsabers. Special cameras would then add in the blades. Sadly, Julie’s Schwartz was bigger than mine.

We went back to our apartment and packed up our stuff. I’d spent four wonderful weeks in Melbourne. It’s a livable, charming, world-class city. But it’s time to get back on the road!

-Will