14 Melbourne bakeries serving excellent baked goods (including this top-tier pie)
These business have caught our attention and the list that follows is part of Good Food's Essential Melbourne Cafes and Bakeries of 2025. Presented by T2, this guide celebrates the people and places that shape our excellent cafe and bakery scenes and includes more than 100 venues reviewed anonymously across 10 categories, including icons, those best for food, tea, coffee and matcha, and where to get the city's best sweets, sandwiches and baked goods. (These reviews also live on the Good Food app, and are discoverable on the map.)
Bakemono
The often lengthy queue snaking down Drewery Lane – a cobblestoned laneway just off Little Lonsdale Street – is worth joining for the pastries at this tiny Japanese-inspired bakery. Shoji-style timber panelling is found throughout, including framing a large window that allows eager customers to peep into the pastry kitchen before entering. Specialty treats might include manju, a sweet bun hailing from Japan, while various croissants, Danishes and loaves of fluffy milk bread make regular appearances.
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ABC News
3 days ago
- ABC News
Wartime spies posed as swagmen near Townsville, historian's research reveals
On a lush north Queensland cattle property in April 1942, a strange shape emerging from the clouds caught a woman's eye as she hung up the washing. A mushroom-shaped cloth attached to a glittering figure was descending from the low-lying cloud cover, the parachutist's feet furiously steering away from the farmhouse. Eyewitnesses quickly mounted their horses and rode to the landing site, but the shadowy figure had vanished. It is a tale that seems almost fictional, one bound to happen far from Australia's shores. But Australian historian Ray Holyoak from James Cook University has uncovered radar records, police reports and eyewitness accounts revealing evidence of a concerted foreign espionage effort in wartime northern Australia. "There is some detailed information in several Australian archive files that around the end of April 1942, there is at least one parachute drop of spies," he said. During World War II the northern Australian garrison city of Townsville was an important Allied base during the fight for the Pacific. The city's deep-water port, rail facilities and troop staging areas made it a key strategic location of great interest to wartime enemies. "After the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941 they really do think there's going to be a landing, or at least a heavy attack, to the north of Australia," Mr Holyoak said. The fall of Lae in Papua New Guinea gave Japanese forces a base closer to Australia, allowing them to step up surveillance efforts. "We've already had the bombing of Darwin in February 1942, and by March there's Japanese surveillance aircraft coming over Townsville," Mr Holyoak said. "To be able to come this far was possible." Allied intercepts from the time show records of spies or sympathisers feeding information from Townsville about troop movements and popular pubs in early 1942, Mr Holyoak said. Then came the parachute drop of a suspected spy onto a north Queensland farm by a Japanese aircraft, on the Woodhouse pastoral holding near Giru, south-east of Townsville. "It sounds like a story or a training exercise, but on the day there are radar records of a particular Japanese aircraft, an MC-20, that was used in the early stages in South-East Asia for spy and parachute drops," Mr Holyoak said. An initial search of the area near the farm was fruitless, but later that night, a sentry fired two warning shots at an unknown man who had approached an American airfield at Woodstock, roughly 8 kilometres from the landing site. The next morning, Mr Holyoak said, authorities noted an itinerant swagman walked along the road towards Townsville, near Toonpan. "Somebody walking through farms or in an Allied uniform — they would have got stopped and checked," he said. "But somebody in a swaggie's outfit walking towards Townsville would have been ignored, so the Queensland Police thought really this was the perfect disguise. "They weren't challenged, and they walked on to Townsville and were never seen again." August 15 will mark 80 years since the Allied victory in the Pacific, when Japanese forces surrendered following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. North Queensland historian and author of Townsville in War and Peace 1942-1946, Geoff Hansen, said the war developed the northern region into the important defence base that it is today. "We had air strips, forts, air raid shelters, search lights, anti-aircraft gun emplacements being built, large military camps and hospitals, schools were closed. "We had lots of Americans and Australians come in, and it was also where the fifth US Air Force was formed, so it was a big transformation." Mr Hansen said it was crucial that local historical accounts of the broader conflict were remembered and commemorated appropriately. "I think it's important to remind ourselves that the world can change very quickly, and north Queensland experienced that in 1942 to 1945." The garrison city will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific with a joint US-Australian commemorative service involving veterans, families and dignitaries.
Sydney Morning Herald
10-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Find comforting Cantonese classics at this Eastwood favourite
A few doors up from Eastwood Village Square, a neon Super Bowl sign marks another branch of this storied late-night Chinatown institution. The surrounds here are more comfortable than at the original, and the menu packs all kinds of classics, from roasted pork ribs to XO pippies. And while live seafood is to become more of a focus – the menu lists lobster with salted egg and ginger-shallot coral trout – early signatures include fragrant Hakka-style salt-baked chicken, and comforting congee with fried bread for dipping.
The Age
10-07-2025
- The Age
Find comforting Cantonese classics at this Eastwood favourite
A few doors up from Eastwood Village Square, a neon Super Bowl sign marks another branch of this storied late-night Chinatown institution. The surrounds here are more comfortable than at the original, and the menu packs all kinds of classics, from roasted pork ribs to XO pippies. And while live seafood is to become more of a focus – the menu lists lobster with salted egg and ginger-shallot coral trout – early signatures include fragrant Hakka-style salt-baked chicken, and comforting congee with fried bread for dipping.
