Wanderung 26

Walkabout, Sailabout

March - May 2012


 

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Tuesday, March 27th, 2012: Bendigo

Bob:

To complete our tour of the gold fields area of Victoria, we decided to take a loop drive up North to the city of Bendigo, hitting some of the old gold-mining towns along the way. I was not eager to drive through the congestion of downtown Ballarat again, so Monika found a way to kind of circle around on the East side of town and then head up to Clunes on C 291.

Clunes was one of the original gold strike communities, but nowadays it is a sleepy little rural town out in the boondocks of Victoria. The advantage of that somnolence is that much of the downtown area looks relatively unchanged from the gold rush boom era of the mid-1850s. Seeing Sovereign Hill Historic Park was great in seeing a reconstruction of the gold fields, but what we were seeing in Clunes were the remnants of the real thing.

I was fascinated by some of the odd details left over from those halcyon days of yore, such as the artistically and beautifully painted shop windows above the entrance doors to several of the shops. Since it was just paint on glass, it would have been easy to scrape it off and have more light in the shop, and that had been done on a couple of the businesses. But on the ones that still held those windows with the old, painted signs, the entryway looked just like it must have 150 years ago, and that was fun to contemplate.

Monika:

Today we finished the loop through the gold fields. Our first stop was the old mining town of Clunes. And where yesterday we had seen a recreation of an old mining town, today we saw the real thing. Clunes reminded me so much of Sovereign Hill, it was scary. The only difference was that all the people wore modern clothing and there were cars on the road instead of horse and buggies. Otherwise it really felt like deja vu. The store fronts were fascinating and everything reminded you of days gone by.


 

Bob:

Continuing northward from Clunes we next stopped off to walk a bit in Maldon, which was a much larger town than Clunes and seemed to be economically more vibrant. Fortunately, most of the old gold-rush era buildings along the main street had also been preserved in Maldon, so it had a charming little central business district to amble around in. We walked up and down both sides of the main drag, marvelling at the intricate ironwork that seemed to characterize business buildings of that period. It reminded me a bit of the ornamentation found in the U.S. in the French Quarter of New Orleans, but in Maldon with a more British style rather than the French style. Still, it was quite pretty and really added visual interest to those old buildings.

Just up the hill from the end of the main street we also found a Veteran's memorial (something we found in each and every small town we stopped at in Australia), and a church with a rather unique color scheme. Traversing the business district back to the other side, we ran across signs for the "Beehive Mine" site and wandered back to see the ruins of building foundations and a large, perfectly intact brick chimney left over from the gold mining days.

Monika:

The next little town was Maldon, also an old mining town. It was somewhat bigger than Clunes and got more tourist trade. So there were several antique stores. But the feel was still of an old mining town. And on the edge of town there were the remains of the Beehive mine: a big smokestack, some outlines of building foundations, and an old mine shaft which was wisely barricaded with an iron grate.

Bob:

By this time we were just starting to get hungry, so we decided to find a place to eat lunch in Bendigo. Bendigo turned out to be a "big city", complete with outlying suburbs that had an Aldi store. We stopped off there to stock up on groceries and continued into downtown Bendigo, where for the first and last time that day we had to pay for parking, which was irritating.

But downtown Bendigo turned out to have many really large, fine examples of late Victorian architecture, and that was impressive. A large central park gave us a welcome respite from the concrete streets and buildings that otherwise dominated the business area. The park even included a beautiful white, wrought-iron conservatory that had a lush bunch of green plants inside and several well-tended flower beds outside. Very English and very pretty!

Monika:

But the main stop was Bendigo, the next large town north of Ballarat. It also used to be a mining town, but now was a bustling metropolis. We parked the car and started walking past a statue of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria - when I see this familiar statue of her I am always reminded of the Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance kneeling and singing "with all our faults, we love our Queen".

Further on was the memorial museum, the old post office, and old courthouse. Beyond that an open area with a conservatory and beautiful flower gardens.


 

Bob:

At the end of the park was a Chinese museum and, in front of that, a large, ornate Chinese archway. I've read that the Chinese favor the color red because it is lucky, and there certainly was a lot of red in some of the sculptures in front of the museum!

Monika:

The path alongside the flower gardens led from the conservatory to the Chinese area of the park that featured a Dragon Museum (which we did not visit as we only had a couple hours on the parking meter), a distinctly Chinese looking playground, and the typical Chinese archway.

Bob:

Normally, we might have wandered around the park, but we were both hungry and we only had two hours on the parking meter, so we curled back into the central business district past the Town Hall to find some lunch.

We finally found a take-out meat pie store called "Gillies" at the Bendigo marketplace, a pedestrianized street filled with shops and restaurants. We sat outside in the warm sunshine to eat our pies (mine was a round chicken pie and Monika's was a square beef one), while reading the history of Gillies' pies that was printed on the back of the takeout bag. I was particularly amused at the endorsement giving by sports announcer Nick Turner at the local radio station during the 1960s, which went, " Have a Gillies....the pie that fills but never kills!" Can you imagine any food product using that kind of an ad campaign nowadays??

Monika:

We were getting hungry and once past the town hall, we entered the business district. And there at a corner was a pie (as in meatpie) bakery. We later found out it had been there for a long time and had quite a tradition. So I got a steak and mushroom pie and Bob a chicken and mushroom pie and we settled at an outside table to consume our pies. I kept watching the people. There never seem to be any let up in the number of people entering the queue. It really was a very popular place, and the pies were really yummy

While walking back to our car, we especially admired a mural at a wall where the bicycle placed against it seemed to be an integral part of the picture.

Bob:

Wending our way back to our car, we retraced our route back to the Aldi store but then drove straight South from Bendigo, taking a different route back down to Ballarat. Although there were several old mining towns along the way we could have stopped at, our guidebook offered a walking tour of Castlemaine, so we opted to stop there and take our last walk of the day. Checking in at the Visitor Center, we were given a nice annotated walking map of the downtown area that marked all the historic old buildings and gave a capsule history of each one.

I read each of those historical blurbs while Monika took pictures as we ambled up and down and in and out the main streets, side streets, and occasionally the alleys of the downtown area. All in all it was great fun and a relaxing way to end the day, and I was just sorry that we didn't have time to wander around all the other old gold mining towns in the area.

Monika:

But now we thought we had seen enough of Bendigo since there was a last stop we wanted to make, Castlemaine. This is another old mining town, that is very popular with tourists, so it has its own "historical houses" walk. When we tried to find the tourist information, we first stopped at the wrong place, but when we looked puzzled, a typically friendly Australian not only gave us verbal instruction but came with us to the street to point us in the right direction.

The correct tourist information was in an old market place, a rather nice old building. There we got the map for the town walk and a description of all the numbered buildings. Bob guided us securely up and down the streets, reading the descriptions of the buildings as appropriate, while I took pictures. Thus a happy hour was spent.

Bob:

I noticed on the long drive back to Ballarat that I was starting to get very tired, and when we got back to our room and had a light dinner of soup and a sandwich, that tiredness turned into downright sleepiness. I was so tired that I dozed off twice while trying to complete my journal for the day, and I finally just gave up and turned in for the night.

Monika:

But after that we were glad to call an end to sight seeing for the day and drove home where we just had a bite to eat and put our feet up.



Copyright 2012 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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