Ballarat, Bendigo and Beyond

Ballarat, Bendigo and Beyond…

Car duly intact, we set off inland for the long haul back to NSW, and Canberra…the journey home to England is looming ever closer for me, and the weather has suddenly drawn in… a cold front blowing directly from the Antarctic heralds in the  Oz autumn and a reminder of my imminent return to colder climes.

Ballarat at first sight seemed enormous,  with sprawling suburbs and many MacDonalds, but the lake (once we’d found it!) provided welcome relief, just as the sun broke through the clouds. Once a deep flowing blue, the lake been ‘reduced’ by draught and draining to wetlands, so another familiar sight, algae and ducks, rather than black swans and surf!

The historic town centre was oddly enchanting. The ‘gold rush’ town buildings are quirkily different to the ‘usual’ colonial avenues, the legacy of banking, trading, and mine towers, complete with bells, plus miner’s memorials and histories lining the streets evoked a deep historical sensation.

The mixture of odd and new, as everywhere in Australia, continued  into the bizarre here, when we entered the massive MacDonald’s for a recuperative ice cream  and found ourselves sitting inside a renovated museum of the once enormous ‘Bakery’ on Bakery Hill, three floors complete with kilns/ovens/ etc-one of the weirder settings I’ve eaten ice cream in!

Ballarat art gallery proved as good as its reputation, the Australian art, featuring the usual Glover and Streeter showcase works, also showed much of Ballarat as it was during the gold rush, and told the moving history of the Euraka stockade-the original flag on show is movingly torn and bloodied-clearer in art than in words.

Arrived late at Bendigo, to find a very quaint motel, but alas also a very full and crowded one. Our downstairs tiny cubby-hole echoed all night with bumps/crashes/voices…Paul has spoilt me with more upmarket rooms since he came out, and I’m out of practise with the previously acquired hostel ‘deafness’.

On the plus side, the motel was right in the historic centre of Bendigo, another gold rush town with a fascinating history, and another excellent art gallery. The Grace Kelly exhibition is a crowd puller, so I avoided that and spent another absorbing hour in the aboriginal and contemporary sections here, wandering all alone minus a sound musing the works whilst Paul took himself off around the gardens to watch the parrots and bats which abound here.

This town is full of quirky shops, fountains and sculptures, plus the usual botanic gardens, and we wandered the lanes among the requisite churches and spires, mining towers, bells and monuments before embarking on the four hour drive across Victoria to NSW and Albury lake (gave me a chance to catch up on ‘The Archers’ podcast Paul has kindly provided…I reckon I’m only about 6 weeks behind now).

Tonight we’re at Lake Hume, staying in a resort overlooking the water and the ‘mountains’ (genuinely called the Alpine Resorts) behind, and we spent an interesting/adventurous evening clambering around the lakefront, getting lost, and as dark fell, increasingly going round in circles-at one point we could see the hotel so clearly we could have touched it but couldn’t find our way out of the woodland or beach…poor Paul was keen to find some supper, he thought he’d have to swim out, catch a fish and eat it raw…

Even when the scenery seems tame, odd touches like kangaroos jumping past in the rest stop by the highway, cockatoos catching the crumbs, and the diverse greens of the numerous gum and pine trees remind that this isn’t England-its become home to me now so I’ll see 'real' home with new eyes when I return.