Wild West

January 9, 2002-Under Down Under
(photos:Main St.-Ballarat,
Jewish grave-Bendigo,
Murray River in Echuca)

We made it all the way to Ballarat today. It was only an hour drive. It’s a former gold mining town & has a tourist attraction that replicates the mining experience & life in that era. The site of the original mine has long been closed over. As of today, the nearest anyone can guess is that the original mine is under the golden arches of the local McDonalds.
Fortunately, the weather turned perfect. It was in the low 70’s & sunny. We went directly to the tourist info center when we pulled into town & were able to book a room at a very old historic hotel in the city center. It has all the lovely fittings of the 1800’s including glossy curved banisters, stained glass, high ceilings, & elegant light fixtures. The rooms are plain but modernized. Since this is still school holiday, we were also lucky to get reservations at the sound & light show at Sovereign Hill, the tourist site. We had to take the 10:30pm show. The earlier one was fully booked.

We spent the day at Sovereign Hill & needed all the time we had. It’s an extremely well done attraction. We started out with a tour of the Chinese village & Chinese Temple. The Chinese were among the first to get gold fever. They were extremely industrious, saved their money, & prospered. The Europeans hated them. The Chinese also suffered less health problems since they grew their own vegetables & rice. The Europeans subsisted on mutton. The government set up a Chinese Protectorate with a representative of the crown, but eventually, the Europeans viciously attacked the Chinese community. It didn’t happen in Ballarat, but in a nearby mining town.

The mining down here was of two types. Panning in a river or stream is alluvial mining. Our guide demonstrated & ended up giving me the one gold fleck he found. Shaft mining is done through the opening of a vertical shaft that goes into the ground. It was expensive to purchase a license valid for three months & the area it was good for was only 8 ft. x 8 ft. Access down the shaft was by a rope attached to a bucket that was lowered by a windlass into the pit. It was really bleak. Accidents & cave-ins were common. Another danger was to the workers who separated the gold from the quartz rock. This was done with mercury. Need I say more? We walked into all the shops & even took a try at the bowling alley. The lanes were much longer than we have now & the alleys were only 18 inches wide with gutters about a foot each. The balls were wooden & heavy. There were no finger holes. I managed to land in the gutter right off, but David knocked over several pins. The pins were wood & had to be set up manually.

We went down into a simulated mine & they had a holographic & audio display showing the discovery of the second largest piece of gold in the world. It weighed in at about 145 or more pounds (69 kilos). It was shipped to England where it was melted down & made into sovereigns. The largest nugget in the world was also mined here. It weighed in at 72 kilos. We surfaced in time for the obligatory march of the redcoats down the main street. These redcoats wore yellow earplugs when they fired their muskets.

On our way to dinner at a Chinese restaurant (it was only appropriate), three young men (20-something) stopped us. One of them asked if we had 40 cents so that, ”I could call me Mum.” They had been drinking a lot & the bartender had, “nicked their keys.” Good on the bartender! One of them was holding a bottle in a paper bag. We figured that 40 cents would not contribute to their drunkenness so we gave them the money.
January 10, 2002-Blood and Plunder

The sound & light show at Sovereign Hill is called “Blood on the Southern Cross.” It’s like nothing we’d ever seen. It tells the story of the battle of the diggers (gold miners) vs. the British at a mining town called Eureka. The Australian gold rush started in 1851. The diggers resented the licensing requirements & the constant harassment by the government agents. The miners wanted to be able to buy the land outright. It was a matter of taxation without representation, the rule of British law vs. what the diggers thought to be justice, & Irish miners vs. the Anglican troops. What the diggers perceived to be a miscarriage of justice took place when a tavern owner who sympathized with the Crown murdered a miner & was not charged. The miners burned their licenses in protest & armed themselves. The military leader read a document to the diggers from the Crown that was called The Riot Act asking the miners to end the protest, but it was ignored. The Union Jack was lowered by the diggers & a flag bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross was raised. The troops attacked the camp on Dec. 3, 1854 & slaughtered almost 30 miners. Ultimately, justice did prevail & the diggers elected a representative to Parliament & we allowed to purchase their mines.

This story was told at the Sovereign Hill site we’d visited earlier. There was a brief orientation film then we stepped outside into the pitch black with the Southern Cross shining above us in the clear night sky. The narration of the mining story in general was accompanied with illumination of areas of action & sounds of voices & activities. Since no actors were used, we were asked to engage our imaginations. As the story progressed, we walked around the mining camp. At one point, the narrator asked us to board our coach to travel a mile to the actual site of an historic massacre. We turned around to see that trams had pulled up. They transported us through the mining town to the Eureka Hotel. We entered & were seated in an auditorium facing a blank wall. When the lights went out, the wall opened onto the full-scale scene of the Eureka mining camp. The narration & effects built to the climax & we boarded the tram to drive through the burning & ruined set. We were delivered to the main street of the Sovereign Hill site where an actor in historical garb summed up the event. The entire presentation was masterful.

Returning to our hotel went less smoothly. For security reasons, they locked the garage after dark. We had to call them from the car so that they could meet us by the garage entrance. We achieved that, but when we tried to get into the hotel, the door was locked & the person who had opened up the garage was gone. We did eventually get in, but it was dicey for a few minutes. We thought that we’d have to call the hotel again.

January 11, 2002-Victoria’s Northland

We always seem to need one more day when we travel. This time we have one more day. We miscalculated our time in the Melbourne area & found we had a bonus day. We used it to explore northern Victoria to see some of the best examples of Victorian architecture in the area. I find the bull nose rooflines of the metal roofs to be charming. It’s a frequently used feature on porches & overhangs & has a slight arching curve to it. The towns of Maldon & Bendigo are loaded with buildings that are part of the National Trust dating back to the gold mining days. At one time Bendigo had a decent enough Jewish population to support a synagogue. Myers of the Australian department store chain started out as a peddler to the diggers. The old synagogue has probably been gone for years, but there’s still a Jewish presence in the town. They’re in the old cemetery. The Jews & Chinese have sections segregated from the “whites” and next to each other. The oldest Jewish grave marker we found was from 1857 & the latest was from 1976. There’s evidence that the Cohn & Lazarus families are either living in the area or have recently replaced headstones & repaired their family gravesites.

We drove past the flat expanses of cattle & sheep stations until at one point I asked David if we were in Kansas. All I knew was that all of the poisonous snakes of Australia were out there. Occasionally we would pass a Neighborhood Watch sign. That was funny since there were no neighborhoods & nothing to watch. At one point it got so boring we turned on the radio & listened to a cricket match. We know nothing about the game so we amused ourselves by trying to figure out what the announcers were talking about. “Wicket maidens” particularly intrigued us. Cricket tests can go on for days. We had no idea if the game was in its 1st or 5th day. When they broke for tea, we turned it off.

I really wanted to see the mighty Murray River that played such a part in trade & transportation. We drove north to Echuca & made it in time for an hour-long ride on a side-wheeler paddleboat. The Murray is 1500 miles long. It begins in the Snowy Mountains & ends east of Adelaide where it empties into the Southern Ocean.

I have read a lot of Bryce Courtenay’s novels about Australia & now things were falling into place. In The Potato Factory, he wrote of the original settlers in the penal colonies of Tasmania who migrated to Melbourne & to the mining towns. Tomo & Hawk deals with whaling & New Zealand. Four Fires tells the tale of an Irish family in more recent times in the greater Melbourne area. It was interesting to see first hand all the places he talks about.

Lost Again-Why Not?

We had plenty of time to get back to Melbourne. Since we had an 8 AM flight the next morning, we were staying at .a motel near the airport. We wanted to drop our luggage at the motel & return the car to Hertz at the airport. The motel had a shuttle that could get us at the airport & take us back to the motel. The directions that the motel gave us were really bad. We were on & off highways & access roads for almost an hour. We decided to return our car first & then call the motel shuttle. It was 8:45PM when we arrived at the motel & they said we could eat in their restaurant only to find that it had closed. The receptionist said there was one pub a few blocks away that served until 9:30PM.The shuttle driver offered to take us there. He dropped us off, we walked into the pub, & the hostess told us they stopped serving at 9PM. She cheerily suggested a pizza parlor down the road. We hoofed it the two blocks & were happy to see it was still open. We’d planned to eat there, but it was too hot inside. We decided to order the pizza & carry it back up the hill to the motel. David was concerned that the pizza would get cold, but there was a solution to that problem. We ordered the pizza to be delivered to our room, started walking back, & it met us there. I have to say it was one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever eaten. It was totally & completely tasteless. The cheese didn’t even have flavor.

I will leave you with this thought for the day gleaned from the wall of a bathroom stall. “Keep Australia (or insert name of appropriate country) green. Have sex with a frog.”

Toby