Ballarat

The city of Ballarat is, for the most part, a well-groomed city of suburbs. Broad, intersecting checkerboard streets stretch from north to south, and east to west.  The older thoroughfares distinguished by weatherboard bungalows with ornate Victorian tracery over their verandas.  The lawns as manicured as any to be seen in Surbiton or Wilmslow.   Its heart is  a large lake surrounded by beautiful parkland, that is a focus for much summer activity, or, quite often, inactivity.  It is called Lake Wendouree and owes its name, as it would seem does much else in this  contradictory country, to an almost total failure on the part of its early settlers to understand, or care for, its original inhabitants.  As the story goes, a Scottish squatter, asked an aboriginal woman the name of the swamp that later became the lake.  She is said to have replied, wendaaree , which I am told may be politely translated as "go away".  He didn't.

 

Helpful road signs

seen all around Ballarat

But, strangely enough, it is the most seemingly neglected area of Ballarat that is the most interesting.I say seemingly neglected, because there is no doubting the city's pride in the Victorian treasures of its Gold Rush city centre. There are plaques everywhere, proclaiming the origins of the many palatial Victorian buildings built during a period of golden prosperity from the late 1850s through to the 1890s.  However, in some ways,  it reminds me of the rural Irish towns of the 1960s, which often gave the impression of more town than people to fill it; as though the tide of population and prosperity that had once surged through the area, had long since ebbed.  Not a ghost town exactly, but, perhaps, a town of ghosts.  The train station, for example, is a remarkable piece of exuberant nineteenth century architecture, with a vast echoing, and beautifully preserved, Victorian booking hall and a  magnificent waiting room, quite capable of catering for many more passengers than now pass through.  However, the waiting room, waits, as it seems, in perpetual anticipation of an era that is past.

Almost the whole city centre area is a time capsule of  Victorian Australia, from the colonial shop and business frontages of Lydiard and Sturt streets, to the magnificent town hall, and hugely evocative reading rooms of the Mechanics Institute.  It takes little imagination to hear the ghosts of the Jersey Lily or Dame Nellie Melba singing on the stage of Her Majesty's Theatre. However, the ghosts are, perhaps, best imagined in the wonderful Craig's Royal Hotel. Taking afternoon tea in its foyer, admiring the Minton tiled floor, or sipping a cold beer in its bar, it is all too easy to see the top hatted mining speculators discussing their latest finds.  In fact, after two or three beers, I'm rather inclined to join in.

                                         

       

                                                                           Craig's foyer