Halls gap to Bendigo museums and parks.
We say au revoir until Fiji to Wayne and Myra, load the car, clean the cabin and depart on almost totally empty roads for Bendigo, one of Victoria state’s major gold-mining towns of the 1850-60s, and home then to thousands of Chinese who fled Canton Province to seek their fortunes and escape turbulent times.
We drive through perhaps the last unseasonably hot weather that Victoria will have this Fall and arrive in the car park behind the Bendigo Art Gallery and café. A bit of cold pasta with salsa verde sauce and some toasted fig bread with smoked trout and rocket (arugula) and a nice Tooborac pale ale pave our way into the gallery, where we stay for less than 20 minutes.
We walk through a beautiful park next to the gallery and down to the Golden Dragon Museum, which sits across from the William Farmer Funeral Home Car Park and houses all manner of Chinese artifacts spanning Bendigo’s golden heyday up to about the 1940s. It is a rather large museum with several rooms on one floor, with a dragon (loong) like those used in New Year’s Day parades, that’s about 1,260 feet long, which curves around the walls and was used to welcome King George V when he came to proclaim Australian federation in 1901.
Another ceremonial artifact: a 2.2 ton solid jade chariot (wooden wheels) carved with 188 dragons (auspicious), 36 bats (good fortune) and 18 phoenixes (wish fulfillment). The carriage was rumored to have been used in the Qing Dynasty.
All manner of history: In 1857, Victoria passed the Chinese Regulation Act, which levied a 10 pound tax on any Chinese landing in Victoria (so lots sailed to nearby Robe) and another pound as a license to dig gold for two months (renewals required). Despite that declaration of love and admiration, the lure of gold brought 33,600 Chinese to Victoria (3,750 in Bendigo). By 1864, when the gold rush died, 23,000 of them left.
We walk around town and check into the incredibly Victorian Sheridan Hotel — pictures in the front hall of Princess Diana sweeping down its central staircase — and go to dinner at a rather fancy restaurant where David asks the bartender if he makes Negronis. The bartender says yes, but David’s tweaked to the fact that many Oz tenders use dry vermouth rather than the required sweet red (because they’re cheaters and convicts, like their ancestors), and asks if he uses sweet vermouth. The tender says, “‘Course I’m not an idjit. No other way to make it, is there mate?”
Good dinner.
Another day of food, fun and history in Oz.
Two Tramps 