[After compiling my Australia Index yesterday, it occurred to me that I still have a couple travelogue's from Australia buried in my archives. I never posted them because they didn't have pictures to accompany them, and I had been thinking that there wasn't any point in a travelogue without pictures. But I've re-thought it, and I've decided there may be some value in the written description of the place. Who knows? At any rate, it won't hurt. (I think I did actually take a lot of pictures on this excursion, but, as with my pictures on the Great Ocean Road, I didn't get around to sorting them and saving them, so now I've lost them.)
This is from January 9, 2011, when I visited the Town of Bendigo outside of Melbourne. (Wikipedia article on Bendigo HERE). ]
Sarah had been my former co-worker at Nova for about 6 months back in the Japan days.
I’ve actually met a lot of Aussies out in Japan. (I think, at least in proportion to their smaller population, there’s actually a lot more Aussies out in Japan than Americans proportionally. That’s probably why Nova going bankrupt was headline news in Australia, but never made the papers back home.)
Anyway, even though I’ve met tons of Aussies in Japan, so far I’ve only been able to reunite with a couple of them here in Australia—Kerrie (who I just had dinner with on Friday) and now Sarah. (Partly this is because I’ve lost touch with some people. Partly this is because Australia is a big country. And partly because a lot of the people I’ve met in Japan haven’t gone home yet, and are still out in various parts of the world teaching English.)
Anyway, Sarah lives in Bendigo, which is just a couple hours outside of Melbourne by train, so we’ve been talking about meeting up together all year, it just never seemed to work out by now.
Sarah volunteered to come into Melbourne at first. She kind of wanted an excuse for a big day in the city, and she told me there was nothing to see in Bendigo.
But since I’ve done such an abysmal job of sight-seeing outside of Melbourne since I got here, I told her I would actually like to see Bendigo. Even if there was nothing out there, I would just be happy to get out in the countryside and see what a small Australian town is like.
So, I woke up at 6:30 am, walked down to Southern Cross station, and took the train into Bendigo.
Was a little tired because I had woken up earlier than usual, but tried to stay awake and catch some of the scenery on the way up. The usual rolling hills, green pasture lands, very beautiful in its own way. Saw some kangaroos from the window as well.
Sarah met me at the train station. She took me to a bakery where she used to work, where we got some breakfast and coffee.
The last time I had seen Sarah, she had been with Ben (also from Australia). They had come to Japan together as a couple. They had left before the whole Nova bankruptcy thing, but then they had come back to visit in January 2009.
After finishing up our food, we headed out to the park nearby. It was already raining by this point, and neither of us had umbrellas, but we decided to brave it anyway.
Sarah mentioned how all the rain this year was nice after the 15 year drought Australia had been having. “You know,” I said, “everyone keeps talking about a drought here, and I don’t believe a word of it. This is the wettest place I’ve ever lived.” (And I think it is too.)
But Sarah assured me the drought had been real enough. I just happened to arrive in the year it broke.
We walked around the park, while Sarah filled me in a little bit on the history of Bendigo. “You know the Eureka fort stockade in Ballarat?” she asked.
I mentioned I had seen it.
“Well Bendigo was also a gold mining town, and the miners here also had a bit of a workers' rights movement. There was no climatic moment like the Eureka stockade, but there was what they called the Red Ribbon movement.”
We passed a plaque that explained this.
There was a big huge look out tower on the top of the hill in the park. We walked all the way up to the top of it, but when we finally got to the top we felt so cold and wet and miserable from the rain that we didn’t stay long.
The weather here has been funny again lately. Yesterday was in the high 30s Celsius, and so hot and miserable I could barely stand it. But today the temperature has really dropped suddenly with the rain for some reason.
Sarah suggested we go back to her place to get an umbrella and try and meet up with her fiancé.
We stopped of at their house, had some soda, et cetera.
Sarah asked me how I was finding Australians and Australian culture. “I like it,” I said. “Of course, in Melbourne it’s so seldom that you actually met a real Australian.”
This was said half as a joke, but Sarah enthusiastically agreed with me. “Oh I know it,” she said. “Whenever we go down there we always play ‘spot the Aussie’ to try and pick out who the real Australians are. Did you know Melbourne is the most multi-cultural city in the world?”
I didn’t know this. Nor have I, as of yet, independently confirmed it. But I’d believe it easily enough. It’s certainly the most multi-cultural place I’ve been to.
We talked about what to do next. Sarah knew of a couple of parks in Bendigo she suggested we check out.
It was still cold and rainy, so I decided to invest in an umbrella. (I am about due to buy another umbrella anyway, since my previous one had gotten destroyed by the wind and rain back in Melbourne). So we went to the department store to buy one. Shortly after I bought the umbrella, it stopped raining.
Bendigo, by the way, is small, but not completely out countryside. It’s got a population of 100,000 (or so Sarah tells me). Sarah said it reminded her of Nakatsu in terms of town size, and I agreed with that. (Or to put it in West Michigan terms, it sort of feels like Holland.)
(Sarah is originally from a small town even further out in the Bush, and she says Bendigo is just about the right size town for her. She says Melbourne is just too big of a city, and she gets overwhelmed whenever she goes there. Which is interesting, because a lot of the international students I know complain that Melbourne is way too small. But to each his own I guess.)
On the way out to the park, Sarah swung by to the yard where her fiancé Nathan and his father were doing some yardwork laying in new sewage pipes. So I got to meet both of them for the first time. Both friendly people.
Nathan’s dad asked me how I was doing with the Australian English. “We got an American girl working in our office,” he said, “and I reckon she doesn’t have a clue what we’re saying half the time.”
“You probably got a little bit used to it in Japan,” Sarah said to me, “working with me, Ben, and Mr. K.”
“Yeah, my time in Japan did give me a little bit of a heads up on Australian English,” I said. “Plus, you know in Melbourne it’s so rare you run into an actual Australian anyway.”
“Oh I know it,” Nathan’s dad said. “It’s ‘spot the Aussie’ down there, isn’t it?” (He used the exact same phrase Sarah had used anyway, so this must be somewhat of a common saying. And I should also clarify all this is probably exaggeration. Probably half the people walking through the streets of Melbourne at any given time seem to be local Australians.)
Sarah and I went to the park. Nathan promised to join us once he finished the yard work and got cleaned up.
The local park had some Australian animals there in cages for people to see. A kangaroo was in one cage, and a few birds (forget which kind) in another.
It seemed to me a bit silly to keep kangaroos in cages here in the park when there were so many of them about, but oh well. (We don’t see kangaroos in Melbourne, of course, but you get out into the country and there seem to be tons of them about.)
In fact, the next place Sarah decided to take me was around her college campus, where there were usually lots of kangaroos just hanging out in the fields and the “paddies” (which I think is Australian for just a grassland area.) We drove around, but didn’t see any kangaroos.
“I don’t know what the deal is,” Sarah said. “They’re usually out. Maybe the rain’s just keeping them hiding under the trees today.”
Unable to think of anything else worth seeing in Bendigo, Sarah just drove me back to her place, where we had lunch and waited for Nathan to come back. (I would have been more than happy just wandering around some of the various parks, or the downtown area, and just getting a feel for the town, but this didn’t seem to be high on Sarah’s list.)
Once Nathan got back, we talked about what we were going to do next. The best idea Sarah and he had was to take me out to the lake, and do a little bit of random sight-seeing on the way.
We got into Nathan’s jeep (I was somewhat crammed into the really small seats in the back, in which I had difficulty fitting in and out of.) Once on the road, we were out of the city and in the forest in about 5 minutes. We went up a hill, and stopped briefly to climb up to a lookout tower, to get a scenic view of the place.
Then on the way back, Nathan decided to take the car for some off roading down one of the trails. “Where this trail ends up, nobody knows,” he said.
He quickly regretted taking the car down this particularly trail because it got very steep and rocky, and he was worried he would damage the underside of his car. But he said it was impossible to turn around now. And indeed, there wasn’t really space to do any sort of 3 point turn around or anything, you just had to keep on going.
I had never really done any off roading before, and was somewhat alarmed at how much the car bumped and tilted going down the uneven road. I kept imagining the car would tilt just a little bit too far at one point, and it would roll over completely. But that’s just me, I’m always paranoid about everything.
“Well, you said you wanted to get out of the city for a day,” Nathan said as we bumped along, “and this is about as far out of the city as you can be.” He later took that back and said that actually last week when he had gotten lost for several hours in the bush deerhunting, that was about as far out from the city as a person could be.
(Note: Australians tend to use the word “bush” a lot of times to refer to terrain that I would just call “forest”.) Eventually after a lot of bumping around we made it out on a real road again.
Saw some kangaroos by the side of the road. Nathan stopped the car briefly for my benefit. The kangaroos just starred at us for a while, until Nathan whistled at them, and then they slowly hopped away.
Then we went to the lake.
I forget what the actual name of the lake is. It was a man-made lake created in 1960 by damning up a space where a couple rivers joined (or so they tell me) and it’s a big deal this year because this is the first year it’s been at 100% for about 15 years or so. In fact last year apparently it was down to just about nothing. Which is hard to believe now looking at the huge lake.
We drove around it. Sarah mentioned one of her friends said the lake was at 103%, which Nathan took issue with. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he said. “It can’t get over 100%, because if it does the excess water just goes over the overflow.” He went on for a bit about how stupid some people could be.
The overflow itself is apparently a bit of a point of interest, because this is the first year in 15 years water is actually going over the overflow (and the river below it). We went down to where the overflow met the river, and there were some people standing around fishing.
Nathan and Sarah told me the cliché thing to do these days is to take a picture of the water going over the overflow, and post it as your facebook profile picture. I declined saying I think it would just confuse my friends.
We got back in the car. I suggested we go up by the actual lake itself and look around for a while. (I had seen the lake from the backseat of Nathan’s car as we drove around it, but never really got a chance to take it all in. And besides after all this driving I was a bit eager for a chance to stretch my legs.)
Sarah mentioned she also wanted to get ice cream by the kiosk near the lake. We went to the kiosk and got ice cream there. (Sarah and Nathan ran into someone they knew working there, and they chatted to her briefly).
And then back in the car.
Somewhat to my disappointment, we never did stop and walk around by the lake. (The ice cream kiosk place had been off the road, not by the lake.) But I did get some glimpses of it as we drove past. (They pointed out to me how many trees were now growing in the lake because they had sprung up during the drought years.)
We made a couple other minor detours afterwards. Stopped by a famous tree, which had a plaque by it saying that this is where the Bourke-Willis rescue party had spent the night once. (Bryson describes the disastrous Brooke-Willis expedition, which had set out from Melbourne, in his book, so that was my connection to this.)
And then, apparently having exhausted all there was to do in Bendigo, we just went back to Nathan and Sarah’s house, where we watched TV for an hour until it was time for me to catch my 6:20 train.
Conversation:
Nathan’s a bit of an outdoorsman, so he talked a lot about the hunting he does. Hunting kangaroos is really popular in Australia (he and his dad were a bit afraid to mention this to me, because they thought Americans would be horrified at the idea that Australians shoot kangaroo for sport, but I told them I already knew, and I had eaten kangaroo sausages here, so I was part culpable.) Nathan also described hunting foxes and deer. (Deer and foxes are both non-native animals to Australia, that had gotten introduced from Europe and then became pests in the wild, so it’s apparently popular to go and hunt them.)
On the subject of climate, they told me just how bad the drought had been getting before this year, and how people had been planning for the worst case scenarios in case the drought never broke. And how you couldn’t water your lawn, or wash your car, or anything like that. “How did they enforce all these laws?” I said.
“People would turn their neighbors in,” Sarah said. “Everyone was just really concerned about the water shortage.”
Sarah and Nathan both got a laugh out of some of my Americanisms. Like my saying “right” when I meant “yes”. (As in “Are you studying at Melbourne?” “Right.”)
I hadn’t even noticed I did that. And I’m not entirely sure if it’s an Americanism or just one of my quirks, but Sarah said Dylan (one of the other Americans in our old Nova office) used to do the same thing, so she was pretty convinced it must be an Americanism.
Later, Nathan’s dad came by to drop some fresh eggs off for Sarah and Nathan when we were sitting around watching TV, and when I was talking to him I started saying, “right” again in response to questions about Michigan. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until Sarah and Nathan started laughing again.
At 6:20, Sarah and Nathan dropped me off at the train station, and I caught the train back to Melbourne.
All things considered, they had been very gracious hosts to me considering I had more or less invited myself up to their town for the day. I didn’t get out and walk around the town quite as much as I would have liked, but you can’t complain too much.
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