by quintam clockbum esq.

I’ve got a favourite photo of Bendigo in its heyday.  It was when the deep mining had just begun, and George Lansell, our ancestral Twiggy Forrest, had sunk his shareholders money into the ‘Big Victoria’, the ‘Red White and Blue’, the ‘180’, the ‘Hustlers,’ and made Bendigo the richest place in the world.  Each year a gold train with hundreds of tons of raw gold, left Bendigo.  Only twenty five years after Major Mitchell, (1836) had “discovered” it, the speculators moved in.  Land was listed on the London Stock exchange a year later.  That’s what Australia is made of, digging stuff up, selling it, and real estate.

The indigines didn’t get real estate, they thought it was their god, they belonged with it, rather than owned it.  Silly them.

George Lansell made big money, and did what anyone who made it in the colonies did.  He pissed off, ‘went home’ to the U.K to live the life of a parvenu.  He returned briefly, and stayed on and off in Lansell Road, Toorak, (Melbourne), and left a pile, both figuratively and literally.  ‘Fortuna’ in Bendigo, his ‘Shangri-la’ as a sort of ersatz, romanesque baroque in amongst the mullock, and a statue in Pall Mall to adorn histories page.

My favourite photograph, taken in 1860, depicts a chinaman, with pig tail; he is holding a candle.  Also an African American, supporting a drill, and a Cornishman, sans pastie, holding the pointy end at a wall of rock.  This photograph was taken in the ‘Big Victoria’, which eventually got down to 4500 feet below ground level.  Eventually the cost of keeping water out made extraction too expensive.  So Bendigo, back then, was truly multicultural, there were Chinamen, even blackfellas, (though non native) and a whole swathe of Europeans, who sort of flocculated along the alluvial and into the deep lead.  They’re still there in spirit, as the place is pockmarked with holes, and every now and then a body turns up, – which amuses the coroner, the public and the press.

Back in the 1860’s Bendigo had a stock exchange, a synagogue, numerous joss houses, fifty hotels, flop houses, brothels, sly grog tents, you name it.  It was truly cosmopolitan, and raucous.  There’s a not so famous painting in the Bendigo Art Gallery that sort of sums it up, but it’s unfinished, as the artist got done for horse stealing and debauchery, public drunkedness, and vice.  But it hangs there as a memento of Bendigo pre respectable.

The Immigration Restriction Act (1901), Australian Parliament’s first piece of legislation saw to it that the Chinese were encouraged to move away, and by the time I got there in the mid 1990’s respectability and boredom had done its worst.  No grog shops, knock shops and brothels, just pubs, all deaded, and the TAB.  They’re a conservative lot in Bendigo now, and a bit Irish Catholic.  The cathedral is the biggest in the southern hemisphere, it’s full of red heads, and is a sort of dusty adjunct to Warrnambool, as a setting for the last remake of Ryans Daughter.  When we arrived there were no foreign people, just heaps of Shanes, and Kerries; sheilas, and clean living blokes, and until recently not much on the telly either.

But all this has changed.  Now they’re encouraging doctors and other useful (employable) people, people from overseas, some of them are now living on the other side of the divide, and all of them are foreign, (dark skinned) and that’s the trick behind 457 Visas and anything else we choose to call, “we can’t be bothered training our own”.

So now, all of a sudden (and this is really shocking), we’ve got Muslims.  We’re terrified about these Muslims, because before long they’ll be ‘jihadding’ all over the place.

And then clean living (sic white skinned) blokes and sheilas just wont be safe.

Opposing voice!? 

Opponents said the mosque would bring violence to Bendigo and the city would be overtaken by Sharia law.

“If you’re Muslim and you want a mosque, go back to the Middle East. This is Australia,” one member of the public said.

The protest group asked what councillors were doing to protect the city from terrorism and accused the council of failing to consult the community.

“Bendigo people own Bendigo, it’s their town, they have the right to say mosque or no mosque,” one person said.

“We’re not racists.”

But then . . .