At the stroke of midnight, Ray, dressed only in a napkin, emerged from the uppermost window of the hotel to descend via a 100-foot (30 metre) ladder, with a spotlight keeping pace, to the applause of revellers below.

The year was notable as the centenary of the Bendigo Advertiser and the Red Ribbon Movement. There was a Modern Plumbing Exhibition featuring revolutionary plastic piping, which its manufacturer claimed lasted for life. Bendigo Tramways completed its 50th year of running and stock and station agents F.A. Hill & Co celebrated 100 years as did the Bendigo Hospital and the Forest Street Methodist Church.

The deaths occurred of Stephen De Araugo, who was one of the first Bendigonians to enlist in World War I, and Bendigo’s oldest doctor, John Eadie.

My 1953 was an eventful one too, beginning with a Scout Jamboree in Sydney with mates from Kerang High led by Scoutmaster Ollie Jane. It was my first sighting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. After four happy years in Kerang, I was to start the year in a new home in Melbourne at Merlynston (North Coburg) and a new school, University High.

I was lucky enough to get a game with the cricket and football teams and do well enough in the examinations, especially in history, geography and economics, to obtain a teaching studentship at Melbourne University. My oldest connection with University High is that I met my best mate Bob Dalgleish there.

I won the school Economics Prize and was given a book, Australia by geographer Griffith Taylor. 

First published in 1940, Taylor had some interesting comments as some of the following excerpts show: 

"This then is the outstanding problem of Australia. How has a people of British nationality fared when it emigrated across the world to an empty land of three million square miles?

"There is nothing in Australia resembling the cool, wet lands of Britain. There is only a small amount of Australia in the same latitude as any part of Europe... it was natural for Australians to dread the swamping of their nation by Asiatics of a low standard of living and this feeling led to the general adoption of a strict "White Australia" policy.

"This led to government claims about the remarkable attractions of the empty lands, without any knowledge of the lands involved. Much economic loss through unwise settlement in the arid and tropical parts of the country has already resulted."

NOTICES

Vahland tours are being run during Heritage Month. Tours cost $4  - book by phoning 5441 3443. Tours leave from Specimen Cottage on Tuesdays at 2pm, and from the White Hills Cemetery gates at 2pm on Thursdays.

Shamrock tours are conducted every Sunday at 2pm. Cost $10 includes cake and coffee. Book at the Shamrock on 5443 0333.