Bruce Michelsen was born steeped in Bendigo history.
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The 84-year-old’s grandfather, John (Jack) Michelsen, served three terms as mayor between 1926 and 1942, and his father, Cyril Michelsen, was editor of the Bendigo Advertiser up until 1972.
It was while playing on Lucan Street, living in houses that his father built, that he became one of the most popular children in the area.
This was largely due to access to his grandfather’s house – a few houses down from his – which started as the cellar of an old distillery.
The cellar became an old sunken tennis court, and the back wall still had the old taps from the brandy vats.
All Bruce and his friends cared about at the time was that it was perfect for playing cowboys and Indians.
He and his friends would also play in Lake Weeroona and the creek.
“Back then all the mines were still going, there were oxides in the creek and we used to fall in all the time and never seem to get sick,” he said.
The gas works were still running and he would get home covered in all the gunk that would come out of it.
He used to swim in Lake Weeroona, which he described as “a cess pool, there’s no other word for it”.
The saleyards were where the Newmarket Pub is now, and the manure used to run down into the lake.
“It was great for catching yabbies – fantastic,” he said.
Bruce wouldn’t change his idyllic childhood back in the 1930s and 1940s for one now. His youth was a boys’ own adventure and kids could just be kids.
His mother, Jean, who at 5ft 2 was married to his 6ft 4 father, Cyril, would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
All Bruce wanted to do was travel and see the world. Looking through the books and pictures that filled his home awoke a wanderlust that would lead him far and wide.
He worked for a stint as a journalist at the Bendigo Advertiser, but it was the siren call of travel and adventure that he could not refuse.
He made his way to England and found Earl’s Court, working at British European Airways. In 1959, he teamed up with a New Zealander and travelled on a motor scooter through western Europe.
“I should have been killed a dozen times,” he said. “We crashed it a couple of times, but they were the best times of my life.”
Surviving the trip, he made it to Rome for the 1960 Olympics and watched Australian Herb Elliott run away from the best mile racers in the world.
Bruce then joined the British Merchant Navy and saw the world.
He made his way around Africa, went through the Americas and around the Pacific.
“It’s one of those jobs where there’s adventure and something exciting is happening and you think ‘this is the life for me’,” he said.
“Other times you think, ‘what the bloody hell am I doing here?’”
It was a hard life for hard men. “It wasn’t a place for sympathy,” he said.
Watching some of the older sailors, he realised they couldn’t function on land. He glimpsed a future soaked in alcohol and dysfunction and it frightened the hell out of him.
He came home in 1974 with no money and no job.
“There was not a lot of calling for middle class ex-seamen” back then, he said.
He was on the verge of heading to sea again when his background at The Advertiser helped him get work at La Trobe University in Bendigo, working in the library.
He always wanted to come home. If he didn’t return to Bendigo, drawn by the call of history on Lucan Street, then he thinks he would be consumed by the life at sea and be dead by now.
The Bendigo he returned to was not that much different from the Bendigo he left.
Bendigo between the wars, like the rest of Australia, he saw as stagnating.
It was just a country town back then. There were no lights outside the CBD and streets like Nolan Street were still dirt roads.
He believes change was slow from the two world wars right up until the late 1990s and early 2000s, although immigration after the war did kick it along a bit.
The Bendigo he sees now is a regional city, as opposed to the country town he left all those years ago.
He can see Bendigo growing into a city at least the size of Geelong.
The Art Gallery and Ulumbarra Theatre were things that could not be envisioned when he was growing up.
It is a much more cosmopolitan place now, he said.
Though the city has progressed, it has lost some things along the way.
He can remember the old times, with crowds of men spilling into the street after watching a night of boxing, looking for a fight.
But on the whole, he remembers a feeling of safety in the town.
“After midnight the place shut down, you could walk around safely and not be bothered,” he said.
He laments the loss of the family feeling around the place and spread of drug use.
“I didn’t make a lot of money, but had a good time,” he said. “What’s a successful life? As long as you’ve had an interesting life.
“When you get as old as I am, you sometimes get reflective and well, yeah, it’s been an interesting life.”
When asked to describe himself he said: “I lived (away from) Bendigo a long time, but I’m a Bendigonian, it’s a great place.”