Down The Mall went, err, down the mall this week to discover that, once again, something is all our fault.
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While the big Australian banks are being whacked by the Banking Royal Commission for doing everything from selling people things they don’t get to not putting out enough Scotch Finger biscuits at morning tea, we can now report that much of this began in Bendigo.
While Bendigo is proudly home to a bank which hasn’t been in the Royal Commission’s cross-hairs, our city’s history is deeply responsible for the growth of the banking sector,
This is evidenced in the Bankrolling Bendigo: Building a City exhibition which opened this week at the Post Office Gallery in Pall Mall.
You might not expect an exhibition on banking to be all that riveting. It could be like watching Sesame Street’s The Count: “Vun! Vun dollar! Ha ha ha! TWO! Two dollars! Heh heh heh.”
As the exhibition’s curator, Emma Busowsky Cox says, before gold was discovered in Bendigo, the three banks trading in Victoria held a measly £763,000. Three years later it was seven-and-a-half times that.
By 1890 there were 33 new banks and more than 1500 branches – all mostly fuelled by gold.
And curiously, even though our Bendigo Bank came into existence 23 years ago (although its origins as a society helping Bendigo people get into a home go back 160 years), it’s not the first Bendigo Bank.
That opened in 1854, three years after the discovery of gold. It had a canvas roof and was taken over by the Bank of Victoria four months later.
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Mind you, we’ve been fascinated by the details of the robbery of the Bank of Australasia in Bendigo in February 1905.
It looked like a safe cracker had picked the bank’s lock and stolen £2000 in gold sovereigns – worth a staggering $250,000 in today’s money.
The bank offered a chunky reward and asked for help from Bendigo’s locksmiths.
Early the next year, a Frederick Gray was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail for embezzling £1100 from the same bank. He was the bank’s senior teller.
The judge did not have nice words to say about the manager or his ability to keep his staff under control. He’d been asleep on the job in more ways than one.