Sunday, May 11, 2014

Around Ballarat…………..Day 47 & 48

11 May 2014 and Happy Mothers day to all Mum’s of all kinds.

7 weeks on the road now and still going. The last 2 days have been spent looking around Ballarat and getting our bearings. Ballarat is quite a large city with many many old historic buildings. I could spend days just photographing them.Around the town I found these:

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Just amazing architecture. I have been photographing iron lace work. I got a heap of photos in South Australia and am just adding ones I don’t have. Lots of old houses in Ballarat have some lacework.

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Many of the buildings have ornate carvings of statues and faces etc on buildings.

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We drove to Buninyong which these days is a suburb of Ballarat. It is the site of the first inland town proclaimed in Victoria and was where gold was first discovered in the area, leading to the large Gold Rush of the 1850s. Lance and I had lunch at the local Bakery before moving on.

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We saw this old Ford vehicle in the street at Buninyong. It looked as if it was part of the landscape.

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Today, mother’s day, Lance made me breakfast as Kurgan was unable to put the bread in the toaster himself. John was also seen to make Denise toast for her breakfast as well. The boys have done well.

A slow start to the morning found us all still at the caravan park for morning tea. We then split up and went our own separate ways to further look around. We went back to the fabulous old Ballarat Train Station. As it was Heritage Mother’s Day it was hard to get a good photograph due to the traffic. Makes our lovely old station at Fremantle West Australia, look like a miniature building. Ballarat Station was the colony's busiest non-metropolitan station for a period during the nineteenth century, its pre-eminence only being surpassed at different times by Echuca and Geelong.

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Opposite the railway station was the Provincial Hotel. The provincial hotel, built in 1909 was designed by a Ballarat architect, Percy S. Richards.

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St Patricks Cathedral is another historic build that stands out as you drive around.  St Patrick's Cathedral, Ballarat built between 1857 and 1871, was based on a design of English architect Charles Hansom, modified by local architects Dowden and Ross. It is made out of bluestone.  The cast iron gates and fence around the perimeter of the complex, designed in an elaborate gothic style with crowned piers

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We drove around the lake and had a look at the memorial to Australian Ex Prisoners of War. There are over 35,000 names on the memorial, including my children’s grandfather, Francis Forbes Farrelly, who was a prisoner of war in Germany for 4 years after being captured on Crete.

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The sun was out today and finally I was able to get another sunset photo, taken outside the caravan park looking on the Western Highway leading to Ballarat city centre.

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