Castlemaine is quite a surprising town… It seems much larger than it’s population of 10,000 and presents as something of a ‘cosmo-hemian’ place that is a jumble of gold-fields history, agricultural, arts-and-crafts’y mixed with a little new-age and hipster culture…

It seems like a very livable place within striking distance of Bendigo, Ballarat, Daylesford and Hepburn.

Not long after arriving in Castlemaine we took a walk up one of the streets on the edge of the CBD to have a look at the Castlemaine Anticlinal Fold. This is a really interesting geological feature that has resulted in a curved arch like layer of rock that was discovered when they dug built the street back in the 1870’s. It is beautifully exposed with a plaque describing it on top and a couple of private house are perched above it.

Another interesting Castlemaine feature is the local IGA supermarket, which is located in a massive historic brick building. From the front, you wouldn’t know it’s a supermarket. The IGA itself is one of the larger style IGA’s that is every bit as well stocked as the larger chains with the added luxury of locally sourced products and lesser known labels that provide good products at competitive prices…

In keeping with our travelling tradition our last night was Pub Night… We took a punt on another out-of-town pub, The Five Flags Hotel in Campbell Creek, a satellite village of Castlemaine. It proved to be a great choice…

From the front it’s a small country village pub with a small drive-thru bottle shop on the side. Once through the front door it extends out the back into a renovated contemporary bistro serving standard pub grub as well as a range of specials. Being a Monday Night it was $20 meal night and we took of advantage of the specials having Risotto for Jo and Scallop Pasta for me. Both were excellent and a really nice way to finish up our stay in Castlemaine… a place that we’re very likely to come back to at some point in the future.

Onwards to four nights in Bright…

The Victorian Goldfields Railway is lovingly maintained historic railway line between Castlemaine and Maldon. It operates day trips with a heritage steam train and carriages (1st and 2nd class) on Wednesdays, Sundays and some Saturdays. The trip takes an hour or so through the scrubby bush and some agricultural land.

We opted to take a 2nd class carriage and had a compartment to ourselves for the journey. The carriages are well preserved but still in need of some repair. The plump padded vinyl bench seats were more springs than padding and you learned to sit down slowly rather than being tempted to flop down onto them. That said… they were quite comfortable.

The steam engine itself runs on an oil burning engine that burns any combustible oil such as fish oil or reclaimed deep frying oil making it cheaper to run than burning diesel to heat the steam tanks.

As the engine pulls out of Castlemaine it settles into a rythmic ‘Clack, Ca-Clack, Ca-Clack, Ca-Clack…’ with each ‘Ca-Clack’ also producing a bounce in the carriage seats from the well used tracks. The bouncing could be attested by the vertical oscillations of Jo’s bosom as we choofed our way to Maldon.

Maldon is another historic gold-fields town that has the usual array of cafes, curio shops and some historic sites. The first thing you see walking from the station into town is the Beehive chimney that projects over the trees on top of the hill that still has a number of old mine shafts and building ruins.

After a walk up and down the main street we stopped at the Maldon take-away and both had a burger-with-the-lot and potato cakes (scallops for us New South Welshmen). The burgers and scallops were absolutely remarkable examples of both… Best burger and scallops in a long, long time…

After lunch we started back to the station and discovered, by accident, the Maldon Vintage Machinery and Museum. An absolute hidden gem (and free). A beautifully curated set of sheds containing a plethora of historic machinery, vintage bric-a-brac, signs nad wares. Unfortunately we only had 20 minutes before we had to be back at the station otherwise we could have spent a couple of hours wandering around.

The ride back to Castlemaine was the reverse of the trip out and just as calming ‘Ca-Clacking’ our way through the scrub and bouncing along the tracks,

Daylesford / Hepburn Springs is to Melbourne what the Southern Highlands is to Sydney… a close getaway for a day trip or (dirty) weekend where you can poke around the antique shops and ridiculously expensive dress shops and enjoy an artisan latte and watching the beautiful people stroll by in their fake animal prints, expensive ripped jeans and knee-high boots…

That said… Daylesford is a quaint little town with meandering main street lined with boutiques, cafes and curio shops. To be honest we were a little underwhelmed with Daylesford. It just seemed to be lacking in ‘buzz’ and felt a little tired… maybe still recovering from COVID…

We discovered a massive antique market, ‘The Mill Market‘, 600m down one of the side streets, which was a warehouse sized building divided up into smaller areas chock full of antiques, junk, memorabilia, old/new clothes and all sorts of treasures and junk. You could probably spend a couple of days poking around it if you’re in the market for that kind of thing…

After doing the lap of Daylesford we headed out of town to the Daylesford Cidery for a tasting paddle and oven fired pizza for lunch. It was a quite beautiful establishment with a spacious garden and lots of open air, undercover tables.

The ciders were extremely clean; leaving no after taste at all… even the strongest flavour containing apple, pear and ginger. We both agreed though, that all of the ciders on the paddle were mostly tasteless ( or very subtle as we described them to the waiter ). Not to say they were flavourless, just not very fruity and had no bouquet at all… Sadly we were not tempted to purchase any. We should also add the the pizza (tomato, basil and bocconcini) was a little on the sad side as well. Hardly any basil and could have gone another minute or two in the oven. It wasn’t bad… it just could have been much better. The cidery would be a better place for an afternoon with friends listening to some live music… alas…

After the cidery we dropped into Hepburn Springs and again were a little disappointed with the atmosphere. The place itself is lovely, especially the lake/spillway area where numerous handpumps let you taste the spring water, which is slightly aerated with a very mineral’y taste. One was most notably sulphurous and vaguely reminiscent of the water in Rotorua, NZ.

Hepburn Springs too looks a little tired and in need of some enthusiasm and sparkle. Again it may just be COVID recovery where everyone is still just a bit jaded and stressed…

Last stop before going back to Castlemaine was Mt Franklin, which was basically a steep tree covered dome rising steeply out of the ground. We decided to drive up the narrow, winding road to discover that it terminated in a large bowl shaped free camping ground that already had a few tents, camper vans and even caravans set up. One hardy camper had towed a 10m caravan (1m longer than ours) up there, which was a good effort given the narrow steep access road.

The Castlemaine Botanical Gardens are right next door to the Big4 Castlemaine Gardens caravan park. They consists of a large lake area at one end with a compacted granite path looping around the outside and into various grassy areas and gazebos.

Ducks and native water fowl are abundant around the lake and we encountered a group of four ducks having a bit of a disagreement and on other that sounded as though it was laughing it’s head… quite hilariously.

The gardens are dominated by a large number of oak trees that were festooned with thousands of acorns and littered all around the trunks. One oak in the centre of the garden dates back to the 1860’s and was ‘Tree of the Year’ in 2021. It was a grand old tree that spreads up, out and around with the lowest limbs being metres above our heads.

The gardens are quite tranquil and obviously a popular place for walking dogs as well as just chilling out on the grass with a picnic or working outdoors with a laptop…

Directly across the road from Castlemaine Botanical Gardens is The Mill, originally a wool mill, which has been restored as a cafe, artisan cheese and chocolate makers and ShedShaker Brewery.

Das Kaffeehaus is a Viennese Style coffee house that is richly and ornately decorated but still maintaining a very contemporary hipster vibe. The wait staff wear maroon aprons with white shirts and ties/scarves. It appeared mandatory that male wait staff have either dreadlocks or man-buns such was the hipster vibe. Still… the coffee was good served in large bowl style mugs on silver trays with a glass of water. We went back on our last day so that Jo could try the Schnappacino and I had a go at the cold filtered coffee. Having never tried a cold filter coffee (over ice) before I found it to be very mild and quite refreshing given the heat of the day. Jo was less enthusiastic about the schnappucino but that was probably because she attempted to do a forward one-half somersault with tuck into the ground as we were walking there. Nothing damaged but her confidence though…

All in all we very much enjoyed Castlemaine… It was very easy to spend a week there and would gladly come back in the future…

Chewton is a small historic village on the outskirts of Castlemaine… We decided to visit for two reasons; to visit the Goldfieds Diggings site and to have dinner at the Red Hill pub in the middle of Chewton.

The Diggings is a preserved gold mining site that contains the ruins of the Garfield Water Wheel. All that is left are the two massive stone support walls that held the massive, 22m, water wheel in place back in the day.

The massive support walls are still impressive standing around 12m high and dominating the space around them. It must have been an awesome sight when the wheel was on them and powering the equally massive ore batteries that crushed to quartz and rock fed into them to extract the gold.

You can wander around a posted track that takes past various features including the water course used to supply water to the wheel and the cyanide tanks where the actual gold was extracted from the crushed ore. Walking up behind the water wheel mounts it’s a bit hard to believe it could have been so high and still get the water to feed into it via a wooden sluice channel that fed the water into the top of the wheel…

After the Goldfields Diggins we headed back into town for a pub meal at the Red Hill pub, which was a small cosy English style pub with a Scottish bent. A fully independent pub it only served craft beers, which is always welcome over the usual ‘Great Northern’ mass produced swill.

The pub has a really nice beer garden beside it where meals are served and does live music, which on this occasion was a slight drawback… We were ordering our meal at about 6:00pm, as were most other patrons, and were placed directly in front of one their speakers. At 6:00pm they were only doing their sound check and they seemed to be one of those over-the-top, fanatically OCD amateur bands that insist on tuning, re-tuning, tweaking, re-tuning, stopping, tuning again and once more until they achieved their perfectly mediocre sound levels. They also, like all other mediocre amateur groups, insisted on having the volume precisely 30% higher than it actually needed to be. We’ll never really know whether they were any good or not because they hadn’t started playing before we left a bit after 7:00.

That said… it was a good little pub with interesting beers, good food and a nice atmosphere (if you could get the right non-amplified acoustic group)…

So I was watching the ABC breakfast news on Friday morning and they had a story on the Lost Trades Fair in Bendigo being held that weekend,,,

I had known about Lost Trades Fairs for some time but they were usually held in South Queensland. I had wanted very much to see one for a while but was not expecting to do so until after out Big Trip. Given the opportunity being so close in Bendigo we booked a couple of tickets for the Sunday and off we went.

Lost Trades Fairs are small festivals that showcase craftsmanship and artisan skills such as blacksmithing, knife making, bow/arrow making, basket weaving, woodworking, candle making, horologists (clock makers), dry-stone walling, coopering, wheel wrights and other skills that are being slowly lost but being kept alive by small groups of dedicated amateurs and professionals. Of particular interest to me was the bowyer and the fletcher (arrow maker). The bowyer had a beautiful range of hand shaped wooden longbows including a magnificent Canadian Yew bow… Yew being the holy grail of bow timbers and very hard to come by in Australia due to import restrictions. He wouldn’t sell that bow but put a price of $1200 on it, which I thought was pretty fair even though there were a couple of natural flaws in it.

The Fletcher was an interesting bloke who shaped his arrow shafts from a square cross-section into rounds by hand… not using a dowelling jig. This was very impressive, however I was dubious about his claims to flight quality given that they were of differing stiffness and not as straight as machined shafts. That said… each of his arrows would have had a ‘personality’ and a good archer would know which was which and allow as such.

As much as archery is my thing the standout exhibit for me was a clock that was just simply mesmerising in its beauty with a steel ball constantly rolling around a rotating cylindrical shelf atop a n ornate tubular shaft and wooden base. The clock face being a cylindrical drum with a frame through which you read the time and date. Truly a thing of absolute beauty…

The range of trades and skills on display were very broad ranging and every stall held some level of interest with the craftsman happy to share their knowledge and answer all sorts of questions. The work on display was magnificent from hand made guitars and violins to knives to dry-stone walls. Of particular note was the sign-writer who made hand-painted signs and was self taught from old books and the odd old-timer.

Really makes you want to pick a skill and get stuck in… Whilst we were at the custom made guitar stall a guy asked if he could play one of the guitars which the stall owner agreed to. We were treated to an impromptu acoustic guitar interlude that was worth the price of admission alone.

All in all it was a brilliant day out and can recommend Lost Trades Fairs to anyone who love quality craftsmanship and old world skills…