BendigoWeekly www.bendigoweekly.com.au
ISSUE 717 FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2011
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Cash for school Page 3
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Kinder commotion Page 5 ■ Grand plan for museum Page 7 BUILDING A NATION: Dr Charles Fahey believes Bendigo’s history has more to do with the Trades Hall than the Town Hall. Photos: ANDREW PERRYMAN
NEW FOCUS BendigoAhead
Bendigo’s gold identity a ‘myth’
By ROSEMARY SORENSEN
THE image of a city made grand and prosperous by the goldrushes has been outed as a myth by a Bendigo historian. “There’s a tendency to romanticise Bendigo,” La Trobe University academic Dr Charles Fahey said this week.
Dr Fahey said Bendigo’s identity had more to do with the history of the Trades Hall than the Town Hall. “It has always been a working man’s city,” he said. “You go through town, and there are statues of men like George Lansell, but we forget the families who dug out the wretched gold that made
him rich, or who brought up the children who worked for him. “You have the image of all those grand buildings, but the majority of people were employed in workingclass occupations.” Dr Fahey is completing a history of Bendigo up until the First World War, when the bottom fell out of the gold-
mining industry. In that book, he will describe Bendigo as a “city divided” by the goldmining industry, which was very expensive to run and led to a string of labour disputes. “People took the profits in the good times, and had nothing left to work with in the bad times,” Dr Fahey said.
“That leads to a great deal of unemployment and underemployment: that’s my thesis in a nutshell.” As the city prepares for the changes which will be forced on it by unprecedented population growth, the historian said it was important to correct the impression created by the romantic and skewed version of Bendigo’s history.
Continued Page 2 EDITORIAL Page 13