Bendigo

On Monday I visited the White Hill Botanical Gardens which has a bunch of birds and animals in cages for the sake of tradition. Apparently in Gold Rush times the people needed to acclimatise and the way to do this is apparently to put swamp wallabies and gallahs in small fenced off areas. Perhaps this is similar to allowing refugees to assimilate by putting them in small fenced off areas.

After attempting to apologise to these bored animals via a conversation of blinks and ear twitches, I then stumbled upon a bike path along Bendigo creek which happened to lead me to White Hill historic cemetery. I must have spent an hour wandering amongst the graves, taking photos and looking for possible relatives and/or zombies.

There is a Jewish section with 125 graves and a Chinese section with 263 tombstones and a funeral tower. Amongst the other graves there are a mixture of pauper graves, marked only with numbered crosses to lavish tombstones and memorials.

According to a brochure from the Friends of the cemetary, this wasn't the place for 'prominent' citizens because the mourners weren't into walking past the Chinese camp on their way there - perhaps because they weren't acclimatised to the Chinese by putting them in cages?
This cemetary is unusual because it doesn't have a fence all the way around, but rather just a set of gates and a small bit of fence that have been there since 1881. But due to this there has been a lot of vandalism and apparently 'grave dancing'. I thought about free camping
there, but I think staying there on a frosty night would have freaked me out. Just a little.
One of the graves that caught my eye - besides all the ones that look like someone had come back to life and pushed their way out - was the tombstone of Mary McCarthy who died at age 114. Apparently she came to Australia at age 99, from Ireland.

Besides this, I continued riding along the path, found a replica mining tower, Rosalind Park full of scary bats and scarier teenagers, the outside and inside of the huge, Sacred Heart church, taking lots of snaps, and found the local library to get my hit of free internet - I'm yet to ween off the thing.

Here are some photos...