The grave of a St Arnaud “forefather”
Statue outside the town library
The railway line
St Arnaud Band Hall
Statue on the Town Hall
The main street in St Arnaud
St Arnaud is a small town in Victoria. The many shops that have shut down on the town’s main street suggest that St Arnaud isn’t a vibrant or growing town. Indeed, when you walk down the streets that surround the main thoroughfare you realise how small the town is. This is the place my grandfather was born and the place my great-grandmother fled in the early years of the 20th century to get away from an abusive and alcoholic man. This is the place my great-grandmother returned to only to find that that man would also return (he spent several years in Queensland working as a shearer) and still be abusive and still be an alcoholic. This is the place my great-grandmother lived in until she was sent to the Ararat Mental Hospital because she had Alzheimers. This is the place that makes me think about the damage that violence and alcoholism can do, and how that damage can be passed from one generation to the next. St Arnaud has on old court house, lots of lovely old churches, a statue of the man it was named after, and a garden in the middle of town.
This is a follow-up post to my earlier one about Ararat.
Things don’t look too promising for St Arnaud and for many towns from central Vic west and north. Twelve years now of well below normal rainfall has been a struggle for small businesses that rely on the farming community and local tourism for income. This year has seen a reasonable winter after a slow start become the driest spring on record at this point. With nothing on the radar and dismal forecasts for the rest of the year we can only hope for a ‘once in a hundred year’ rain event to at least put some water into pitifully low water storages. It seems we’ve had plenty of other once in a hundreds lately but none involving rain.
Nice pics Darlene, come back and bring some more of those showers. Incidently Berry’s Bridge is along that railway line towards Bendigo. Cheers.
Thanks for that. You can’t get the train directly from Melbourne to St Arnaud so I wondered where that line was going to.
It’s really sad to the see the slow death of some of our small towns. There is often nothing to make young people stay.
Oh yes, it was freezing cold and the clouds were often very dark. There was some very impressive hail storms. Don’t know what they did to those wineries not far away.
Yep. You remember the times you’ve been through so many places like this when they were thriving.
They have their faults, same as the big cities as to boredom, family breakdown, gambling, drinking etc. But you look at the various houses empty and wonder why they brought in some of the more exotic social security laws, that drove residents out and prevented others from moving in.
Surely places like this would be be no worse for pensioners, unmarried or unemployed people and their kids, than some of the uglier places in the cities, where accomodation shortages are a problem, or so we are told?
And of course, we have to keep up the pretence that there are adequate job opportunites for all, when it’s tacitly known, if seldom admitted except under duress, that some people are never going to get a fair go as to employment. Why not at least give these categories of people the consolation of somewhere decent to live and a better environment for their children,if applicable?
Or is the urban housing shortage just a myth after all- it was actually necessary to drive as many people as possible to the cities to drive up housing prices?
Good point, Paul.
I agree some people are never going to get a fair go, for a wide variety of reasons. Having a sense of belonging and community is very important for us all, employed or unemployed. If governments could take a more creative approach such things could work (engaging people in community building in small towns, for example). Alas, it’s probably not to be.
wow – I was born there – -didnt think any thing came or went from the town – other than me – lol
parartus.
This reminds me. A few years ago there was a report about a stand of woodland out that way that was the last remaining habitat for a rare species of parrot. It looked like Bracks was going to allow it, but never saw a final report.
Could you help?
parartus, don’t know how big the town was when you lived there. Apparently, there’s about 3000 people there now (which one website promoting the town describes as “substantial”). Hmmmm.
Gday Darlene.
How are you going?
Its been awhile.
Good call on community and sense of belonging.
I’d also like to add ” to be a witness to each others lives and sharing experiences together, taking care of each other”
All of this can help folks through life.
It builds a sense of community, strength, resilience and a sense that you are not alone.
I believe anyway.
Hope you are well mate.
Regards
David K
Thanks, David. Hope things go well for you.
I love that idea of being a witness to other people’s experiences. It’s so important.
After my recent experience of being diagnosed with a mental ilness (disorder – whatever the shrinks call it), I found hearing other people’s experiences of living with the disorder and also recovering from it to be incredibly important. Very exciting to come across the work of experts like the feminist clinician Judith Herman as well.
Being part of a community and having our lives validated are important for us all.
Shame to hear St Arnold has a number of vacant shops, but I think that is probably true for a number of the smaller regional Victorian towns. Nearby Bendigo is thriving and even Echuca with its tourism appears to be doing ok, and not to far away Beechworth keeps on ticking though it does have a few vacant shops at the moment. Will be interesting to see what the next 18 months holds
I think that’s true, Jamie. Bendigo is a thriving town. Perhaps it’s the nature of how these towns get their money (e.g. a town that has in the past depending on gold mining might be in a more precarious situation these days if they haven’t found anything to replace it).
Thanks for posting this Darlene. The similarities between your great-grandmother’s story and that of mine are uncanny – different town, different mental hospital, similar consequences down the generations. While her daughter, my grandmother, wouldn’t qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis, she has a few quirks that I suspect are the result of growing up under the kind of circumstances that you describe. Like an efficient cheerfulness (that often seems forced), an obsession with dirt and dust (the house where she grew up was always a mess) and a reluctance to either save money or spend it on herself (she was the family breadwinner from her early teens, and anything she kept for herself would be stolen by her father and spent on booze). She seems to be permanently on red-alert, and she barely eats or sleeps. I’ve long been frightened that someday, something will happen that will combine with a lifetime of unattended sorrow to kick out what I imagine to be her carefully constructed yet still fragile foundations and then it will be my mother’s job to give permission for her ECT, just as it was her job to give permission for my great-grandmother’s. But perhaps this is over-theorising, or just projection, and she has more resources at her disposal than I can conceive of? I should give her a call.
Thanks for that, Emma, and thanks for your beautifully insightful comment.
Not an easy way for your grandma to live her life: always on red-alert, barely eating or sleeping, obsesssing about dirt etc. She must have been living like this for a long time, which sounds utterly exhausting. It’s not hard to assume that she might crave having some control over her life and surroundings. It must have been hard for her to have to make that decision about her mother: treatment for the mentally ill isn’t particularly pleasant these days, but in days gone by…not good at all.
But I know my grandmother wouldn’t agree – the way she sees it, she’s happy, other people have more serious problems than her and my ‘psychologising’ is unfair and reductionistic. And that’s fair enough. For while I think it’s a very good thing that we are starting to take a more trauma-informed view of mental illness, I think it may occasionally lead to more (not less) stigma and blaming, the imposition of totalising, deterministic narratives, and (usually unflattering) assumptions and expectations being made about one’s current behaviour and level of functioning. I call it the “You were fucked and now you’re fucked” argument, and I think this is one reason why my grandmother dislikes my formulation of her, although she would never put it so crudely!
From discussions with those doing research into PTSD, I gather that apart from one or two researchers who have enough clout to direct their own work, the work of Herman et al sadly hasn’t caught on much in Australia, at least not in academic circles. I suspect that the concepts of “complex PTSD”, dissociation and similar are seen by many researchers as self-indulgent, hysterical Americanisms, borne of the same puritan panic as satanic ritual abuse, alien abductions and so forth. Trauma is still mostly conceived of as discrete, episodic and “outside the range of normal human experience” (i.e. “real problems” experienced by “real men”), as opposed to the chronic, common, interpersonal “women’s issues” stuff. I gather you’ve done a fair bit of reading around this topic, so I would be interested to hear more of your thoughts, if you are inclined to share them.
Might as well drop in and say hullo.
Good to hear from you Darline.