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Walhalla recreations
Sporting festivals were regularly held in the main street on public holidays. Beginning in 1882, with brute strength and picks and shovels, the miners dug some 9 meters off the top off the hill just to the north of the junction in order to provide the community with a sports oval for regular football and cricket matches. By 1885 they had formed an oval some 125 meters in length and 81 meters wide. It was said that the home team would sometimes climb the precipitous 200 meters up to the sports ground the night before a match in order to enjoy the considerable advantage of having rested by the time their opponents arrived the next day. Such tactics hardly seem necessary given the stamina of the likes of Dick Merrington, a regular player of those days who was reputed to walk almost 40 kilometers to Walhalla every Saturday to play cricket or football, then walk the same 40 kilometers home again at the end of the game. An equally enduring legacy was created on October 29th, 1896, with celebrations to mark the opening of the Mountaineer Brass Band's Rotunda. The Band had awarded a three guinea prize to Mr F Meyers of the local photographic firm of Langhorne and Meyers for the winning design, and the tender that was subsequently let for its construction was for the sum of £85/17/6.
Walhalla Mountaineer Brass Band Rotunda, 1896 Although the rotunda was originally only expected to be used for some six months, it survives to this day as Walhalla's most distinctive and colourful landmark at the junction of the Left and Right Hand Branches of Stringer's Creek. The Walhalla Post and Telegraph Office had moved into new premises in 1886, and had by then become the third busiest mail room in Gippsland, handling over 50,000 items of mail per year. Crowds would gather in the street outside to await the arrival of the mail coach and the sorting and distribution of its contents.
The recently-restored Walhalla Post Office of 1886 |
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But gold was becoming harder to find. In the late 1880's there had been eight hotels in Walhalla, including the Grand Junction Hotel and the Star Hotel (a recreation of which reopened in March of 1999). By the beginning of the 20th century, only six hotels remained, a certain sign in a mining community that growth in the township had ceased. |
Dying by degrees
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© 2004 Walhalla Heritage & Development League Inc. |
