Imagining Ned, Bendigo - June 2015

In case you haven't worked it out yet Sam and I don't mind heading away for a night or two to break the monotony of our work, eat, sleep existence. This last Friday night we decided to head up to Bendigo for the night so we could check out the Imagining Ned exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery on Saturday morning. The plan was to then do a city walk utilizing their talking tram, before heading home on Saturday night, events didn't actually turn out as planned however but we still had a great time away.

Our room at The Schaller was compact but comfortable.

Living in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne means that its a bit of a nightmare getting north of the city on a Friday night, the freeways are totally clogged from around 4pm to around 7pm. With that in mind we decided to have dinner at home and leave a little later. Heading off from home at around 7:30 we had a fairly uneventful two and a half hour drive up the Calder Highway to Bendigo, the main interest was how cold would the ambient temperature readout get, 3 degrees was the answer but it kept me entertained! Pulling up at The Schaller Studio, part of the Art Series of Hotels we were lucky to find a carpark, for the size of the hotel it really doesn't have much parking.

The foyer had a lot to keep you interested.

After checking in at the funky foyer we headed up to our room, the room was very nice although incredibly small. We had a large flat screen, modern bathroom, small balcony, and...wait for it....free wi fi!  All this for around $115 a night, pretty good value I thought. After checking out the lounge area down stairs we made ourselves at home for the rest of the night in the cosy room, catching up on a bit of reading while watching the cars turn white with frost outside.

While the rooms were small, the communal area's were welcoming.

Checking out next morning we decided to check out a small cafe called Sim'R, it was here that I had the biggest 'big brekky' that I've ever had, it was truly enormous. This is probably why our walk didn't go off as planned, as breakfast stretched almost until lunch time while I finished the plate along with a couple of coffees and some orange juice, along with the Saturday Paper. As Ned would say "Such is life".

The big breakfast at Sim'R was truly big.

This looks familiar!

Bendigo Art Gallery.

Eventually we headed to the Bendigo Art Gallery to check out the 'Imagining Ned' exhibition. The exhibition features works by Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Adam Cullen among others and along with the regular works on display it was an interesting place to spend a few hours. With its great architecture, cafes and galleries Bendigo is the perfect place for me to relax for awhile, combined with plenty of walking and mountain biking opportunities I can see that we'll have to return again, although maybe for a little longer next time. Now what about the walk that I had planned, well we got down to the start of the walk at the Central Deborah Mine at around 2pm only to find that we couldn't take the tram up to the north of the city without paying and going on a mine tour and a tram museum tour, now normally that would be OK but because breakfast had stretched out to almost lunchtime we were going to run out of daylight if we had to do the two tours, oh well. With a bit of apathy setting in we decided to head home a little earlier than initially planned and save the walk for next time.

Ned's armour, complete with ding's from the bullets.

There was the usual suspects.

Along with some that I'd never seen.

And some like this one by Mars Drum called 'Ned and Burka on the Pink Lake IV' were pretty thought provoking.

The Dirt.

We stayed at The Schaller Studio which was a nice funky hotel, the foyer is very interesting and whilst the rooms are small they are comfortable.

We went to The Bendigo Art Gallery to check out the Ned Kelly exhibition, the art gallery is well worth the trip up from Melbourne in my opinion.

Finally, most of these photo's were taken on our iphone's so don't expect any great shots, I'm never entirely comfortable walking around galleries with my DSLR so if I take any shots there normally with the phone.  

Some of the newer architecture in Bendigo.

And some of the old.