Maldon, Victoria

I’d heard a lot about Maldon, long before I ever went there. “You’ll love it,” someone said.

“It’s just the prettiest place, so many lovely old buildings – I’d live there in a heartbeat,” said someone else.

“It has a great sense of community and well-priced real estate,” and so on and so on.

So last weekend, I set off, expectations high and eager to see what I would make of this new place.

It wasn’t a long drive – just 40 minutes or so from where I live and just ten minutes northwest of Castlemaine (140km NW of Melbourne for those who want a bigger landmark). It sits on the slopes of Mt Tarrengower in the middle of an agricultural, pastoral and mining region in the heart of the Victorian goldfields region.

 Gold was found there in 1853 and within a month 3,000 miners had arrived at the Tarrengower Fields to try their luck. Another month after that, the population was said to be around 18,000. These days, it’s a more modest 1,500 or so but everything they say about the town being little changed from the 1850s is true.

My head spun in every direction trying to take in all the old gems, all the old typography preserved on the outside of so many of them. It was a little like stepping back in time and easy to see why the 2007 Australian film,” Romulus, My Father,” set in the 1950s was shot there. It was also easy to see why the National Trust of Australia declared it Australia’s first Notable Town in 1966 – this on the basis of its well preserved goldmining era buildings and the number of different architectural styles that make up the settlement.

From the outset, it was all about the architecture for me; but there was something else too, an ‘intangible essence’ about the place that I loved. As someone said after my visit, “it’s genuine old world and it hasn’t been hijacked by gourmands and pretensions.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. The locals were friendly and there were boutique stores and cafes aplenty but I never got the feeling they were trying hard to be trendy. They just seemed to be going about their business – unhurried and unworried about what ‘the outside world’ thought of them. It was refreshing and I slowed my pace to fit the mood of the place.

This is a town designed for the leisurely amble and with the sun warming my back, I went from shop to shop, café to café and into everything in between. There were numerous antique and collectible shops, the prerequisite craft/interiors places, an art studio or two, a terrific print shop, an amazing shop filled with antique lace and linens, a traditional lolly shop, a deli, a car garage and mechanics repair shop right beside a patchwork quilt and fabric store, a Christmas shop (!!), the traditional old grocer with an amazing town noticeboard outside and at least two wonderful independent bookshops.

(Independent bookshops seem to be very well represented in small Victorian towns. I haven’t been in one town yet that doesn’t have at least one excellent and very enticing bookshop – and long may that be the case).

I gazed longingly at the Maldon Hotel and its beautiful iron fretwork balconies and wondered what wonders and small town secrets might play out in its Clydesdale Room. I noted they offered a range of lunches – curried sausages $12; beef lasagne $15 - with an invitation to step inside and partake. I watched a steady trail of people going into the tiny bakery, some lingering for coffee at the outside tables, others clutching their brown bags full of edible goodies, some sitting down on the public bench seats because they obviously couldn’t wait to go any further before eating.

And I stood, gazing in awe at the huge pomegranate tree that spread over the bakery roof and adjacent courtyard. I’d never seen a pomegranate tree before and initially, I thought the bright red globes hanging from its bare branches were apples. Unseasonal I thought, but then, it was much warmer here (19-degrees), roses were still blooming and all the yellow wattles were in bloom – so why not apples? It wasn’t until I put my glasses on that I noticed the burst fruits and the millions of seeds spilled over the ground below, that I realised they were pomegranates – and I couldn’t stop thinking about the waste, and how I would have paid NZ$7-8 for a single pomegranate in a New Zealand supermarket.

The locals hardly seemed to notice. Perhaps they all had pomegranate trees in their home gardens? It seemed as good a reason as any, to get into my car and explore the residential streets. Like so many of these old Victorian mining towns, the housing stock is right up my romantic, idealised alley – all colonial villas, iron fretwork and cool, generous verandahs and balconies for those hot Aussie afternoons. Forget the nightmares of repairs, renovations and maintenance, I cling to the dream of characterful architecture equalling the perfect, inspirational retreat laced with history and intrigue, and I won’t be told otherwise.

 I did spot one lovely property for sale – Robinson House (above, top right), Circa 1864 – a cute Gothic, double-brick home with 13-foot ceilings. I sat awhile on the roadside imagining myself living there – sweeping its polished floors, lounging in its spacious sunroom, pottering in the garden, shivering in its hard-to-heat rooms. I’ve imagined worse things, lived in worse places. Somehow though, I don’t think I’ll be moving any time soon. That would take at least two pomegranate trees, a mango orchard, three fig trees and an avocado tree.

But I will very definitely be visiting again.

There's plenty more to see yet.