In The Clumsiest Way, We've Helped To Put A Town On The Map
The Age
Wednesday April 27, 1994
THE GOOD folk of St Arnaud are cheesed off at us reptiles down here in the Melbourne metropolitan press. St Arnaud? Where's that, you might ask. Precisely, say the townsfolk.
St Arnaud isn't the sort of place that makes headlines regularly. It isn't the sort of place that gets into the news all that often, except, of course, in the `North Central News', edited by the redoubtable Ella Ebery.
This column has mentioned Ms Ebery before. A few years back, after more editions than you'd care to shake a stick at of reporting affairs on St Arnaud Council, Ella Ebery found herself the mayor of the said town.
Would she still dispassionately report council affairs? This was one case where the mayor could never claim to have been misquoted. Like a true pro, Ms Ebery hired a part-time scribbler to cover the town hall.
Imagine how carefully that hack pecked away, knowing every story would be checked by the editor and the mayor at the same time.
But back to the point. Just where is St Arnaud? ELLA Ebery brought up the question in her Bits and Pieces column in the `News' because a Melbourne metropolitan newspaper - all right, `The Age', if you must know - seems to be still in a state of confusion over the whereabouts of the town.
When the Victoria Talbot case first came to trial, it was, ahem, `The Age' that reported that friends of the Mileham family, who arranged the kidnapping of their six-year-old granddaughter, were to drive from Perth to Horsham but ``only got to St Arnaud".
This was very confusing to St Arnaud people. They consulted their maps over and over but still found themselves to the east of Horsham.
Then came yesterday's account in `The Age' of the Mileham's sentencing. St Arnaud, this time, was described as being ``outside Bendigo". Ha! Cobblers! Ella Ebery says St Arnaud is a 90-minute, forget-the-radar-guns drive from Bendigo.
The locals say that St Arnaud has sat on what is now the Sunraysia Highway, just about midway between Melbourne and Mildura, since 1854.
Just remember that, says Ms Ebery. We have been warned.
EARLIER this year, the St Arnaud Football Club held a goods and services auction to raise money for the new season's necessary supply of jockstraps and eucalyptus oil.
Supporters came up with the usual offers of painting, mowing and gardening. The club's honorary doctor went one better. He offered his services for a free vasectomy. And he pitched his appeal to the wives and girlfriends of the players. A vasectomy, he said, would make them feel more secure when their blokes went away on that end-of-the-year trip.
No takers as yet, we believe.
SPARE a thought this morning for Ian Lewis. The British restaurateur has spent 30 years tracing his family. Mr Lewis travelled all over Britain and talked to 2000 relatives. He even planned to write a book about how his great-grandfather left to seek his fortune in Russia and how his grandfather was expelled after the revolution and returned to Britain.
Then his cousin's wife revealed that Mr Lewis was adopted. He traced the adoption papers. He was. Despite the disappointment, Mr Lewis said he had not lost his taste for genealogy. ``I will have to start again, but I am determined to carry on," he said.
This time he will not be barking up the wrong family tree.
A LATE Anzac Day tale from John Leonard, of Bacchus Marsh, who thinks ``Weary" Dunlop would blanch at this talk of a statue put up in his honor. He was too straight-forward a chap to go for that sort of thing.
Mr Leonard says he was at the dawn service at Hellfire Pass on the Burma Railway in 1991. Sir Edward arrived unavoidably late, picked his way down the steep cutting and slipped into the crowd. At the end of the ceremony the journalists, like blue heelers, cut him out of the flock. One, a little more crass than the others, chipped in. ``Sir Edward," he said, ``tell me what you are feeling right now."
``Weary" looked at him and replied: ``I'm wondering how I'm going to get back up that bloody hill."
© 1994 The Age
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