Beltana Historical Town – 17km was signed, so we turned down the dirt road to see what it was about. The dirt road looked OK, but the corrugations were terrible. The road was rough and bumpy.
I looked at Jarrad as I was being jolted around in the car, wondering what it was like in the campervan. “Can you go any slower?” I wondered out loud, seriously doubting it though.
“No, if I go any slower the car will stall,” he sighed.
Edmund was happy as he tunelessly said “aahhhhh” to listen to his voice vibrate. No one else was as contented, though, and the corrugations got even worse at the frequent dry creek bed crossings.
One patch was reasonable and Jarrad exclaimed, “Look! I can get to 20 kilometres per hour!” As he finished, the car started reverberating again. Everything bounced off the dashboard. “Hmm, I better not try and go 20 kilometres again,” he complained.
It was a really long seventeen kilometres, and we were all feeling rather irritated as we drove in to the old town.
The town had an odd feeling to it. Susan was the first to say,
“I don’t like this place. It’s creepy.”
Most of the houses were the typical old, stone buildings. They had low rooves, and were small. But…many had extensions or renovations using shiny, new corrugated iron. One house had a satellite dish. There were a few power lines around. Many had electricity meter boxes. Most houses had polyester guttering leading to new polyester water tanks. There were new-ish cars in a few driveways.
It had the creepy feel of a ghost town from the 19th century, that people had tried half-heartedly to renovate and update in to the 20th century.
“Are we going to camp here tonight?” Lucy asked. The rest of us shook our heads.
“It feels like people are watching us, but I don’t know from where,” Peter voiced what we were all feeling.
We got a shock when an old man called out to us, “Is that a campervan?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, I thought it might have been a block of flats.” He paused as we tried to work out how to respond, then continued,
“Where are you from?”
“We were from Melbourne,” we answered, as we’ve learnt over the time we’ve been travelling that this question is a conversation starter rather than any genuine query.
“Oh, I’ve heard of that place before,” he answered.
“How many people live here?”
“Only me and the person over there, but they are away at the moment. Over Easter it gets really busy, though.
campervanners come in and get stuck looking for somewhere to turn around. I hear them fighting down there, ‘You said to come this way’, ‘No, you did’. It’s a bit of entertainment. Other times, people stare in to my house through the lattice, then jump away, saying ‘There’s someone in there’. I always wonder if they’d do that in Hawthorne, in Melbourne.”
“We better go, we’ve got to find somewhere to stay tonight,” Jarrad said, and after quick exchange of goodbyes, we turned around to leave the town.
We read a sign outside what had been the old church. It explained that Beltana had been one of the large sheep station empires in the 1800s, before copper was found at a nearby mine and its size swelled to accommodate the miners. The coming of The Ghan had caused the town to get even bigger. As the sheep station had moved, the copper mine was abandoned and the train line then abandoned, the town was slowly deserted to what it is today.
And what it is today is a creepy, sleepy little ghost town.
“Oh, we didn’t get any photos,” Jarrad remembered as we drove away.
“No, it just didn’t feel right to get out the camera,” I agreed.
“It felt like the sort of place that if we had taken photos, when we’d looked at them there would be a ghost in the photo. Probably someone standing behind the kids with a knife at their head.”
“I usually like ruins, like Kanyaka or that whats-it’s-name, the de-gazetted town in Victoria. But Beltana was creepy.”
“It felt like people were watching us, but no idea where they were.”
“It was three-quarters old, but then like someone had tried to drag it into the 20th century.”
“Just a really, really, really creepy place.”
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