Friday 3rd August
Today we went to Herberton Historic Village. It's an open air museum, made of lots of historic (from the last 150 or so years) buildings from all over Queensland to make up a village, based around the Happy Jack run mine that operated on the site in the late 19th century. There's a 'manor house' (a lovely traditional Queenslander house that was the family home of the founder of the actual town of Herberton); a school; a chapel; a motor garage; a carriage house; a grocer; a blacksmith; a butcher; a chemist; a bank; a hotel; a pub; a prison; a railway station; a radio shop; newspaper printer; a dressmaker; a toy shop; an early homestead house; a miner's hut, and the mine. I'm sure there are some things I've left out but you get the idea - everything you'd want or need in a little pioneer town.
It's all really cool, you can spent pretty much a whole day there. In my experience, even museums I'm really interested in tire me out after a few hours, with all the slow walking and reading and looking closely at the exhibits. It's a bit information-overload and my mind just blanks out. Anyway, I went to Herberton on my 2012 visit, and there were some new exhibits this time, like the chapel and the traditional Queenslander house. Some things were exactly the same, like the room in the old school about the area's mining history, and the location of the dress I loved in the dress exhibit.
One part of the old school had been turned into an army museum. In there was a photo from World War One, of an Australian battalion posing on a pyramid in Egypt before they go to Gallipoli. The text below tells you some stories about the people in it. In the first row standing behind the seated officers are four men standing with their arms linked - they're a father and his sons, who would all be killed in the first week of fighting. Sitting near the top of the photo, in amongst those who had clambered up the pyramid, was a soldier without a hat - he was just 14, having lied about his age to get in. There's also a dead man. He had died a few days before the photo was taken, and his comrades felt he was still part of the battalion and shouldn't be left out, so they dressed him in his uniform, hauled him two-thirds of the way up the pyramid, and made sure he was standing, propping him up with their hands on his shoulders. The comradeship of the military in wartime is something special. It takes a long time to find all these people, the museum staff haven't circled them or anything, which means you're looking closely at every single face. It can often seem a bit abstract, looking an old photos, but they're people just like us, faces we could see passing us in the street.
We had lunch at the old hotel, which is now the museum's cafe, and the food was still very good. I had a veggie quiche which was more like a frittata. It was here that I was given the recipe for the lemon butter squares on my first visit. Then, I'd had a corned beef sandwich for lunch (not corned beef as we know it, but thin slices of actual meat, and tasty) and one of their lemon squares. It was about 1cm thick, was hard and crumbly like a biscuit, had dessicated coconut in, and a sticky lemon glaze on top. It was gorgeous. My aunt half-jokingly asked the waitress if I could have the recipe, as I lived all the way over in the UK. I don't remember the waitress' response, it was probably something like a surprised and uncertain laugh and an "Oh, I don't know..." We did not at all think that she would come back ten minutes later and actually give me a bit of paper with the recipe written on it.
Needless to say I was thrilled. I'm always envious of people who were properly taught to cook by a family member whose food they loved, or have inherited a family member's recipe book. I haven't had that, so being given a recipe at all, let alone by a complete stranger, was a gift I'll always treasure. I've made the recipe only a handful of times at home (will do so more often now) and the result has been a cake rather than a biscuit bake, but they've always tasted as good as the original. Sadly, the cafe didn't have lemon squares out on this visit.
We spent about six hours at Herberton before heading home. Dinner was simple and delicious - pan fried white fish with veggies in lemon butter.
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