Crooked sign, sturdy bricks. Name a more iconic duo!

Yes, the question’s rhetorical, but pivot around 180 degrees from the above photo and you’ll find another contender: crooked sign, psychedelic church. Probably the ultimate example of “business in the front, party in the back” architecture, St John’s Catholic Church is usually a staid old affair, but slip a few wacky wafers in the holy communion and this thing lights up like Disney’s Iron Giant and chases terrified parishioners around the town until dawn.

But that was a separate trip to Jamieson. This time around, we had actual work to do: admiring the conscientiousness of local workmen. You can take the jobs out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the jobs! Although the instructions were no doubt to do the job as cheaply as possible, here we see a sink that the local builder could simply not let be without a tiled splashback.

Back in the day, Jamieson was a supply town for gold miners making the long trek up the Goulburn River to Woods Point and beyond. Those were the days! Steam train to Mansfield, stagecoach to Jamieson, horse to Woods Point, horse dies (sorry, “breaks down”) after getting mired in muddy track, long cold walk through early winter snows to Matlock (not finding this name very funny as television hasn’t been invented yet and you also have severe frostbite), fall through rotten timbers on side of road down mine shaft, find overlooked nugget down mine shaft, bushranger steals nugget and becomes an Australian folklore hero, The End.


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