It’s been a while since I’ve brought you a Trove Tuesday post so it’s time for another. If you’ve only recently come across Western District Families, you may not know about Trove Tuesday. It was a blogging prompt started several years ago by an Australian geneablogger for fellow geneabloggers to share their discoveries found at Trove, the National Library of Australia’s wonderful site. At one stage I had posted eighty-two consecutive Trove Tuesday posts. Most of the posts are about quirky and amusing articles I’ve found while researching Trove’s digitized newspapers. This week, it’s another of those quirky stories.
I have read many articles about horses coming to grips with the mechanised age, from shying at steam engines pulling threshing plants to cars sharing Western District roads. Not all had a happy ending. Bicycles were around from the 1860s in Australia, but it wasn’t until the arrival of the “safety” bike in the 1890s when cycling took off as an alternate form of transport. Even ladies fashion evolved as a result.
THE CYCLING VEALE GIRLS OF LAKE BOLAC. Image courtesy of the William E. Veale collection of Lake Bolac. State Library of Victoria http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/89464
Bikes also became popular among shearers moving between sheds in the Western District.
CYCLING SHEARERS AT CASTERTON c1900. Images courtesy of the Museums Victoria Collections https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/767593
Although the bicycle was a quieter form of mechanisation, they were still mind-boggling for a horse, especially bicycles built for two as discovered near Macarthur in 1896:
Items of News. (1896, May 7). Hamilton Spectator (Vic. : 1870 – 1918), p. 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article225871697
A TANDEM BIKE AND STANDARD BIKE. Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/184376
You can read my earlier Trove Tuesday posts on the link – Trove Tuesday archives
Western District Families 
Enjoying catching up on some of these blog posts, I hope you’re still going? Coincidentally, I know who was riding that tandem mentioned in the newspaper report above. One of them is a Champion Lady Cyclist who I am currently writing a book on. They have a very different version of the incident too! The Beyers, pictured on the tandem above are also “Melbourne cycling royalty” in many ways. Tandems at the time were extremely expensive.
LikeLike
My husbands grandmother (married name Mitchell) rode from Qld/NSW to Melbourne on a bicycle but unfortunately I don’t have the newspaper cutting now.
LikeLike