A walk through places’ past

PETER Freund is a person who’s intimately familiar with Ballarat’s historic walkways, landmarks, and architecture.

For almost three decades, he’s spent many hours regaling people with walking tours, where he’s detailed the region’s past places, people, and proceedings.

Mr Freund came into the activity as a way of blending his love of history and performance, both of which he studied at the University of Melbourne, and the Victorian College of the Arts respectively.

“I’ve done a whole different style of things over the years from a theatrical pub crawl to a tour around Joe the Bellringer to my Ballarat Lost Stages tour of old theatre sites,” he said.

“I was working at Her Majesty’s Theatre and in my role as theatre historian, I was actually taking people on tours of the theatre itself and talking about its history, and how the building itself changed with technology.

“At that stage, there was an earlier version of what’s now Ballarat Heritage Festival. I was running events for that and decided to contribute an event around the sites of Ballarat’s theatres.”

Mr Freund took his tours outside of Her Maj and onto the streets with his Ballarat Lost Stages tour, which explored the city’s performing spaces down Main Road through to Sturt Street, ending at Grainery Lane.

Since then, he’s also led walks through Ballarat Botanical Gardens’ Prime Ministers Avenue, and performative tours as a historic bell ringer down Lydiard Street, as well as through Sturt Street, recounting writer and historian Nathan Spielvogel’s reminiscence of the thoroughfare as the man himself.

“There’s the attraction of making what you’re talking about more real by being in the places that have some bearing on what you’re talking about,” Mr Freund said.

“It’s encouraging people to look differently at the familiar places around them.”

Recently, he hosted several historic walks through the Eureka Stockade Memorial Park as part of a program acknowledging 170 years since the Eureka Stockade.

Moving to the region in the late 1980s, he’s been no stranger to the infamous rebellion, having also provided the narration for the annual Eureka Dawn Walk from 1998 to 2004.

He said his most recent tour was instead about the impact the public space itself has had following the event.

“Eureka itself is such a well-trodden path in terms of the battle,” Mr Freund said.

“This was actually looking at how this place has evolved over time as a place of memory and what that’s meant.

“It brings back stories of the old East Ballaarat borough council which was a struggling council financially trying to build this place. It’s also a story of community involvement and how the shape itself has changed.”

Mr Freund said he hopes to continue developing his latest Eureka Stockade Memorial Park tour with further sessions next year as well as through a potential written guide.