Men pick through streetworks and mullock heaps in the hope of turning over a missed piece of gold from the city’s boomtime. Others hawk rabbits trapped in the paddocks around the region, tramping them in barrows strung on wire. Poverty is common, and big houses are commonly broken up into boarding rooms.

Still, there’s wealth too. Solid names like Selkirk, McGregor and Little; Bartrop, Yuille and Stoddart are still in the church lists and council records, testament to staunch Anglian and Caledonian fellowships that rule the town for decades. The Presbyterian church stands opposite to the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sturt Street, its soaring spire narrow and elegant in contrast to the solid bluestone expanse of the Irish faithful’s estate.

Dr Daniel Foley, cousin of Daniel Mannix, is celebrating his 19^th anniversary as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Ballarat. He has completed around £400,000 of building work on 68 churches, schools and halls, not including extensions to St Patrick’s College nor work on the Redemptorist monastery.

Sixty or 70 hotels are scattered through the city, down from almost 500 at the height of the rush days. There’s always a steady income in running a pub, and a respectable publican is a solid member of the Ballarat community, providing support and meeting places to sporting clubs and cultural societies.

It’s to this town that Peter Larmer brings his young family to take over the lease of the Lake View Hotel. Established in 1875, it’s a regular haunt for council employees engaged in the exhausting labour of raking weeds from Lake Wendouree, sweeping the streets and for the young men who spend their time in the rowing clubs on the lake’s edge – the working class Wendouree Rowing Club, Ballarat, Ballarat City.

His son Lawrence is 12. Enrolled at St Pats as a day student, he dinks his new mate on a bicycle to school each day. Lawrence’s early memories have bands playing on the edge of the lake on summer Tuesday nights: the Ballarat City Brass Band one week, a pipe band the next.

“It was during the Depression,” Mr Larmer, now 93, says.

“The rowing clubs were one of the main outlets for young fellows, older than me. Blokes would come up after work and that was their relaxation.

“They built a sort of little community there among the rowing clubs. There was Wendouree Rowing Club, which was more or less working class; there was Ballarat and Ballarat City.”

“Strangely enough, my father was leasing the Lake View and he was advised by bank managers and accountants, ‘Don’t buy a pub, there’ll be a war on. It’s too risky.’ And he could have bought it for a song in those days.”

The country rolls on, while the world around does slide inevitably into another world war. The students of the college continue their lives as the minority UAP government of Robert Menzies commits Australian troops to the European front. He narrowly wins the 1940 election, but his government is terminally weakened by the loss of three ministers in a plane crash preceding the election. The crash also kills the army Chief of General Staff Brudenell White.

During 1941 Menzies’s grip on parliament slides, and he resigns. His successor Arthur Fadden holds on for a month before two independents cross the floor and give John Curtin’s Labor Party  government.

Curtin continued Menzies’s use of a militia call-up to prepare Australia for a war footing, and Lawrie Larmer finds himself having to make a choice about the service he wants to give his country.

“I got called up when I was 18, in 1941, after I’d left school,” Mr Larmer recalls.

“When you were called up it was to go into the army. You did your medical and if you passed that you went into the militia. The only way you could avoid going into the army was by volunteering for the navy or the airforce.

“I didn’t fancy the army. I don’t know why, it just didn’t appeal to me. I put my name down for air crew in the air force.

Mr Larmer says he passed the much stricter medical exam, then waited for a couple of months. 

“Then, suddenly –  I was into the air force. I did my initial training school at Somers No. 1 training school. I was there with 300 trainees for two months. Half the day was schooling, the other half of the day was drill.”

They decided which blokes were going to train as pilots and which were going to train as navigators, and I was fortunate and was selected as a pilot.”

His basic training done in Victoria, learning how to fly light aircraft, navigation and meteorology, Mr Larmer travelled to Manitoba in Canada to continue moving up through the sizes of aeroplane, now flying the Cessna Crane. He graduated as a sergeant-pilot, and transferred to England.

Flying two-engine Wellington bombers at first, Mr Larmer was sent to a ‘heavy conversion unit’ to prepare for operations flying either Lancaster or Halifax bombers. Mr Larmer says the transfer from small planes to the four-engine Halifax was like getting out of a small car into a heavy truck.

A Handley-Page Halifax bomber was no toy to fly. With a fully-laden weight of almost 25 tonnes it was a determined skill to get the plane off the runway, and landing it was almost as difficult.

Lawrence Larmer learned this first hand. Returning from one of his first sorties over Germany, the plane landing behind his own overshot the runway.

“My first experience was when we came back from a bombing raid one night. The aircraft behind us crashed off the end of the runway and they were all killed,” Mr Larmer says.

“The next day I said to somebody, ‘When are they going to have the funerals?’

“They said, ‘What funerals?’ 

“I said, ‘The fellows that were killed last night?’

“They said, “There’s no funerals. There’s a war on’.”

Because they were tailwheel or ‘dragger’ aircraft, the pilot – as Mr Larmer was – found vision virtually non-existent at take-off and landing. Relying on their training to be able to put the sometimes damaged aeroplanes on the runway tarmac safely, they flew mostly at night. RAF Bomber Command, which directed bomber crews from around the Commonwealth, thought the Halifax too weakly armed to defend itself adequately in daylight raids.

“They were great big heavy things really,” Mr Larmer says. 

Mr Larmer was just 20 and did not possess a motor vehicle licence by the time he was responsible for a crew of six other men and the four-engine behemoth filled with high explosive.

“Everybody in the RAAF was under the control of the RAF, because they controlled all the operations: training command, fighter command, bomber command, coastal command.”

“You grew up fairly quickly,” Mr Larmer says. “You lived from day to day. In the air, even on the ground, I was the skipper.”

“We saw many occasions where our aircraft would collide, or a bloke’d be bombing 500 feet higher than he should to protect himself, and bomb our own aircraft.”

But it was the civilian casualties on the ground that came back to Lawrence Larmer, who never flew again after the war finished, after his nine missions over Germany.

In 2015, at the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, he was reflecting on what he saw as the celebration of the ‘bloody disaster’ that was Gallipoli, to the disregard of what had happened in Europe.

“I thought about how it would have been if the Japanese had bombed Melbourne and killed my parents.

“And then I thought – I killed a lot of innocent people.”

Mr Larmer wrote a letter to the mayors of the cities he bombed – Dortmund, Wuppertal, Homburg, Hagen, Boizenburg, Heligoland, Wangerooge, Beyreuth and Travemunde.

“I cannot recall the military reason for the raid and I make no apologies for it,” he wrote, “but I deeply and truly regret we were responsible for the deaths and injuries of so many innocent civilians.”

Their generous and moving replies have led Mr Larmer to a deeper consideration of the nature of conflict.

“The world hasn’t learnt. We’re still going to war. In the Second World War, 55 million civilians were killed. Fifty-five million. And yet have a look at what’s happening in Syria today. I feel strongly about it because I saw what happens to people, and it doesn’t stop.”