One of the descendants of the Bradbys, the family whose name is given to a lane adjoining a proposed multi-storey development in Bakery Hill, has suggested it might be apposite to retitle the roadway to a more prosaic description.
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Doug Bradby says his family have worked, operated businesses, played, shopped, worshipped, and been educated in Bakery Hill for 170 years.
The Bradbys were part of the Gunn and Co Fruiterer's business in Main Road, one of Ballarat's leading fruit and vegetable merchants for decades.
Mr Bradby says he is proud to be associated with the area, but feels the new buildings designed by Hygge Property for the Robert Sim site, are an affront to the history of Bakery Hill and its role in the extension of the voting franchise in Australia.
He would, he says, demand that the disrespect, the insult to his family, and to all the pioneers of Ballarat, be rectified by renaming Bradby Lane.
"I have a number of suggestions, including Soulless Lane and Despicable Drive," Mr Bradby says.
"The miners would have been even more direct and suggested a name such as Money Grubbers Lane. To read the article in The Courier one would think that the idea was being promoted by a group of philanthropists who wisely and generously were going to save Ballarat. But that is not the whole truth. These buildings will only be built if the proposers think there is a profit to be made."
Mr Bradby says proponents of high-rise are the 'intellectual heirs of those who removed Victorian-era verandahs'.
"These are the people who gave us those dreadful buildings in Lydiard St - the AMP, the London Bank, and the building next to Her Majesty's which is so awful I refuse to use its name," he says.
"At first on reading Saturday's Courier, I thought I had received a joke copy of a 1950's Courier when 'progress,' growth, bigger is better, was the conventional and unquestioned wisdom. The last 70 years, and particularly the last decade, has taught us that this is simplistic nonsense.
"If these sun and sky blockers are built, I can not wait to see the tourism campaign which could be centred around the slogan, 'Come to Sunny Ballarat and see the seven-storey office blocks'. It will be a winner."
Mr Bradby says Bakery Hill is as important a site in the history of democracy as the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede.
I have a number of suggestions, including Soulless Lane and Despicable Drive
- Doug Bradby
The argument to extend the democratic right of voting to the working classes was successfully pursued out of the actions of the miners in their meetings of 1854 - so successfully that by 1858 every adult male British citizen had the vote.
Bradby Lane is also where the first steam engine on the Ballarat Goldfields was introduced, enabling gold extraction from the Gravel Pits and from Ballarat West and Sebastopol, he says.
"In the 1890s Main Road from Bridge to Humffray Street was the centre of a multicultural city in which Cornishmen, Irishmen, Scots, Londoners, Jews, Chinese, and Germans all worked and prospered," Mr Bradby says.
"Worth knowing, worth preserving, I would have thought, but Ballarat's treatment of this area has been shameful. Indeed the State of Victoria and the Commonwealth of Australia have similarly ignored the site. An inaccessible plaque in the middle of a roundabout is the best we can do?
"Inappropriate development on Bakery Hill has been fought and beaten before and it will need to be fought again. If Ballaratians do not rally and successfully fight this proposal, then we are simply unworthy of our ancestors.
If the developers think Ballarat needs more office buildings, I suggest they build them out near Burrumbeet. Next to a new hospital would be ideal."
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