This weekend was the annual Clunes Book Town Festival.

Two days on the celebration of books and story telling in a rustic town of Clunes which is about two hours west out of Melbourne.

We headed off nice and early so that we couldn’t be stuck in Saturday traffic and stopped at a service station for a toilet and coffee break with excitement of the upcoming day.

Clunes is the only recognised international book town in Australia which according to the definition of the International Book Town Organisation is:

A small rural town or village which second hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated. Most book towns have developed villages of historic interest or scenic beauty.

Clunes was definitely rustic! It’s the town that is most like its original form. We parked our car at the Showgrounds and walked to the main town centre. In the way, some houses and halls had their places open to public selling books and it gave us a chance to look inside these places.

The town centre was like I had stepped into 1850s with the original brick buildings and ornate verandahs. In the middle of the road there were food vans and over 120 book sellers and their stalls.

We were lucky with the weather too with glorious blue skies throughout.

The township puts on this event every year which obviously helps the local economy. Lots of houses and places opened their doors to sell second hand books and naturally we had to go into each one to score ourselves a bargain.

I was looking for specific titles in the modern literature and classics but there weren’t many in this genre unfortunately (I found them later in Ballarat).

What I loved about Clunes is that as well as poring over dusty bookshelves and baskets of books, I was looking up at the fascias and signs.

Although the shops were in a deteriorated state, (broken windows, peeling paint, dust and cobwebs everywhere – and that was inside) there was a quaint charm about them. A bit grungy, bohemian look about them. It must be very expensive to maintain these buildings and I hope that the festival helps in some way to update these buildings.

Due to the sheer number of people attending, the electronic payment systems stopped and the Internet also went down which resulted in long queues for the ATMs.

Thankfully, I’m a bit old school when it comes to paying for things and always carry cash with me that came in handy. It meant we could buy our books and have a meal without waiting in long lines.

In the end I bought these books at Clunes but an additional three (a couple of Julian Barnes and an Anita Brookner) after heading back to Ballarat (the main big town built on the gold rush of the 1850s) to trawl through their book shops too.

Once we finished for the day we drove back to Ballarat to stay in a small studio at the back of a house for one night. It was quite a good price and so quiet!

However, one hour in arriving, there was a major power outage in the area that once the sun set, things got dark and cold suddenly. It was pointless to go out and just wait it out at a pub or restaurant because we were tired. Instead, in the twilight hours, we stayed outside to the last light playing a deck of cards we found in one of the drawers eating cold pizza left over from lunch. Despite that, I loved it. It was nice not to be on our phones or tablets or in front of the tv. We just talked and talked and laughed.

Thankfully a quick message to the owners, they gave us a torch and a candle but there was nothing else we could do once we were inside except just get to sleep early and wait out for the power to get back on.

The next day after a lovely breakfast at Racers Cafe on Lake Wendouree we visited the new Eureka Museum which showed the history of the Eureka Stockade.

The stockade was a battle between the golf miners and some corrupt police who had forced them to have gold mining licences that were far too expensive. 30 people were killed in the battle that lasted about 15 minutes and many more injured. It’s on the original site of the museum and inside you can read about this history and decide for yourself what this represented.

Was this the birth of Australia’s democracy?

The original flag which was from 1854. Bits of it were cut up and given as gifts to visiting dignitaries. It’s now behind glass and temperature controlled environment and it’s quite huge too. If it ever left its case, it would disintegrate into dust.

Later we drove into Ballarat town ce tee and it’s a great place to walk and look around at the mush mash of different architecture. Everything from the 1850s through to art deco and 1950s and ever later. The homes along Lake Wendouree are turn of the century beautiful Victorian mansions with intricate ironwork and huge verandahs with turrets and widows lookouts.

We saw that this secondhand book store was open and had to have a look before we headed back home. It was my kind of bookstore! It had all the modern literature books which is my preferred genre and spent ages loving through the dusty shelves and looking at the bits and bobs on the shelves and in the walls. You had to move things around to walk through the tight spaces!

So there ended our quick weekend trip to Clunes. It was enjoyable to get away for once together. This was our first trip away this year since our last weekend trip in July this year.

I’m hoping that we can do another one again in the new year!