After last year’s trip to the Pierre Bonard exhibition at the NGV, this year’s burst of Francophilia was a trip to the Belle Epoque exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery.

Strictly it wasn’t the Belle Epoque period, which is normally bracketed by the Franco Prussian War and the horrors of the First World War, when, under the Third Republic, Paris was a liberal and cultured haven unlike the repressive and dull atmosphere of other European capitals – rather the exhibition covered the period between 1880 and 1925.

Most of the material was from the Belle Epoque, with a large collection of impressionist paintings from the period, early cinematography, enlivened by a nice range of artefacts including these rather splendid golden snails

which once adorned a snail vendors shop.

The exhibition was nicely set out, and well captioned. In truth the only post world war one material were some dresses by Worth to show how women’s fashions had changed compared to the pre WW1 clothing on show, and some immediate post World War I cinematography produced by students for the Bal des Qua’z’Arts in 1919.

I’ve only really two criticisms of the exhibition one minor, one major. The minor one is that they should have made more of the rise of informal photography after the 1885 arrival of the Box Brownie, and the major, was to fail to acknowledge the impact of the First World War on the city, when the guns at the front could be heard most nights and Paris was occasionally shelled by German long range artillery.

That said, it’s an interesting exhibition, and well worth the trip.

Getting there was little more complex than a trip to the NGV in Melbourne. There’s no direct public transport links to Bendigo from where we live, meaning that while you could take the train, you would need to go via Melbourne meaning a six and a half hour trip, so we drove, given it was only 250 km.

As  usual we stopped roughly halfway at Murchison, which has reliably clean public toilets, even if one time I found myself sharing with a brown snake, a nice riverside area with picnic tables, multi coloured glass fibre cows and a decent bakery for pies and sandwiches – there’s even decent public wifi available courtesy of Greater Shepparton  council if you need to pull out your laptop to send a couple of emails.

This time I was derided, probably rightly, by J for being fascinated by the self service library machine next to the Heritage centre.

While it would be possible to go and return in a day, we opted to stay overnight with dinner at Clogs Pizzeria – it may not be traditionally Italian but it’s a fun informal and welcoming place. In fact we stayed two nights and ate at Clogs both nights as there wasn’t a lot of choice on Sunday or Monday nights in the middle of winter.

Driving home, we originally planned to take in the relatively new Shepparton Art Museum, but realised that we would be driving back on a Tuesday when the museum is closed so basically returned via Murchison and a pretty good chilli beef pie and takeaway coffee with the cows.

Shepparton Art Museum will have to be a day trip once the weather has warmed up a little …