Sunday Day 15

The day of the Bendigo Easter Festival-so spent all day photographing at the Chinese Museum where traditional waking the dragon scenes are enacted using lively teams of lion dancers. Traditional Chinese and Mongolian dance displays etc. Culminating in a torchlit spectacular procession. This is just the preamble to the Easter parade-very impressive and energetic nonrtheless. The anti-Chinese feelings on the goldfields in the mid 19th Century continued into the 1880s, with digger resentment of Chinese mining resulting in the small Chinese community often being scapegoated in the press as purveyors of drugs and prostitution and general low lfe. The introduction of there festivities in the 1890s helped to change that image and to make the Chinese cultural strength a lynchpin of Bendigo life.