RATED 5 OUT OF 5 HELMETS Victoria Hotel
32 Wimmera Street
Dimboola, Victoria
T: 03 5389 1611
IN AN EARLY SCENE of Dimboola the movie, the visiting English writer asks the two blokes at the train station where he’s just arrived, what the town’s like.
“Ordinary,” replies one to which the other adds, “Dead ordinary”.
This place on the Western Highway, midway between Melbourne and Adelaide, was known to its ancestral owners, the Wotjobaluk, as “Watchegatcheca”, meaning “wattle trees and white cockatoos” but was given the name “Nine Creeks” when first surveyed by whites in 1862.
A few years later a new surveyor arrived in the Wimmera. J.G.W. Wilmot - likely a bastard offspring of an English baronet - had lived in what’s now Sri Lanka making coffee and he arrived in Sydney by boat in 1852. Maybe because he was white, his boat wasn’t towed back into international waters and he ended up in Melbourne, and then Nine Creeks.
He figured the place’s name was ordinary, was impressed by the fruit trees at a station up the road and so changed the town’s title to a modification of the Sinhalese ‘Dimbula’ which meant “Land of Figs”.
Anyway, Jack Hibberd’s original play, Dimboola, was set around the wedding of Protestant Morrie
