The former gold-mining boom town of Bendigo bears vestiges of Victorian prudishness in its architecture as seen in this Rosalind Park, with a Queen Victoria statue to boot. With the gold-prospecting scramble during the 1850s, Bendigo, some 150km north-west of Melbourne, has grown to be the fourth most populous city in Australia. Like his travels all over the world, Ong Kim Seng, a Dolphin Fellow (2000) for winning the American Watercolor Society (AWS) Award six times, makes records of places and landmarks he’s been, taking special care on the light and colours. This was done during his solo exhibition in Australia in 1990. That was the year he became the first Asian outside America to be named on the registrar of the AWS – only five years after becoming a fulltime artist. His personal record was set for an acrylic on canvas, Nepal, which sold for HKD725,000 (S$130,540) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. The world-acclaimed watercolorist Ong Kim Seng has been honoured with several prestigious awards – the Dolphin Fellow, the Singapore Cultural Medallion in 1990, and the Singapore Arts Supporter Award (2001). He was the organising chairman of the Asian Watercolours ’97 and since 1998, is the art adviser to the Singapore National Arts Council. His works are in the collections of Queen Elizabeth II, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, and former prime ministers of Thailand, Japan and India.