LONG before internet stream and social media fads like Tik-Tok, entertainment was live and real in Loddon communities.
The treats came from visiting entertainers - roving minstrel musicians and music hall revues, even magicians like the modern-day spellbinding trickster Duck Cameron who popped up at Inglewood Town Hall last Friday.
And then there was the circus. Exotic entertainers whose stages were only confined by stops along a railway line.
Colonial entertainers like Matthew Mitchell who died at Inglewood Hospital, aged 86, in 1937.
Newspaper reports said he was a native of Victoria, and spent some of his early years with the coaching firm of Cobb and Co., mostly in Echuca distric before joining the first circus that toured Victoria, and came with it to Wedderburn. He liked the town so much, he stayed and became an employee of the old Korong Shire Council.
Whether it was the touring troupe with Matthew is unknow, but the Inglewood Advertiser reported on a circus in town in 1860.
“The arrival of Worrell and Gardiner’s circus, which considering it is the first circus that has visited Inglewood, must naturally act very prejudicial to the interests of the Royal (Hotel). On Wednesday and Thursday, the two first nights of representation, the place was crowded, but on the two suceeding evenings there was a great falling off,” it was said. “On Sundaythe establishment was pulled down and removed to Kingower.” 
The next decade had the training pulling into town at 2am and greeted by ”a large crowd of people assembled at the railway station to witness the arrival of the three trains carrying Cooper and Bailey’s great circus and menagerie”.
Come the new century, it was Wirth’s Circus that made regular visits to Inglewood.
Wirth’s started with the children of brass musician and German-born Johannes ‘John’ (1834–10 July 1880) and his English-born wife Sarah 
Seeking fortune on the goldfields, German brothers and musicians Johannes, Jacob, Peter and Philip arrived in Melbourne in 1855 and performed as a German brass band as they travelled through the eastern colonies. 
Wirth’s was performing under canvas in 1880. The children and descendants ran the circus until its closure in 1963.
Historians say they had built a brightly painted show wagon in 1882 and, two years later on a layover in Ballarat, purchased their first performing horses.
The circus switched from horse-drawn carts to the railway to tour Australia in 1888 and attracted crowds just to watch its trains being unloaded.
According to researchers: “With the Australian banking crisis of 1893, the Wirths went on a seven-year overseas tour. While giving a performance in October 1895 at Mount Video, Uruguay, the Politeama Theatre burnt down and was completely destroyed. Returning to South Africa, they found the Second Boer War in progress, but made their neutrality clear; but on one occasion, the circus train narrowly missed demolition as the Boers were about to blow a bridge over the Modder River.
“While Philip Wirth was a ringmaster standing 6 feet tall and weighing 14 stone, he was also an expert horse trainer. In 1893 in South Africa, he trained a gnu to ride on the back of a horse, and broke and trained six zebras, which according to Wirth, The Bible allegedly said to be the only animal that could not be trained. When in South America in 1895, he trained two wild mustangs to waltz together. In another instance, a pony would enter the ring dressed as a woman, undress, put on a nightgown, blow out a candle and get into bed; teaching all done without cruelty, but patience and some sugar.”
Back in Autralia in the early 20th century, tours to country areas became greater.
A visit to Inglewood in 1917 was billed as  a great event where “nothing has  been left undone which might detract from its distinctive qualities”.
“Artists and performers who have been brought from the four corners of the globe will perform just exactly as they. were shown in London, Paris, New York,.and other world centres.
They said the travelling menagerie boasted “every denizon of the jungles” - African lions, Russian bears.
It must have been a rollicking time for a later newspaper article said: “A mild sensation was caused on Sunday; night by a disturbance among the employes of Wirth’s cirous at the railway station. The circus which showed on Saturday night, remained in the town all Sunday, and in the evening a difference arose between some of the men and the proprietor of the  Railway Hotel. 
“The men became so violent that the police had to be sent for and shots were fired before the disturbance was under control Three of the circus employees received injuries from the batons of the police, but there are no reports of any damage to property. It was not till the early hours of the morning that order was restored.”
In 1931, Wirth’s Circus was again in Inglewood and made state news when two tiger cubs were born.
 They will be reared on a baby’s bottle as the mother frequently kills her cubs through trying to hide them from view, an on-the-spot reporter wrote.
Wirth’s Circus had its rivals. One, Fitzgeralds had been a regular on the Loddon goldfields until taken over by the bigger family outfit.
The family also had more permanent locations, including where the Melbourne Arts Centre now stands, but continued touring to country towns likes like Inglewood until World War Two.
The demise of Wirth’s also came as television took hold in meeting the entertainment desires of people across Australia.
Like the magic shows and vaudeville actors who once graced the stage of Tarnagulla’s Victoria Theatre or in other towns, slowly replaced by silent movies and then the talkies, the circus is pretty much a part of history.
Unless performers like Duck Cameron have a couple more tricks up the sleeve.