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YOU’D think that after delivering a more than six-hour lecture, Neil Huybregts would have exhausted everything he had to say about William Beauclerc Otway, but he reckons he could have gone for longer. Mr Huybregts a PhD student at Federation University has delivered his opus on the life and times of Dr Otway who arrived in Ballarat during the gold rush in 1854. “”If you’ve talked to anyone who’s a history addict they will talk to you about their chosen subject until they drop,” he said. “I am completely obsessed with Dr Otway and I thought it would be a really great thing to do. I pitched it to council and they thought it was hilarious.” My Huybregts research showed the longest public lecture given in Ballarat was believed to be around two hours. “When I got to the end, I thought, wait, there’s all these other things about Dr Otway’s life I didn’t mention,” he said. “I thought my voice would go, but it was more a case of my back from all the walking that was the biggest problem.”

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