Ballarat

Yesterday I went to the gold-mining town of Ballarat, about 90 minutes by V/Line train from Melbourne. Founded in the gold-rush starting with the first find in 1851, there is lots of grand Victorian architecture, not least the railway station.

I was told that Sovereign Hill was really worth visiting - and so it was. I was on the train after the "Goldrush Special" so had to walk from the station instead of getting the courtesy bus, but that gave me a chance to walk through the town.

Sovereign Hill is a recreation of the town as it was in the 19th century - a gold-mining equivalent of England's Beamish coal-mining town museum. It is every bit as fascinating. You can, among other things, go down a mine, watch gold being smelted, see performances in the theatre, eat in the hotel, buy pies from the pie-shop (yes I had a traditional meat pie for my lunch) and pan for gold.

There are lots of people in costume, on the streets as well as in the shops, to tell you all about it. Excellent. I wish I'd had longer there, but I'd heard the Ballarat Wildlife Park lets you get up close to the animals and I wanted to get some more koala pictures for Little Miss.

Yes I got some good views of the koalas, and there were kangaroos and emus who came right up to you and would feed from people's hands. The little ones were very cute. I also saw wallabies, quokkas, wombats, echidnas, giant tortoises, crocodiles, iguanas, tree frogs and snakes. It's probably just as well the latter were behind glass - they included taipans (the most poisonous snake in the world) and death adders.

I discovered there were no buses after 1pm, so had to walk back to the town centre. There were some lovely gardens, full of flowers, including lots of roses.

They smelt so good.

I also passed the Eureka Centre, commemorating the bloody rebellion of 1854.

As Wikipedia says...

The Eureka Stockade was a miners' revolt in 1854 in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, against the officials supervising the gold-mining region of Ballarat due to many reasons, including heavily priced mining items, the expense of a digging license, and unfair treatment. It is often regarded as being an event of equal significance to Australian history as the storming of the Bastille was to French history, but almost equally often dismissed as an event of little long-term consequence. Although the revolt failed, it was a watershed event in Australian politics, and is often described controversially as the "Birth of Australian Democracy".

You can find loads more of my pictures of Ballarat,Sovereign Hill and the Wildlife Park here on Flickr.