Ballaarat

Ballarat (previously spelt Ballaarat, as it was named from an Aboriginal phrase: ‘Balla arat’ ) is a large-ish city north west of Melbourne that totally fails to live up to its reputation of being brown, devoid of cars and in the mid nineteenth century. The town of Ararat is nearby and was named by someone with a mouth full of bread. The city proper of Ballarat is actually really nice. I might describe it a little.

The streets are wide and lined with grand old nineteenth century buildings and fountains. It's a pretty even mix of new buildings and old ones and you get the impression that they are all still used for normal, everyday things, and the tourists are shipped off to the outskirts. We arrived there by train in the morning and barely had time to appreciate the culturally significant buildings before we hit the first coffee shop on the road. We’d only slept for a few hours before leaving for our flight from Sydney earlier that morning, and while the high of being in fucking historic Ballarat was pretty sustaining (and flavoursome), we knew at some point this high would not be able to overpower the need for both the taste and energy that a latte with one sugar provides.



The coffee came with a chocolate lolly. This was one of the many positive experiences we had of the place. After our coffee, we walked further down the street, generally admiring the numerous grand structures built from the riches of a bygone goldrush era, and it struck me that in places like Ballarat (and Bendigo, etc.), a short period in their history brought in so much wealth that it’s still reverberating today. Like a loud gunshot in the Grand Canyon, where the bullet hits a lake and endless ripples form. We actually went to a place called the Grand Canyon, but that’s later on.

We got to our okay hotel with a tiny, cold-looking pool and put our stuff down. We then caught the free (for us) bus to Sovereign Hill, an open air museum that I was immensely interested in from a historical perspective. Sovereign Hill was worth a good day’s exploring, mainly because of the quantity of activities with which you can engage. It works like a mix between a gold rush town, a gold rush theme park, and a high school history lesson. There are horses that carry carriages around the town in circles. There is a gold panning area where you could find gold pieces so small that only the Sovereign Hill employees could even see them. And there are numerous shops and craftspeople (blacksmith, grocer, lollymaker, etc). Niki was positively enthralled with lollymaking. And exorbitantly happy with the printing place.

After generally walking around, looking at horses and whims, and failing to find any gold in a small river, we walked through the air-conditioned history lesson section. There were interesting little nuggets of information, like how much gold each state ended up bringing in, and how it affected their populations. Victoria won out in those stakes, with NSW significantly behind. South Australia almost lost out completely (apart from population rise from more indirect means). We then regrettably decided not to do any gold mine tours, which I think would have been a lot of fun. Apparently we didn't think so at the time.

Finally, after watching various demonstrations of gold sieving, sorting and smelting (with a bar worth about AU$100 000!), we headed back to the real town, ate some saucy noodles and slept. When we awoke, we had a coach to catch to the Grampians mountains, so we bought some food from the 24hr(!) Coles, and went on our way to Stawell (pronounced Stall).