Ballarat is just over 100 kms west of Melbourne. Even though there's not much happening there right now, it has been 'the place to be' less than a century ago.
It all started when a couple of wanderers came across a nugget of gold lying around on the ground. How lucky is that?? So the news spread and as you would have guessed, people around the world packed up their things and came running down here. Most of these migrants came from England and China.
But of course not everyone was lucky, according to statistics only 1% of the gold miners actually hit the jackpot. However the consolation prizes were enough for most miners to buy their own cottage and move out.
The preferred method of transport in Sovereign Hill
According to a guide there Ballarat has (or rather had) the most purest form of gold occurring in nature, second place went to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, and third came South Africa. However I could not find any sources to back this up, so I'm still a bit critical about that statement.
Anyhow, just over a period of half a century the city of Ballarat managed to export tonnes of gold before the last mine was closed down in the 1920's. So there isn't much gold around these days.
Some people are still hopeful that they might find something that glitters!
The major attraction of the place is "Sovereign Hill" which recreates life in the 1850's golden era. It's a whole village with gold mines, blacksmiths (who process the dug gold) miners quarters, shops, schools and what not. This is a real nice place to experience life back then, and you can easily spend a whole day walking around, exploring mines and learning all about gold.
A blacksmith, pouring the molten gold (1200 Celsius) into a mould, to make a bar of gold.
Towards the end of our small vacation in Ballarat we popped into "Kirrit Bareet"which is an aboriginal gallery. The place wasn't marketed as much as the other attractions, and it wasn't a very commercialized entity either. But there we learnt that there was another side to this gold coin. The pictures and stories on the walls told us a different side of the gold rush.
Before the whole gold rush thing began, this area was inhabited by the aboriginal people. The gold rush created in the mid 19th century saw them losing their lands and their lives. Few of the natives stood up against the white man, only to be perished under their aggressive rule. Some miners actually had an aboriginal person's skull hanging outside their door, so as to scare them off!
All the other places we've been to in Ballarat talked in detail about the harsh conditions the miners had to face in making a living, the way they stood up against the unfair conditions under which they had to work, but I don't think that in any way compares with the injustice that the aboriginal people had had to face, and it was a bit disappointing that it wasn't even mentioned anywhere other than on a wall in this small silent gallery.
An unexpected find. A vintage car exhibition
