Ballarat

Yesterday was really, really cool!

A while back, I'd received an email from Karen Chatto, who is the National Program Advisor for Guides Australia. She'd heard that I was in the country and looking for Guiding contacts, and wanted to meet me. Turns out she lives in Ballarat, which is an easy 1 1/2 hour train ride from Melbourne, so I invited myself out there so I could meet her and tour the town. Jen is off at camp (of all things) with her students, and even if that wasn't going on she would've been at work, so I went on my own.

I arrived in Ballarat just after 9:30am and Karen and her 14-month-old son Mitchell met me at the train station. (She was right. She was really easy to spot, what with the fantastic black-and-orange pram she has for her little boy!) Karen had already done all the hard work of finding tourist brochures for the town's various attractions so we "hit the ground running", as it were.

Ballarat has an important place in Australia's history. First off, it was the centre of the Victorian gold rush in the late 1800's, and when gold was found here, thousands of people abandoned their jobs elsewhere and converged on Ballarat's gold fields. Thousands more came from overseas to seek their fortune, including many Chinese. You can't help but feel a little bit sorry for the government of the time - Ballarat's population went from 50 to 50,000 in a matter of weeks. Can you imagine how hard keeping law and order was? Even the police were deserting their posts to go gold hunting!

In an attempt to keep control of things, the government imposed these crazy license laws, which were meant to discourage ordinary folks from abandoning their jobs and going gold hunting. The licenses had to be bought monthly and were very expensive. Needless to say, the miners didn't like this system and thought it was very unfair. Well, one thing led to another, and eventually there was rioting in Ballarat, followed closely by the famous Eureka Stockade showdown. At the Eureka Stockade, the miners barricaded themselves to fight for their rights - including the right to vote for the authorities who were making the laws (the miners up to this point didn't have the right to vote since most of them owned no property). The police and army attacked and there was a terrible slaughter. Following this incident there was a huge public outcry supporting the miners and denouncing what the government did to try and control them. Today the battle at the Eureka Stockade is widely recognized as when true democracy came to Australia.

Knowing all this, of course the first place we stopped was the Eureka Stockade interpretative centre. The stockade itself is long gone, but the city has done a great job of explaining the events that led up to the battle in the centre. Again I enjoyed the excellent use of lighting and sound effects as I wandered through the displays, listening to clips from the protests, the battles, and the eventual trials. It was great. While I was in the centre, Karen took her little boy to the nearby playground - shaped like a stockade, I'd like to point out, and with ranks of wooden British soldiers standing guard! So cool.

From there, we drove across town to Sovereign Hill. Karen had tried to describe this place to me over the phone but I hadn't truly understood what it was. Turns out that Sovereign Hill is a Living Museum, in much the same spirit as Upper Canada and Black Creek Pioneer Villages. One big difference is that, unlike the pioneer villages I've been to in Canada, all the buildings at Sovereign Hill were purpose-built reconstructions, and not originals. Some of the steam engines and other machinery on site were authentic, though. On the other hand, given the volatility of the gold rush era, it was probably difficult to find examples of the mining buildings etc., as they would have been dismantled and moved elsewhere once the gold ran out.

Sovereign Hill was really, really, really cool. There were actors walking around in period costume. British soldiers raided the mining tent camp and demanded to see miners licenses. There was a gold stream that the public could try panning at - and yes, there was still gold to be found in the stream. I gave it a go but had no luck, but apparently the day before, someone had found a $100 gold nugget right where I was working! Wow! Stagecoaches, wagons, and horsemen rode up and down the streets. All the shops were open and selling their wares - all made in the town. The meat pies and apple pasties were GREAT.

Having recently been to Upper Canada Village, I didn't spend all that much time in the shops and homes, as these were very similar to what I'd see there. But the mining aspect of the town was absolutely fascinating. They had a tent city set up like it would have been in the late 1800's. You could look in each tent and tell a little about how prosperous the miners were by the furnishings inside. In many of the tents they had voice recordings set up on motion sensors, so when you poked your head in, you'd hear snippets of conversations from the tent's occupants. This gave a whole different perspective about life on the gold fields.

There were also two mine tours to do, and of course I did both of them. In the Red Hill Mine, we followed the ghostly voice of an old miner, as he "trained" us new "young boys" in the ways of life underground. It was cool - we'd stop at some point in the passageway, an alcove with an interactive demonstration would light up, and when that part of the show was over, a new tunnel would light up and we'd follow it to our next stop. In the other tour, we went down into a real gold mine and learned how the gold was extracted. At the end of that tour, we all got to ride on a modified ore cart train down the narrow twisty tunnels and back to the entrance. Craziness!

The absolute highlight of the day was watching the gold pour. Each hour, they do a demonstration to show how gold ingots are made. So Karen and Mitchell and I sat in the crowded amphitheater with a whole ton of (very well behaved) school kids and watched in fascination. The gold was melted in a crucible made of (I think?) iron (I can't remember!), then poured into a breadpan-shaped cast iron mold. I was astounded at how quickly the gold solidified and then cooled (after a dunking in a bucket of water) - I would say within 5 minutes of being molten metal at over 1000C, it was cool enough to touch! The ingot we saw was worth something like $95,000, and was about half the size of one of Maureen's banana breads. One lucky kid was pulled from the audience and got to hold the gold for a minute or so. Totally awesome.

By the time we'd finished wandering around Sovereign Hill, Mitchell was getting pretty tired, so Karen and I parted ways and she headed home to put him down for a nap. She dropped me off back in Ballarat's downtown, and was thoughtful enough to provide me with a brochure with a walking tour of the town's historic architecture. I wandered up and down Lydiard Street, admiring all the old buildings. I also stuck my head into Ballarat's art gallery, but by that time I was also pooped and I didn't stay all that long.

The only complaint I have about Ballarat is that there are no decent cafes within a 3-block radius of the train station! It took me quite a bit of walking (and backtracking) to find a place to grab a bite to eat before getting on the train back to Melbourne. Ah well. Can't win 'em all!

What with one thing and another, I didn't make it back to the house here until almost 8:30pm and I was pooped. Again. Then again, I realized yesterday that part of the reason I was likely so tired was because the week before, Jen and I had hopped time zones six times in six days, what with our journeys back and forth between the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and of course the beginnings here of Daylight Savings Time. Gah.

Tonight I'm off to meet a group of senior Guides and Ranger Guides, and we're going to be comparing wilderness camping techniques between Australia and Canada. Should be interesting! At home, it's been drilled into me that "cotton kills, cotton kills, cotton kills"... but here in OZ cotton is the preferred fabric for hot summer weather! I wonder what other differences we'll find?