THE VISUAL, gastronomic and vinous delights of Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne, in Australia, are well known to the city’s visitors. But a drive in the opposite direction can bring rather different rewards.
The city of Ballarat doesn’t have a seaside, and even Lake Wendouree, which hosted the rowing in the 1956 Olympics, has dried up to a few square metres of reedy water, leaving the old boathouse slipways leading into grass. But, as the place where the world’s biggest alluvial gold rush began, in 1851, it has a rough, romantic fascination.
At the height of the rush some 10,000 people sluiced and dug there for a shiny dream. Most scratched barely a living, but a few major fortunes built a city with fine homes, the essential Royal Hotel, a university, botanic gardens and a theatre. Ballarat today has highly prized Victorian architecture, and Lydiard and Sturt Streets are worth the walk. From the town centre Grand Avenue of Honour stretches 15km into the countryside, its 4,000 trees sporting plaques to local soldiers who served in the first World War.
The Sovereign Hill attraction (above), which reconstructs the 1850s, is well worth at least half a day to experience and visualise how tough things were then. School-tour kids dress up in contemporary clothes, try nibs and inkwells in the school and go down a mine.
Blood under the Southern Cross is a sound- and-light presentation depicting the Eureka Stockade miners’ rebellion against excessive licence fees. It was a bloody episode, but an Irishman at their head, one Peter Lalor from Co Laois, did well politically from it, later becoming an MP for the state of Victoria.
Comfortable in the Mornington wineries, I hadn’t really intended to go to Ballarat. But it was a couple of days well spent, a reminder that Australia not so long ago had days that weren’t all wine and roses.
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