[lettie]

We duly arrived in Ballarat and found our motel about 4km from the town centre. What a prosperous place this was, the houses were huge and ornate with wide avenues and grand old buildings in the town centre. Due to the drought, the once lush gardens were dry with yellowed grass and patches of soil showing through. The motel manager said that they had 40mm of rain a few days before but because the place was so hot and dry nobody could tell where the water had gone. The dry earth had just sucked it in.. We assured him that he would have rain for the next couple of days because we had brought some with us and it had followed us around the country..

We gamely walked the 4km into town that evening and found a brilliant Italian restaurant which was BYO (bring your own).... We had brought our own, a cracking bottle of wine which the waitress opened for us. We were mid way through our meal when the heavens opened.. It absolutely persisted down, we were in t-shirts and sandals (customary dress in Oz). The restaurant called us a taxi to take us to the motel where we gave a nod to the manager before hitting the sack, it was still raining..

The next morning we awoke to a dry but cloudy day and decided to visit Sovereign Hill on the outskirts of Ballarat. Ballarat was once a sleepy pastoral town with not much going on when, in 1851, there was an almighty cry of 'Gold!!!!!'

Within a few months tent cities had sprung up all over this district and prospectors had come from all over the world to find their fortunes. Coverage of the event in British newspapers meant that a large percentage of the newly arrived immigrants were English. People sold everything they had to travel to Australia in order to make their fortune. Many of these miners were professional people who had never mined before and the conditions were incredibly tough with hard physical labour, a harsh unforgiving climate and no guarantee of a find..

There were some spectacular nuggets found here and the lucky finders of these nuggets prospered. Some of the gold was found in creek beds by panning but when that ran out, deep mines were built which followed the quartz seams to the gold. It was an exciting time and Ballarat prospered. Within 20 years it had become a small city with rich ornate buildings. The gold rush petered out in the late 1870s but Victoria had truly prospered as gold had been found in many of the other districts too.

Sovereign Hill is a living reminder of those days and offers visitors the chance to explore this fantastic period in Australia's history. It is an 1800s village with blacksmiths, coachmakers, bakeries, a post office, newspaper, shops, miner's huts, mines and a Chinese village. The Chinese also got in on the gold rush and many of these early miner's families still live in Victoria. The people who work here are all in period dress and mingle with the visitors. They have a small creek where you can go gold panning and a fantastic mine tour which shows what the conditions were like for these miners in the shafts and tunnels. It was a superb day out and the cost of the ticket also covered entry to the Gold Museum across the road, which focuses on the use of gold throughout history. We spent the full day at Sovereign Hill and the Gold Museum and thoroughly enjoyed it.

That evening, we couldn't be bothered trying to find a restaurant for food so we spent A$10 on a fish and chip supper and ended up with 2 massive pieces of fish and enough chips to feed a family of 6 people, all for the equivalent of £4.30.... I love this place..

Here are some photos of Sovereign Hill.