Crouched by a stream, young prospectors are sifting through dirt with their simple iron pans. They're looking for what brought people to Ballarat more than 150 years ago: gold. It would be a shame to spoil wide-eyed dreams by telling them that the easy pickings have long gone.
The gold-panning area at Sovereign Hill is next to the Chinese camp, where voice recordings coming from inside the tents recount tales of misery and mistreatment, allied to a fear of never returning home.
Farther along, horse-drawn carriages rattle up the main street, where hotels, newspaper offices and foundries stand proud and red-coated soldiers ceremonially fire their rifles.
If this all sounds a bit 19th-century theme park, that’s partly because it is. Sovereign Hill is part re-creation and part rejuvenation of Ballarat’s gold-rush-era cityscape. But it’s also significantly more than that. The candlemakers, tinsmiths, blacksmiths and wheelwrights are all in costume, giving demonstrations of their crafts, but it’s not just for show – they sell their old-fashioned products in the real world, too. And this is what makes Sovereign Hill so distinctive. It’s a very skilful blend of misty-eyed past and modern reality, and it’s very difficult to see the joins.
It also shows off a side of Australia that many outsiders don’t realise exists. For all the beaches, epic outback scenery and wildlife encounters, Australia also has a surprisingly strong heritage, and a road trip from Melbourne through the history-heavy state of Victoria is a marvellous way of exploring this.
Ballarat is the best-known goldfields town, but it’s Bendigo that did the heavy lifting in terms of the amount of gold produced. The city is riddled with a network of underground tunnels and thousands of mine shafts. At the Central Deborah Gold Mine, it’s possible to venture into a small fraction of this maze. This involves a claustrophobic descent down the shaft in a cage, then being guided around the passages carved out by miners over the years.
One section is guarded by a protective barrier, the reason for which becomes clear on closer inspection. Behind it is a seam of white quartz – the rock the miners would be looking for – and there’s still a sprinkling of gold within it.
The trade-offs for getting that gold weren’t pretty, though. The guide explains what life down below was like. “The man on the steel platform’s job was to load a truck with rocks,” he says. “He had to fill one truck every four minutes for seven hours. It was a huge amount of work.”
Then there’s the drills, which replaced hammers and chisels in 1886. “This one was called the widowmaker,” says the guide. “Because of the dust.” Quartz is a natural glass, and getting tiny shards of it in the lungs wasn’t exactly a life-expectancy aid. And that’s before you even get to having to deal with the deafening noise they had to endure.
Without gold mines such as Central Deborah, though, Australia would be a different place. Gold transformed a distant British colonial backwater into a place to seek fortune, and brought a multicultural element as Californians and Chinese prospectors came to try their luck. Gold was the first step to independent wealth – which 50 years later led to independence.
But it was by no means the only source of income, as can be seen in Echuca, the most attractive town on the Murray River. Australia’s longest river is the lifeblood for much of the country. The farms in its basin are reliant on it for irrigation, and given that there’s not too much fertile land elsewhere, this means the Riverina is Australia’s foodbowl.
Echuca is at the closest point of the Murray to Melbourne – a strategically important position that saw it become the third-largest port in Australia during the 19th century. Food and wool would be taken to Melbourne by rail from Echuca, and goods would go the other way, being distributed along the Murray by paddle steamers.
The paddle steamers are a prime ingredient of a heritage that has been remarkably well preserved. They leave from the gigantic wooden wharf, which was built in 1865 and stretches across three levels, so that it can still be useful regardless of river levels.
Tourist cruises, rather than freight, are the stock in trade for the paddle steamers these days – but the last one built for heavy lifting is still in business. The PS Alexander Arbuthnot was built in 1923, and has been restored to chug along the Murray while one poor soul below deck shovels coal to feed the merciless, noisy, clanking engine. Everyone else gets to admire the archetypal Australian scenery, of bare, ghostly silver eucalyptus tree trunks reaching for the skies.
The best-preserved town in Victoria, though, is in the High Country. Beechworth is a place of famed bakeries, gorgeous old buildings, time-warp balconies and – most importantly – the Ned Kelly legend. Throughout the rest of the world, Kelly is vaguely known as an outlaw with absurd homemade metal armour. In Australia, he’s a convoluted folk hero – a freedom fighter figure to some; a brutal murderer to others.
Walking tours start from the town hall and take in key sites from the Kelly story, such as the courthouse where he was first tried for horse-stealing and the cold, temporary jail cells where sympathisers and associates were locked up.
In 90 minutes, the story sways from anti-British resentment in Ned’s father’s native Ireland to the short-lived dream of an independent republic in north-eastern Victoria. On the way, there are bare-knuckle boxing bouts through the streets of Beechworth, corrupt cops, a forest shoot-out that left three policemen dead and the country’s biggest-ever bounty on Kelly’s head. And it ends with the charred corpses of the Kelly gang members inside the burnt-down hotel where they staged their last stand. It’s not about picking sides – there are no good or bad guys in this twisting, turning saga.
But the Kelly story is like Australia’s – there’s far more to it than it’s often given credit for, and it’s worth going to the source to get wrapped up in it.
If you go
The flights Ballarat, Bendigo, Echuca and Beechworth are all within about three hours' drive of Melbourne, and can be tackled as a looped circuit from there. Etihad and Emirates fly from Abu Dhabi and Dubai respectively to Melbourne from Dh4,810.
The sights Entry to Sovereign Hill costs from 54 Australian dollars (Dh152). Central Deborah Gold Mine tours cost from 30 dollars (Dh85). Echuca Paddle Steamers cruises cost from 25 dollars (Dh71). Ned Kelly walking tours cost 10 dollars (Dh28).
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