On Monday the 8th, James and I took the train to Ballarat: an old gold mining town, north of Melbourne. Gold was discovered in Ballarat in 1851 and the town soon became a major settlement flooded by new Australians and Chinese miners.

Our main destination was Sovereign Hill, an open-air museum which brings the gold mining town back life. We decided to walk there from the train station to see the city centre of Ballarat first. It was worth it. The centre of the town was flooded with houses from the mid-19th century. These buildings were absolutely magnificent, but the cars passing by and the ticking of the traffic lights made you question where you were in time.

As we got further from the city centre, we noticed another side of the city. There were barely any businesses open, many had a “for rent” sign hanging in the window with a big number of houses for sale. The city looked a bit dying.

Finally we got to Sovereign Hill. James has been there many times as a kid and loved it. Once we got inside I understood why. The museum was a replica of the 19th century town at the time of the gold rush. The buildings were reminiscent of the American Wild West and the staff were strolling the streets wearing historically accurate outfits.

The weirdest part of the whole experience was the fact that the museum had a Winter Wonderland theme, due to it being winter down in Australia. My European mind could not process the Christmas decorations and the fake snow made of bubbles in the middle of July at 14 degree.

The main street had the big shops and important buildings like the bank or theatre. Most buildings had life bustling inside and out of them. The theatre showed multiple plays a day. The bakery was stuffed with people buying the smoking hot sausage rolls. We walked around and looked into every shopfront window. We were passed by horse carriages multiple times as they took their guests on a little tour of the park. You could walk through fully furnished model houses and schools that had classes for children visiting the museum.

The biggest attraction of the day was panning for gold. A little creek flowed down through the lowest point of the hill. All along the shore people were squatting and holding heavy metal pans. We gave a quick try to panning for gold but couldn’t get the hang of it. We were just about to leave when we saw a staff member dressed up as a miner demonstrating on how to wash the gold out. After watching him we went back and spent approximately 40 minutes panning for gold. The basic theory is that gold is the heaviest of all the stuff in the pan. So you had to carefully wash away everything else until gold is the only thing left. We ended up with a file with 6-7 tiny gold flakes floating in it which we could take as a souvenir.

This area included the Chinese village where the Chinese miners lived. They were heavily taxed at the time because the European settlers did not want them to find any gold for themselves. At one point captains had to pay for every Chinese who they brought to the port, so they put them out a lot earlier at the shore and they had to walk for days to get to Ballarat.

The top of the hill was occupied by the building involved in the gold mining. At one of them you could even watch a blacksmith pour out gold into a bar. The lady who did our demonstration was the only female blacksmith there and the gold bar she smelted was melted and reset for over 28 years, worth 20,000 dollars.

We spent a full day walking around at Sovereign Hill. We caught a bus going back to the city and a very late lunch at 5ish. Over all we had a lovely and tiring trip travelling back in time and we left Ballarat listening to the fitting track “Married in a Gold Rush” by Vampire Weekend.