Ballarat

Our focus in Ballarat was really Eureka and Sovereign Hill. We went to the sound and light show,  Blood on the Southern Cross, which was really quite good as an explanation of why the Eureka Stockade was built. It was great for Ben, as it is part of year 5 curriculum.

Sovereign Hill is just fantastic. We spent two 7 hour days there, and really enjoyed it. We panned for gold (and were taught how this time so we actually found some), watched lots of demonstrations of how things were made and enjoyed the small acts by people in costume. Ben loved these so much he had us treking from one side of the hill to the other to make sure we were in the right place at the right time to catch them all.

We also enjoyed learning about the colourings that were used in the lollies of the time - soot for black, rust for orange, chloroform for green, and our favourite, arsenic for yellow. Given the moulds were made of lead, those lollies were pretty toxic!  Luckily children rarely got to eat them, and adults probably died of other causes first!

Our Ballarat visit was plagued with school groups.  The caravan park was hosting various groups, some of which were badly enough behaved to be annoying. There was also one school group interacting with one of the acts at Sovereign Hill so energetically that we couldn't hear the actors and the actors had to push them out of the way. Eventually an adult (parent maybe?) shushed them, but far too late. Ben was appalled and noted that Torrens kids would have been silenced way way earlier, and wouldn't have been so disrespectful in the first place. There were some other school groups that were well behaved though :-).

I enjoyed chatting with a mum at Sovereign Hill who home-schools her five children and they all volunteer at Sovereign Hill once a week in costume. What a great experience for them!

The Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka was fantastic too. We saw THE Flag. There were very good interactive touch screen displays about Eureka, and also about democracy, suffrage and struggle. A great place to visit and learn. They were also having an exhibition about the Chinese in the gold rush, which was very interesting.

We ended up spending an extra day in Ballarat as our car was miss firing, so we had to have the spark plugs replaced. While annoying, it meant we spent a day walking around the main street admiring the wonderful buildings.