Day 28-29 - Sovereign Hill, Ballarat

Well what a blast this was! We have wanted to come to Sovereign Hill for a number of years but things never really worked out. Our original plan coming into Victoria was to go to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road, then head down to Tasmania for a couple of weeks up to mid March or so, which would give us enough time to get up to Stanthorpe for the Easter Bible School. Unfortunately we couldn’t get a ferry ticket for the times we wanted, so we decided to spend the extra time in Victoria. This has been a blessing really because the last several days have had some great relaxing experiences which we may not have had if we’d been rushing to get to Melbourne.

One of these experiences, of course, was Sovereign Hill! We used our RAA discount to get 5% off the entry cost, not a lot but better than nothing. It was also a 2 day pass which we had heard was necessary, and having been through one day I would completely agree! We have a lot still to get through! We had a quick breakfast and headed off about 9am, and after stopping at the supermarket for some lunch supplies we arrived about 9:30. The gates don’t open until 10 so we had a look through the gift shop until then. Quite a range of interesting things, including some of the raspberry drops the Smith’s had recommended.
We entered Sovereign Hill just after 10, and straight away we were wowed! It’s like a pioneer village, but a with live actors dressed up in period costume, and the shops are all open and trading! A Cobb & Co coach rolled past just after we walked in, pulled by four shire horses. Just to our right we could hear the blacksmith hammering away at his work, and ladies in bonnets and gentlemen in top hats appeared and crossed the streets every so often. It all looked so authentic!


Aaaanyway... so when we came to write it up, I found we'd taken so many photos and so many videos we figured a video montage was the best way to capture it all. So here's the highlights, and some of the key photos and all the info's after the break!

The first thing we did was an orientation tour, where our guide took us up the main street pointing out the different shops, the stories behind them and the characters who made the place what it was. Sovereign Hill is created to be a re-enactment of the 1850-1860’s period of the gold rush in Ballarat. This was when gold was first discovered and a whole stack of people rushed in to try to get their hands on some. After 1860 gold mining became more of a commercial / big business operation. So Sovereign Hill is looking primarily at that first 10 year period where it was on a bit of a smaller scale and all the services which were needed to support the mining work.

The map and program showed that while you can just wander around the different shops buying things and looking at things, there are specific demonstrations, shows and activities on at certain times of the day. So after our orientation tour, we went to the blacksmith who had a demonstration at 11.  He showed us how to make a decorative simple hook out of a piece of rectangular steel. First he heated the middle of the bar in the forge until it was red-hot, clamped one of the ‘cold’ ends in the vice, then with a tool he twisted the other ‘cold’ end through 180 or 360 degrees to turn the rectangle into a gentle spiral.  He then heated each end, hammered them flat and bent a little step into it. The process took probably 20 minutes as he had to dunk it in cold water after each step to be able to work on a different piece of the metal. I bought the hook for $5 at the end of the display and will be very happy to use it around home when we get back!

By now it was 11:30, and the Hope Bakery across the road was beckoning, especially as the guide had told us of its famous sausage rolls! So we grabbed one of those, a couple of pies and an apple and custard pasty and had a lovely morning tea.  While we were doing this we saw a musket loading and firing demonstration.

Next we went to a Gold Pour demonstration, where they melted down a $250,000 gold bar and showed how it was poured into a mold to create an ingot.  Gold is often found in quartz rock which they would crush into a poweder and spread on a table containing mercury. Mercury has a natural affinity to gold so they would stick together in an amalgum. This allowed them to get rid of all the powdered quartz. They then had to boil off the mercury, and to save the mercury they’d run the vapour through water so it could be captured and re-used. This process then left them with gold, which could be heated up to about 1060 degrees C. They could skim any dross off the surface, which is a good reminder of Malachi’s words, that gold is purified through the fire. It’s then finally poured out into the mold, cooled in a water bath, and the process is complete! They would then melt it all down and repeat for the next demonstration, something they’ve been doing with this same bar of gold since 1994!

We had a quick look at the sweet shop after this and got a sample of a raspberry drop, and were convinced to come back for a sweet making demonstration later in the day. We then had a Meet the Animals tour, where a guide took us around parts of the facility showing us the different animals typically onsite in 1850’s Ballarat and what they were each used for. There were horses, goats, different types of chickens, turkeys, pigs, dogs and cats.  Most ended up as meat of course, but some had a useful purpose in life too, e.g. guard dogs to guard your tent while you’re out searching for gold.

From here we saw some red soldiers doing a gun firing demonstration, similar to the earlier one.

We then had the sweet making demonstration, and this was very interesting! They showed us how to make striped humbugs.  First they had heated up some sugar in a pot to about 155 degrees C. They then poured it out onto a warmed table. It was a golden / yellow colour. They took out a small section and added some black colouring to it and rolled that into three ‘sausages’. The rest of it they added some peppermint oil, then one of the confectioners folded and folded and folded it. This introduced air into the mixture which lightened it, and he kept going until it was almost white. They then pressed this into a flat rectangle and pressed three channels into the top of it, and into these three channels they laid the three black sausages of mixture. This whole rectangle was then folded, stretched, refolded, restretched and so on until the black sausages were a multitude of thin streaks in the classic black and white striped humbug pattern.

The last thing to do was to chop this into small book-size pieces and feed them through a set of rollers which pressed the mixture into whatever shape they wanted the lollies to be with a thin bit of mixture in between each ‘drop’. Finally after the mixture had cooled they would simply pick up a flat piece of pressed-into-shape sugar, drop it back on the table and it would break into a hundred neatly shaped lollies! They were delicious!

In between these different activities we would pop into one or other of the little shops along the high street, and around this time we visited the tinsmith who was making scone cutters and gingerbread man cutters by hand (as in, manually-operated guillotine and bending the strips of metal into shape with jigs).








We were getting peckish by now, so stopped in the New York Bakery for a Devonshire Tea!

Our next stop was a very important, and potentially (but not actually) lucrative one – the river where we’d go gold panning!  One of the staff members explained what to do thankfully. The gold, being heavy, falls right to the bottom, so the best thing to do is to get a shovel load of material from the bottom of the creek (it has a concrete bottom). You then have to swish the gravel / dirt mixture around with water and wash all the large and small stones back in until you don’t have that much left.  You then swish some water around in the pan to remove most of the rest of this down to one side of the pan, leaving any gold particles up the top with the very fine silt. We had a lot of fun doing the panning. We did find some very small nuggets, nothing big of course, and plenty of flecks of gold leaf.

Let's play "Spot the Nugget"! (It's a little way above the black rock near the top)

Our prospecting was interrupted by realising we needed to be at the theatre for a comedy act. It wasn’t too long and not hilariously funny but it was I guess ironic situational comedy with an unrequited / undisclosed love plot which was probably typical of its period, and funny enough in its own way.

We spent the rest of the day finding our fortune at the gold river.

We zipped back to the van via the shops where Mim had done an Apricot Chicken. Yum!
 

Day 2 (Day 29) – Saturday 29 Feb

We came with a clear plan of where we wanted to go, so first up we went straight down to the gold panning. The staff throw about 3g ($250 worth) of gold each day so we thought if we went early we might have a better haul than yesterday.  We certainly found some good nuggets this time, nothing enormous of course but probably a bit bigger than yesterday. We didn’t bother with all the really small stuff.  One of the staff members there gave us some extra tips, whereby we’d just wash almost everything back into the river leaving just the heaviest silt, and the gold, in the pan. This method was quicker than keeping some in the pan and trying to swish most of what was left to a different part of the pan.  We helped out some others who had just come in and picked up a pan and had no idea what they were doing - just like us yesterday afternoon!

We stayed there until a bit after 11. The kids ducked up to the apothecary to see pill rolling but were back in a few minutes as it was pretty quick.

We walked up onto the main street where a street show was just starting – someone acting out the proprieter of one of the businesses was giving a speech from the balcony of his theatre which led to an argument with other players in the street.

At 12pm we went up to a school room and had a lesson in writing in Victorian script with a steel pen and ink wells. The ‘teacher’ also gave us quite a bit of history on the place.

After ‘school’ we wandered past the metal spinner, where they made a range of flat metal dishes, such as gold pans, candle holders, kerosene lanterns and so on.

All of the machinery in Sovereign Hill is powered in a very different way to how it’s done today. There were of course no electric motors in the 1850’s, so how was one to provide motive force to a machine? Well, they had a single motor (presumably a steam motor originally) which spun a flywheel, and from this single flywheel a belt ran up to the roof where a pulley was mounted to the end of a long axle.  From this axle there were a whole series of other pulleys, belts, and slave shafts which took this rotating power out to different parts of the workshop.  So above your head in the Wheel Wright, the gold shop, the Red Hill mine, the metal spinner and several other shops there was this network of overhead pulleys spinning with giant belts running down to other wheels, and on the end of each of these would be a machine – a lathe, drill press or other such item, which they could engage a clutch to spin up when necessary. A very sensible way of providing power to a whole range of different parts of the shop at a time before electric motors when it wasn’t practical for each machine to have its own motor.

We went outside to have our lunch again – this time Mim had made some turkey and lettuce wraps which were delicious!

After lunch we went up to the stables and briefly saw some of the horse stabling / harnessing things but the boys and us went down to the gold panning area as we’d read there was going to be a display of police arresting people without their permits. It’s very interesting how they have these little displays alongside people just going about their business exploring the place. The police fired their guns and came down and arrested a few chaps (in costume) who were panning for gold without their permit. We spoke to one of the actresses who, partly in character and partly just talking, explained that men and boys over 12 had to pay a 2GBP monthly fee for a gold permit which amounted to about two weeks’ pay! So a lot of money just to go looking for gold, and if you didn’t find any you’d obviously be out of pocket. So some tried to mine / pan for gold without a permit, which if caught got them in jail with a 5 pound fine!  These high fees were partly what led to the Eureka stockade rebellion, which took place a little way out of Sovereign Hill.

The Grocer's Shop

Our next stop was seeing how candles were made. In Ballarat they strung the wicks for about 10 candles into a frame, and then this was dipped into a big tub of hot wax and left to cool. The process was repeated until it was up to the required thickness (1”), and they were all trimmed to exactly the same length to allow them to burn for 10 hours. This is how a miner underground knew when his 10 hour shift was finished – once the candle was almost out it was time to go up to the ground again!  They also had some lovely soaps so we bought four - Lemon Myrtle, Coal Tar (good for sensitive skin apparently!), Sandalwood and Bergamot, and Orange Blossom. We will be fragrant for the next few months! 😊

We next went on a brief self-guided tour of the Red Hill mine which was basically a network of underground tunnels with an audio presentation and sound effects which guided you through the tunnels. At one point there was a video projected against the side of the mine wall of a chap discovering the Welcome Nugget, the second largest gold nugget discovered in the world.


From here we raced onto the Wheel Wrighter. This was very interesting, as they showed how wagon wheels were made! First up he used a machine to turn a rectangular length of timber into a spoke, by tapering one section to act as a shock absorber. Another machine was used to create the rectangular shape which would be pressed into the hub.

Next he made the hub.  First a thick piece of tree trunk was placed in a machine and a round tapered hole drilled through its middle. Into this hole he hammered a splined shaft which held it tight, and this was mounted into a lathe. This was used to round the outside of the hub until it was a cylinder, after which a second tool was introduced to the side to turn it into shape.  A third machine then drilled a series of evenly spaced holes around the hub for each of the spokes, and spread these into a rectangular shape. The whole process took about 5 minutes, but by hand probably would have taken the best part of a day!

In real life, the spokes and hubs have to be left to dry for a number of years, as for ease of working they’re all turned from green timber. But for the demonstration he hammered spokes into the side of the wheel, showed how a series of bent pieces of timber were drilled to accept the other end of the spokes, and each of these hammered in in turn to create the whole wheel.  This was then sanded to get it smooth.

Our demonstration finished here, but he explained that the final step was to mount the steel tyre. A steel band was measured, welded slightly undersize by the blacksmith, and then heated up to about 600 degrees until it was just large enough to slip over the wagon wheel and water poured onto it to prevent the wheel burning too much and to constrict the band tightly around the wheel.
All in all it was an incredible process and a testament to how well thought out so many processes were in olden days!

On our way back down to the Main Street, we joined in an impromptu dance of the Heel and Toe Polka in the Main Street! We’d spoken to one of the actresses a number of times over yesterday and today and said we might join a dance at some point, so we happened to be on the spot so in we got!

After all this rushing back and forth, and dancing around mind you, we were well and truly ready to sit down in the New York Bakery for some milkshakes and lemon tart!  It was about 4:30 by now and the park closed at 5pm, so we made a quick but critical visit to the sweet shop where we got a range of sugar drops – their trademark Raspberry Drops, also some Aniseed Drops, Acid Drops (sour lemon), Butterballs (butterscotch), and the Peppermint Humbugs we’d seen them making yesterday.  We then spent the last half hour walking around sections we’d not gotten to, particularly up the top of the hill – the accommodation for school groups when they visit, the bowling alley, the undertaker, and then back down the hill to the jeweller, the apothecary, and finally the playground.

In the end we ran out of time so couldn’t get to the Gold Museum, but to be honest by this time our feet were so sore from traipsing from one end of the park to the other that we were content to let this slide and just head back to the car.

On the way home we went to the shops for some dinner supplies, and stopped by the location of the 1854 Eureka Stockade rebellion. From there it was back to the van where Mim whipped up a Tuna Mornay.

The past three days have easily been some of the most exciting, (and expensive!) for sure. We would definitely come to Sovereign Hill again, it was every bit as interesting and exciting as we hoped, probably more so! It was so realistic, we ended up feeling quite natural sending Bek off to the Saddlery and letting her know we were just popping into the Apothecary for a spot of some remedies. We felt on a number of occasions we’d enjoy working there! Of course the Victorian times in real life would have been a lot dirtier, smellier and far more dangerous than Sovereign Hill, but the modern recreation provides a realistic-enough taste to make it a thoroughly worthwhile and memorable experience!


-- Greg