Things To Do in Ballarat When You’re Dead

Fly-fishing, Ballarat-style!

One thing about staying in a youth hostel is that there’s always plenty of reading material close to hand. Magazines, tourist brochures and promotional materials all vie for the attention of the callow, easily-distracted backpacker who… Ooh look a kangaroo!

Sorry, what was I saying?

One day in December, when Rosie and I were putting up at Melbourne’s lovely Urban Central Hostel, I was casually flicking through one such magazine over breakfast. It wasn’t long before I started to notice a pattern in the articles featured. “The stresses of inner-city living were driving Coleen and Bruce apart, until they fell in love all over again in Ballarat”; “Sally spent four hours a day commuting and never saw her kids, until she came to live in family-friendly Ballarat”; “Ballarat’s historic streets have been filmed once more in a commercial for Toilet Duck, starring Dame Edna Everage”. Flicking to the front cover, I realised that I’d picked up Ballarat Magazine, a glossy organ established to promote this Gold Rush era town to tourists and prospective residents alike.

Well, on Monday it was Labour Day, a public holiday, so Rosie and I decided to pay a visit to Ballarat and see what all the fuss was about. By train, Ballarat is around an hour’s journey from Melbourne, in mid-Victoria. The town grew up on the site of a former swamp after the discovery of gold in 1851, when ‘diggers’ from all over the world flooded into the area. 1854 saw the Eureka Rebellion, with diggers fighting government troops in a dispute over the licence fee that they had to pay to work the goldfields. The town boasts a fine collection of grand 19^th Century buildings, most of which are now filled with slot machines. But more on that later.

Start spreading the news. Ballarat, yesterday.

Once we’d arrived, it didn’t take us long to realise that a public holiday was probably not the best time to visit Ballarat. This normally sleepy town was positively comatose on Monday, with most of the shops shut, and bored teenagers standing around on street corners.

We headed first to Lake Wendouree, on the edge of the town centre. The lake was built for rowing events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and is now bone dry, thanks to prolonged drought. Walking along the ‘shoreline’ we passed fly-fishing and yachting clubs along with numerous little boathouses, their jetties jutting out poignantly over the grass and wildflowers. Interestingly, there were still boats in the yachting club yard, which suggests that locals haven’t entirely given up hope of the lake’s return. The name ‘Wendouree’ comes from the swamp that used to be here. In the language of the local Wathaurung aborigines the word means something along the lines of ‘piss off’, which is what they said to William Yuille, an early European settler. He doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to this and the rest, as they say, is history.

Next we headed to the Botanical Gardens, where a major event in Ballarat’s social calendar was taking place, namely the town’s annual Begonia Festival. We wandered around for a while, taking in, amongst other sights, the fernery (“Look – this one’s all green and ferny!”) and the stylish Robert Clark Conservatory, before realising that neither of us cared enough about begonias to pay the paltry five dollar entrance fee for the main event.

The Robert Clark Conservatory. Smashing!

Back in town, we had a bit more of a look around at some of the imposing Victoriana that we’d passed earlier. There’s a study Victorian town hall, sturdy neo-Gothic hotels and an attractive theatre, haunted by the ghost of an actress who died after a bad review. It’s a bit like Grantham really.

I was keen to see the insides of some of these buildings, so we went into a few of the hotels in search of a coffee. Now, the word ‘hotel’ can mean a number of things in Australia. It can mean a big building with beds in, or it can mean a pub, or it can mean a pub with hundreds of slot machines and possibly some beds too. Without fail, the hotels in Ballarat seemed to fall into the last category, with lines of sun-starved patrons wasting their days away in front of twittering fruit machines. Gambling is big business in Australia, which has 21% of the world’s gaming machines – known to Aussies as ‘pokies’ – and less than 1% of the world’s population. The point here though is that pokies completely ruin the ambiance of historic buildings like Craig’s Royal Hotel, where the likes of Lord Kitchener and Mark Twain once stayed. What’s the point of having a spooky old building if you’re going to ruin it by putting in a load of flashy fruit machines? Eh? Eh?

Having found a quiet, modern café around the corner, we next popped into the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery to take a look at the tattered remains of the Southern Cross flag raised by the Eureka mutineers all those years ago. On the way out we ran, rather incongruously, into a series of Beatles-themed events taking place to mark, erm… well it’s anyone’s guess really. In a little covered market there was Beatles memorabilia on display, out the back there was a stage with bands playing Sixties classics and in a nearby screening room there was archive footage of the Fab Four. It felt strange to have travelled half-way around the world to see this.

So, with a (Beatles) song in our heart and a spring in our step we took the train back to Melbourne, and to all the things that people move to country towns to forget.