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One of the most enjoyable days we spent on our recent holiday in Melbourne was the day tour to Sovereign Hill. Just outside Ballarat, about 120 kilometres north west of Melbourne, Sovereign Hill is built on 25 hectares of an early goldmining site. It was established in 1970 and is a living museum depicting conditions during the first ten years after the discovery of gold. Gold was discovered near Ballarat in August 1851. By 1853 there were more than 20,000 hopeful prospectors who had come from many different countries hoping to ?strike it rich? in Australia. At its peak, in 1868, the Ballarat goldfield supported 300 companies and the population of the settlement was estimated at 64,000. Sovereign Hill?s sixty buildings are duplicates of original structures. They are built according to photographs, drawings or designs of the period. Many of the builders put aside their electric power tools, choosing to use only the tools that were available in the nineteenth century. The result is an excellent reproduction of life in those times ? down to the horse-drawn carriages on the dirt streets. Thank goodness the weather was dry on the day we were there! About 250 actors/volunteers are dressed in authentic costumes of the 1850s. They work in the cafes and shops and walk around the streets

of Sovereign Hill looking at home. Not only do they wear typical clothes from that era, but the style of beards, hairdos and spectacles is authentic, too. This, together with their old-fashioned manner of speech, helps to create a very convincing nineteenth-century atmosphere. In Sovereign Hill there are places where visitors can see sweets being made, candles being dipped, pottery being crafted and gold being poured. There are wheelwrights, metal spinners, wood turners and saddlers. The shops of Main Street sell a variety of goods that would have been available in the 1850s ? groceries and draperies, brassware and baskets, confectionery and stationery, candleholders and crinolines. The Bakery sells old-fashioned types of pies, pasties, tarts, cakes and buns ? all baked in a wood-fired oven behind the shop. Sovereign Hill also has a bowling alley ? attended by a bespectacled volunteer with bushy sideburns and a fob watch adorning his waistcoat. We watched a group of schoolboys enthusiastically rolling wooden bowls along wooden alleys and knocking down wooden pins. Outside, not far away, several schoolchildren were trying their luck panning for gold in the stream while others were about to go on a tour of one of the mines with their teacher. There was so much to see and do;

our four hours flew by. Opposite the entrance to Sovereign Hill is a gold museum. We had set aside less than an hour to wander around it before joining our coach for the trip back to Melbourne. Fifty minutes was not nearly enough time to do justice to all the displays and collections. The museum is beautifully laid out with countless exhibits of all types, visual presentations, audio histories, multimedia displays, virtual dioramas, hands-on demonstrations. The excellent Museum Gift Shop has an enormous array of gold decorated ornaments, Australian-made gold jewellery and small containers of gold dust and little nuggets as well as the usual souvenirs. Life was very difficult for the prospectors of those days but many did make their fortunes: even today, about 30 families in the area exist on the gold they mine. We were told about a man who, just a few years ago, equipped himself with the appropriate heavy machinery and approached local farmers. He volunteered to dig dams for them on their properties without charge, provided he could keep any gold he found. Out of the twenty dams he constructed, only one didn?t pay for itself in gold, proving that there still is ? ?gold in them thar hills?!