Why should I visit Sovereign Hill in Ballarat?

The recreated gold mining town of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat is arguably the best museum in Australia. Sovereign Hill tickets get you a mine tour, a visit the Gold Museum, and the chance to watch wheelwrights in action.

At Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, the chap behind the bench pulls out the sort of iron device that could be quite well be used as a torture instrument. He uses it to wrestle and clamp two wooden spokes into position. And now the holes match up, he can slot said spokes into a segment of the wheel rim. Later, a colleague will apply a metal tyre to the edge.

Want to skip the story, and just book Sovereign Hill tickets? Book ’em here. You can also book a day tour from Melbourne, including entry tickets, here…

We don’t very often tend to think about how wheels are made these days – particularly ones for horse-drawn carriages. The noble profession of the wheelwright has slipped out of consciousness since the heady days of the 1850s when Ballarat first burst to prominence.

But now, in Sovereign Hill, the W Proctor Wheelwright and Coach Manufactory is continuing to make wheels the old-fashioned way. And it’s a perfect example of how Sovereign Hill blends past and present, fiction and reality.

4 Ballarat experiences to book in advance ⬇️

Sovereign Hill tickets – visit Australia’s best open air museum. Give it a full day, too – there’s so much to see and do.
Ballarat Wildlife Park entry – meet loads of cute native Aussie animals.
Kryal Castle admission – enjoy a bizarre knights in armour theme park.
Beer-making course – learn to brew, with tastings and lunch thrown in.

What is Sovereign Hill in Ballarat?

To call Sovereign Hill a museum would be vastly understating things, but if you are calling it a museum, then it’s the best museum in Australia. It’s a giant open air recreation of gold rush-era Ballarat, albeit one built on the site of actual mines and with some original buildings transported from their previous spots. Sovereign Hill is the single best reason why Ballarat is better than Bendigo for visitors.

The rest have been remade, based on old photographs, to look as they would have done 150 years ago. Those photos are on show in the neighbouring Gold Museum, and the reconstructions are incredibly faithful.

But it’s not just a collection of old buildings and fake old buildings to look at. Behind virtually every door, something really interesting is going on. Hence the wheelwrights, who still have plenty of 19^th century machinery, and wear period costume while making wheels for the vehicles that trundle around Sovereign Hill and taking orders from businesses elsewhere in the country.

Things to see at Sovereign Hill, Ballarat

And this is a perfect encapsulation of what Sovereign Hill manages to pull off. It allows tourists to coo at olde worlde things, while making those olde worlde things viable businesses in 2017. The bargain seems to be that people get to keep the old crafts alive and make a living doing it as long as they buy into the character, the era and the greater overall concept.

So therefore, there’s a candlemaker’s shop where women in bonnets laboriously drop lengths of string into a vat of hot wax. There’s the Soho Foundry, where metalworkers make brass bells, money boxes and dishes as well as iron pans for gold-panning in the stream elsewhere on the Sovereign Hill site. And the Glasgow saddlery sells riding crops and bridles.

Miners’ camps in Ballarat

If all Sovereign Hill did was cluster such businesses in a well-reconstructed 19^th century film set, and do a few demonstrations on how things work, then it’d still be pretty impressive. But there’s a lot more to it than that. The camps Chinese miners lived in are recreated, with audio recordings playing from inside them telling of their hopes and fears. One hits surprisingly hard, with the Chinese miner’s voice saying: “Things are very bad here. I may never have enough money to go home. Imagine being stuck here forever. What a terrible thought.”

Nearby, a stream trickles through, and visitors are invited to pan for gold in the rubble, just as the first prospectors would have done in 1851. But the supplies of gold handily being washed down streams didn’t last for long, and soon the prospectors had to dig. They became miners, rather than prospectors.

Normandy North Company mine tours

Sovereign Hill is on the site of the Normandy North Company mine, one of dozens hidden under Ballarat. It’s a good example of the ways things went once the easy pickings dried up. Several times a day, tours are operated down in the mine with the initial descent taking place on a ridiculous cable tram contraption. It goes 33.5m underground, directly under the candlemaking shop, and it’s a considerably more comfortable journey than it would have been for the miners. They’d be squeezed into or on top of a claustrophobic cage that’s on display.

Next to the cage is the pump that would get the water out. Down here, the major issue wasn’t light or impenetrability – it was water. To get at the quartz reefs that contained the gold, the miners would have to get below the water table. And that meant pumping the water out. The clanking machinery on the surface starts to make sense once you learn this.

The other problem would have been the noise. For a demonstration, the guide puts on ear protectors before unleashing “the widowmaker”. This is the fierce, steam-powered drill that would be unleashed on the rock. It’s noisy as hell.

“Now imagine what that would be like twelve hours a day, six days a week,” he says after mercifully turning the noisy beast off. It’s not a pretty thought.

Sovereign Hill tickets

Tickets for visiting Sovereign Hill can be booked online. Basic entry tickets cost $49, although guided tours and the evening sound and light show can be added. You can also book on-site accommodation at the Sovereign Hill Hotel.

Bring layers in winter, however – the Ballarat weather can be surprisingly cold and windy. Other Ballarat attractions include Lake Wendouree.

Ballarat is a 116km drive north-west of Melbourne along the Western Freeway, via Melton. The Melbourne to Ballarat drive takes just under an hour and a half. If you’re heading the Grampians, it’s the first leg of the Melbourne to Halls Gap drive.