Ballarat and Healesville

In my final week in Australia, I had my eye on two destinations outside of Melbourne, both accessible by public transport. Ballarat is a gold rush town known for its historical theme park, Sovereign Hill, that brings to life the mining heyday of the 1850s and beyond. The other town, Healesville, is part of the Yarra Valley wine region. Its animal sanctuary was highly recommended to me, and a famous distillery called Four Pillars happened to be nearby, so it was an easy sell!
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Even though it was the off-season and the weather was cold and gloomy, both Sovereign Hill and the Healesville Sanctuary were large enough attractions to still have plenty of tourists, arriving on buses. Getting there on public transport required patience but was very much in my wheelhouse.

There was a direct train from Melbourne to Ballarat, which I was familiar with from my previous journeys to the Grampians and Castlemaine. I sat in the dedicated quiet car and edited a speech for my brother’s wedding, catching the occasional glimpse of a kangaroo as the hills and reservoirs rolled by.

An hour and a half later, I started my walk across Ballarat towards Sovereign Hill, admiring the grand brick buildings on the main streets. The walk continued on a creek-side bike path through a sleepy neighborhood. I encountered a few magpies near the intersection of Magpie Street and Grant Street. The layout of the theme park was a little confusing, but I found the entrance and bought a ticket.
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The first area that one encountered was a tent city, inspired by the beginning of the gold rush when miners and their families had just arrived. It was my first encounter with the costumed actors who brought the town to life. A chipper butcher offered me a choice of mutton, mutton, or mutton. It was a funny dynamic between the disoriented tourists stumbling upon a new place with new rules, and the actors who were in their element and accustomed to engaging with tourists.

​The park had a number of events and demonstrations, more than you could see in a single day. I started with an orientation tour that pointed out the key locations and event times. As we walked the main street, we had to step aside for a horse-drawn carriage that was doing laps around the town. It was such a vivid sight, with the hoof prints in the mud and the warm vapor of the horses’ breath.

​I scouted out some of the artisan shops, including a blacksmith, a bakery, and a print shop. Posters with “current events” were a frequent site around town, presumably from this very shop. I was delighted to find the printer was taking commissions for souvenir posters and got one for my dad. The printer showed me the process of typesetting, applying the ink, and pressing the paper down onto the letter blocks.

​I was the only one in the shop and continued chatting with the printer while the poster dried. He had relatives in the US and expressed concern about US gun culture. It turned out he was a gun owner himself, and described the details of his responsibilities regarding permits, storage, and inspections. The whole conversation was a little bizarre. Here I was in a recreation of a gun-slinging frontier town, talking about modern gun control with a printer in an apron. I told him I was ending my trip soon, and he encouraged me to look for engineering jobs in Australia so I could stay, even writing down the website “seek.com” on a piece of paper for me – a website I was all too familiar with from my working holiday job hunt.

​I continued exploring the town. There was a post office, a candle maker, a bowling alley, a lollie shop, and an iron foundry. The storefronts had beautiful facades and signs advertising their wares. Metal drums containing fire were the perfect place to warm one’s hands in the cold. On the side streets there were houses with gardens and animals like donkeys, Rhode Island Red chickens, and guinea fowl. There were a few small places to grab a bite, including a hotel pub with its own brand of beer on tap. I stopped by the bakery for a sausage roll and their signature vanilla slice, a tasty dessert that reminded me of the kremsnita I tried in Slovenia.

​One of my favorite stops was the wheelwright, a functioning workshop that uses traditional woodworking and metalworking techniques to maintain the site’s horse carriages. There were signs that explained the machinery used to carve the wheel hubs and spokes, bend the wheel rims, and press on the metal “tires.” I marveled at the intricacy of the component design, which despite relying on wood as a material, was extremely sophisticated. In particular, the way the profiles of the spokes were contoured to act as shock absorbers. A craftsman working in a cordoned area was happy to share more information. He showed me some of the specialized carving planes used to create the body of the carriage, tools that were probably 100 years old. He also pointed out a recently restored carriage with elaborate decorative linework, all hand-painted by a local artisan. It was inspiring: both the ingenuity behind these seemingly antiquated techniques, and the dedication to keeping these trades alive.

​Of course, the mining history of Sovereign Hill was an important part of the visit. There was a river for gold panning and a free underground experience with holograms. The holograms told the story of the Welcome Nugget, found near Ballarat, and the 2nd largest gold nugget ever discovered.

I also paid for a guided mine tour that went deeper underground via tram. It was just one of three options, showing how much depth there was at Sovereign Hill (literally!) During the tram ride, we were asked to remain in darkness and silence. I couldn’t see my hand held in front of my face. At the bottom, we regrouped in an antechamber. The group had around 15 or 20 people including a few Asian tourists who didn’t speak English well. The guide sternly told them to turn off their phone flashlights several times before they got the message. The guide (or perhaps his costumed character, hard to tell) was a strict military type, who was to be addressed as “sir.”

We followed a network of drives (horizontal tunnels) past decommissioned shafts (vertical tunnels). These were made during the later mining era, when individual miners had consolidated into corporations and heavy machinery was used to extract gold from quartz deposits. The miners descended in crowded baskets and used pneumatic drills instead of pickaxes. The quartz blocks were brought to the surface, where they were crushed and sifted for gold flakes.
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The most amazing part of the tour was an earlier mine that was rediscovered by coincidence. It was originally excavated by a small team using expert Cornish techniques. Dozens of wooden poles, jammed in to buttress the ceiling, were still in place. The guide told us that the miners had dug down from the surface until they struck a quartz deposit and then removed most of it. The miners were smart enough to leave some of the dense quartz in place to ensure the stability of the mine.

​Back on the surface, I attended a gold pouring demo where molten gold was formed into a bar. It was similar to the one I had seen at the Perth Mint, and just as scintillating. The gold pourer at Sovereign Hill was charismatic and went into good detail, even explaining the process of chemically removing impurities.

After the demo, I happened to see the gold pourer outside. I was surprised to hear that he had only been running the demos for a few months. He said that folks from the Perth Mint had visited Sovereign Hill and were impressed with the furnace used for melting the gold, which was state of the art. Within earshot of the conversation was the guide for the quartz crushing machinery demo. The quartz crusher showed the gold pourer some gold flakes that were produced as a by-product of the crushing demo. They reckoned it was worth around $20. Talk about some unusual day jobs!

​For the school groups, the highlight was surely the confectionery where boiled lollies are still made the old-fashioned way. The confectionery is considered one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in Australia, dating back to the 1850s. The confectioner melted and mixed a vat of hot sugar, then poured it onto a table where it was cooled and worked. The way the viscous mass flowed and congealed was mesmerizing (like it was alive!) Then a hand cranked press turned the sugar into a sheet that resembled bubble wrap. In a dramatic flourish, the confectionery slammed the sheet onto the table, shattering it apart into individual lozenges. To minimize the candy grabbing chaos, two trays were filled and handed out: one for the school group and one for the casual tourists. The resulting lollie was a tart berry flavor, and unsurprisingly, of excellent quality. (Side note: the use of the word “lollie” instead of “candy” was one of the few Aussie terms that I had trouble embracing, but it was somehow fitting at Sovereign Hill.)

​The final pop-up event was about the evolution of mining detonator technology. An actor in a top hat pretended to be a salesman-inventor, demonstrating his new voltaic battery by creating a small explosion with a time delay. The actor was a talented comedy improviser, who bantered with the audience. He had previously approached me on the street, noticed my poster from the print shop, claimed I was an outlaw myself, and tried to convince a nearby police officer to arrest me! The detonator routine was a fun way to end the visit.

​On the way back to Melbourne, I stopped for in the suburb of Footscray for dinner. Footscray has a diverse immigrant population and is known as a foodie destination. I sought out something I hadn’t tried before – Uyghur Chinese food. The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group in northwest China that are being oppressed by the Chinese government. Uyghur food was a bit like a fusion of Turkish and Chinese food, and the enormous menu at Karlaylisi was beckoning in so many directions – noodles, stuffed breads, and dumplings all sounded good. I settled for a tomato-based noodle stir fry and a pot of their house tea. The sauce and toppings were so flavorful, and the noodles were tender and chewy. The tea was a little too sweet, so I couldn’t finish the whole pot. The restaurant only had one other guest, which was a shame because it was so good!

​The train journey from Melbourne towards Healesville was going smoothly until I encountered the dreaded “replacement bus,” the bane of every Melburnian living in the outer suburbs. Instead of going all the way to Lilydale, the train stopped at Ringwood and I had to follow a bunch of confusing signs to an unmarked bus that would complete the journey. And at Lilydale, there were no bathrooms – it turned out the station itself was under construction. I managed to find a bathroom and catch the next bus to Healesville, which didn’t run very often and was the key connection.

The bus ride itself was scenic, journeying through the relaxed small towns of the Yarra Valley. At one point the bus driver pulled over and ran into a café. It was a misty morning on the beautiful country roads. Some roads were so remote that they lacked lane markers. I felt that a public bus had no business in such a peaceful backwater, but there we were, so I soaked it in.
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At the Healesville Sanctuary, I bought a flat white and set out to see some cute Australian animals. What can I say, I’m a creature of habit – these sanctuaries (and espresso drinks) never got old.

Not needing to gawk over the emus and koalas gave me more time to see the less common denizens. Away from the main kangaroo pasture, I watched a shy Parma Wallaby emerge from its private fenced garden. Its ears were quivering as if it was cold. I later learned this was a form of communication. I wonder what it was trying to tell me?

​One of the daily keeper talks was focused on the Tree Kangaroo, an endangered marsupial found in northern Australia and New Guinea. They spend their whole lives in trees and are adapted to jump between them. A lunch portion of leaves was brought to the treehouse, where the Tree Kangaroo largely stayed out of view. Their appearance was similar to a lemur. This Tree Kangaroo was part of a breeding program, and the keeper said that a joey might be on the way.

​The most stunning animal of the day was the Satin Bowerbird. As soon as I approached the edge of its cage, it burst into a loud song of robotic whistles and chirps, complete with sharp head movements. Its uncanny behavior was honestly a bit frightening. Its perfect impression of a kookaburra laugh, seamlessly blended into the routine, only added to my shock. No one else was nearby to witness the spectacle, and I wondered if I was going crazy. I later learned the Bowerbirds are known for building elaborate nests using blue objects. But their mimicry alone was unique enough to be memorable for me!

​The sanctuary had an excellent house for nocturnal animals, kept in darkness with red tinted lamps. One exhibit had several handsome quolls with spotted coats. In another, I was shocked to see a real live bilby – of Easter Bilby fame. It was a ball of energy, sprinting laps around the obstacles in its habitat. Its enormous ears were so cute! They also had a Mountain Pygmy Possum, a tiny and endangered marsupial with big black eyes, that adeptly climbed up some branches.

The flagship bird presentation had to be cancelled, as there was a wild wedge-tail eagle that had a front row seat to the ampitheater. Later on, when I was walking through an enclosed aviary with lorikeets and cockatoos, the same wedge-tail eagle did a flyover and sent the sanctuary birds into a panic.
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The sanctuary had a hospital area with glass windows. I circled through a few times, and on the third attempt, caught a procedure in action. A colorful Swift Parrot was receiving x-rays, while the previous patient, a wombat with diarrhea, recovered from anesthesia in the arms of a veterinarian. Nearby, a friendly staff member was more than happy to have an extended chat and answer my questions. She even had an echidna quill for show and tell.

​Towards the end of the route, I stumbled upon a lyrebird in the middle of an elaborate birdsong. A staff member explained it was the time of year where Apollo (named for the Greek god of music!) was giving regular performances, every hour or so. I loved the way Apollo fanned out his tail feathers like an umbrella over his head, and then folded them up when the song was done. I had previously seen wild lyrebirds browsing through leaf litter in the Blue Mountains and Ferntree Gully, but getting the full performance was a real treat.

​A dinosaur-themed wing of the park had enormous animatronic velociraptors and T-rexes posed against a natural backdrop of gum trees. Australia really does have all the most dangerous animals!

Unlike many of the other sanctuaries in Australia, the Healesville one didn’t have a kangaroo feeding element. However, the range of animals and quality of the infrastructure were top notch. It was a great way to say farewell to all my favorite species, the recurring characters of my Australia adventure.

After the sanctuary visit, I took the bus to Four Pillars Gin distillery. This brand was a staple at Australian bars, and I had previously enjoyed a cocktail made with their Bloody Shiraz gin.
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I started with a gin tasting that ended up being a private guided experience. The bartender explained their distilling process, with the equipment visible through a round window, and poured several tastings. Along the way, he introduced me to the botanicals used in their gin, conveniently sorted in glass cups so I could smell their individual aromas. There were staples like juniper, coriander, and star anise, plus Australian botanicals like pepperberry and lemon myrtle. The tasting covered their standard gin, Navy Strength, Spiced Negroni, Bloody Shiraz, and “Sticky Carpet” gin – inspired by the beer-stained floors of the Espy in St. Kilda. The bartender was kind enough to let me try some additional types, like yuzu gin and barrel-aged Bloody Shiraz gin. It was a fun and unique tasting experience.

​Afterwards, I headed to the restaurant-bar for a few gin cocktails. After having relatively little alcohol the past few months for budget purposes, it was the end of my trip and I finally decided to splurge. I started with their classic martini. Not my typical order but man did they nail it. The second drink was a Tiki style drink with gin and orange marmalade. During the tasting, I learned that the distillery uses fresh orange as a raw ingredient, and later converts the orange scraps into marmalade. I thought it was cheeky to then use the marmalade in a drink alongside the gin. Of course, as a responsible citizen, I also had some food and water. The glass water bottles were stamped with a hilarious and practical phrase – “NOT GIN.”

​There you have it. I really “struck gold” on these day trips to Ballarat and Healesville.