Ballarat

The land around Ballarat is Wadawurrung country, and the name is thought to come from a Wadawurrung expression understood as a resting place. Squatters took up runs here from the late 1830s, grazing sheep on the volcanic plains and grassland around the swamp that became Lake Wendouree, and the district was quiet pastoral country until August 1851, when gold was found at Poverty Point. Within months tens of thousands of people were living in tents on the diggings, and Ballarat became one of the richest alluvial goldfields ever worked; the Welcome Nugget, the second largest ever found, was dug up at Bakery Hill in 1858.

Government licence fees, corrupt officials and the absence of a vote produced a rebellion. Miners burned their licences at Bakery Hill, built a stockade at Eureka and swore an oath under the Southern Cross flag; troops and police stormed it at dawn on 3 December 1854, in fighting with an official total of 27 deaths, most of them miners. The trials that followed ended in acquittals, the licence was replaced with a miner's right, and the events are read in Australia as a founding moment of its democracy.

Deep quartz mining then turned a camp into a city. Companies sank shafts, fortunes built Sturt Street's banks, churches, theatres and gardens, and Ballarat was proclaimed a city in 1870. Gold declined from the 1890s, and manufacturing, the railway workshops, food processing and education took over. The city's Victorian centre survived largely intact, and since the 1990s it has grown quickly as people have moved out from Melbourne.

Ballarat carries its history deliberately. The Eureka flag is a civic emblem, flown at public buildings and carried at union marches, and the rebellion is taught, commemorated each December and argued over by historians. Heritage is a live local concern, with the intactness of the streetscapes defended vigorously against unsympathetic development.

For a city of its size the performing arts are unusually strong. Her Majesty's Theatre has been in use since 1875, and the Royal South Street competitions, in their second century, fill the city's stages with young singers, dancers, musicians and speakers through the spring. The Art Gallery of Ballarat, the oldest regional gallery in the country, anchors a visual arts scene of studios and small galleries, and a substantial writers' and photographers' community has grown up alongside it.

Sport and the seasons set the social calendar: rowing and dragon boats on Lake Wendouree, Australian rules football through the winter, and harness and thoroughbred racing. Irish and Cornish names from the goldfields remain common, and the Chinese miners who came in the 1850s are remembered in cemetery monuments and museum displays. Winter is met with open fires, footy and long lunches rather than avoidance.

About 112,000 people live in Ballarat, which makes it the largest inland city in Victoria and one of the fastest-growing in regional Australia. New estates spread west around Lucas and Alfredton, while the older suburbs — Soldiers Hill, Ballarat East, Golden Point — hold cottages and villas from the mining decades. Many households now include someone who commutes to Melbourne by train, and the Ballarat line carries heavy commuter traffic.

Health, education and public administration are the largest employers, with the base hospital, Federation University and government offices in and near the centre. Food processing and light manufacturing continue on the edges of the city, and tourism is significant, built on the gold story. Gold mining itself has returned and stopped again more than once; the district also runs cattle, sheep, potatoes and cool-climate wine.

Day to day, the city feels calmer and cheaper than Melbourne while offering most of the same services. The recurring debates are familiar ones for a growing regional centre: house prices and rents rising faster than local wages, pressure on the hospital and schools, the balance between new housing and heritage protection, and how to keep the centre busy as shopping moves to the malls at the edge. Winter cold and homelessness are a sharp seasonal concern, and the city has also been a focus of national reckoning with institutional child abuse, a painful part of recent local history.

Ballarat eats well for a country city. The centre has a dense run of cafés, wine bars, bakeries and restaurants in old shopfronts and banking chambers along Sturt and Armstrong streets, with coffee taken as seriously as it is in Melbourne, and the surviving gold-rush hotels serve dining-room meals behind iron verandahs. Pie shops and bakeries are a genuine local institution, and the Bridge Mall is where the city buys lunch.

The surrounding Central Highlands are productive cool-climate farming country: potatoes above all, along with brassicas, berries, beef, lamb and free-range eggs, and the volcanic soils and cold nights also suit chardonnay, pinot noir and sparkling wine made in small quantities nearby. Weekend markets bring that produce into the city, and mineral water from the springs around Daylesford and Hepburn, about 45 minutes north-east, is sold everywhere.

Migration has layered the menu. Chinese cooking has been part of the goldfields since the 1850s, Italian and Greek families arrived after the Second World War, and Indian, Vietnamese and African restaurants have opened more recently. Beer has a long local history going back to goldfields breweries, continued now by small independent brewers and distillers. At the open-air museum, boiled sweets are still made in a period lolly shop, and the raspberry drops leave the city in a great many glove boxes.