Moran and I recently had the pleasure of a weekender at Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, Victoria. Ballarat is situated on the Tourist Gold Route (also known as Victoria's 'Golden Triangle' from the gold rush days). The Sovereign Hill site is linked with the richest alluvial goldrush in the world, where people migrated to the diggings to make their fortunes panning and mining for gold.

Set 10 years after the discovery of gold in 1851, Sovereign Hill is now one of Victoria's main tourist attractions, with the famous Sound & Light Show - Blood On The Southern Cross (about the Eureka Stockade), gold panning, wheel making, gold pouring, costumes of the period, onsite accommodation, homemade tin, pottery, candles, metal spinning, furniture, confectionery and blacksmithing products (made at Sovereign Hill) and reconstructed buildings belonging to an earlier age. All the brochures say that "Sovereign Hill is a living museum representing Ballarat's 19th century goldrush history" and this certainly seems to be the case.

My own personal experience on this most recent trip was an exciting one. Upon entering the Red Hill Mine Tour, we were shuffled through damp tunnels (with appropriately claustrophobic widths and heights) to learn of the discovery of the Welcome Stranger Nugget in underground riverbeds. No, the real one is not kept in the safe underground - it has already been melted down and made into millions - but you can see a good likeness in the mine.

The confectionery factory was also interesting, with a cook that explained the old fashioned recipes and substitutes when making boiled sweets, such as the addition of lard, lead and mercury to the lollies when appropriate cooking utensils and practices were not available. He also mentioned that many diggers allowed themselves just one lolly after dinner as a kind of dessert. I ate all my desserts in one day, when I purchased a bag of delicious peanut toffee, tasty for the palate, but not the waistline!

Gold pouring was another not-to-be-missed event, with the use of graphite/clay cups and other tools to melt $50k worth of gold into an ingot. We discovered a weighing machine in the souvenir room that printed out your weight in gold on a certificate - naturally the heavier you were, the more you were worth.

There was plenty of street theatre, such as musket firing, coach rides, tethered horses, licence checking etc and we spent two days exploring Sovereign Hill thoroughly, from the Chinese miner's huts where you could score a free origami fish or bird, to the hand set letterpress prints of the Ballarat Times and the steam powered battery used for crushing quartz.

I won't say anything about the Blood On The Southern Cross because you have to see it for yourself!

I'd definitely recommend a visit to Sovereign Hill if you haven't been before. It's one of Victoria's most popular tourist attractions and rightly so.