Sovereign Hill in Ballarat was wonderful. We spent all day there from early in the morning, when it opened, until it closed. There were workshops running all day, which we managed to do most of.
Jacob panning for gold. It was free to do at the stream and we found eight bits of gold.
Jacob and I doing team work panning and sieving.
One of my favourite workshops was the melting and purifying of the gold. Here you can see the gold has been melted and poured into a mold.
Now the gold has cooled enough to come out of the mold. It's now a gold bar worth $125000.
We paid extra to do an underground gold mining tour. This is the shaft.
First stop underground was to see a gold vein within in the quartz.
This drill was used for holes which were filled with explosives. It's called the Widow Maker.
One of the tunnels we walked down which was 25m underground.
Jacob and I both liked watching how they made the lollies. We got to sample them after the demonstration. They still use the original lollie pressing machines they used back in the 1800s.
It was mentioned the red colouring for the lollies was cochineal. It comes from an ancient Egyptian technique; they dried the cochineal beetle in the sun then ground into into a paste. Here are the sheets of lollies ready to be broken into lollies.
Our last thing for the day was a tour of the gold museum. This is the Welcome Stranger. It's only a replica as the original was cut into three pieces. It was found sticking out of the ground in the mud when their wheelbarrow wheel got stuck.
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