Ballarat. Even the name sounds exotic. Scene of the epicenter of Victoria’s 1854 gold rush, Ballarat is now simply a suburb of Melbourne, with commuter trains going back and forth mulitple times every day. This is our destination tomorrow, when we will go to spend the night in a holiday park adjacent to Sovereign Hill, a recreated gold rush town with costumed guides and plenty of opportunity to spend money. It sounds like an Australian Tombstone to me, and I am quite excited about our visit.
I first heard about Ballarat (and the Australian gold rush, for that matter) when I was still in Magee Junior High School and reading Sherlock Holmes for the first time. The Boscombe Valley Mystery set Holmes and Watson on a puzzle that resulted in apprehending an English murderer who had formerly been a member of a bushranger gang in Australia. On the lips of the murder victim were uttered the word “rat” which the great detective realized was actually “Ballarat,” and so here I am about fifty years later.
Jayne was quite sick the other night and coughed violently, causing both of us a bout of sleeplessness that really wore us out. She stayed home today while I made a trip to a bookstore adjacent to the University of Melbourne where I knew they had a copy of Rolf Bolderwood’s classic Robbery Under Arms. It was a long journey in the surface tram, which I learned crawls along the city streets at a fraction of the speed of the commuter trains. They stop multiple times between the official stops, and the trip was an ordeal I would not care to repeat, even though I got to see a lot more of the city. I felt like I was on a Cobb & Company stagecoach headed to the gold fields, but at least I was not concerned about being bailed up by bushrangers.
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