Recently when looking through nineteenth century travel accounts of
visitors to Victoria, Australia, that are in my personal library, I
was struck by the number of published accounts from visitors who
spent time in Ballarat. In assembling 126 discrete accounts from
visitors spanning its first fifty years (1851 until 1901), I
realised that here was a largely untapped resource. In assembling
this archive of published visitor accounts, I have sought to
extract their impressions of Ballarat and its immediate surrounds,
including Buninyong, which is now part of the City of Ballarat. I
have arranged the sources in alphabetical order within each decade,
and where necessary I have provided each account with a brief
contextual introduction. I have deliberately chosen to reproduce
only published material. This archive is a trove of material that
is rich and rewarding for many uses and users - for those looking
to understand the evolution of a city from an Indigenous landscape
and the contribution of gold mining to this development, the
resource is indeed a rich quarry. The views presented here are from
men and women, from clergymen, from British, Irish, Indian,
American, Canadian, French, German, Hungarian, and other
natonalities, from members of royal families, politicians, authors,
journalists and other people with an interest in seeing this city
that had sprung from gold. From the perspective of the evolution of
tourism in Ballarat, these sources provide unparalleled glimpses of
the transformation of a swamp into Lake Wendouree, muddy tracks
transformed into wide and impressive streets, and botanical gardens
and statuary that never failed to impress visitors. We see Ballarat
transformed from a crude gold mining town into a grand regional
city. A fundamental rationale for many visitors to Ballarat was the
attraction of gold mining, and the opportunity to don work clothes
and go down into the mines to see them in operation. This is Volume
One spanning the years from 1851 to 1861.
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