Gold Beneath The Hill

Before Sovereign Hill became one of Australia’s most celebrated open-air museums, it was a working landscape shaped by gold, ambition, innovation, and tragedy. Most visitors know that Ballarat was a place where rich alluvial gold was discovered in 1851, helping to spark the Victorian gold rush. Far fewer know the remarkable story of the rich nugget discoveries and the mines that later made Sovereign Hill one of Ballarat’s most important centres of quartz mining.

Drawing on newspapers,…