26 Melbourne (2nd time) - Day 3

We went to the botanical garden in Ballarat this morning. We picked this garden because of the trees. They have a few Mammoth Sequoia and they were big. They are not as big as the ones in California because they were only imported in the 1800s. There were this other Pine tree which were big too, they had spiky leaves. We saw them at the Adelaide botanical garden too, but I can't remember the name...
it is the Bunya Bunya pines.

spiky leaves of Bunya Bunya pine




















Our next stop was the Gold Rush open-air museum at Sovereign Hill. The museum is located at the site of an old gold mine. They set up a gold panning demonstration along a small creek and anyone can try. If you spend the time to sieve through the river bed pebbles and sand, you will indeed find some gold specks. We did not bother with that.  In the early days of the gold rush, people can pan gold the size of one to two fingers; nowadays you can only get the size of 4 or 5 grains of sand.  Now that the alluvial gold is gone, they have to dig down to about 3000 feet.  We then went to tour an old mine underground that was abandoned a while back. They called it quartz mining sine the gold was embedded in the quartz. The broke up the quartz, brought them up, crushed them in the battering station, and finally melted them at 1200°C to separate the gold from the other metal (e.g. silver, copper, etc.). The place is well preserved and is still using the boilers from the bygone days.  They also have the foundry, gold smelting workshop, a Victorian theatre, coach rides, and people in costumes (Redcoats (British soldiers), policemen, etc) to give the visitors a feel for what a gold mining town is like in the old days.
$160,000 worth of gold
I saw a "boy dress" that boys wore until they are 7 years old; the lady in the shop said that was to help with toilet training! The gold pouring was cool; the guy melted a gold bar worth $160,000, poured it into the mold, cooled it and popped it from the melting crucible.

We made a final stop at the adjacent Gold Museum to learn about life in Ballarat, see samples of the gold nuggets that were found (some guy found a 5.5 kg one in the bush in 2013!), and gold coins and artefacts from all over the world.

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