Three days from Melbourne will suffice for visiting the interesting and handsome city of Ballarat. It is now a place containing over fifty thousand inhabitants, owing its existence entirely to the finding of gold on the spot which it occupies; indeed, it has not inappropriately been called the city of Midas. Where thirty years ago the land was covered with miners' tents and log-huts, an arid and treeless expanse lying between two low hills, there is now a fine modern city. It is a metropolis with broad boulevards, substantial stone buildings, massive warehouses, sumptuous residences, elegant official structures, and good schools, supplemented by many philanthropic and religious institutions. The environs of Ballarat are also beautified, having many choice trees planted all about them, especially California pines, which are great favorites here and multiplying continually. Trees grow in this climate with such rapidity as to encourage their planting. They are particularly desirable here, where the surroundings were redeemed from such original crudeness, as they impart a certain grace and home-like appearance to otherwise desolate places.
A glimpse only may be had of Ballarat in the time we have named, but let no one who comes hither neglect the Public Garden, which the reader of these notes has by this time learned is one of the prime necessities of each of these colonial capitals. The wealthy citizens of Ballarat have expended freely of their gold upon this delightful park, which, if it does not rival in some particulars those of Sydney and Melbourne, certainly comes quite up to them in general excellence and beauty. There is plenty of water to be had in the city for irrigating and all other purposes, an artificial lake having been created in the hills not far away, whence pipes bring the water to every one's door. This reservoir is of admirable workmanship, and of inestimable value to the town. The pleasant streets are rendered shady and attractive by long lines of bordering trees. The mining here is carried on in the environs, not in "every man's back yard," as is said to be the case at Sandhurst, another famous mining point of which we shall speak further on. All the ground upon which Ballarat is built, however, has been faithfully and profitably dug over and passed through the sieve or over the amalgamating tables. Surface mining is no longer prosecuted here to any extent. These deposits are naturally the first to fail in productiveness, but the neighboring hills are formed of a gold-bearing quartz which is being crushed, night and day, by hundreds of powerful machines; and the works still pay ten thousand miners fair day-wages, besides giving the organized companies who employ them satisfactory dividends. Thus mining has been largely robbed of its adventurous character in this neighborhood, and perhaps also of most of its alluring charm, having become a sort of regular industry, like coal-mining, or even brick-making.