Travel in Victoria
Last week I wrote about some of the places that make for great day trips from Melbourne. It appears you can go to places like the Yarra Valley and Daylesford in an hour or two. Beyond these, there are some other areas in broader Victoria that I want to visit.
Heading northbound, there’s Ballarat, a Victorian era boomtown that drew people from all over the world when gold was discovered there in 1851. “The Golden City” is also the site of Australia’s only armed civil uprising, the Eureka Stockade. It was organized by gold miners who objected to heavily priced mining items, the expense of the Miner’s Licence, certain government actions, and taxation without representation (us Americans know all about taxation without representation, but our last straw was over tea rather than gold). Today Ballarat attracts over 2 million visitors and is most notable for its open-air museum Sovereign Hill, which appears to be a huge recreation of Ballarat during its Gold Rush heyday. I’m a go panning for gold!
Further north about four hours from Melbourne is the Grampians National Park. This is just one of those beautiful natural places and an important site of Aboriginal rock art.
To get to the site at the very top of my list, we’ll head south-west until we make it to the Great Ocean Road. I can’t tell you how excited I am to do this drive. Well, to sit in the car while Theo does the actual driving (on the wrong side of the road). I’ll just leave you with this video.
About the image: Great Ocean Road – 12 Apostels (Jan Kalle Ribbert) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
