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Few Australian cities wear their history as visibly as Ballarat. Spread across the central Victorian goldfields roughly 110 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, it grew with extraordinary speed after the gold rush of the 1850s, and the wealth that poured through the region left behind a streetscape of bluestone buildings, ornate civic architecture, and wide tree-lined boulevards that remain largely intact today. The Eureka Stockade of 1854, one of the most significant episodes in Australian political history, took place here, and the city has never quite let go of that identity as a place where ordinary people pushed back against authority.

The physical legacy of the gold era is most concentrated around the Sturt Street corridor and the area surrounding Lake Wendouree, the large natural lake on the city's western edge that hosted rowing events during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Ballarat Botanic Gardens, which border the lake, contain one of the finest collections of classical statuary in the southern hemisphere, donated by former gold miners who had made their fortunes and wanted to leave something permanent behind. Walking this part of the city on a cool Victorian morning, with the plane trees in autumn colour and the lake flat and grey, gives a strong sense of what prosperous colonial Australia looked like at its most confident.