The first gold was found nearby in August 1851, only months after Victoria separated from New South Wales. Within days the rush was on. The earliest diggers could pull half an ounce to five ounces of alluvial gold from the ground in a single day, more than a labourer earned in a week, and word of it raced around the world. Immigrants poured in from Ireland, China, and the played-out goldfields of California, where some had already chased one rush and now chased another. They called them Ballafornians. By 1858 the population had swollen toward 60,000, mostly men, living in a sprawl of tents and shanties along the creeks. When the surface gold ran dry, most boomtowns died. Ballarat did not. Its deep underground reefs kept yielding for decades, and the diggers became citizens.

That sustained wealth is why Ballarat looks the way it does. Confident the gold would never stop, the early citizens built on a grand scale: the Town Hall, the Art Gallery of Ballarat — the oldest and largest regional gallery in Australia — and Her Majesty's Theatre of 1875, the oldest intact and operating lyric theatre in the country. Lydiard Street holds one of Victoria's finest concentrations of Victorian-era architecture, all cast-iron lace and ornate facades. Boosters dubbed the city the 'Athens of Australia.' Sturt Street runs for two kilometres with a central garden of bandstands, fountains and statues, and the city claims the greatest concentration of public statuary of any in Australia. The Ballarat Botanical Gardens, established in 1858, display bronze busts of every Australian prime minister along the Prime Ministers Avenue.

The 20th century was harder. As the gold slowed, growth all but stopped, and the city was overtaken by the port of Geelong. Ballarat's losses in World War I were severe, and the city's response became one of its most moving features: the Avenue of Honour, a corridor of nearly 4,000 deciduous trees stretching some 22 kilometres, each tree bearing a bronze plaque naming a local soldier who enlisted. The grand Arch of Victory, opened in 1920, frames its entrance. Later in the century Ballarat reckoned with darker chapters honestly recorded in its history — the Aboriginal children taken to the Ballarat Orphanage during the era of the Stolen Generations, and the institutional abuse uncovered by a Royal Commission. The city does not hide these from its visitors; remembrance here includes the painful as well as the proud.

Ballarat has made its history its livelihood. Sovereign Hill, opened in 1970, is an open-air museum that recreates a 1850s gold-mining settlement — costumed townsfolk, a working main street, and visitors panning for real gold flecks in the creek. It is consistently rated among the best outdoor museums in the world and draws around 450,000 people a year. The wider city is a service centre of more than 110,000 people, the third-largest in Victoria, with Mars and McCain factories, a growing technology park, and one of the windiest, frostiest climates in the country — locals are said to wear puffer jackets almost year-round. Gold still lingers in the rock beneath the streets, and a single deep mine still works it. But the real fortune Ballarat kept was the city the gold built, standing intact a century and a half later.