Historical Walking Tour of Ballarat

Opened in 1862 as Ballarat West to serve the goldfields line to Melbourne via Geelong, this Victorian Free Classical station gained its prominent clock tower in 1891. Its 1863 bluestone goods shed is the only one of its kind in Victoria, and the station is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Source: Wikipedia

Also known as Reid's Coffee Palace

Coffee palaces were the temperance movement's answer to the pub: grand hotels that served no alcohol. J. Reid & Sons built this one in two stages, a three-storey block designed by Tappin & Gilbert in 1886 and a four-storey extension to the north by Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy in 1888. The two-storey verandah came around the turn of the century. It is a rare surviving purpose-built coffee palace in regional Victoria (VHR H0469).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Regarded as the earliest of Australia's provincial galleries, it began in temporary rooms in 1884 before winning a Lydiard Street site on the old Government Camp. Tappin, Gilbert and Dennehy designed the Renaissance Revival building, built in 1887–90, with a red-brick extension added in 1927. Inside are a stone stairway and Art Nouveau ceilings, and the collection includes the original Eureka flag. The gallery also shaped the young Lindsay family of artists (VHR H0680).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Camp Street was the core of the Government Camp, where police were based from the 1850s. The Public Works Department built this two-storey police quarters in 1885 for just over £1,623: brown brick banded with cream, on a rough-faced bluestone base. Its decorative cast-iron verandah, more often seen on houses, makes it unusual among Victoria's police buildings. It is the only nineteenth-century police building left in the precinct (VHR H1544).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

This Renaissance Revival club stands where the gold escort once kept its barracks and stables. The Old Colonists Association was founded in 1869, led by philanthropist George Coppin, to help elderly colonists in hardship; in Ballarat it looked after the pioneer miners who had arrived in the 1850s. Its foundation stone was laid on 21 June 1887, Queen Victoria's Jubilee Day, the same day as the gallery's and the Mining Exchange's (VHR H0116).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Also known as Ballarat Mining Exchange

Deep gold mining needed big money, and from 1857 Ballarat's mining companies sold shares to the public, creating a new trade of sharebroking. This exchange, designed by local architect C. D. Figgis and built in 1887–89, replaced an earlier one on the corner of Sturt and Lydiard Streets. Behind the two-storey row of shops lies a large trading hall, lined with arcaded brokers' booths beneath arched clerestory windows (VHR H0391).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Three post offices have stood on this corner since 1858. The oldest part of today's building, an Italianate palazzo from the Public Works Department under William Wardell, opened in 1864; a telegraph office and treasury followed in 1871, and more offices and the clock tower in 1885. As the money and communications hub of the colony's largest regional economy, it became Victoria's second-largest post office after Melbourne's GPO (VHR H1018).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Ballarat built this bandstand in Sturt Street in 1915 as a memorial to the Titanic and the ship's musicians, who kept playing as she went down. Its sweeping, oriental-style roofs make it one of the most unusual Edwardian bandstands in Victoria, and one of the few left of a building type once common in parks. It is a reminder of how central band music has always been to Ballarat's identity (VHR H0971).

Seen from the street

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Also known as Ballarat Mechanics Institute

The institute first met in 1854 in a borrowed reading room at the fire brigade. Its first president, J. B. Humffray, had been secretary of the Ballarat Reform League, the diggers' group behind the Eureka uprising. Melbourne architect Charles Boykett won the design competition, and the southern half of this Sturt Street building rose in 1860–61 for £3,400, paid for by members and grants; it was extended in 1869–70 (VHR H0987).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Built in the 1870s as the Academy of Music, renamed Her Majesty's in 1898 and known as the South Street Memorial Theatre from 1966 to 1988, this is arguably Australia's oldest operating theatre. Theatre historian Ross Thorne called it the most intact of the country's surviving nineteenth-century theatres. Its double horseshoe balconies on columns, designed by William Pitt in 1898, are the last of their kind in Victoria (VHR H0648).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

Also known as Craig's Royal Hotel Ballarat

Craig's Royal grew with the city. Its Italianate south wing, with two storeys of loggias and two towers, was designed by C. D. Cuthbert and built in 1862, in the years after the gold rush. A taller boom-style north wing by James and Piper followed in 1889–90, topped by an octagonal tower with a pointed roof and widow's walk, and the cast-iron porch was added in 1901. Gas lamps still stand at the kerb (VHR H0111).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database

An 1868 design competition produced a town hall by three hands: J. J. Lorenz drew the exterior, local architect H. R. Caselli the interior, and borough architect Percy Oakden merged the two into one design. Built by William Cowland, it is one of the few grand symmetrical town halls in Victoria, a statement of Ballarat's civic pride in the 1860s. Its mansard clock tower holds the eight 'Alfred Bells', weighing four and a half tons (VHR H0978).

Source: Victorian Heritage Database