Life After Gold

"Life After Gold" is the story of good luck, bad luck and human perseverance. It is the tale of a city with a history which will make sense to most Australians, for Ballarat is the doorway to experiences which generations of families have shared. In "Lucky City", the first of his two-volume study of Ballarat, Weston Bate explored the theme of interaction among a talented and adventurous group of migrants coming to grips with a resource-rich environment that both challenged and sustained them. Massive gold deposits, fine soils, good rainfall and magnificent forests stimulated extraordinary economic activity and produced a resilient society. The 20th-century story is quite different. Mining petered out, the two most important factories were closed, the forests had gone and many young men were slaughtered in World War I. The city was decimated; in each of the decades 1901-10 and 1911-20 it lost about 10 per cent of its population. Yet much remained in the social institutions, the industrial skills of the population, the rich agricultural and pastoral hinterland and the fine urban infrastructure.
These all helped to sustain the city during its population decline and underpinned its expansion during and after World War II. Weston Bate explains how the past, always powerful at Ballarat, has been used with great success to stimulate tourism during the second half of the century. In the celebration of great beginnings, the city has found a substantial "gold mine" in Sovereign Hill at the Ballarat Historical Park. In "Life After Gold", too, he evokes the ghosts of the people who sustained the city in tough times and handed on their belief in it as the Golden City, or the City of Gardens, as it is sometimes known.