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Lessons learned from Sovereign Hill


In an effort to gift our children with experiences over stuff we recently took our kids on holiday to Ballarat to visit Sovereign Hill. Instead of getting a 10th birthday present my son got to choose where we went on holiday this year, so off to Ballarat we went last weekend.

Taking your kids on a holiday isn’t exactly more frugal than buying them a birthday present, however we were looking for somewhere to go for a few nights getaway and Sammy got to make the choice. And we are so grateful that he chose Sovereign Hill!

So we drove 7 hours in our Honda Civic which costs a total $60 for petrol to get there and packed our own lunch, snacks and drinks. Pretty cheap way to get to another state! We also stayed in a cabin that wasn’t super cheap (say compared to camping) but allowed us to make our own meals. The cabin also had the added benefits of heating (it was 8 degrees!) and it was a 300 metre walk to Sovereign Hill.


For those of you that don’t know what Sovereign Hill is, it is a town that has been constructed to look like Ballarat would have looked in the 1800’s in the gold rush era. Yes it is touristy but it is soooo well done and so authentic. Horse drawn carts, ye olde worlde shops, post office, apothecary, mines, and creek to go gold panning. In fact the authenticity of the place made us ask the kids “If you could go back and live in these times, would you?” to which they replied “Yes because there were no mobile phones”.

Now my kids love a screen as much as the next kids but I think what they were really saying was “Yes because there are no distractions”. And indeed I have had many conversations with people who have been to Sovereign Hill who say “Wouldn’t you just love to go back to that era where things were a lot simpler?”


After having given it a bit of thought I would have to say a big fat NO. Life back then was a lot harder (think child birth in the 1800’s ladies!). The aspect of that lifestyle that is really appealing to people is that it was a lot slower; people were not as rushed as what they are nowadays. But we don’t need to get into a time machine and go back to the 1800’s for a slower life we can just choose to live our very privileged modern lives a lot slower. That is what we need to realise, we have a choice, we can keep running as fast as everyone else is running (where are they all going?). Or we can just STOP, take stock, and SLOW the heck down!

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