Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/174

 along a road, and behind it a town like any other town, containing, as a guide-book informed us, a "Hospital, Orphan and Benevolent Asylums, Women's Homes, Mechanics' Institute, with Library, Fine Art Gallery, Banks, Commercial Houses, two Town Halls, three theatres, forty churches, School of Mines and Museum, Agricultural High School, State schools, six iron-founderies, a brewery, a flour and two woollen mills, boot and other factories!"

We were fifty years too late. We had come to see Ballarat, and we were shown it by a kind and hospitable stranger to whose care we had been consigned for the purpose. There is a tremendous fund of local patriotism in Australia. Everybody is very proud of their own town, for the simple reason that they have seen it grow and helped to make it. They have a paternal or proprietary interest in it. In Ballarat they are most proud, and justly so, of their principal street, Sturt Street, called presumably after the pioneer who named that wonderful hanging scarlet and black flower "Sturt's desert pea." Ballarat lies on the side of a hill, and Sturt Street, very wide and planted with trees in the centre, slopes sharply away through and out of the city towards a green hill that rises abruptly, and is framed, as it were, by the street.