The Art Gallery of Ballarat is 100% free of charge for regular exhibitions!  What else do you need?  If that isn’t enough of a selling point, the vast collection and rich history should convince you.

This is the oldest and largest regional gallery of art in Australia.  The elegant original building was erected in 1887 in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and is an Australian heritage site.  The museum has kept up with the times, expanding to make room for a growing collection of modern art.  The expansions were planned so that each room would reflect the era of the art is houses.  Thus, passing from one section to the next is like time traveling through 200 years of Australian visual history, finishing with the austere, edgy contemporary wing.

The museum represents the spirit of Ballarat itself, which is sort of the San Francisco of Australia.  The region was the site of a massive Gold Rush in 1851 (just two years after the start of the California Gold Rush), and Ballarat sprang up as a rough and tumble boomtown.  Much like San Francisco it attracted a motley crew of drunks, gamblers, gunfighters, and prostitutes.  In fact, many miners came to Ballarat from the California goldfields seeking better fortune.  These transplants became known as “Ballafornians.” 

Ballarat was the site of Australia’s only armed rebellion, the Eureka Rebellion, in which miners rose up against civil authority in 1854.  The original rebel flag, “The Eureka Flag” is on display in the Gallery.

Also like San Francisco, after the gold boom was over the nouveau riche elite transformed Ballarat from a mining camp into a beautiful Victorian metropolis and artistic Mecca dubbed “Athens of Australia.”  The Art Gallery of Ballarat was the crowning jewel of this movement, and remains so today.

If you’re still not sold, the collection features some naughty nudes by Australia’s favorite erotic painter, Norman Lindsay.  Much of Lindsay’s work was shipped to the USA for safekeeping during World War II, where American authorities confiscated and burned it during a train inspection, thinking it was pornography.  Haters gotta hate.  Luckily, some of his babilicious beauties survive in the Art Gallery of Ballarat for peeping eyes to see.