My  Sovereign Hill blog post

 

Hello my fellow bloggers, today I’ll be talking about my experience at the Sovereign Hill camp.

I think I used resilience to get through the time and have a great time as well. I was pretty scared about the food and not having my family around. I also used my curiosity to experiment with different things, like tasting the food and learning about stories of the goldfield.

Here are a couple things I learned: dollars were known as shillings and cents were known as pence. The homework was really hard and you had to learn it over a shockingly short period of time. You also had to wear very uncomfortable clothing like scratchy shirts and knickerbockers, and remember to tip your cap when meeting someone outside of the school.

The scariest thing I learned, mines were very dangerous and could collapse at any moment.

I thought school was interesting. Wesleyan is the second richest school at Sovereign Hill. Even though we were the second richest school, we apparently couldn’t afford a globe. We had to write in fancy writing that took a while to learn but the teacher made us learn it quickly. The teacher made the boys draw as an activity and the girls sew as an activity.

I think it was an unfair life for children. With all the regulations, everyone had to remember a lot of rules. Boys and girls would get hit in various places with a cane made of bamboo in school! Boys had to tip their hats when meeting someone outside of the schools, they had to wear pants that are called knickerbockers that exposed part of your legs in freezing weather and they always had to take their hats off when inside. Girls had to always have their hair platted, they had to marry someone when they were 16 and our teacher said they had to marry a man with a window! Plus, boys and girls always had to have their hands in proper positions!

The teachers there are very strict but humorous as well. Our teacher made us learn our 12 and 16 times tables. When we paid our school fees, some people accidentally wrote a letter to Ma’am and mistook her for a Sir! We also had a rich person come into our school and we had to read a poem, as well as our 12 and 16 times tables just so she can donate shillings to our school.

The camp in total was a marvellous place and it was pretty fun being in the schools. We got to see real gold being melted into a gold ingot and if you were well behaved and lucky enough, you even got to hold it! The food and lollies are great there, I thought I would never eat a sausage roll, but I did, and I feel very proud of myself for that. We walked into a mineshaft that was pitch black and scary, and got to see a little movie. I got to pick friends to be in my cabin. We told funny stories before we fell asleep. One of my highlights was going gold panning. If you found gold, you could put it in a container, but I had no luck whatsoever! I found Sovereign Hill to be one of the best camps I’ve ever been on and I barely felt homesick.