Golden Point

Golden Point is a suburb of Ballarat, immediately south of the central business area. Its boundaries are the Yarrowee River (west side), Canadian Creek (north), Carter Street (east) and an irregular final boundary (Ellsworth, Magpie and Gladstone Streets) to the starting point.

Gold was discovered at Poverty Point, off Clayton Street, in August 1851. This brought gold diggers to the area, but its surface metal was nearly worked out by November, and it took a second find to change 'Poverty' to 'Golden'. Golden Point is a hill nearly 1 km south of the Poverty Point monument, and is now in the Sovereign Hill Historical Park.

The Golden Point primary school, just north of Sovereign Hill, was opened in 1878. Golden Point received a very brief mention in the 1903 Australian handbook where readers were directed to the town of Blackwood:

Cricket (1910) and football clubs were formed, and the Ballarat East bowling club (1904) established its clubhouse and greens in Golden Point. (The cricket and football clubs, however, have their home ground at Eastern Oval, north of the city centre, and the football club has merged with East Ballarat under the name 'East Point'.) The school closed in 1993 and was replaced by a new building at Canadian Lead.

In addition to the sporting clubs there is also the Llanberris Reserve athletics and netball facilities, and linear parks along Yarrowee River and Canadian Creek. Nearly as large in area as Llanberris Reserve there is the Peady Street Reserve, once a weed infested wasteland that has been revegetated since 1982. Its eastern edge leads to Sovereign Hill, Golden Point's and Ballarat's most visited tourist destination since being established in 1970.

Golden Point's commercial centre is at the corner of Humffray and Grant Streets. Its census populations have been: