Rereading Sherlock Holmes

Recently I reread the entire series of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, after I discovered they're all freely available online. My father read them to us as bedtime stories when I was growing up, and I still remembered various bits and pieces, but I'd forgotten enough in the meantime to enjoy them again.

Coming back to them with the experience of the intervening years has also been interesting in various ways. The best example I can think of comes from the short story “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” a murder mystery where the murdered man's dying words, according to his son who was the only witness, were something nonsensical about “a rat.” Elsewhere in the story it was mentioned that the victim made his money in Australia, and since I read the story over a few days I was standing there brushing my teeth one night when I suddenly thought, “Hang on, it's not going to turn out to be a reference to Ballarat, is it?”

Ballarat is a town in Victoria, a few hours west of Melbourne up in slightly rolling hills, and was a major location in the Victorian gold rush which began in 1851 and lasted around twenty years. I visited it twice while I was living in Melbourne, once as part of a graduate student workshop prior to the 2018 Astronomical Society of Australia meeting, and once with my family when they visited in 2019. Both times we visited a tourist attraction called Sovereign Hill, which has a period-accurate gold mining town with various sights and activities. I thought I'd written about it before, but apparently not; for whatever reason I didn't take many photos either time I was there there. This is one of the better ones, showing a panoramic view of the center of the area.

Sovereign Hill, from up on a mining-derrick-turned-viewing-platform.

It's a more interesting attraction than my lack of photos might make it seem; there are lots of buildings with things like authentic black-smithing exhibits, a tour underground through an old mine shaft, a sort of 19th-century offshoot (precursor?) of bowling that you can still play, and perhaps my personal favorite, a demonstration by a metallurgist where the presenter melted a bit of gold and poured it into an ingot while talking though the process. (The indoor lighting and brilliance of the molten gold combined to render my photo attempts not worth sharing, unfortunately, but it was pretty neat to watch.)

Anyway, I've got a bit off topic; I thought of Ballarat in conjunction with the story, and wouldn't you know it, it did turn out be a reference to the town (though I won't spoil the ending). Overall I found the stories to be as engaging as they were growing up, even apart from a few cases of Science Marches On in the century-plus in between. (One major case is in the plot of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” [regarded by fans and Doyle himself as one of the best stories, if not the best], which involves a snake; what it supposedly does makes no sense at all from the perspective of snake biology, though it undeniably remains a good story outside that.) It's nice to discover the stories are free to all to read, and if you haven't read them, I can recommend them; it's easy to see why they've enjoyed continuous popularity since they were first penned. A hui hou!