Australian tourism icon, living museum Sovereign HiIl is about to celebrate its 40th year.

Set across a 32-acre site, Sovereign HiIl is renowned for the quality and depth of its interpretation of Australian goldrush history. In the township, working exhibits include small businesses and factories where visitors can meet goldfields characters and see daily demonstrations of 19th century trades such as wheelwrighting, sweet making and candle making.

There are also dwellings and costumed schools to visit. In the diggings, there is real gold to be discovered in the creek, and an alluvial mine and a Chinese camp to explore. A diverse program of interpretive theatre presentations, a separate Gold Museum and an evening AUD$6m sound-and-light show further extends the visitor experience.

Sovereign Hill's gold mine is a fully-accredited tourist mine. Above ground, visitors can watch some of the finest working steam plant to be found anywhere in the world. The surface installations of the mine include two massive steam boilers, a winding engine, a Cornish beam pump, a 10-head stamper battery and a gold pour room where visitors can witness the pouring of a gold ingot worth over AUD$150,000.

The opportunity to take an underground gold mine tour has always been a signature experience at Sovereign Hill, attracting some 30 per cent of day visitors. However, during the Christmas holiday season this year, mine tour numbers rose to 50per cent of day visitation.

This dramatic rise has been due, largely, to the success of a summer holiday marketing campaign which invited visitors to 'take an epic ride ... 100 years back in time' ... to ride the new inclined tramway into the mine on a 'Journey through the Labyrinth of Gold'. The campaign was so effective that it has been continued throughout the summer months and will now lead into Easter.

The new inclined tramway is the latest stage of an on-going plan to extend the underground mining experience at Sovereign Hill. Inclined tramways were often used on steep slopes to transport miners into and out of underground workings. Designed in-house, Sovereign HiIl's trams were constructed by a local firm. Each holds 33 passengers. They travel up and down the incline through two tunnels. For safety reasons, and for ease of construction, the tunnels have been built inside concrete culverts laid on the surface and then covered with soil. Inside, they have been fitted out to look like the timber-lined drives of yesteryear. The trams are drawn by cables raised and lowered by computer-controlled winches. Adjacent to the winches is a 101 year old Walker steam engine, typical of the kind used to drive such tramways. The 'Walker' operates daily, following a full restoration by Sovereign HiIl's Steam Operations staff.

Tours commence with a thrilling 80-second ride through darkness, plunging downhill to deliver passengers deep inside the mine. Underground, tour guides highlight the working life of a 19th century miner. Visitors see original mine shafts and mining equipment such as cages and trucks. They also enjoy watching a rock drilling demonstration and viewing original workings of the Normanby North mine which operated in the early 20th century. Forty minutes later, they board a tram again and return to the surface.

The next stage of Sovereign Hill's mine development project is already well underway, with an opening scheduled later in 2009. This will be an underground adventure experience based on the 1882 disaster at the New Australasian mine in Creswick, just north of Ballarat. Both the tramway and the disaster experiences have been supported by funding from the Victorian Government's Regional Infrastructure Development Fund.