Ballarat gets VERY cold. It snows sometimes in the Winter.
I love living rural. I grew up very rural, actually. My family home is in the Brisbane Ranges (nothing to do with Brisbane in Queensland). At nighttime you can see the glowing lights of Melbourne in the distance.
I've had the best of both worlds. I'm a born-Italian, and I grew up in a beautiful north Italy town called Pettinengo. We moved to Australia when I was still quite young, and I began to live in a busy suburb there. But I love long walks out in the middle of nowhere, and the sincere mateship which you only see in far-reaching, small places. I've taken a trip across the Australian desert with close friends a couple of years ago, and we passed a lot of such places. Beautiful. We're a beautiful, lucky country.