Mount Clear is a semi-rural suburb of Ballarat,
VictoriaVictoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
,
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
located south of the CBD is a suburb of Ballarat,
VictoriaVictoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
,
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
located south of the CBD in the Canadian Creek Valley. At the 2006
censusThe Australian census is administered once every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The most recent census was conducted on 9 August 2011; the next will be conducted in 2016. Prior to the introduction of regular censuses in 1961, they had also been run in 1901, 1911, 1921, 1933,...
, Mount Clear had a population of 2,346.
Mount Clear is characterised by its topography of gently undulating hills flanked by bush and pine plantation forestry. Canadian Creek, on the suburb's eastern border, flows southward.
It began as a small mining community, however it expanded rapidly in the latter 20th Century to become part of the Ballarat urban area and much subdivision activity continues.
The suburb is organized primarily on a
street hierarchyThe street hierarchy is an urban design technique for laying out road networks that exclude automobile through-traffic from developed areas. It is conceived as a hierarchy of roads that embeds the link importance of each road type in the network topology...
with the main roads through it being Midland Highway/Geelong Road (north-south) and Sebastopol Road (east-west). Housing consists almost solely of Single-family detached homes constructed since the 1970s on larger than average blocks. There is a small commercial area on the corners of Geelong and Sebastopol Road.
Historically Mount Clear had its own railway station on the
Buninyong railway lineThe Buninyong Line was a Victorian Railways branch line running south from Ballarat, Victoria to the town of Buninyong. The line branched from the main Melbourne – Ballarat railway at Ballarat East station and was 11 km long. The line was opened on 12 September 1889 and finally closed on 1...
however the station closed to passengers in 1930. Today Mount Clear is classed as
automobileAn automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
dependent and traffic along its main roads are some of the heaviest in urban Ballarat with over 15,000
vehicles per day passing through Mount Clear and expected to increase by almost 50% over the next three decades. The main form of public transport is a bus service which runs along the Midland Highway between Bunninyong and northern Ballarat at a frequency of approximately 30 minutes.
The suburb has several educational institutions catering for all age levels, including Mount Clear Secondary College, a campus of Damascus College and a community kindergarten.