Mount Clear is a semi-rural suburb of

Ballarat, Victoria Ballarat ( ) () is a city in the Central Highlands (Victoria), Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia. At the 2021 Australian census, 2021 census, Ballarat had a population of 111,973, making it the third-largest urban inland city in Australi ...

, Australia south of the CBD in the Canadian Creek Valley. At the , Mount Clear had a population of 3,671. 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 organised on a

street hierarchy The street hierarchy is an urban planning 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 ne ...

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 home A single-family detached home, also called a single-detached dwelling, single-family residence (SFR) or separate house is a free-standing residential building. It is defined in opposition to a multi-family residential dwelling. Definitions ...

s constructed since the 1970s on larger than average blocks. There is a small commercial area on the corners of Geelong and Sebastopol Road. Mount Clear had its own railway station on the

Buninyong railway line The Buninyong Line (also known as "Bunny Hop Line", or simply "The Bunny") was a Victorian Railways (Australia) branch line, which ran south from Ballarat to the nearby town of Buninyong. The line branched from the main Melbourne – Ballarat ...

but the station closed to passengers in 1930. Mount Clear is classed as

automobile A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, Car seat, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport private transport#Personal transport, peopl ...

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.University of Ballarat Travel Plan
/ref> The main form of public transport is a bus service which runs along the Midland Highway between Buninyong and northern Ballarat at a frequency of approximately 30 minutes. The suburb has several educational institutions catering for all age levels, including two high schools,

Mount Clear College Mount Clear College, formerly known as Mount Clear Secondary College and Mount Clear Technical High School, is a public high school in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. It was established after two secondary colleges, Ballarat Boys' Technical School ...

and

Damascus College Damascus College is Ballarat’s only Catholic Church, Catholic co-educational secondary college. It was established in 1995 after three separate Catholic colleges, St Martin's in the Pines, Sacred Heart College, Ballarat, Sacred Heart College a ...

, two primary schools, Mount Clear Primary School and Emmaus Catholic Primary School, and a community kindergarten.

References

Suburbs of Ballarat {{GrampiansAU-geo-stub