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=                        Victorian gold rush                         =
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                             Introduction                             
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The Victorian gold rush was a period in the history of Victoria,
Australia, approximately between 1851 and the late 1860s. It led to a
period of extreme prosperity for the Australian colony and an influx
of population growth and financial capital for Melbourne, which was
dubbed "Marvellous Melbourne" as a result of the procurement of
wealth.


                               Overview                               
======================================================================
The Victorian Gold Discovery Committee wrote in 1854:


With the exception of the more extensive fields of California, for a
number of years the gold output from Victoria was greater than in any
other country in the world. Victoria's greatest yield for one year was
in 1856, when 3,053,744 troy ounces (94,982 kg) of gold were extracted
from the diggings. From 1851 to 1896 the Victorian Mines Department
reported that a total of 61,034,682 oz (1,898,391 kg) of gold was
mined in Victoria.

Gold was first discovered in Australia on 15 February 1823, by
assistant surveyor James McBrien, at Fish River, between Rydal and
Bathurst (in New South Wales). The find was considered unimportant at
the time and was not pursued for policy reasons.

In the 1850s gold discoveries in Victoria, in Beechworth, Castlemaine,
Daylesford, Ballarat and Bendigo sparked gold rushes similar to the
California Gold Rush. At its peak, some two tonnes of gold per week
flowed into the Treasury Building in Melbourne.

The gold exported to Britain in the 1850s paid off all of Britain's
foreign debts and helped lay the foundation of her enormous commercial
expansion in the latter half of the century.

Melbourne was a major boomtown during the gold rush. The city became
the centre of the colony with rail networks radiating to the regional
towns and ports.

Politically, Victoria's gold miners sped up the introduction of
greater parliamentary democracy in Victoria, based on British Chartist
principles adopted to some extent by the miners' activist bodies such
as Bendigo's Anti-Gold Licence Association and the Ballarat Reform
League.

As the alluvial gold dwindled, pressures for land reform,
protectionism and political reform generated social struggles, and a
Land Convention in Melbourne during 1857 recorded demands for land
reform.

By 1854, Chinese people were contributing to the gold rushes. Their
presence on the goldfields of Bendigo, Beechworth and the Bright
district resulted in riots, entry taxes, killings, and segregation in
the short term, and became the foundations of the White Australia
policy. In short, the gold rush was a revolutionary event and reshaped
Victoria, its society and politics.


                              Background                              
======================================================================
There were rumours abroad about the presence of gold in Australia, but
Government officials kept all findings secret for fear of
disorganising the young colony. However the Colonial Secretary, Edward
Deas Thomson, saw a great future for the country when Edward Hargraves
proved his theory that Australia was a vast storehouse of gold.
Hargraves had been in the California gold rush and knew gold country,
when he first saw it, round Bathurst. The news spread like wildfire,
and soon the race was on from coast to gold fields. Flocks were left
untended, drovers deserted their teams, merchants and lawyers rushed
from their desks and entire ships' crews, captains included, marched
off to seek their fortunes.


 Gold discovery 
================
In March 1850, William Campbell of Strath Loddon, found on the station
of his brother-in-law, Donald Cameron, of Clunes several minute pieces
of native gold in quartz. This was concealed at the time but on 10
January 1851, Campbell disclosed it. Others had found indications of
gold. Dr. George H. Bruhn, a German physician, whose services as an
analyst were in great demand, had been shown specimens of gold from
what afterwards became the Clunes diggings. In spite of these and
other discoveries, however, it was impracticable to market the gold,
and James Esmond's "find" which was made on Creswick's Creek, a
tributary of the Loddon River, at Clunes on 1 July 1851, was the first
marketable gold field.

A party formed by Mr. Louis John Michel, consisting of himself, Mr.
William Haberlin, James Furnival, James Melville, James Headon, and B.
Groenig, discovered the existence of gold in the quartz rocks of the
Yarra ranges, at Andersons Creek, near Warrandyte, in the latter part
of June, and showed it on the spot to Dr. Webb Richmond, on behalf of
the Gold Discovery Committee on 5 July.
The third discovery was by Mr. Thomas Hiscock, a resident at
Buninyong; induced by the writings of the Rev. W. B. Clarke, and by
the discovery of Brentani's nugget in the Pyrenees district two years
before, he had kept a constant lookout for gold in his neighbourhood.
He discovered an auriferous deposit in the gully of the Buninyong
ranges now bearing his name, on 8 August 1851, and he communicated the
fact, with its precise locality, to the editor of the 'Geelong
Advertiser' on the 10th of that month.

Dr. George H. Bruhn, a German physician, in the month of January,
1851, (i.e. before Mr. Hargraves' discovery at Summerhill) started
from Melbourne to explore "the mineral resources of this colony'.
During his lengthened tour, he found, in April, indications of gold in
quartz about two miles from Mr. Barker's station, and on arriving at
Mr. Cameron's station was shown by that gentleman specimens of gold at
what are now called the Clunes diggings. This information he made
widely known through the country in the course of his journey, and
communicated to Mr. James Esmond, at that time engaged in erecting a
building at Mr. James Hodgkinson's station. Dr. Bruhn forwarded
specimens, which were received by the Gold Discovery Committee on 30
June 1851.

The Gold Discovery Committee awarded £1000 to Michel and his party;
£1000 to Hiscock, as the substantial discoverer of the Ballarat
deposits; £1000 to Campbell as the original discoverer of Clunes;
£1000 to Esmond as the first active producer of alluvial gold for the
market and £500 to Dr. Bruhn.

On 20 July 1851 Thomas Peters, a hut-keeper on William Barker's 'Mount
Alexander' station, found specks of gold at what is now known as
Specimen Gully. This find was published in the Melbourne 'Argus' on 8
September 1851, leading to a rush to the Mount Alexander or Forest
Creek diggings, centred on present-day Castlemaine, claimed as the
richest shallow alluvial goldfield in the world.

These discoveries were soon surpassed by Ballarat and Bendigo. Further
discoveries including Beechworth in 1852, Bright, Omeo, Chiltern
(1858-59) and Walhalla followed.

!Year	!Non-indigenous population of Melbourne
|1835	0
|1840	10,000
|1851	29,000
|1854	123,000

The population of Melbourne grew swiftly as the gold fever took hold,
as did the colony's total population: from 1851 to 1861, it grew from
75,000 to 500,000.
Surface alluvial gold was the first to be exploited. It is reported
that in 1851, when the first miners arrived on the Mount Alexander
goldfield, near Castlemaine, nuggets could be picked up without
digging. Then followed the exploitation of alluvial gold in creeks and
rivers, or deposited in silt on river banks and flats. The
gold-seekers used pans, sluice boxes and cradles to separate this gold
from the dirt.

As surface alluvial gold ran out, gold seekers were forced to look
further underground. Miners discovered so-called deep leads, which
were gold-bearing watercourses that had been buried at various depths
by centuries of silting and, in some Victorian goldfields such as
Ballarat, volcanic action. They also began to exploit the underground
gold reefs which were the original sources of the gold. Deep mining
was more difficult and dangerous. Places such as Bendigo and Ballarat
saw great concentrations of miners, who were forming partnerships and
syndicates to enable them to sink ever-deeper shafts. Coupled with
erratic and vexatious policing and licence checks, tensions flared
around Beechworth, Bendigo and Ballarat. These frictions culminated in
the Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat in 1854. Following that uprising, a
range of reforms gave miners a greater say in resolving disputes via
Mining Courts, and extended electoral franchise to them.

As gold-rush immigrants flooded into Victoria in 1852, a tent city,
known as 'Canvas Town', was established at South Melbourne. The area
soon became a massive slum, home to tens of thousands of migrants from
around the world who arrived to seek their fortunes in the goldfields.
Significant Chinatowns became established in Melbourne, Bendigo and
Castlemaine.

At Walhalla alone, Cohens Reef produced over 50 tonnes (1.6 million tr
oz) of gold in 40 years of mining.


            Chinese involvement in the Victorian gold rush            
======================================================================
News of the gold discoveries in the colonies of New South Wales and
Victoria in 1851 quickly arrived in the provinces of Southern China.
By the end of 1855, more than 19,000 Chinese immigrants, particularly
from the Guangdong province of China, were estimated to be working on
the Victorian goldfields of Ararat, Ballarat, Ovens, Bendigo,
Castlemaine and Maryborough. By 1858 this number increased to roughly
33,000 and Chinese miners were estimated to have made up approximately
one fifth of Victoria's miner population. Figures suggest that
Victoria's Chinese population began to dwindle after 1858. This is
likely due to a decrease in the number of new gold discoveries in
Victoria during this period.  

Like European gold diggers, the majority of Chinese miners in Victoria
worked either independently or with a partner upon arrival. As gold
however became harder to find in Victoria's goldfields the Chinese
population of Victoria began to form their own mining cooperatives and
companies. An unofficial 1868 census on the Chinese population in
Victorian gold districts suggests that 660 out of the 765 Chinese
miners in Daylesford and half of the 4000 Chinese miners in the Oven
District had "form[ed] themselves into small companies" by 1868.

A minority of Chinese miners in Victoria were also employed by
European mining companies. The 1868 census on the Chinese population
in Victoria suggests that 700 Chinese miners in the Oven District were
working for European companies which were paying their employees £1 to
£2 per week. Smaller numbers of Chinese miners were also reported to
be working for European companies in Maryborough, Ballarat and
Daylesford.

The rapid influx of Chinese migrants into the Colony of Victoria
aroused large amounts of anxiety within Victoria's European
population. On April the 14th 1855, 'The Argus', a daily newspaper in
Melbourne, described the growing Chinese population within Victoria as
an "invading army" whose presence will "subject the community to the
demoralizing influence of their ideas".

In June 1855, the Victorian government passed 'an act to make
provision for certain immigrants'. The act sought to limit the number
of Chinese immigrants that a vessel could carry to one for every ten
tons of shipping and required the ship's master to pay a £10 poll tax
for each Chinese passenger it carried. The act however failed to
reduce the number of Chinese arriving on Victorian Gold Fields. By
landing at the port of Robe in the colony of South Australia and
travelling more than 400 km across country to the Victorian
goldfields, Chinese gold seekers were able to successfully evade the
restrictions of Victoria's immigration act.

In November 1857, the Victorian government passed 'an act to regulate
the residence of the Chinese Population in Victoria'. This act
required all Chinese residing in Victoria to obtain a £1 license which
had to be renewed every two months for an additional £1 in order to
remain in the Colony of Victoria. The residence tax was however
reduced in February 1859 and repealed in 1862 due to Chinese protests
against the legislation, increasing levels of tax evasion, and a
downturn in Victoria's mining population.

The increasing presence of Chinese miners on Victorian goldfields
eventually resulted in anti-Chinese riots taking place on several
Victorian goldfields. On 8 July 1854, an estimated 1500 European
miners meeting at a hotel in Bendigo planned a riot to drive the
Chinese out of Bendigo. This riot was however brought to a stop by the
arrival of police. The worst attack on Victoria's Chinese miners
occurred at the goldfields of Buckland River on 4 July 1857. Following
a group meeting at the Buckland Hotel, an estimated 100 European
miners sought to expel all 2500 Chinese miners that occupied the
goldfields of the Buckland River through the use of tent and store
burning, robbery and beatings. Drowning and severe beatings are
believed to have resulted in the death of several Chinese miners. This
event has come to be known as the Buckland Riot.


                    Lead-up to the Eureka Stockade                    
======================================================================
The conditions which led up to the Eureka Stockade arose mainly from
the actions taken by the Government in supervising the various
goldfields. To meet the expense of securing order and to restrain
unauthorised mining on Crown land, a local Act of January 1852 imposed
on all diggers a licence fee of 30 shillings per month, the penalty
for mining without a licence being £6 for the first offence and
afterwards imprisonment for terms up to six months. Clause 7 of this
Act also appropriated half the fine to the use of the informer or
prosecutor, a provocative and irritating provision. In December, 1853,
an amending Act reduced the fee to £1 per month, but did not alter the
diggers' greatest grievance, that they could be imprisoned for not
having the actual licence on them, though their possession of one
could be proved from the official record. They were also unrepresented
in Parliament, and in 1854 the population on the Ballarat goldfields
was estimated at 20,000.

Charles Hotham, who arrived in Victoria in June 1854, was alarmed at
the depleted state of the Treasury and the growing expense of
goldfields administration. He ordered the police to redouble their
exertions in collecting the fees. To miners just scraping by, the
payment of £12 per annum was impossible, and there is no doubt that
hundreds did endeavour to evade payment, but the innocent suffered
with the guilty. The police, too, had been largely recruited from
Tasmania, and many were ex-convicts. These grievances were common to
all the Victorian fields, and had under Latrobe's administration
produced riots at Beechworth and Castlemaine, but Ballarat, always the
most domestic of the goldfields, was renowned for its peaceful
progressiveness and quietness.

On the night of 6 October, however, a Scottish miner named James
Scobie was killed at the Eureka Hotel, near Ballarat, and the murdered
man's associate blamed the murder on the proprietor, Bentley, a
Tasmanian ex-convict. Bentley was brought up before a magistrate, who
was alleged to be financially under Bentleys' thumb, and he was
discharged. The miners were indignant; a meeting was called and a
demand made for a fresh prosecution. The meeting itself was orderly,
but towards the end of proceedings a cry was raised that the police
(who had been ordered to protect the hotel) were trying to disperse
the meeting, and the miners, becoming furious, swept aside the police,
smashed the windows and furniture, and burned the building. The police
arrested three men- who could not be proved to have been ringleaders
or active in the riot, and they were sentenced to three, four, and six
months' imprisonment.

At an indignation meeting held on 11 November on Bakery Hill, the
Ballarat Reform League was formed, with John Basson Humffray (a
Welshman) as its first secretary, and Peter Lalor, Frederic Vern (a
Hanoverian), Raffaello Carboni (an Italian teacher, of languages),
Timothy Hayes (an Irishman), and George Black, a well-educated
Englishman, as prominent members. A deputation of three men waited on
Governor Hotham to demand the release of the prisoners, but he refused
and had already sent additional troops to Ballarat, which gave
considerable offence by marching through the town with fixed bayonets
and by other exasperating conduct. On 29 November, Black, Humffray,
and Kennedy reported to a mass meeting held at Bakery Hill the result
of their deputation to the Governor, and Vern proposed a burning of
the hated licences, which was then carried out. Next day the police
carried out a specially vicious and vigorous licence-hunt, and when
the troops marched back to camp, the diggers hastened to a conference
with the leaders of the Reform League.

Peter Lalor was elected leader, and under a blue flag adorned with the
stars of the Southern Cross the assembled diggers swore 'to stand
truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.' An
area of about an acre on the present Eureka site was hastily enclosed
with a pallisade and a deputation was sent to the military camp
demanding the release of the morning's prisoners and the cessation of
licence-hunting. The Commissioner flatly refused the request, saying
that the agitation was 'only a cloak to cover a democratic
revolution.' On 1 December the occupants of the stockade were hard at
work by 5 a.m. drilling and improving the barrier, and a German
blacksmith was fashioning pike-heads. But neither food nor ammunition
was available within the stockade, so that by the evening of the 2nd
after a very hot day, not more than 200 remained within.

Spies informed the Commissioner of the situation and about 4.30 a.m.
on Sunday morning (3 December) a troop of 276 men was marched silently
to the stockade. Inside the stockade only 50 diggers had rifles; there
was also a troop of Californian diggers armed with revolvers and
another of Irishmen with pikes. Many of them were asleep when the
signal gun was fired and a storming party of 64 'rushed' the stockade.
In the first volleys several men fell on both sides, but the line of
advancing bayonets, flanked on both sides by cavalry and mounted
police, was too much for the diggers. They turned to seek shelter and
all was over. Of the military force Captain Wise and four private
soldiers were killed, and about a dozen injured. Sixteen miners were
killed, and at least eight others died of their wounds, 114 prisoners
were taken, and Lalor, badly wounded, managed to escape; so did Black
and Vern. The Government then offered £500 for the apprehension of
Vern, and £200 each for Black and Lalor.


                                Legacy                                
======================================================================
Australia's population changed dramatically as a result of the rushes.
In 1851 the Australian population was 437,655, of which 77,345, or
just under 18%, were Victorians. A decade later the Australian
population had grown to 1,151,947 and the Victorian population had
increased to 538,628; just under 47% of the Australian total and a
seven-fold increase. In some small country towns where gold was found
abundantly, the population could grow by over 1000% in a decade (e.g.
Rutherglen had a population of about 2,000. Ten years later, it had
approximately 60,000 which is a 3000% increase). The rapid growth was
predominantly a result of the gold rushes.

The gold rush is reflected in the architecture of Victorian gold-boom
cities like Melbourne, Castlemaine, Ballarat, Bendigo and Ararat.
Ballarat today has Sovereign Hill—a 60 acre recreation of a gold rush
town—as well as the Gold Museum. Bendigo has a large operating gold
mine system which also functions as a tourist attraction.

The rushes left Victorian architecture in towns in the Goldfields
region such as Maldon, Beechworth, Clunes, Heathcote, Maryborough,
Daylesford, Stawell, Beaufort, Creswick, St Arnaud, Dunolly,
Inglewood, Wedderburn and Buninyong whose economy has differing
emphases on home working, tourism, farming, modern industrial and
retired sectors. With the exception of Ballarat and Bendigo, many of
these towns were substantially larger than they are today. Most
populations moved to other districts when gold played out in a given
locality. At the other end of the spectrum ghost towns, such as
Walhalla, Mafeking and Steiglitz exist.

The last major gold rush in Victoria was at Berringa, south of
Ballarat, in the first decade of the 20th century. Gold mining became
nothing more than a hobby in Victoria for decades mainly because of
the depth and cost of pumping. The First World War also drained
Australia of the labour needed to work the mines. More significantly,
the prohibition on the export of gold from Australia in 1915 and the
abolition of the gold standard, winding down stockpiling of gold and
production of sovereigns throughout the Empire saw Australian gold
towns shrink, in some cases, being totally abandoned. The slump in
gold production never recovered. Gold mining ceased in Stawell in
1920, but recommenced in 1982 and continued into the 21st century.
However, as of 2005 the recent increase in the gold price has seen a
resurgence in commercial mining activity with mining resuming in both
of the major fields of Bendigo and Ballarat. Exploration also proceeds
elsewhere, for example, in Glen Wills, an isolated mountain area near
Mitta Mitta in north-eastern Victoria.


                               See also                               
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*Australian gold rushes
*New South Wales gold rush
*California Gold Rush (1848-1855)
*:Category:Victoria (Australia) gold rush river diversions
*Colonial liberalism
*Gold rush
*Goldfields region of Victoria
*Klondike Gold Rush
*Oriental Claims
*Welcome Stranger
*The Cheese Stick, sculpture inspired by the gold rush


                           Further reading                            
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*
*
*
*
*
*
*

*

*Jan Critchett, (1990), 'A distant field of murder: Western district
frontiers, 1834-1848', Melbourne University Press (Carlton, Vic. and
Portland, Or.)
*Ian D Clark (1990) 'Aboriginal languages and clans: An historical
atlas of western and central Victoria, 1800-1900', Dept. of Geography
& Environmental Science, Monash University (Melbourne),
*Ian D Clark (1995), 'Scars in the landscape: A register of massacre
sites in western Victoria, 1803-1859', Australian Institute of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra),
* Ian D Clark (2003) That's my country belonging to me' - Aboriginal
land tenure and dispossession in nineteenth century Western Victoria',
Ballarat Heritage Services, Ballarat.


                            External links                            
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*[http://www.egold.net.au/ eGold - Electronic Encyclopedia of Gold in
Australia]
*[http://www.walhalla.org.au Walhalla]
*[http://www.sovereignhill.com.au/ Sovereign Hill]
*[http://www.sovereignhill.com.au/ Gold Museum at Ballarat]
*[http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/stories/s1032324.htm Report on
resumed exploration]
*[http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/early-photographs-gold/ Photos of
The Victorian Gold Rush from the State Library of Victoria at Culture
Victoria]


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