The first discussion in the Understanding Victoria event series, titled "Disturbing the order of things": The impact of the Gold Rush on ideas, identity and society in Victoria, was held in May 2024.
This discussion explored a significant period in the early years of the State of Victoria, Australia. An excerpt of the December issue of the Victorian Historical Journal, which describes the presentations in detail, is available via the attachment below.
Background information
The gold rush in Victoria is generally described as occurring over the period from around 1851 to the late 1860s.
In 1850 the British Parliament passed the Australian Colonies Bill which provided for the establishment of a new colony. The Colony of Victoria was declared on 1 July 1851, marking its separation from the Colony of New South Wales where it had been designated as the Port Phillip District from 1836 to 1850.
The announcement of the discovery of gold on 2 July 1851 in Victoria in Mount Alexander near Castlemaine was coincident with the foundation of the new colony. The role of government was immediately significant, with Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe introducing the gold licence system on 23 August 1851.
The first two decades of the new colony, Victoria, were marked by this phenomenal and transformative change. The gold rush brought intense activity and movement of people, changing the landscape through clearing and digging, and changing the development of the colony by the creation of many temporary settlements and eventually a series of new permanent settlements and towns, as well as a burgeoning and marvellous Melbourne.
Victoria’s First Peoples were involved in and materially affected by the rapid expansion of settlement and diggings, coming as it did after the conflicts and displacement of earlier settlement prior to the separation of the colony.
Immigrants from other nations, principally Europe, the UK, Canada and the USA, but also from China, flooded into the new colony. This added to the significant migration of people from other colonies. Between 1851 and 1861 it is estimated that the population of Victoria grew from 75,000 people to 500,000. In 1855, around 19,000 Chinese immigrants were in Victoria.
Art, music and writing attempted to capture and respond to the ferment that the gold rush occasioned. There are bush ballads, many drawings and some paintings created at the time, speaking to the time.
David Goodman (1994:xiv) argues that contemporaries agreed that the gold rushes “were a disturbance to the normal order of things” most particularly the disturbance occasioned by the opportunity to become very wealthy without much work or effort.
There was also a unique event, the Eureka Rebellion, which encompassed the Battle of the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854. It is clear this event affected the constitution of the parliament of Victoria, that it was marked by dissemination of Chartist ideas and led to adult male suffrage. However, its long-term significance and its representation is contested.
Was there a lasting impact on Victoria as we know it today? And if there was, how did it affect our society, politically, socially and culturally?