Victoria’s Mining History

vic-map.jpgVictoria’s mining history begins with the discovery of gold at Clunes, Warrandyte and Kilmore in mid-1851, but it was the discoveries at Bunninyong, and then at Ballarat in August of the same year, which started the great Victorian gold rush. Since then, rivers have been diverted, landscapes obliterated under silts, and permanent scars left on the landscape.  But the influx of people created a new society to bequeath an inheritance of towns, buildings, infrastructure and sites in witness of their ambitions, efforts, ingenuity, and successes and failures.

By September of 1851, the Ballarat miners had become true diggers by going down three to twelve metres to find the rich wash yielding anything up to 225g of gold per dish.  Few shafts were as rich as this, but between July and October, Ballarat grew into a tent and shanty city housing close to 9,000 people.  By August of the following year, the rush from overseas was underway and the surface alluvial gold became scarcer.  Victoria’s annual gold production peaked at 82.25t in 1857, fell below 30t in 1877, and by the 1970s had fallen to around 0.25t. The 2008-9 annual production was about 7.26 tonnes.

By late 1856, over forty steam engines were operating to haul ore and water from the deepening mine shafts, and to crush quartz.  Hidden stream beds overlain by basalt flows were discovered, so that gold was recovered from surface, surface alluvial, deep-lead alluvial, quartz and hard rock crushing by various methods.  These included gravity and mercury concentration.  Sluicing and dredging techniques, and extensive use of the cyanide process followed towards the end of the nineteenth century.

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Ballarat diggings ,1851         Victoria Hill, Bendigo, 1857     Wonthaggi coal mine, 1929    Oil rig, Bass Strait

Most of Victoria’s goldfields lie in an arc between 80 and 240 kilometres to the north and west of Melbourne, and the majority of them were found in the 1850s.  Major alpine fields were at Beechworth (1852), and the Ovens Valley plus East Gippsland (1851), following close on the finds on the Mt Alexander field at Forest Creek, now Castlemaine.  But one the richest reef areas in Victoria, Walhalla, was not opened until 1865.  Later still the refractory ores at Cassilis were worked from 1895.  The last Victorian gold rush occurred in 1904 at Mafeking under Mt William in Victoria’s western district.

Only proclaimed in 1851 as an administrative entity governing territory as large as the United Kingdom, Victoria’s Legislative Assembly faced the responsibility of supporting these new concentrations of population, and within twelve months, an additional a horde of vigorous overseas gold seekers.  From governing a pastoral based society, with limited revenue, Victoria’s administrators now faced demands to build infrastructure and provide administrative systems to cope with this unprecedented population explosion.  The so-called Eureka rebellion has its roots in the conflicting needs of universal development, focused demands, and ill-defined sources of revenue.

Victoria lacks the range of simple or mixed ores found in other States.  Tin has been worked in small deposits, although dredges in the Ovens valley yielded tin of greater value than gold during WWII.  The State is rich in good quarry stone and commercial quality clays.

Copper has been worked with gold at Bethanga.  Mineral sands are currently mined by open cut north of Hamilton, and viable copper deposits were recently identified to the east of Hamilton at Glen Thompson. Stawell still has an active gold mine, but extensive recent works at Bendigo and Ballarat based on studies of old mining records have had limited success.  The principal mines operating in 2010 are at Costerfield, Stawell, Tarnagulla, Bendigo and Fosterville.

Brown coal is still worked extensively in the Latrobe Valley near Yallourn and at Anglesea, while the black coal mines in the Wonthaggi region were closed in the 1970s.  Coal Creek at Korrumburra and the abandoned rail track to Outtrim bear witness to other coal mining activity.

Finds of crude oil at Lakes Entrance in 1924 were ultimately unprofitable.  Offshore drilling in the 1960s discovered highly productive gas fields of Kingfish-1, Barracouta, Marlin and Snapper.  The Fortescue oilfield in Bass Strait (1.2 barrels recoverable) was discovered in 1978 and the West Tuna Field followed in 1984. Since then, the search for new fields has shifted to the Otway Basin both onshore and offshore. The Port Campbell treatment plant began supplying onshore gas to the Victorian gas grid in 1999.

Bibliography of Victorian Mining History

The Bibliography of Victorian Mining History is taken from the Bibliography of Australian Mining History (published in 2002 and updated to 2010)

Victorian Mining History Websites

Victorian Mining History Groups