A WEARY traveller stumbled into a pub that "beggared description", 170-odd years ago on their journey to Bendigo's fabled goldfields.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
"Diggers were drinking liquor from utensils of every kind, drunken fights were in progress on every side, and hundreds fought or clamoured to get to the bar," they would relate in an 1899 account for now defunct newspaper the Bendigo Independent.
The traveller and their party found this "riotous blackguardism" so repellent they struck out on a different route through the newly-born goldfield of central Victoria.
This scene on the road to Bendigo is just one story modern-day author Geoff Hocking walks his readers through in his newly published history of the city, titled Sandhurst: Genesis to Federation.
Gold Rush turned world topsy-turvy
Hocking is far more taken with this rowdy rags-to-riches world than 1850s moral crusader Dr John Milton, who sneered that Victoria had become a place where "we can scarcely tell who are below the middle-classes".
He pooh-poohed a colony where a digger's labouring garbs could hide their wealth.
"I have known clergymen, gentlemen's sons, men of education, in County Court cells, many of them in rags," Dr Milton lamented.
Such was the topsy-turvy state of affairs the Gold Rush created, Hocking writes.
The good doctor would no doubt be horrified that people grabbed hold of their city's uncouth origin story with both hands.
Bendigo citizens voted in the 1890s to ditch the city's official name (the more respectable "Sandhurst").
They overwhelmingly preferred a name linked with 19th century boxer William Abednego Thompson.
The famous pugilist's nickname "Bold Bendigo" (a play on "Abednego") had been associated with the city's digging since the Gold Rush's early days, thanks to a boxing enthusiast connected to the area.
"I'm quite sure the British military administration of the goldfields camp preferred a name that did not represent a thug from the Midlands in England," Hocking said in an interview with the Bendigo Advertiser.
Book features stories overlooked, downplayed
His book traces Bendigo's development from a remote creek in 1835 to a metropolis in 1910.
Hocking draws on a deep knowledge honed writing numerous histories and accounts mined from collections of material saved by librarians from the original Bendigo School of Mines.
Sandhurst: Genesis to Federation is richly illustrated, as perhaps would be expected from an author whose other jobs have included graphic design.
"There are more than 300 original images, some of which to my knowledge have never been reproduced in a history of this kind," Hocking said.
The book explored histories too often overlooked or downplayed, including uncomfortable accounts of the wholesale displacement of an entire culture.
Hocking describes how Traditional Owners the Dja Dja Wurrung were initially accommodating of the new European farmers and shepherds.
That changed as their hunting grounds shrunk.
Few shepherds appreciated Indigenous people eating sheep, even though it was their presence that fueled the displacements.
Landowners and their workers demanded retribution.
"Then came the killings," Hocking writes.
Edward Stone Parker, a man entrusted in the 1840s with solutions to the violence, would come to reflect on their plight.
"For them it was a case of: 'Twilight and evening bell - and after that, the dark'," he wrote in around 1840.
By the start of the Gold Rush a decade later, pastoralists had forced the Dja Dja Wurrung off most traditional land.
But Traditional Owners did (and still do) keep a strong affinity with Country, as one Gold Rush era trooper found when he demanded to see a group of Indigenous people's licences to be on the diggings.
They replied that "the gold and the land were theirs by right, so why should they have to pay money to the Queen?", according to one historic account Hocking's book features.
Geoff Hocking's latest work Sandhurst: Genesis to Federation has been published by New Chum Press and is available now at Bookish in Hargreaves Street.
Digital subscribers now have the convenience of faster news, right at your fingertips with the Bendigo Advertiser app. Click here to download.
Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
