Description
This is a wood engraving, dated 18 July 1868, by A C Cooke from the 'Illustrated Australian News'. It shows a scene on the gold fields of Ballarat in Victoria with the Chinese quarter in the foreground. Under a cloudy sky, industrial chimneys send up clouds of smoke on the right-hand side, and the houses of the community cluster together. Flags are flying and a large tent is shown in the background. On the right, in the foreground, are Chinese figures, some panning for gold around the stream.
Educational value
- This asset shows some of the remaining members of the Ballarat Chinese community in the late 1860s - large numbers of Chinese miners and workers came to Australia during the gold rush period; in 1858, on the Ballarat gold fields alone, there were 40,000 Chinese people out of a total population of 150,000; their unpopularity with other miners led to a campaign in the 1860s to drive them off the gold fields and to force them to return to China.
- It depicts a period of transformation of a gold-mining town from a tent-and-shanty town of the gold rush period into a town with industry and permanent housing - in the 1860s, when the shallow alluvial gold deposits began to run out, companies were formed to exploit the deep quartz lodes; according to local historians, the Ballarat gold field was at its peak in 1868 and supported 300 companies and a population estimated at 64,000.
