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The sight which had met those arriving at Jim Crow at the beginning of the
1850s was very different from that of a few years later as gold had then only recently
been discovered and the mining activity was intense. John Egan, it will be recalled, had
found gold in the Daylesford district m August 1851 and the four Swiss who had
arrived a few months later had encountered many thousands of diggers of different
nationalities working the fields. Numbered among them were many Chinese and large
numbers of Europeans who had come from the goldfields of California. The British
authorities delayed the announcement of the gold discoveries, fearing that it would
upset the order of the convict populations and jeopardise the squatters' ready labour
supply: though gold had been uncovered in the Jim Crow region many years before
1851, the news was suppressed until the convict population had diminished and
labourers had begun leaving AustraUa for the goldfields of California.* The opening of
Australia's doors to a broad range of ethnic groups was, therefore, rooted more in
social and economic conditions than liberal-minded govemment policy.
By 1854, the year when most Italian speakers began arriving in the Colony, the
Daylesford area was more settled with permanent shops and houses. In June,
Govemment Surveyor Eraser had laid out a township site (of 80 square chains) and
named it Wombat.' This name was officially changed to Daylesford when it appeared
in the Govemment Gazette of 23 August 1855 in connection wdth the application of
the Wholesale Spirits Act. On 17 October 1854, a first land sale was held around
Wombat, defined as the area wdthin the town boundaries East, West, Raglan and a part
of the lower areas of Vmcent Street South (ref figure 9). The selections for sale
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