Bendigo General History - Department of Planning and Community ...

1852: Three quarters of a mile north of the site of the Government Camp rose Lightning
Hill ... The pioneers knew it as White Horse Hill ... soon to be gouged and ever scarred. It
too, contained golden treasure. By the close of 1852 most of the gullies around Bendigo and
as far north as Sailors Gully had bee worked, although some were still receiving attention. A
few miles north, over the ridges from Sailors Gully, Sydney Flat and neighbouring gullies
were perhaps the northern limit of activity on the Bendigo goldfield at the time. W.S
Urquhart’s map of Bendigo diggings, 1852, shows Wellington and Napoleon Gullies,
Fiddler’s Green (now Fiddler’s Gully) and Sydney Flat as the northern limits of Bendigo
goldfield. C. Rudston Read, a gold commissioner, established his camp at Myers Creek in
1852. Napoleon Gully was about a mile east of his camp ... The extension of mining was in
1852 temporarily halted along a curved line extending some ten miles from Sydney Flat,
along the northern side of Lightning Hill to Epsom. The Whipstick had been reached. The
scrub and dense forest, together with a shortage of water and a reduction of population were
perhaps the main reasons for halting the advance. 1
May 1852: It was on the 8 May, just a few days after the breaking of the drought, that rumour reached
American Flat that in the hills five miles north, beyond California Gully, men were
shovelling gold from between each others’ feet. The field pulsed with excitement. Rumour
flashed from gully to gully - the great bonanza, the mother-lode had been struck. In Adelaide
Gully, in New Chum and Derwent, on Spring Creek and Back Creek, tents were down and
flung on to carts and barrows with tubs and shovels. The holes were deserted - the rush was
on. The murmur of ten thousand men on the move, the fever sweeping the field, even
penetrated the sanctum of the government tents as a commissioner wrote:
From the camp the night before we could feel the flutter of excitement. Tents were being
struck and baggage packed - the gold fever was in the air. Next morning, as we rode along
the bush track, the site was simply incomprehensible. The road was covered from end to end
with every conceivable kind of vehicle, from wagons to handcarts and wheelbarrows.
The destination of the hurrying throng was Red Hill.
the spectacle was, indeed, a remarkable one. It was no longer red, but grey with diggers.
They were clustered on it like ants on a mound. Hundreds lay upon their backs, with
outstretched arms, gripping perhaps a pistol in one hand, a sheath-knife in the other, and
claiming to own at all the ground they could encompass. Hundreds of others were hurrying
away the surface stuff in bags so rich was it. The din was tremendous…
It was the opening up of famous Eagle Hawk Gully. Commissioner Panton thought the upper
portion of it ‘the richest alluvial ever discovered’. It was one of the historic rushes, retaining
a charisma over the years. When old diggers met to reminisce, to have been at Eaglehawk, to
have participated in the mad rush to Red Hill that autumn day in ‘52 was to have drained the
cup of adventure to the lees. Some 20,000 diggers packed into the surrounding gullies and
scavenged the nearby hills. The returns were fantastic News of the dazzling riches of
Eaglehawk Gully electrified the colony ... By June 1852, at the height of the rush, diggers
were said to be arriving on Bendigo at a rate of 5-6,000 a week. The road from Mount
Alexander was ‘one continuous line of vehicles and passengers’ and the estimated population
of the field reached 40,000. 2
July/Aug 1852: Of great interest to the early diggers were the six or seven rounded white hills, ‘unique and
peculiar to Bendigo’, that glistened against the dark of the nearby range at the northern end of
the valley. Masses of smooth, water-washed quartz pebbles were cemented to a conglomerate
of almost blinding whiteness that was possessed of a ‘most obdurate hardness’. Many a
digger had blunted his pick on them without unravelling their secret but at length a party of
Cornish miners, refusing to accept defeat, drove through them for some sixty or seventy feet.
It was back-breaking, slaving toil but they got their reward. Suddenly, their picks sank into
soft-pipe clay, white, satin-smooth and seemingly depthless. The men began tunnelling.
Presently, the roof forming above showered gold at their feet - the secret of the famous White
Hills lay revealed. A wild rush followed. Within days the tents and stores stretched out to
Epsom Flat. “The White Hills yielded enormously’ writes Mackay, ‘and some pretty piles
were made of Epsom Flats. The Bendigo Creek Diggings now extended the full length of the
valley ...[the diggings] ... embraced almost a hundred gullies and flats. 3
1 Perry, 1975, pp8-9
2 Cusack, 1973, p43
3 Cusack, 1973, pp44-45