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

1853: Bendigo Reefs ... In April 1853, another report said that quartz was being opened
with success at Bendigo [C&W Reports, 16 April 1853). One of the first workings was at
Specimen Hill, Eaglehawk, where a digger named McNair had worked with some success in
1852. Another source tells us that two men, Cave and Amos, from Tasmania, worked the first
reef at Bendigo in October 1853, which was then known as the Old Specimen Hill Reef, and
was worked out. Reefing at Bendigo began in 1853. The story goes that in 1853 a party of
African Negroes, who deserted ship, discovered Hussler’s Reef [Hustler’s?], just south of
Ironbark Gully. They cut down the scrub and found gold all over the surface, and soon after
sold the reef to Thomas Hussler, a one-armed German. He paid the Negroes, Jonathan Harris
and party, a few hundred, and made a fortune selling it to John Watson and Jonathan Latham.
Another story of the earliest reefers at Bendigo was of two boys, who discovered the Victoria
Reef near Ironbark Gully and sold their claim to Ballerstedt. The ‘eccentric German’
Christopher Ballerstedt, an old soldier of Blucher’s army, with his son Theodore, brought a
puddler for £60, after seeing specimens on the surface, at the end of 1853. He soon had a
half-ton of gold at the Bendigo treasury. The New Chum Reef, a line of rock running up the
hills, was first worked in 1853, and one of the first claims belonged to a Swede named
Tyneborg, who once got £2300 worth of gold from thirteen tons of stone there. [Age 11 Jan
1856]. 1
By 1853: Increasingly, life on Bendigo Creek began to revolve about the Camp, and Gilbert’s choice of
site was already beginning to shape the pattern of future development. With the flow of
traffic to and from the Camp, stores began to appear along the banks of the creek below.
Soon, they also dotted the flat opposite and began clustering about the western entrances to
the Camp at View Point ... Permanence and prosperity began to generate a sense of
community, and social attitudes and pretensions, suppressed or forgotten during the more
hectic adventure of gold-seeking, began to reassert themselves. ‘The blue and red shirted
denizen of ‘53, writes George W. Thomson, ‘became the citizen of ‘54. 2
1853+ Quartz mining. Cornish diggers, many of them from South Australia and the Burra
copper mines, began concentrating in settlements about the western gullies where the sinking
was deeper and the rewards, generally richer. German diggers ... A German geologist,
Gustave Thureau, was to frame the first course in geology and mining when a School of
Mines was established, and it was the itinerant German engineer, Jacob Braché who, when
alluvial mining showed signs of waning, urged the exploration of the reefs. German initiative
was largely responsible for putting his suggestions to thee test. Pioneer quartz-reefers
included Wittscheibe, Roeder, Christopher Ballerstedt, Kock and Bruhn, Niemann, Collman,
Luuffsmann, Lazarus and Hildebrandt ... German diggers also laid the foundation of another
important local industry. When alluvial mining began to fade, Doctor Backhaus urged his
compatriots to look to the land, and along the ferruginous slopes of the adjacent valleys
Grosse, Fuchs, and Albert Bruhn, Carl Pohl, Grieffenhagen and other began hewing out wine
cellars and planting vineyards. 3
Alluvial diggings: many Italian diggers, and even more Italian-speaking Swiss remained,
dispersed particularly, about Epsom and Huntly, at Myers Creek and about the edges of The
Whipstick ... Few made fortunes from the fickle Whipstick gold, and with the growth of
quartz mining, as a group they turned increasingly to charcoal-burning and timber-getting for
the mines. 4
American diggers poured into the Victorian fields. However, they left in droves a few years
later when gold strikes were made in Colorado and in Peru. Mining experience and
prospecting skill put them amongst the most successful diggers on Bendigo ... American Flat,
American Gully, California Gully and California Hill all bear witness to the presence of the
American digger on Bendigo. 5
Of the cosmopolitan crowd forming the ‘strange assembly’ in the gullies of Bendigo in the
fifties, apart from the diggers of British origin, none were so numerous after 1853 as the
Chinese. Mainly Cantonese 6
1 Flett, 1979, pp 243-244
2 Cusack, 1973, p66
3 Cusack, 1973, p58
4 Cusack, 1973, p60
5 Cusack, 1973, p60
6 Cusack, 1973, p62