JESSIE BOYLAN

The discovery of gold in the Victorian Goldfields attracted an unprecedented population and caused an enormous housing and economic boom in the region, but since the end of the Australian gold rush the Central Victorian Goldfields have been virtually silent for half a century. What’s left are hundreds, if not thousands, of disused mine sites, ghost towns and multiple scars on the landscape that tell a story of colonial Australia and its destiny.

Fourteen Ounces traces the contours of the Central Victorian Goldfields and records the social, economic and environmental legacies of the minerals boom in Victoria.

Starting with the discovery of the first saleable quantity of gold, fourteen ounces, by James Esmond in Clunes in 1851, this work looks not only at major sites relevant to the gold rush days, but smaller sites, now overgrown in forests, acting as if they have always been there, and larger sites that are now sheep and cattle grazing fields, melding with the contemporary landscape that remains.

The diggings and disused mine sites that are scattered across this region have been embedded in the social and cultural history of this landscape. One of the first sites that I came across was the Amelia Reef in Newbury, near Trentham; almost completely covered with overgrowth, one could barely make out that it was once a site for gold mining. I came across an old article from The Argus, from February 1865 about the area:

This district, so long considered the Siberia, if not the Sahara, of the Victorian gold-fields, has latterly displayed such signs of a golden vitality, and of substantial metal as well as golden hopes, that the miners in the favourite localities, and the mining speculators of Daylesford, Castlemaine, and Ballarat, have gone into the heart of the under-ground mysteries with an earnest energy that augurs well for a speedy success. Newbury was at first the great centre of mining operations, but that place, always the most squalid, muddy, uncouth, and miserable locality conceivable, has been utterly deserted for months. Some of your contemporaries have fallen into error in confounding the whole of the Blue Mountain with that squalid Newbury. The main diggings now flourishing, and on the eve, as the best judges consider, of very great things, are at Garlick’s and Kirk’s, at the Alma and the Amelia Reefs, at the Coliban River and Trentham Creek, and at the little township of Trentham. All these are “alive and digging.” Newbury is dead and deserted.

(The Argus, Melbourne, VIC : Friday 17 February 1865, Page 7, BLUE MOUNTAIN PROSPECTS. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA)

This is an ongoing project.

The most recent part of this work was the result of a commission by the Mount Alexander Shire Council for three large photographic lightboxes that were installed on the side of the Castlemaine Market Building in 2014.