Discovering Sandhurst
The Devonshire Group of mines on the New Chum Claim
The blank years of 2020-21 have, in fact, been very useful for forcing most of us to slow down and find other ways to amuse ourselves, rather than racing around from one thing to another filling our once-busy lives. Words and painting By Geoff Hocking As I am now retired, I have had a few years of experience in keeping myself busy, and this year I decided that it was time to finish something I began more than a decade ago – a pictorial history of the Bendigo Gold Fields. I started this project thinking that as a Bendigo lad, born and raised, I knew all I needed to know about Bendigo. But once I started, it astonished me to discover that I knew very little at all. I guess that is why I put it away in 2012. It soon occurred to me that I had never bothered to learn the names of the streets of Bendigo. Growing up in West Bendigo (Golden Square), the schools I attended were less than 10 minutes’ walk away. The Specy Hill Methodist Church, which was the centre of our social lives, was on the next block. Little corner shops were two blocks away in more than one direction; I didn’t really need to know any more than that.
was located, but I never bothered with White Hills because I didn’t know anyone who lived there. Even today, I have to think about Wattle Street, or Panton or Emmett, but having resurrected the Bendigo history project, I soon discovered that I had to get a handle on ‘location, location, location’. I can inform you that Thistle Street is where the St John of God Hospital is, but I had always known it as where Mt Alvernia was. Emmett, named after an early pioneer and first mayor of Sandhurst, is up the end of Chum, turn right then left and it heads into the scrub. Panton, named after Goldfields Commissioner Joseph A. Panton, is where the Golden Square Metho is and the grounds of the second primary school I attended, GS Primary.
Naturally, I knew Chum Street, Barnard, Booth, Maple, Curnow and Pallet. They were the perimeters of my existence, but beyond that I navigated Bendigo by knowing where people lived. Two aunties lived in Somerville, but I never learnt that, I just knew where they lived, and I knew where the Kennington Methodist Church was, because we sometimes went there on family occasions.
I always knew Long Gully, California Gully and Ironbark, which all hugged the tramline to Eaglehawk, but Sailors Gully, a little further out past the Borough Town Hall, was further than my boyhood rambles would allow me. All four were among the richest fields on all the Bendigo diggings. They were once home to thousands of men, camped by the creeks digging for gold. Some, in fact a lot, made their fortunes there. Once the alluvial gold ran out and deep-lead mining took over, millions of pounds worth of gold was won on this rich field.
I knew Keck Street because that is where the former Keck’s nursery
In putting this book together, I was astonished as I calculated the 57
