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. 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 knew Keck Street because that is where the former Keck’s nursery 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. 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. In putting this book together, I was astonished as I calculated the

value of the ounces of gold taken in today’s terms. The numbers were so large that I checked and rechecked, not trusting the results of my calculations. No wonder Sir George drove around town in a Rolls-Royce when at home; no wonder he could take himself off to travel the globe and buy whatever he wanted and bring it back to be installed in Fortuna. I gathered several hundred photographs of old Bendigo and spent hours looking over the growing city, trying to identify the streets and the buildings on them. What a pity I never bothered to learn the names when I was a kid, but with a town map in hand, I was able to recognise what I was looking at. There was one funny-looking building that cropped up in several images, of which I had no knowledge, but in the end I identified it as the bell-tower of an early fire brigade station that once stood between Pall Mall and the creek. Who remembers the headframe of the mine that also stood in the Mall, where the Soldiers Memorial hall now stands? I certainly don’t. It was gone long before my time, but it is quite astonishing that an industrial mining structure such as that remained in the heart of our main thoroughfare up until after the turn of the century. In the photographs I found, there are so many beautifully constructed old buildings that have since disappeared: the Bendigo Market Hall, the Synagogue, the Chinese quarter in Bridge Street, totally destroyed in the late Sixties to make way for a service station, just as the grand old Princess Theatre was ripped down and replaced by an Ampol servo. The old photographs show elegant hotels now stripped of their iron-laced verandas, the arcades and the fire station bell-towers, all closed down, boarded up or built over. The photographs tell a story of Sandhurst, a rich community proud of its success and proud of what it was building for posterity. We are lucky Bendigo has kept many significant buildings and so many are still there, gracing the streetscape. Even though they have suffered some inappropriate modernisation, the underlying fabric of the city remains. My investigation has taught me a lot. It has taught me to remember which is Williamson and which is Mitchell. Hargreaves is spelt with an ‘e’. Abbott Arcade and Galvin, Hopetoun and MacKenzie streets, all named after notables and pioneers. Or, as in the naming of many roads that head out west of Forest Street, honouring horticulture: Forest, Wattle, Vine, Violet, Honeysuckle, Thistle, Shamrock, Rose, Maple, Beech, Fir, Bay, Poplar, Oak, Elm, Ash, Mimosa – also Alder, Rowan and Nettle, which run east-west. I have no idea who named Drought, Flood, Water, Mercy and Hope streets, and in any case, what on earth were they thinking? I will let you know when the book is available. It is titled SANDHURST. From Genesis to Federation. 1835–1910. A Richly Illustrated Story of the Bendigo Gold Fields. *Sandhurst was the name first given to the settlement. It remained as such until 1891, when the citizens voted to change the name to the more popular Bendigo. The diggings had always been known as the Bendigo Gold Fields.

Section of a panoramic photograph of Pall Mall, 1905, showing the mine that once stood where the Soldiers Memorial is today: The Hustler’s Royal Reserve No. 2 City Shaft Mine. (State Library of Victoria).