The Specimen Gully dredge in action at Barkers Creek in 1885. The diggings extend over ten metres into the ground.
Two former premiers are the face of a World Heritage bid for the Central Victorian Goldfields. All thirteen local councils have supported the bid.
The push raises important questions about our history and how we value it.
World Heritage is reserved for places of ‘outstanding universal value to humanity‘. Australian places inscribed on the World Heritage List include the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru-Kata Tjuta, and the Sydney Opera House.
Are the goldfields in this category? Do we want to celebrate what was done in the mid-nineteenth century, which caused so much lasting damage? It is a question of what we value.
Heritage and history should not be confused. The Victorian gold rush is a fact of history. It brought some good things – including fine buildings of that era. It brought population and wealth to the fledgling colony of Victoria. It produced the Eureka stockade and similar movements that helped shape our democracy.
But it also brought massive environmental and cultural devastation. The damage done by the gold rush is still with us – almost the whole of central Victoria was dug up, often to a depth of several metres, and turned over. This created what is often called ‘upside down country’ – with hydrology deranged, the topsoil gone, and depauperated soil unable to retain moisture and hosting only a fraction of the biodiversity that once flourished here.
Central Victoria was home to Box-Ironbark woodlands. According to the 2001 Victorian Environment Assessment Council study into Box-Ironbark:
'Old growth forest', as defined in most other Victorian forests, is virtually absent from Box-lronbark forests, because of their history of clearing and heavy use in the gold rushes, followed by intensive selective harvesting.
One and a half centuries on, we are seeing the disappearance of species once common across the area, while others, such as the swift parrot, the squirrel glider and the tuan, are just hanging on. It is a dire legacy.
The heritage bid focuses on the immigration that brought a new society to central Victoria – for both good and ill. But it airbrushes away the catastrophic trashing of the environment and minimises calamitous destruction of indigenous culture. You can read the documents in vain for any acknowledgement of the damage done to the environment. This makes the document disingenuous – downplaying as it does the shameful side of the era it seeks to celebrate.
Although a mere flicker in the long history of this region, there is no doubting the significance of the gold rush. But chapters in history can be significant without amounting to heritage: the White Australia Policy was significant, but who would elevate it to the status of heritage?
Castlemaine was briefly the most productive gold-producing region in the world. The damage is still obvious, with denuded soils, mullock heaps and mine shafts, and old junk left by miners. The promotional documents for the bid disingenuously states:
Castlemaine Diggings, scene of the 1852-54 Mount Alexander Goldrush, was the first major goldfield in Australia to attract a huge influx of voluntary immigrants. Its landscape provides exceptional testimony to the early-rush individual ‘miner-adventurer’, and eloquently captures the human goldrush spirit in material form. Diggers’ small claims, across the goldfields in gullies and flats, surrounded by regenerating Box-Ironbark forest, yielded the greatest concentration of the largest gold nuggets the world had ever known; a catalyst for hundreds of spontaneous rushes by large populations.
Really? First of all, the striking fact is that the Box Ironbark forest is not regenerating, except where intensive intervention has enabled this to happen. And the ‘small claims’ are marked by erosion, infestation of weeds, old junk, and the sad legacy of destruction.
Community groups are working to restore Box-Ironbark. This requires repair of water retention features, and management to allow the woodland to regrow. On public land, each step requires consultation and permission. Prioritising gold mining historic values will retard this work, imposing a further layer of restriction.
The bid trumpets its (questionable) value to tourism, but tourism values and heritage values are distinct.
Publicity material lists other values in the bid, including First Nations values, but inevitably the bid will prioritise gold rush history over other values.
For me, living near Castlemaine, the legacy of the gold rush is a matter of shame. So much was lost for such ephemeral gains. There are many features of this area which would justify World Heritage status – but not the tragic legacy of the gold rush. We should never include those values as part of any bid for World Heritage.
