Bendigo is a regional city in central Victoria, Australia, located in the City of Greater Bendigo. The Greater Bendigo municipality is home to around 100,000 while the city has a steadily growing urban population of about 80,000 people which places it as the third largest regional centre in Victoria after Geelong and Melbourne. Residents of Bendigo are called Bendigonians.
Originally known as Sandhurst, the city grew quickly out of the Victorian gold rush and became established as a major provincial hub and minor financial centre, being home to Australia's only provincially headquartered retail bank, the Bendigo Bank, and the Bendigo Stock Exchange (BSX).
Bendigo is notable for its Victorian architectural heritage and gold mining.
History
Before European settlement, the area covered by today’s City of Greater Bendigo was occupied by the clans of the Dja Dja Wrung people. They were regarded by other tribes as being a superior people, not only because of their rich hunting grounds but because from their area came a greenstone rock for their stone axes. Early Europeans described the Dja Dja Wrung as a strong, physically well-developed people and not belligerent. Nevertheless the early years of European settlement in the Mount Alexander area were bloodied by many clashes between intruder and dispossessed.
Following the footsteps of explorer Major Mitchell, the Victorian countryside was opened up by squatters who established vast sheep runs. Bendigo creek was part of the Mount Alexander or Ravenswood sheep run.
The name of the Bendigo creek derives from an employee of the Mount Alexander Run, an ex-sailor or bullock driver who was handy with his fists and nicknamed Bendigo after the Nottingham prize-fighter, William Abednego Thompson, generally known as “Bendigo Thompson”. Bendigo Creek was named after him, and the Bendigo Goldfield after the creek.
In the late spring of 1851, two women from the Ravenswood Run, Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell, found gold in ‘The Rocks’ area of Bendigo Creek, in what is now the suburb of Golden Square. They were seen with gold by a journalist who reported what he saw to Melbourne and the rush to Bendigo started.
The Post Office opened on 1 July 1852 as Bendigo, was renamed Sandhurst in 1854 and Bendigo in 1891.
In 1853 occurred the Red Ribbon Agitation by surface miners against the amount of the gold licence fee and the frequency with which it was collected. Unlike the later Eureka event in Ballarat, this was a peaceful protest, because of the ability of the miners' leaders and the young Scots Police Commissioner, Joseph Anderson Panton.
Numerous pit mines later exploited the underground ores which are found in elongated saddle quartz reefs in corrugated sedimentary rock. Since 1851 over 22 million ounces of gold have been won from Bendigo’s goldmines, making it the largest goldfield in Australia in the nineteenth century and still the largest in Eastern Australia.
Although the goldfield was always known as Bendigo, the first official name was Castleton, which was quickly replaced by Sandhurst, after the British military establishment. The city was not officially called Bendigo until 1891.
Bendigo quickly grew from a “city of tents” to become a substantial city with great public buildings. The first town plan was developed by 1854. Bendigo was connected to Melbourne by telegraph in 1857 and it was from here that the first message reporting the deaths of Burke and Wills was sent in 1861. Frequent Cobb & Co coaches ran to Melbourne until the railway reached Bendigo in 1862. Local trams began in 1890 and were used for public transport until 1972, after which a tourist tram service began on one of the lines.
The first Town Hall was commissioned in 1859 and from 1878 to 1886 the architect William Charles Vahland transformed it into a grand building which has recently been restored internally, with its ornate plasterwork gilded with gold leaf. Vahland designed over eighty public and private buildings, including the Alexandra Fountain, the Masonic Temple (now the Capital Theatre) and the Mechanics Institute and School of Mines (now the Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE). The first hospital was built in 1853, with a new building on its present site established in 1858, designed by Vahland. The Bendigo Benevolent Asylum, now known as the Anne Caudle Centre, was erected in 1860. Other substantial buildings in Bendigo include ‘Fortuna Villa’ in Golden Square, (which was the home of ‘Quartz King’ George Lansell), the Law Courts, former Post Office (now Visitor Information Centre) and the Shamrock Hotel in Pall Mall.
Water supply was always a problem in Bendigo. This was partly solved with engineer Joseph Brady’s scheme to harness the waters of the Coliban River. Water first flowed through the viaduct in 1877. Bendigo is entitled to a portion of the water in Lake Eppalock, an irrigation reservoir on the Campaspe River. Recent developments have led to the building of a pipeline from Waranga to Lake Eppalock and thence to Bendigo in 2007.
Bendigo has always been famous for its singers, musicians, brass bands and sports men and women, and boasts one of the finest regional Art Galleries (1887) in Australia, as well as a Performing Arts Centre. There was and continues to be a significant Chinese presence in Bendigo, starting with the gold rush and evident today in the Golden Dragon Museum and in the Easter Fair, which started in 1871.
~ Wikipedia
