GOLDFIELDS
In 1851, the first year of Victorian statehood and just two years after the California gold rush, gold was discovered in the unassuming burg of Clunes. A year later, the London Times reported that 50,000 diggers had already converged on Victoria's goldfields. And to the chagrin of Victorians who had taken pride in the fact that free persons had settled in Victoria before convicts had, ex-convicts from Van Diemen's Land floated over as well. Gold was to prove the great equalizer of classes, as convicts hardened by years of manual labor dug up ore more efficiently than their effete bourgeois counterparts, and the silk-clad, genteel landed gentry soon found them having to rub elbows with an unpedigreed nouveau riche. The established classes did not allow this social shake-up willingly, forcing the government to invoke mining taxes and grog prohibition, fac¬tors which ultimately led to the brief and bloody Eureka Rebellion of 1854. The Victo¬rian prospectors eventually extracted more ore than even the Californian '49ers, but by the end of the 19th century, the mines were largely exhausted, and most of the boom towns withered away to ghost towns. A few, such as Ballarat and Bendigo, remain sub¬stantial cities, and others, such as Castlemaine and Maldon, have been preserved as his¬torical relics. These remaining cities and townships of the Goldfields region, occupying the central area of western Victoria, afford travelers the opportunity to enjoy the recre¬ated gold rush spectacles, a handful of wineries, and the hurly-burly frontier spirit that grew out of this short wave of settlement but went so far in shaping Victoria's—and Australia's—national character.