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Small container with log only, need to take a pen. Hanging on string to try and keep log dry.
Very interesting place / museum inside.
Plan to spend at least an hour here. You can even pan for gold and keep any you find.
PLEASE NOTE - THE TRACKABLES 'GIRL WITH NO NAME' AND 'WORLD CACHING OCEAN GEOCOIN' ARE NOT IN THE CACHE. THEY HAVE EITHER BEEN TAKEN AND NOT LOGGED, OR THEY WERE REMOVED WHEN THE CACHE DISAPPEARED. SORRY :(
The Overland Route from Robe in South Australia to the goldfields of Central Victoria was much trodden by the Chinese gold seekers of the 1850s.
They came to the ‘Land of the New Gold Mountain’, often deeply in debt to money lenders, with the same aim as tens of thousands of Europeans – to make their fortunes and return home. They landed in South Australia to avoid the poll tax of £10 per person which was levied by the Victorian government on incoming ships from 1855 specifically to discourage the arrival of Chinese diggers. Few of those who disembarked at Robe would have had any idea of how far they would have to trudge across the unwelcoming land to reach their destination.
In 1857, nearly eleven thousand Chinese walked from Robe to the Victorian goldfields. In May of that year, a group of some 700 were making their way to the goldfields at Clunes in Victoria and stopped to rest at a spring on the Eastern flanks of the Great Dividing Range, not far from the Cathcart goldfield.
The group was well organised and equipped, consisting of fit men, mostly married and selected by their communities in China as being likely to withstand the rigours of gold mining and return to their families with the proceeds. Testing the ground, they found traces of gold, and so they set up camp on land that soon became known as the Canton Lead. This strip of land, about five kilometres long and up to half a kilometre wide, was to yield five tons of gold over the next six months.
The Chinese diggers were systematic in their approach, forming themselves into teams to undertake the various tasks such as digging, carrying, pumping water, working the sluice box and collecting the gleanings. They dug holes that were round in shape in contrast to the square holes of the European diggers, reflecting their belief that evil spirits would hide in the corners – a tradition that coincided with the fact that round holes are stronger and less likely to cave in.
While Chinese miners in most other Australian goldfields worked on abandoned sites, often sifting through the tailings to find gold missed by European diggers, in Ararat they made the first discovery and in the few weeks before their secret was out, sank holes of up to 70 metres in depth to pull up gold by the bucketload.
Needing supplies, they took some of their gold to the nearest goldfields at Cathcart, with the result that news of their find spread like wildfire, starting a large-scale rush from Fiery Creek, Ballarat and other Victorian goldfields.
The original Chinese diggers did their best to hang on to their claims, but many were forced to leave.
One night in June a gang of men set upon the Chinese miners in an attempt to jump their claims but the Chinese resisted. In the melee that followed, Chinese tents and a store were set alight and the Chinese were robbed of money and gold before the police arrived to restore order. An inquiry into the incident found the Chinese to be in the right and compensated them for the destroyed goods. The perpetrators of the attack were found guilty and put to hard labour on the roads.
In November 1857, the first Premier of Victoria, William Haines, introduced and enforced a residence tax which required every Chinese male in the state to pay a fee of £1 per month – a huge amount and frequently more than they earned. In February of 1858, a group of eight European miners confronted Chinese miners at a shaft on the Canton Lead, demanding that they show their tickets of residence. When they could not, the Europeans took over or ‘jumped’ the claim.
Within hours, between 60 and 70 other claims had been similarly jumped and many Chinese diggers were dispossessed.
After leaving Ararat, some are thought to have caught ships to the New Zealand goldfields, others returned home to China, while some may have moved on to work on other Australian goldfields.
300 Chinese people are buried in the Ararat cemetery, but only a few of their graves are marked now as a result of a fire that swept through in the 1870s which burnt the wooden markers as well as the records. The remaining stone markers can be seen on a visit to the cemetery.
The Canton Lead was mined until 1912 and, at its peak the population of Ararat was 50,000, including 9,000 Chinese.
The City of Ararat has taken its Chinese origins to heart, building a museum in the Chinese style.
Ararat has also forged a close relationship with sister city, Taishan, in the Guandong Province of Southern China, where many of the founders of Ararat came from.
While there is plenty of local pride, there is still much that is not known about the Chinese gold diggers who discovered one of the richest alluvial gold fields in the world, all part of our heritage.
SORRY - UNABLE TO REPLACE LOG AT THIS STAGE AS NO LONGER LIVE IN ARARAT.
ASSISTANCE FROM ANOTHER GEOCACHER WOULD BE APPRECIATED.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Vg'f n tnf!