The Grand Trunk Co. was a Creswick company operating in Ballarat in 1866. Peter Lalor was a shareholder.
The Australasian Co. was formed in 1866 in Ballarat. It was opposed by Peter Lalor – who considered that his own Grand Trunk Co. would be disadvantaged.
Creswick in the 1870s – Rorts and Riots
By the early 1870s Creswick has still not yet emerged as a major quartz gold field. Further, there was little evidence across the colony of Victoria on significant engagement of Chinese participating in either quartz or deep alluvial mining mining.
It is therefore all the more remarkable, that within the mining community of Creswick, the early 1870s had seen the leasing of a major deep alluvial mine, The Grand Trunk Gold Mine (later the Key Company Gold Mine) to a consortia led by local Chinese business man Pin Que. Pin Que was to lease and operate the mine, meeting all the expenses – and including sourcing of labor, In return Pin Que’s consortia was to receive eighty-eight pound of every one hundred pound of gold sold. This arrangement ran for several years, with the bulk of the workforce being Chinese miners, while shift and surface management in the hands of Europeans.
In January of 1873, the Director’s of the Australasian mine entered into a similar agreement for partial leasing of their mine under tribute to Chinese business interests. The result was a significant increase the number of Chinese deep alluvial miners living in Creswick and a corresponding increase in community tension, as those European miners still in employment grew concerned about the security of their own livelihoods. This tension in turn gave rise to greater impetus for the establishment of unions and in the longer term to the establishment of the Australian Labor party. In fact Spence, recalling his youth working in the Creswick Mines recalls the growing community disquiet when it was realised that Chinese labor was being considered for more than just the Australasian and Grand Trunk Mines.
By early 1873, 30-40% of Creswick’s gold output was obtained from mines wholly or partially operated by Chinese-led business consortia. It was this pool of available Chinese deep alluvial miners working in both the Key Company and Australasian mines which provided the Chinese workforce with which it was proposed to break the 19 week strike at the Lothair Mine at Clunes.
Peter Lalor, the hero of Eureka and long standing member of parliament was a director of both the Australasian and Lothair mines at the time of the strike. Lalor was in a position to have first hand knowledge of the cost-effectiveness and efficiencies offered by a Chinese labor force under an appropriate commercial framework.
Creswick was unique in having a Chinese community with the numbers, skills and commercial arrangements already in place to support large scale deep mining mining ventures. Unlike the Chinese at comparable gold fields, Creswick’s Chinese had one characteristic feared by the European miners – they were organised. Creswick’s Chinese community, thanks largely to the business acumen of Pin Que, was one of the first and few examples of large scale organised Chinese labor in the nation. Pin Que took the model he developed in Creswick, operating large mines under tribute with skilled Chinese labor, with him to the Northern Territory where he subsequently become on of the territory’s most successful mining entrepreneurs. (Updated 28th November 2006)
Source: http://chinese-heritage.tripod.com/Creswick%20Chinatown.htm