Before European settlement, it is estimated that the local aboriginal population had been living in the vicinity of Melbourne for approximately 40,000 years.

In 1803 the English built a settlement using convicts near present day Sorrento due to a perceived fear that the French would beat them to the area. The settlement didn’t survive because it couldn’t find enough fresh water and so ended up relocating and beginning the foundations of present day Hobart.

By the mid 1830s, farmers in Van Diemens Land (now known as Tasmania) were looking at expanding the size of their properties. John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner were chief amongst them and so set sail for the area that at the time was known as the Port Phillip district. John Batman struck a treaty with the local aborigines to purchase 600,000 acres of land and thus begun the settlement of a small, independent village called Dootigala on the northern banks of the Yarra River.

The independence however didn’t last long as in 1836 the treaty with the aborigines was annulled by governor of New South Wales, Governor Burke. The village was renamed Batmania and was appointed the administrative capital of the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. Later in the same year the city was again renamed as Melbourne.

Pretty much from that point on, the citizens of the ever growing district of Port Phillip resented the control that was wielded over the area by the colony of New South Wales and the governor was constantly being petitioned for the district to become a separate colony. The fact that Melbourne was growing rapidly and was challenging even Sydney in size and population was not lost on the residence as Melbourne quickly became the hub of trade for wool and grain. In 1847 Queen Victoria officially declared Melbourne a city and by 1851 the governor could not resist the movement of the Port Phillip’s district towards independence any longer and it became a separate colony, called Victoria, with Melbourne as its capital.

Shortly after the announcement of the new colony, gold was discovered in Victoria which lead to a gold rush, the size of which had not been seen anywhere on earth before. Within months the population of Melbourne almost doubled and soon after there were more people living in Melbourne, than Sydney. The actual rush died off by about 1860, but gold mining still provided a huge slice of the economy of Melbourne right through to the late 1880s.

By 1880, Melbourne was now the largest city in the British empire (after London) and was considered by most to be the richest city anywhere in the world! And the economy continued to grow at an extraordinary rate. Consumer confidence was high, even as the costs involved in living continued to increase. Easy access to credit and the continual underpinning of the entire economy by the gold that was forever coming out of the ground spurred on further growth. This was the super growth spurt of Melbourne, when many of the old building you see around the city were built. Electricity and the telephone came to Melbourne as did the first trams and the first elevators allowing the construction of the first high rise buildings. There were huge costs involved in this kind of massive development, but credit was easy to achieve when you continually had gold being dug out of the ground.

That was of course, until in the early 1890s, the gold dried up. Now Melbourne still had the costs, but minus gold, it equalled death for the Victorian economy. Now heavily held down with the enormous costs that were involved in the massive amount of construction that had occurred through the 1880s, Melbourne now couldn’t afford to pay its creditors as the one thing that had underpinned the entire economy, the gold, was now no longer there. Investors quickly became very anxious and financial support for the great city disappeared, almost overnight.

What ensured was almost 20 years of economic stagnancy. Large numbers of banks and large businesses failed, shareholders lost thousands and were left penniless and tens of thousands of people were put out of work. It was estimated that through most of the 1890s, Melbourne’s unemployment rate was between 20 and 25%. Melbourne’s population in 1890 was 490,000 people, but following the spectacular crash, that figure never really increased at all for another 15 years. Immigration dried up completely. Large swathes of miners who had built the economy up now took off for the new gold fields of Western Australia and South Africa. The birth rate fell and the death rate soared as people now lived in poverty and squalor.

By 1900 however Melbourne was still suffering, although she was still a larger city than Sydney and so when federation occurred in 1901, Melbourne was the choice of city for the new Parliament of Australia. However, this didn’t last long and by 1905, Sydney had once again regained the title of the largest city in Australia. It wasn’t really until the beginning of the First World War in 1914 that Melbourne began to see any real resemblance of economic recovery, so catastrophic was the spectacular crash of 1890.

The geocache you seek is at S GG SO.HHD, E TCT TE.DGL

All historical and heritage information courtesy of Lake Mac Libraries

Any questions regarding this puzzle cache or the LMHS geoart series will be answered by clicking HERE

*** The LMHS geoart was placed in conjunction with the OzGeoMuster 2018 mega event. The OzGeoMuster 2018 committee would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this series. ahomburg, day1976, sedgwickDave, The Morris, bobbiesgirl, and the_garbageman.***