Bendigo is a city in Victoria Australia that was literally built on gold which formed in marine sedimentary slates, sandstones and mudstones approximately 500 million years ago. Gold quartz veins developed until 60 million years ago when a massive upward movement pushed the gold upwards to create what we now know as Bendigo, sitting 350 metres above sea level.

In around 1851 the wives of two stockmen, Mrs John Kennedy and Mrs Patrick Farrell stumbled across gold at a location now popularly know as ‘The Rocks’ By November of 1851 the news of the gold discovery in Bendigo (then known as Sandhurst) had spread and the Bendigo Gold Rush was on. Gold was discovered throughout the region and soon the areas now known as Epsom, Kangaroo Flat, Eaglehawk and Diamond Hill were teaming with around 30,000 hopeful prospectors.

The prospectors arrived from around the world including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and America and soon an infrastructure began to be developed. In 1852 Commissioners were appointed to maintain State Victorian law and to collect the licence fees from miners. This fee became so unpopular amongst the miners that on August 28th 1853 it is said 10,000 miners marched in protest to the government camp wanting the fee reduced from 30 shillings per month to 10 shillings.

Within two years most of the easily reached alluvial gold had been had extracted and prospectors turned to digging shafts and mining to extract and crush quartz reefs. By the 1890’s some shafts reached 1500 metres. With a few short lived gold mining revivals in the early 1900’s it wasn’t until the  1980’s that a new company was formed using modern day extraction techniques to search for the gold rich quartz reefs of Bendigo.