What was life like in a settlement in rural Victoria immediately following the gold rushes?

The history of white occupation of the Colac district dates back to 1837, making it one of the oldest inland settlements in the colony, and thus one which experienced all the major waves of immigration. A census conducted in March 1857 collected vital statistics about many aspects of Victoria's population, analysed by counties, electoral provinces and electoral districts. Colac was the smallest electoral district in the colony, and the list of its voters was correspondingly small. This district therefore presented both a varied population and an area of manageable size to study.

It was a settlement isolated in many ways by its geographical position. Situated on the southern banks of a large body of freshwater that white settlers named Lake Colac, the small township was on the edge of extensive plains - occupied as grazing land mostly under Crown tenancy by eight squatters. The settlement was 40 miles (64 km) west of the port of Geelong and there was no public coach service from the coast for the last half of the journey. Travellers sometimes took up to three days to complete the trip, so bad was the route at times of the year. Travel further west from Colac was blocked by a stretch of volcanic stony rises, an area of dense scrub and undergrowth, weird geological formations, and also a feared reputation resulting from stories of robberies and attacks that had occurred in its strange environment. As a result, most traffic from the next small settlement, Camperdown, by-passed Colac by travelling north of Lake Corangamite, a large area of shallow saline water, which effectively hemmed in the Colac district from the north-west. The route to Ballarat, 60 miles (97 km) north was a rough unformed track winding over the plains. To the south the Otway Ranges created another barrier. There was therefore a largely enclosed area from Winchelsea to the stony rises, sparsely populated, with the small settlement as its node. This was chosen as the study area.

The 1857 census revealed that while there were 792 people in the small electoral district incorporating the Colac township, 41 per cent of them were under 21 years of age. These included 208 children under seven and another 129 between seven and fourteen. In the surrounding pastoral land there were small clusters of settlement at the station homesteads, scattered shepherds' huts, and a limited area of agricultural land at Larpent seven miles (11 km) west of the town. There were 207 males and 149 females of all ages, 'exclusive of unemployed Aborigines' as the census return stated, in these rural districts.¹

How to find these people was the first problem. The only official sources of names initially appeared to be the electoral rolls for Colac and the surrounding countryside, and these became the starting points.² They yielded the names of 166 men, 127 of whom lived in the immediate Colac area. The franchise included a property qualification and so it was reasonable to suppose that many of these men had been in the district long enough to establish a stake there, and that they had also established families. This led to the index to births being the next resource to be consulted, and by entering the name of the voter it was established that indeed many of the voters were married men whose wives had given birth in the district. The first women were added to the list. As the index could also be searched by location and date, other married women who had given birth in the area during 1857 were identified. When sibling births were found spanning 1857 it seemed reasonable to presume that these were in families who were there in that year. All the birth certificates for Colac in 1857 were subsequently read and these proved invaluable, containing not only the names of the parents and siblings, but also those of witnesses, midwives, accoucheurs and the registrar. More people and their families to pursue! Indexes could not be searched by district for deaths but when these were identified from family histories they led to certificates rich in names - informants, doctors, undertakers, witnesses to the burial and sometimes an officiating minister. Marriages were fewer, but some certificates were sighted, with similar rewards.³

Benjamin Miller was one name on the list of enrolled voters. He could be identified from a range of sources as a literate assisted migrant, married with three children and active in local affairs. Colac and District Historical Society

A laborious task was finding single men and women who had arrived during the target year. Here the online index to Assisted British Immigration 1839-1871 proved invaluable. It was possible to isolate the ships that had arrived in Victoria that year and in the preceding months, and by scanning the microfiche disposal lists it was possible to find local men who had employed the new settlers and so identify the young men and women who came to the district as their employees. Most new arrivals came on at least three-month contracts, so were in the Colac district for some part of 1857, and very often for longer.⁴

Unassisted immigrants who came to the district were harder to find, there being no convenient disposal lists to suggest where they went after their arrival. Early in the project there was only a card index, in which the arrival date of settlers said to have been in the district in 1857 could be confirmed. The subsequent publication of an online index meant that, if the name of a ship were known, this resource could be used to pinpoint arrival date in the colony.⁵ For many migrants the ship on which they had made the momentous voyage across the world remained part of their identity, and was mentioned in obituaries and family histories. People admitted to the Colac hospital had the ship of arrival entered as part of their admission details and searching indexes by ship and date led to names of extended families whose presence in Colac could be further investigated.