Commander David Collins founded the first European settlement at Sorrento, Victoria on the shores of Port Phillip Bay on the 9th October 1803 and the lack of a permanent water supply caused him to abandon the site after seven months. He moved his two ships, three hundred convicts, fifty marines and eighteen free settlers to Tasmania. In that first Sorrento settlement was the son of a convict, John Pascoe Fawkner, who sailed back after thirty years to Port Phillip and with the help of John Batman founded the city of Melbourne.
Port Phillip District, which is what it was called while still part of New South Wales was a very prosperous settlement with a record wool clip in 1850 which reached £1,000,000. A moved was then made to seperate New South Wales and Victoria. The southern colonials proposed that the new state should be called Victoria after the Queen and the capital Melbourne after her Prime Minister.
Gold was discovered in 1851 which marked the beginnings of prosperity and helped with the move for Victoria to becme independent. Immigrants landed at Port Melbourne in their thousands and crews deserted their ships to join the rush to Ballarat and Bendigo in the hopes of finding gold. Within a few months Victoria's population soared from 77,000 to 463,000, making Melbourne the most populous city in Australia. Skilled tradesmen from all over the world headed for the diggings and the majority had no luck so they went back to their trades building the beautiful cities of Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo. Some of the ships that headed for Melbourne came to grief on the "Shipwreck Coast" near Port Campbell.
Then in 1854 the mining licence fees were introduced and were paid upfront whether gold was found or not. This then caused Australia's first political rebellion. On 3 December 1854, a fierce battle at the Eureka Stockade, lasting only fifteen minutes, resulted in the death of thirty miners and five soldiers.
During the years of 1870 - 1890 Victoria had a second burst of prosperity when the Port of Echuca on the Murray River was the busiest in the nation. The wharf at Echuca which was a kilometer long provided docking berths for hundreds of paddle steamers and barges involved in the Murray-Darling river trade. In 1880 a record 90,000 bales of wool were unloaded at the wharf and shipped by the rail link to Melbourne.
Victoria is also divided into regions. On the following pages you can find out a little about each of them with some beautiful pictures as well.
Goldfields
