>>17767786
Melbourne, Victoria was a colony of free settlement, built almost solely because of the wealth found in the Bendigo gold fields & elsewhere. It's also the birthplace of the Australian labour movement, which is responsible for the country's identity as external to Britain, and its strong labour protections. The gold rush brought forth a mini-revolution, called the Eureka stockade, that occurred due to unjust mining licenses mandated upon labourers trying to strike it big in the fields. Immigrants often sold all they had to find gold there, while suffering under a 'taxation without representation', similarly seen before America's revolution.

>The discovery of the Victorian Goldfields has converted a remote dependency into a country of worldwide fame; it has attracted a population, extraordinary in number, with unprecedented rapidity; it has enhanced the value of property to an enormous extent; it has made this the richest country in the world; and, in less than three years, it has done for this colony the work of an age, and made its impulses felt in the most distant regions of the earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_gold_rush