Colony of Victoria

The Colony of Victoria was a British colony in south-eastern Australia from 1851 to 1901, with its capital at Melbourne. Separated from New South Wales just as gold was discovered, it grew rapidly on the wealth of the gold rushes, and Melbourne became the financial centre of Australia. In 1901 it joined the other colonies to become a state of the Commonwealth of Australia.

The land had been home to many Aboriginal nations for tens of thousands of years; a hearth at Keilor near Melbourne has been radiocarbon-dated to about 31,000 years ago, and the eel-farming landscapes of Budj Bim show long-term management of the land. British settlement began with the Henty family at Portland in 1834 and with the Port Phillip settlement, later Melbourne, in 1835. Squatters spread sheep runs across the grasslands, and between 1836 and 1842 Aboriginal groups lost most of their land. Violence accompanied the takeover, including the Convincing Ground massacre at Portland Bay in 1833 or 1834 and conflicts such as the Eumeralla Wars, part of the wider Australian frontier wars. Aboriginal Protectors appointed from 1839 had little power to change a land policy that favoured the squatters.

Settlers of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales petitioned for self-rule from 1840. A British act naming the new colony after Queen Victoria was signed in August 1850, and separation took effect on 1 July 1851, with Charles La Trobe as Lieutenant-Governor. At that point the colony had a settler population of about 77,000, some 23,000 of them in Melbourne.

In 1851 gold was found at Clunes and Buninyong near Ballarat, and then at Bendigo. Immigrants poured in from Britain, especially Ireland, and from around the world, including many Chinese miners, who faced discrimination and, in 1857, a riot at Buckland Valley. In ten years the population grew about sevenfold, from roughly 76,000 to 540,000, and in the 1850s the colony produced around a third of the world's gold. In 1854 miners angry at licence fees and lack of representation rose in the Eureka Stockade; British troops crushed it, but the licence was abolished and some leaders later sat in parliament.

The Victorian Constitution Act of 1855 brought responsible government, with ministers answerable to an elected parliament. In 1857 Victoria had the Empire's first Catholic government leaders, John O'Shanassy and Charles Gavan Duffy. Land acts tried, with limited success, to break the squatters' grip, and the 1866 McCulloch Tariff was the first substantially protectionist law in Australian tariff history. Railways and telegraphs tied the goldfields to Melbourne, which acquired a university in 1853, a public library and a national gallery. From 1878 to 1880 the bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang defied the colonial police.

Heavy British investment fuelled a land boom in the 1880s. It collapsed in the early 1890s, and in 1893 a wave of bank failures plunged the colony into deep depression. Victorian politicians such as Alfred Deakin were leading figures in the movement for federation, and after a successful referendum in 1899 the colony became a state of the new Commonwealth on 1 January 1901, an event covered under Federation of Australia. Melbourne served as the seat of the federal parliament until it moved to Canberra in 1927.

The maps label the colony "Victoria (UK)" and draw it in 1878, 1880 and 1900. On the 1815 map the region falls within New South Wales, and from 1914 it is part of Australia.