Forest Creek Monster Meeting

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One of the social effects of the gold rushes in the colony of Victoria (Australia) in the period 1851-54 was the growing demand for political representation and reasonable limits to taxation.

The Forest Creek Monster Meeting represents the identifiable starting point of this democratic agitation.

On the 15th December 1851 14000 miners gathered for the first mass meeting of diggers, as the miners were known, at Forest Creek, between Castlemaine and Chewton. The notices in advance of the meeting advertised it as a 'Monster Meeting'. The Miners Flag flew at this meeting for the first time.

If the birth of democracy on the Australian continent occurred at the Eureka stockade at dawn on the 3rd of December 1854 then its conception took place at the Forest Creek Monster Meeting, almost three years earlier.