Forest Creek Monster Meeting
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One of the social effects of the Australian 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 15 December 1851 estimates of between 14,000 and 20,000 miners gathered for the first mass meeting of diggers, as the miners were known, at Forest Creek, the original name given to rough diggings town by the miners latter given its "official" name of Chewton by the government. The notices put about the diggings by a person who called himself "A Digger" in advance of the meeting advertised it as a 'Monster Meeting'. The Miners' Flag, also known as the standard of Australian reform, flew at this meeting for the first time.
It has been claimed by some the birth of democracy on the Australian continent occurred at the Eureka stockade at dawn on 3 December 1854. If this is so then its conception took place at the Forest Creek Monster Meeting, almost three years earlier. The original site of the Monster Meeting was lost in the mists of time. It was known however that the meeting took place at the site of a shepherd's hut, an out station of William Campbell's sheep run 'Strathloddon" which was built around 3 miles south of Major Thomas Mitchell's line of road at the junction of Wattle and Forest creeks in the 1840s.
It was claimed at the time that between 12 to 20 thousand people attended the meeting that day, a far greater number than any meeting of gold diggers before or since. The site of the shepherd's hut was rediscovered after extensive research was carried out by Glenn Braybrook a local historian and long time resident of Chewton. Glenn was helped by fellow Chewton resident, John Ellis who knew Glenn was determined to find the Monster meeting site. John supplied Glenn with a map he had been given by Barbra James, another local historian. By using this map and two others and drawings that were done on the day of the meeting in 1851, the site can be identified and clearly it hasn't changed all that much since 1851. The site is now marked with a cairn placed there in the original spot by members of the new version of the Ballarat Reform league. Once a year locals gather to celebrate the monster meeting.
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