https://ballaratfoto.org/events/peter-berzanskis

Vestiges, the recipient of an Honourable Mention in the Open Program

The discovery of gold in the Ballarat area in the 1850s created a boom town that competed with Melbourne for a while as the wealthiest city in Victoria.

That prosperous era continued for a few decades and then, as that era faded, Ballarat became and has remained an important regional centre and tourism destination.

Many of the grand historical buildings that were created from the wealth that the gold created have been preserved, a slim reminder of how prosperous those times were.

The effect that the discovery of gold had is hard to imagine more than 160 years later. Tens of thousands of prospectors flooded into to Victoria from around the world. Thousands of them, with nothing but a pick and shovel, became instant millionaires.

The wealth from the gold diggings changed Victoria from what was mainly a pastoral settlement into an industrialised and modern country.

The physical signs of that early era are gone from the streets and paddocks of Ballarat. The camps and shanty towns, diggings and mounds of alluvial waste, as they were then, are now recreated and confined to the Sovereign Hill theme park.

However, what remains for anyone to see are the grand buildings built from the wealth the gold created.

My interest in creating this project was a brief period in the story of the gold rush, the Eureka Rebellion of 1854.

As prospectors crowded into the region from 1851, they were slugged with a massive monthly licence fee before they could prospect for gold. This created much anger and resentment that lead to protests by the miners.

Licence searches occurred at any time, and there was opposition to strict liquor laws. The murder of a miner was followed by a mass protest when the prime suspect, a hotelier was acquitted by an alleged corrupt judge. An angry mod burnt the hotel down.

Gatherings and protests continued. and culminated in the Eureka Rebellion, a battle fought between gold miners and the colonial forces of Australia.

At 3am on Sunday the 3rd December there was a short, fierce and one-sided battle, the loose collection of miners bettered by the colonial military. There were at least 27 deaths.

In this series of images for Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2021 I’ve used images of building and spaces from current day Ballarat.

I have removed the context in which they exist so the original or current function is no longer defined and then added cotemporary elements to refashion the context in which they exist. A regular motif within these images is the use of gold or yellow that hints at Ballarat’s origins as a gold mining town.

The titles for this set of images are drawn from online reporting and descriptions of the rebellion and the lead up to it.

Walking down any of Ballarat’s street today there’s very little evidence of the fervour and tumult of the mid 1850s that you can see, it’s quite peaceful in fact.

The titles I’ve chosen are not there to illustrate the image, and conversely, the image is not intended illustrate the text, that they each exist happily on their own, but when brought together create something new, a sum greater that their parts.