Petition highlighting the miseries and privations of the miners at the new township of Mount Ararat in Victoria, and asking that every miner be allowed to occupy and cultivate an acre of Crown Land.

Petition highlighting the miseries and privations of the miners at the new township of Mount Ararat in Victoria, and asking that every miner be allowed to occupy and cultivate an acre of Crown Land.

Ararat was first settled by Europeans in the 1840s after the surveyor Thomas Mitchell passed through the area in 1836. It was in 1857 that a group of Chinese miners en route to Central Victoria struck gold at the Canton Lead, making it the only city in Australia to be founded by the Chinese.

This petition, then, dates from the very beginnings of the development of Ararat, and deals particularly with the poor diet of the miners ('the impossibility of obtaining a proper quantity of vegetable food'), but also highlights the relative poverty of the small society at Mount Ararat, where 'profits are too frequently the price of virtue.'