Lazarus Street - Poorman's Gully Precinct
Harvey, Lazarus & Union Streets WEST BENDIGO , GREATER BENDIGO CITY
![Greater Bendigo City](http://api.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/img/owner_icons/39.gif)
-
Add to tour
You must log in to do that.
-
Share
-
Shortlist place
You must log in to do that.
- Download report
Statement of Significance
Statement of Significance
What is Significant?
The Lazarus Street/Poor Man's Gully Heritage Precinct is a small residential area north of Marong Road and to the south of Long Gully in West Bendigo. The collection of 1870s-1890s timber weatherboard and pise miners cottages in Lazarus Street, Harvey Street and Union Street form part of the historic mining landscape associated with the deep quartz mine, Moonta, which opened in 1869, which now forms part of the Long Gully Linear Park. They replicate earlier examples of German pise cottages, which were formerly located at the end of Lazarus Street towards the Royal George mines. Other cottages such as at 8 Union Street and 13 Harvey Street illustrate the architectural changing styles of the 1940s and 1950s. The area was mined by depression workers and sustenance workers who re-worked the nearby mullock heaps and banks of Poor Man's Gully, a small creek that feeds into Long Gully from near Lazarus Street. Chinese contractors worked the tailings from nearby Nell Gwynne mine complex.
The Long Gully/Ironbark area of Bendigo is particularly associated with skilled Cornish and German miners. It was the Cornishman's traditional skills of shaft sinking and stoping and the tribute system, which was well known in Cornwall that were in immediate demand. Cornish mining technology was essential in Victoria mining in the years after 1860 and the influence of the Cornish permeated into other aspects of social and cultural life in the Victorian central gold fields.
The local community was served by the Moonta Mission, an independent charismatic evangelical revival church group that dates from 1893. The timber church at Union Street provides evidence of the widespread interest in non conformist evangelical religious movements in Australia associated with Cornish migration to the area. As the name 'Moonta' suggests, the area was worked by miners from the Moonta mines of South Australia. The church is associated with several important Australian spiritual revival movements, the 1875 Moonta mission 'Revival' in South Australia with a corresponding 'Revival' in Bendigo and the 1883, Loddon River 'Revival' around Bendigo in addition to the 1894 revival in Bendigo.
The landscape became characterized by huge mullocks and slag heaps of quartz tailings and with available work the pyrite and cyanide ore treatment and processing plants in the late 1870s to the north of Moonta mine, it attracted local unemployed and Chinese mining contractors. The history of Long Gully and Ironbark goldfields are marked by growing distress of unemployed miners towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. The Moonta area staged a brief recovery period in the 1890s and 1920s and again in the early 1930s during the Depression eras, when the mine was re-opened coinciding with the favourable supply of cheap local labour, the large numbers of desperate sustenance workers, who were sent out to work on the fields by the government. Like other areas along Ironbark and Long Gully, there was little attempt by authorities to clean up contaminated mine lands until the mid 20th century to early 21st century. Much of the former mine land now remains reserved as open space and collectively forms one of the most comprehensive collections of mining artefacts, which spans the entire period of mining on Bendigo from the earliest reef workings from 1853 through to the 1950s.
How is it Significant?
The Lazarus Street/Poor Man's Gully heritage precinct forms a cultural landscape that has rare, historic, aesthetic, architectural and social significance at a local level to the City of Greater Bendigo.
Why is it Significant?
The Lazarus Street/Poor Man's Gully heritage precinct is associated with skilled migrant Cornish, German and Chinese miners, whose combined contribution became essential to the development of the city of Bendigo, its mining operations and distinctive social life.
Criterion A: Importance to the course, or pattern, of Victoria's cultural history.
1) The Lazarus Street/Poor Man's Gully heritage precinct is a cultural landscape which has heritage significance for its historic associations with the 19th century mining settlement of Long Gully that developed amongst some of the wealthiest deep quartz mines of Bendigo. The working class miners' cottages set amidst the regrowth trees, peppercorn trees and old mine relic landscape of Moonta area represent a 'fringe' landscape that illustrates the extremely uneven distribution of wealth in Bendigo that resulted from the development of large company mines after 1870s. The small cottages are the self-made homes of the poor, unemployed, created from the mud of the local creek beds, influenced by traditional construction methods of local German miners in Derwent and Sparrowhawk Gullies to the north. They provide a powerful visual contrast between the newly formed affluent suburbs of Bendigo built by mine owners and mine speculators and the less fortunate.
2) The small timber weatherboard church at Union Street, the former Moonta Mission dates from 1893, has historic significance as a local example of an independent charismatic evangelical church revival group that became hugely popular in the local district during the time of greatest religious revival in Australia (1870-1910). The group remained independent for nearly 100 years and was abandoned in the 1990s.
Criteron B: Possession of uncommon, rare or endangered aspects of Victoria's cultural history.
3) The miners' cottages and their large gardens in Moonta area are associated with one of the unique features of the Victorian goldfields- the Miners Residency Area. The Lazarus Street cottages are self-made community housing that resulted from adverse possession of Crown Land at the time of the 1890s depression. The cottages belong to a group of increasingly rare structures that show a combined use of timber weatherboards and pise, rammed earth construction techniques, the mud coming from the nearby creek. Groups of mud adobe and pise rammed earth dwellings associated with the German community were once a common feature on the Bendigo goldfields and in the former Long Gully Creek area, but are now becoming increasingly rare.
4) The contextual setting as an archaeological relic mining landscape, creek lines of Long Gully and Poor Man's Gully and the isolated groups of self made rammed earth and timber cottages that line Union, Lazarus and Harvey Street to the north are rare features. Few areas in Bendigo illustrate to such a degree, how marginalised miners, Chinese contractors and the unemployed lived in the early 20th century, prior to the creation of assisted government housing programmes.
Criterion D: Importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a class of cultural places or environments.
5) The cottages at numbers 19, 21, 25 and 24 Lazarus Street are excellent representative examples of miner's cottages particularly associated with the influence of the German community, who worked nearby on the gold mining works along Long Gully, Derwent and Sparrowhawk Gullies, where they built most of their building from locally made mud bricks and pise. All miners' cottages in the Moonta precinct are significant features and are an excellent architectural record of some of the earliest types and designs of miners' cottage. The two former weatherboard and timber cottages at 7 and 9 Harvey Street are significant as highly intact mid 19th century miners cottages erected on Miners Residency Areas, which were retained on Crown Land until the 21st century.
6) The cottages display a level of intactness and authenticity in terms of their architectural character, form and scale that demonstrates the principle characteristics of cottages, built by unemployed miners and sustenance workers, during the Depression years of 1890s and 1930s.
7) The sporadic and scattered incidence of very small miners' cottages on large lots in an open landscape, with timber church, erected prior to the establishment of formal roads, together with the nearby mining archaeological wastelands clearly tells the story of the early alluvial and quartz reef mining boom in Bendigo. There is physical evidence from the 1850s through to the major mining boom of the late 1860s and early 1870s when advances in technology allowed the formation of huge mining companies and periodic revitalisation of the mines in the 1890s, 1930s and 1950s.
Criterion G: Strong association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons.
8) The Moonta precinct has social significance for its strong association with the local Cornish mining community and its links to the Moonta mines and Moonta mission. The mud pise rammed earth cottages show strong German influence in their construction methods and building techniques.
Assessment against the Criteria
HERCON CRITERIA
Criterion A
Importance to the course or pattern of our cultural or natural history.
Criterion B
Possession of uncommon rare or endangers aspects of our cultural or natural history.
Criterion C
Potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of our cultural or natural history.
Criterion D
Importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a class of cultural or natural places or environments.
Criterion E
Importance in exhibiting particular aesthetic characteristics.
Criterion F
Importance in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period.
Criterion G
Strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons. This includes the significance of a place to Indigenous peoples as part of the continuing and developing cultural traditions.
Criterion H
Special association with the life or works of a person, or group of persons, of importance in our history.
-
-
Heritage Study and Grading
Greater Bendigo - Ironbark Heritage Study
Author: City of Greater Bendigo
Year: 2010
Grading: Local
-
-
-
-
-
GOLDMINES HOTELVictorian Heritage Register H0827
-
FORTUNA VILLAVictorian Heritage Register H2211
-
VICTORIA HILL QUARTZ GOLD MINESVictorian Heritage Register H1355
-
-