Victorian gold rush in the Melbourne "Argus" on 8 September 1851, leading to a rush to the Mount Alexander or Forest Creek diggings, centred on present-day Castlemaine, claimed as the richest shallow alluvial goldfield in the world. These discoveries were soon surpassed by Ballarat and Bendigo. Further discoveries including Beechworth in 1852, Bright, Omeo, Chiltern (1858–59) and Walhalla followed. The population of Melbourne grew swiftly as the gold fever took hold. The total number of people in Victoria also rose. By 1851 it was 75,000 people. Ten years later this rose to over 500,000. Surface alluvial gold was the first to be exploited.
Women in the California Gold Rush number of women in the mining communities and mining camps can be estimated by subtracting the roughly 2,000 females who lived in predominately Californio (Hispanics born in California before 1848) communities and were not part of the gold rush community. About 3.0% of the gold rush Argonauts before 1850 were female or about 3,500 female Gold Rushers compared of about 115,000 male California Gold Rushers. By California’s 1852 State Census the population has already increased to about 200,000 of which about 10% or 20,000 are female. Competition by 1852 had decreased the steam ship fare via Panama to about $200