I was flipping through a collection of marvellous old 19th century pictures and postcards of early Bendigo and came across one which showed a steam locomotive with a string of heavy carriages hooked up.

The caption said 450 tonnes of gold and wording on the carriages said: Bendigo to London, so it inferred this train was carrying an eye-watering amount of gold to London in 1893. 

Errr, except that the railway station in the background is apparently Maryborough (itself a goldfields treasure) and it is highly unlikely that anyone would have risked sending that much wealth on one trip around the world. Not that the volumes are impossible, mind you.

To try to work out if that was even remotely likely, we looked up how much gold had come from Bendigo in the 19th century.

It’s a gob-smacking 780 metric tonnes of gold. That’s 27,513,690 ounces of gold.

At today’s price of about $1337 an ounce, that’s worth $36,785,803,530.

And if that money was now spread over Bendigo, it’d be like giving each and every Bendigonian $344,500. 

In 1893, when the picture was taken, our population was around 35,000 and the gold production would have meant more than $1 million for every man, woman and child. Except, of course, it didn’t.

As that picture infers, so much of the golden wealth of Bendigo was shipped off to Melbourne and mother England.

But there are fascinating ideas of how much of it stuck here in one way or another.

A gold-seeking lawyer friend often remarks that there’s more money to be made from paper than from gold, and this was the case even back then.

The Advertiser reports that in 1893, gold mining shares dividends in Bendigo had paid out £578,678. There’s an online calculator which shows what one 1893 pound would be worth in today’s money and the total dividends would be equivalent to just over $133 million. In just one year. That’s on top of the actual gold value.

Every guesstimate of how much gold came out of Bendigo, and how much share market activity it generated, are always accompanied by warnings that these are only the official figures and that it’s likely much, much more went out on the black market.

Money and wealth flowed through this city like golden rivers.

It fuelled so much that we have now largely forgotten. For example, the wealth in our city generated political and social power. It’s not widely remembered that Bendigo in particular, and the goldfields in general, were the national heartland for the push for federation.

So many of the major speeches, which brought the colonies together, happened here, along with a politically connected culture. 

It was the engine house for a still astonishing explosion of grand European architecture, with banks built like princes’ palaces and railway stations, which looked like they’d been relocated from Paris or Moscow. Not just in Bendigo, but Melbourne as well.

Not bad for a city with a population of just 35,000. But we have come a long way in the past 120 years. Not all of the journey has been good.

In 1893 gold mine share trading generated three times as much in dividends … as Bendigonians lost last year on poker machines. Just saying.

WAYNE GREGSON