Second edition, illustrated with 33 plates outside the text, including 23 in black and white, 8 on tinted background, and 2 folding plates in colour (panorama of the city of Ballarat; map of the gold deposits), cf. Ferguson VII, 18716.
No copy recorded in the CCF.
The list of plates, p. xv, mentions only 27, as it groups together the reproductions of documents relating to the 1854 uprising.
Publisher’s binding in full grey cloth, flat spine and covers decorated in black and gilt, headcaps worn, endpapers and pastedowns in brown paper, inner hinges split, slightly shaken copy, a tear with paper loss along the inner hinge of the lower board, some light foxing.
The first edition of this early monograph on the city of Ballarat (State of Victoria) was published in 1870.
The town had only been founded in 1850 on the site of a former Indigenous encampment, and its spectacular growth owed much to the exploitation of gold deposits.
It is today the third largest city in the State.
The work is also of great importance for the history of the Eureka Stockade of 1854–55. William Bramwell Withers (1823–1913), born in England, emigrated to Natal in 1849, then to Victoria in 1852. Having become a journalist in Melbourne, he settled permanently in Ballarat only in 1885, fifteen years after the publication of his book.