MINERS' COTTAGES

Abstract

The major visual reminder of Victoria's nineteenth‐century gold rushes is the thousands of miners' cottages, which remain a significant part of the housing stock of former mining towns. This article traces the evolution of these modest structures that were adopted to solve the pressing problem of providing affordable and quickly constructed housing for gold miners once the alluvial rushes were over. Simple construction methods combined with cheap land on which to build allowed miners to construct and own their own homes to an extent not achieved elsewhere by manual workers in the developing world in the nineteenth century.