By Kirsty B Carter & Joe Harrison 11 December 2020
A two-hour drive north-west from Melbourne is a historical town where, for decades, the local language was Welsh rather than English.
The Welsh migrants of the now-abandoned village of Llanelly arrived in Australia during the 1850s and the 1860s, amidst a population boom in the south-eastern state of Victoria. News of gold discoveries in the region brought thousands of newcomers eager to strike it rich as Victoria and neighbouring New South Wales yielded unprecedented amounts of gold. Among the 500,000 “diggers”, as immigrants arriving during the gold rush explosion were called, were prospectors from Britain, the United States, Poland and China.