Victorian Pascoe History

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In April of 1841 James Clarke (my mother's Great Grandfather) and his family arrived in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Some 26 years later my father's ancestors did the same thing, Martin Prist Pascoe and his son reached Melbourne in 1867.
A common connection between these two families was that they both gravitated towards Victoria's Gold Fields, namely Creswick and Ballarat.
Victoria is located in the south eastern corner of Australia.  In 1851, Victoria seperated from New South Wales after a first attemp at settlement in 1803.
It was not until the Henty brothers landed in Portland Bay in 1834, and John Batman founded and settled on the site of Melbourne in 1835, that Port Phillip District was officially Sanctioned (1837).  The first immigrant ships arrived at Port Phillip in 1839.
So the Clarke's and Pascoe's in turn were amongst the very new arrivals in a new land.
Victoria began in the 1830's as a farming community.  The discovery of gold in 1851 near Ballarat transformed it into a leading industrial and commercial centre.  Bendigo came next followed by many sites across Victoria.
This triggered one of the largest gold rushes that the world has ever seen.  In ten years the population of Victoria increased sevenfold.  All sorts of gold records were produced including the "richest shallow alluvial goldfield in the world" and the largest gold nugget.
Immigrants arrived from all over the world to search for gold.  Was the arrival of my ancestors above to do with finding new wealth or simply, especially the Pascoe's, a situation of unemployment.  They were a mining family.
Conditions at the goldfields were cramped and unsanitary, an outbreak of typhoid at Buckland killed over 1,000 miners.

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