Golden Square Median PriceThe House price is 5% higher than last year.
Surrounding suburbsGolden Square Median RentThe House rent is 2% higher than last year.
| | Map | Street view | Nearby property price | | Planning History: | | | Registered as Victorian heritage | What is significant?
Fortuna is a picturesque nineteenth century villa and garden developed from 1857 by two of Australia's wealthiest gold magnates, Christopher Ballerstedt from 1854 and George Lansell after 1871. It was developed on the treatment site for ore from nearby gold mines. It comprises the villa, lake and garden at the centre of the site, with the former gold processing buildings to its north, and army structures which were added around the periphery of the site after 1942.
History Summary
The Bendigo goldfields were discovered in 1851, and the surface gold was soon traced to gold-bearing quartz reefs, which proved to be the deepest and richest in the world. The German immigrant Christopher Ballerstedt and his son Theodore were among the earliest successful reef miners on the Bendigo diggings. In 1854 they bought for ??60 a mining claim on Victoria (or Chum) Hill (VHR H1355) to the north of Fortuna, and obtained from it gold worth nearly ??200,000. Christopher bought the Fortuna site in 1857 and by 1858 had built a quartz-crushing mill on the site, as well as a modest two-storey brick house, which he extended in 1869 to designs by the Bendigo architects Vahland & Getzschmann. Christopher Ballerstedt died in 1869 and in 1871 his son Theodor sold Fortuna and the mine on Victoria Hill to George Lansell for ??30,000 and returned to Germany.
Lansell (1823-1906) had migrated from Kent in 1853, and from 1855 invested in quartz mining companies. His confidence in deep mining began to yield returns in the 1860s, and after acquiring Ballerstedt's mine he sank it even deeper, soon finding ??180,000 worth of gold, which became the basis of his enormous wealth. He became a millionaire and was known as 'Australia's Quartz King'. He was to have interests in almost every mine in Bendigo and was famous for his tireless efforts to maintain the town's mining industry. He transformed the Fortuna site, with the villa continually altered and extended to successive plans by various prominent Bendigo architects: Vahland & Getzschmann, Emil Mauermann and William Beebe. By the early twentieth century the house had become a mansion of over forty rooms, one of the largest in Victoria, lavishly decorated and furnished with pieces collected from around the world. He transformed the industrial landscape of settling ponds and tailings dumps into spacious gardens with ornamental lakes, extravagant fountains and follies, pathways and exotic plantings.
On Lansell's death the management of his mining interests was taken over by his son, and his widow Edith continued to live at and develop Fortuna until her death in 1934, when the house and its contents were sold. The house was used for a short time as a reception centre until acquired in 1942 by the Commonwealth as the headquarters of the Australian Survey Corps, accommodating the army's ca | | | | 03 Sep 2014 | | Subdivide land into three lots. (22-48 Chum Street) | | (Source: Streamlined Planning through Electronic Applications and Referra, reference no: S056888A) |
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