Robe walk

In order to avoid the Victoria poll tax some 16,000 Chinese gold seekers embarked at Adelaide and Robe to walk into Victoria.

Frightened at the numbers of Chinese miners flocking to its goldfields, the new and tiny Colony of Victoria in 1855 imposed a tax on these arrivals as well as a limit to the numbers of Chinese passengers allowed per ship. The most obvious result of these restrictions was a shift in disembarkation point from Port Philip (Melbourne) to at first Port Adelaide and then increasingly to Guichen Bay (Robe), just across the border in South Australia from where many thousands walked many hundreds of kilometres to arrive at the Victorian goldfields. Before South Australia enacted its own similar legislation, some 16,000 Chinese gold seekers had arrived at Robe, most in 1857, and moved on.

At the time this walk was not seen as more than a curiosity with some thousands of South Australians making a similar walk and the Victorian's eventually settling on a resident’s tax as a better means of discrimination of Chinese miners. In later years however the walk has become seen as variously an "invasion" and a long march like ordeal replete with stereotypes and myths concerning hardship and stopovers to building a variety of infrastructure in western Victoria. Little if any of which can be substantiated.