SCORES and debts could be settled, big prize purses worth hundreds of pounds snagged and victors gaining a legion of followers gained on the goldfields.
The fame came not from unearthing big gold nuggets inches below the surface or striking it rich down mine shafts.
Men covered not in dust and mud from toiling for gold but rather sweat and blood from minutes in makeshift boxing rings for a few bouts of bareknuckle boxing.
The bouts may have been held on the edge of miner’s right claims around towns in the 1850s. Or a few miles out, away from scrutiny of authorities and those who abhorred the sport.
And so it was with the gold claim at Sporting Flat, about a mile inside what today is the boundary of the Loddon Shire.
Gold was first discovered there in 1856, according to mining records. Sporting Flat is the area where 21st century part-time gold prospector Matthew Carkeek hopes to literally go over old ground with plans to explore land he owns on the Tarnagulla-Dunolly Road.
It has been suggested Sporting Flat Road took its name from the scene of great goldfields sporting contests - foot races, perhaps even horse events.
Nothing quite so glamourous, says Matthew. It’s where miners gathered for some good old-fashioned stouches in the days before boxing became, relatively, more genteel.
That was from 1867 when the Queensberry Rules governing modern boxing were first published in 1867.
Drafted by John Graham Chambers, they were named after John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who endorsed them.
Padded gloves became mandatory, match-ups were three-minute rounds with a one-minute rest, and a 10-second count for a downed fighter who must rise unassisted or lose the match.
It would be a few decades before bareknuckle encounters disappeared from the goldfields.
Around central Victoria, newspaper of the era reported on fights with prizes of up to £600.
Two of Victoria’s most popular fighters of the era were Lancashire-born Joe Kitchen and Tom Curran, from Jersey.
Kitchen beat the black American Harry Sellars at Werribee in 1858, in a fight that lasted four hours and 12 minutes and comprised £110.
But Curran, who pops up in contemporary reports at southern Loddon communities, beat Sellars two years later in a fight lasting 2½ hours for which he earned £600.
In the 1850s, a newspaper reported on a Prize Fight Extraordinary: On Monday last one of those disgusting exhibitions took place at Dunolly between two champions of the ring named “Black Charley” and Lockwood. The fight was for £250 aside, and the number of spectators present to witness the brutalising sport was variously estimated at from 7000 to 10,000 men.
“The men were said to have fought 227 rounds and were both severely punished, when (Charley) was obliged to succumb to his redoubt able opponent.
“A justice of the peace is said to have shown the most extraordinary anxiety to promote this milling match, and Mr Barrister McDonough, the most persecuted of men, and the most plausible of candidates for legislative honors, is said to have lent the valuable assistance of his counsel and physic and energy to the manly British sport.
“... so many thousands could be found to sympathise with a spectacle so degrading to all concerned in it.
“Detective-Sergeants Addy and Duffy were at Dunolly at the time of the prize-fight, and thinking they might recognise numerous friends on such an interesting occasion, they repaired thither. Being recognised by a mob of desperadoes, a hue and cry was raised against them. At the instigations of one Duffy and a party named Innsley they were severely assailed by the mob. It was even suggested that they should be hung to the nearest tree!”
The most famous boxing name on the goldfields is that of a latter-day Methodist evangelist who never made it to Australia - Abednego Thompson.
By age 18 he had started prizefighting, and by 21 he had become a professional boxer. In the course of his pugilistic career (1832–50), Bendigo lost only one fight, a defeat to Benjamin Caunt in 1838, says Encyclopedia Britannica.
But bareknuckle fighting was classed as breaching the peace and he was arrested after many of his bouts. He had a stint in jail for excessive drinking and brawling after his retirement from the ring.
“He had a religious conversion and became a preacher. The language of his own sermons was described as quaint, but he drew huge crowds wherever he preached,” the encyclopedia entry states,
And of course, the corruption of his Biblical name (from the Book of Daniel) is what today we know as Bendigo.
The bareknuckle boxers of the goldfields left their mark on place names that today sound more glamourous than in the 1850s.