The boom of the 1880s was exhilarating but could it last? There was a limit to the railways that could be sensibly built to outer suburbs or the houses and shops that could be rented, and that limit had been reached. In Melbourne in 1891 new skyscrapers began to advertise for tenants. Some warehouses in Flinders Lane were filled with unbought goods. New cottages and villas standing in paddocks in the suburbs called out for buyers. It seemed, to those who read the signboards, that half the city was ‘To Let’. There had been too much British capital entering Victoria, too many costly public works, too many people living in Melbourne compared to the country, too many imports, too few exports, and too much borrowing and speculating. Much of the standard of living depended on heavy borrowing but somebody would, some day, have to pay for it. The common belief was that Tomorrow would pay the debts, but suddenly Tomorrow became Today.

Victoria now had a serious slump but not a depression. As the inflow of British capital became slower, and as prices of wool and other exports continued to fall, the pressure on the economy became tighter. In 1892 the small land banks and building societies, which in the boom had speculated heavily in land and buildings, began to fail. Thousands of building labourers and tradesmen in Melbourne were now out of work. Many able-bodied people were often hungry: hunger was a fact of life in London and Vienna but rare in Victoria. Society, here, lacked the institutions to cope with large-scale poverty, and charity was meagre and makeshift. In Mansfield, Ararat and other country towns in the winter of 1892, rabbit hunts were organised – shopkeepers even closing their shops to take part – and thousands of pairs of rabbits were sent by train to Melbourne to feed the needy.