[Federation Invitation] Australian Commonwealth Celebrations. The Government of Victoria requests the Honour of the presence of Mr. Mark Hammond at a Converzaione in the Exhibition Building on the Evening of Tuesday 7th May 1901, at 8 p.m.

An invitation to Mark John Hammond (1844–1908) to the Converzaione in the Exhibition Building on the Evening of Tuesday 7th May 1901, at 8 p.m, for the Australian Commonwealth and Federation celebrations.

Hammond was a gold-miner and politician, was born on 15 November 1844 in Sydney, the elder son of John Hammond. Late in 1853 the family moved to Sofala where Mark became a blacksmith and a successful jockey. In January 1861 at Lambing Flat he lost his money in a hotel venture; in September he joined the rush to Forbes but contracted typhoid and went home. In December 1862 he struck payable gold at Lambing Flat but next year was almost crippled by a scorpion bite and returned to Sofala. In 1868 he joined a mining company at Hill End and in 1872, as a partner of Beyers & Holtermann, his dispirited change in direction of a tunnel led to the discovery of the world’s greatest specimen of reef gold. In June 1873 he retired to Sydney with independent means. On 24 September 1878 he had been elected an alderman of Ashfield municipality and mayor in 1882. Hammond retired in January 1887 and went to England in 1889. On his return he became vice-president of the Ashfield Bowling Club and a member of the Ashfield Horticultural Society. In 1891 he was made a justice of the peace and in 1900-03 had a city office as a mining agent. After Federation he supported Edmund Barton in the Australian Democratic and Liberal Reform League.