Duncan Gillies (14 January 1834 – 12 September 1903), was an Australian colonial politician who served as the 14th Premier of Victoria. Gillies was born at Overnewton near Glasgow, Scotland, where his father had a market garden. He was sent to the high school until he was about 14, when he entered an office in Glasgow. In 1852, he arrived in Melbourne and travelled to the goldfields at Ballarat, where he worked first as a miner and later as a businessman and company director. Gillies was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly for Ballarat West in 1861, holding that seat until 1868. A conservative, he was President of the Board of Lands and Works in the short-lived government of Charles Sladen in 1868, which cost him his seat at Ballarat, a strongly liberal constituency. He was elected for Maryborough 1870–77, Rodney 1877–89, Eastern Suburbs 1889–94 and Toorak 1897–1903. He was Commissioner for Railways and Roads in the ministries of James Francis and George Kerferd from 1872 to 1875, and Agriculture Minister in the third government of Sir James McCulloch in 1875–77. In both the first (1880) and second (1883–86) governments of Service, Gillies was Commissioner for Railways and Vice-President of the Board of Land and Works. He was also Minister for Public Instruction 1884–86. As Railways Minister, he proved to be amenable to lobbying from members of parliament and others, initiating the 1884 Railway Construction Act (nicknamed the Octopus Act) which extravagantly authorised the building of 59 new rail lines. He also assisted the passage of a bill to allow the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company monopoly rights to operate a cable tram network in the city and suburbs. Service retired before the 1886 elections and Gillies succeeded him as Premier, forming a coalition government with the liberal leader Alfred Deakin, and winning a comfortable majority over a divided opposition at the elections. The Gillies ministry presided over the climax of the long economic boom which Victoria had enjoyed since the gold rushes of the 1850s. The great Victorian Land Boom took off in late 1880s and reached a climax in 1890. There was no regulation of the banking and finance industries at that time, and no expectation that governments could or should protect investors against unsound or unscrupulous financial schemes. More than 50 million pounds of speculative capital from Britain flowed into the colony, much of which was spent