The discovery of gold in the 1850s and 60s is the most significant event in the
evolution of the state of Victoria.
Gold fever hits
Fuelled by extravagant stories of wealth gained at the 1849
Californian gold rush, gold fever hit Victoria following the early gold discoveries
in and around Clunes, Warrandyte and Ballarat. But the real rush began with the
discovery of the Mount Alexander goldfield 60 kilometres north-east of Ballarat.
Mt Alexander (taking in the goldfields of Castlemaine and Bendigo) was one of
the world’s richest shallow alluvial goldfields, yielding around four million
ounces of gold, most of which was found in the first two years of the rush and
within five metres of the surface. When eight tonnes of Victorian gold arrived at
London’s port in April 1852, the Times of London declared: '.. this is California all
over again, but, it would appear, California on a larger scale…'
Nuggets of the stuff
Mt Alexander goldfield’s largest nugget was found in 1855
at Golden Gully by some inexperienced miners who had been sent to a ‘duffer’ or
empty claim. On just their second day digging they discovered the 1008 ounce,
‘damper-shaped’ nugget and named it in honour of the area’s popular gold
commissioner, Mr Heron.
The small town of Moliagul became famous when a 69-kilogram gold nugget was
found in 1869 at Bulldog Gully. Dubbed 'Welcome Stranger', the nugget was the
largest in the world, though it was soon broken into pieces as the district lacked
scales big enough to weigh the 60 by 30 centimetre nugget. Today the nugget
would be worth over one million dollars.
Gold rush names
Diggers gave names to almost every metre of ground on the
gold fields. Some were named after real people such as Cranky Ned’s Reef and
Dirty Dick’s Gully. Others named their new home after old ones, choosing
Adelaide Flat, Californian Gully and Switzerland Reef.
Many names conveyed something of the misfortunes suffered there. As well as
Murdering Flat and Chokem Flat, there was Deadman’s Gully and Burying
Ground Flat. Unlucky diggers bestowed names like Poverty Hill and Three Speck
Gully. More lucrative spots were labelled Hundredweight Hill and Nuggetty Flat.
Population boom
By the end of 1852, 90,000 newcomers had flocked to
Victoria in search of gold. Provincial cities like Ballarat and Bendigo grew,
bringing railways, roads, libraries, theatres, art galleries, and stock exchanges.
In the 1850s the heaviest traffic in Australia was on the road from Melbourne to
Bendigo, and by the 1880s, Melbourne was christened ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ –
one of the world’s biggest, booming, and cosmopolitan cities of the era.
The legacy of the gold rush era is evident at Sovereign Hill, Central Deborah and
other gold-themed attractions such as Carmen's Tunnel near Maldon, and in the
towns and bush, buildings, ruins and relics of the gold rushes are everywhere.
http://www.visitvictoria.com/displayobject.cfm/objectid.000325D8-C01B1AA9-954B80C476A90000/
http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/BLP/websites/gold/index.htm - usful website yrs
5/6
Many people associate the Gold Rush with California or the
Klondike, but the Australian gold rush remains the world's richest.
The discovery of Australian gold
Isolated gold finds had been reported in New South Wales since the
1820s, but it was another thirty years before a fully-fledged gold
rush would take its hold on the British penal colonies in Australia.
Edward Hargraves, an Australian immigrant from England, had
already (unsuccessfully) tried his luck in the California gold rush
and spent his last dollars on a passage back to Sydney. He was
familiar with the terrain west of the Blue Mountains not far from
Sydney and became struck by the similarity of its quartz outcrops
and gullies with those he had seen in the Californian goldfields.
In February 1851 Hargraves took his pan and rocking-cradle and
with his guide, John Lister, set out on horseback to Lewes Pond
Creek, a tributary of the Macquarie River close to Bathurst. In his
own words, once in the creek bed he somehow felt "surrounded by
gold." Scratching in the gravel with his pick and shovel he filled and
washed several pans, a number of which did indeed produce gold.
Word spread quickly and within a few days 100 diggers were
frantically tunnelling for instant wealth. The road over the Blue
Mountains from Sydney became choked with men from all walks of
life, carrying tents, blankets, and rudimentary mining equipment
hastily bought at inflated prices. By June there were over 2000
people digging at Bathurst, and thousands more were on their way.
Edward Hargraves did not make a fortune from gold. He named the
Bathurst goldfield Ophir and was paid £15,000 by the governments
of New South Wales and Victoria, but a dispute arose when James
Tom, a farmer involved by Hargraves in early diggings at Summer
Hill Creek, protested that it was he who had discovered gold. An
official enquiry resolved the dispute in favour of Hargraves, who
was appointed Crown Land Commisioner for New South Wales and
later received an annual pension of £250. However, a second
enquiry just before his death in 1899 reversed the earlier decision,
upholding claims by John Lister and William Tom (whom Hargraves
had shown how to make a Californian-style washing cradle, and was
the brother of James Tom) that it was they who had discovered the
first payable gold, and they were each awarded £1000.
The discovery in New South Wales and the resulting rush of labour
from the adjoining state of Victoria prompted the Governor of
Victoria, Charles J. La Trobe, to offer a £200 reward to anyone who
found payable gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. William Campbell
had already claimed to have found gold in 1850 on Donald
Cameron's sheep station at Clunes but this was kept secret by
Cameron, fearing the station would be overrun by diggers. Now, in
June 1851, Cameron decided to announce the discovery and it was
worked by James William Esmond – who had accompanied Edward
Hargraves on the return journey from California – and Dr George
Bruhn.
Other prospectors realised that Victoria was a geological extension
of New South Wales and shortly afterwards gold was discovered in
even greater abundance by a septuagenarian digger, James Dunlop,
at Poverty Point, Ballarat. Thomas Hiscock and others struck it rich
nearby at Buninyong, and more was found by Henry Frenchman at
Bendigo Creek. The Australian gold rush was on, and by the end of
1851 some 250,000 ounces had been taken from the central
Victorian region.
Gold in abundance – the colonies transformed
Very soon the fabulously wealthy alluvial goldfields (stream and
river deposits) at Ballarat and Bendigo turned Victoria into a
magnet for immigrant adventurers, who came in their hundreds of
thousands – literally. The Australian gold rush would transform the
British colonies, eventually into a nation. In 1851 the population of
Victoria stood at around 80,000, and a decade later it had risen to
over 500,000. The total population of Australia increased threefold
from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871.
Deposits were also uncovered in other states: Western Australia
and Queensland in the early 1850s, the Northern Territory in 1865,
and Tasmania in 1877, though the rich Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie
fields in the west were not uncovered until the 1890s. But Victoria
was the epicentre of the Australian gold rush.
The huge influx of population threatened to collapse the
administration of the fledgling state, exacerbated by the fact that a
large part of the civil service and police of Melbourne – including the
city's most senior government officials – abandoned their posts and
flocked to the gold diggings. It seemed as if a plug had been pulled.
Businesses lost their workers and schools emptied. Ships' crews
deserted and headed inland in droves. Fathers left their families to
dig for gold, and whole families travelled the short distance from
the city to set up camp on the goldfields. Mining camps appeared
seemingly overnight with each new find, then moved on when the
gold ran out to set up elsewhere.
The Australian gold towns grew quickly as the state of Victoria
convulsed with gold fever. Ballarat was proclaimed a township in
1852, a municipality in 1855, a borough in 1863, and a city in 1870.
Bendigo – known as Sandhurst until 1891 – was proclaimed a city in
1871 and introduced trams in 1890. The Forest Creek diggings at
Mount Alexander proved to become the finest alluvial goldfields in
the world, where the town of Castlemaine was proclaimed a
municipal district in 1855 and a borough in 1863.
Gold placed the financial viability of Victoria and New South Wales
beyond doubt, and Britain no longer had any excuse for withholding
self-government from its Australian colonies. A long economic boom
followed, spurring the development of state infrastructure, local
legislatures, and land policies. The authorities also introduced a
licence system on the goldfields. A miner's licence allowed a digger
to keep whatever gold he (or she) found on his (or her) claim.
Without a licence – which had to be purchased in advance, at an
exorbitant fee of 30 shillings per month – a miner was deemed to
be stealing from Crown property and was liable to suffer criminal
proceedings. Licence hunts caused great resentment within the
mining communities, especially as the police employed to enforce
the licencing system were notoriously corrupt and behaved with
excessive brutality. A miner was required to carry his (or her)
licence at all times and to produce it on demand from an authorised
officer of the law. Failure to produce it, no matter what the
circumstances, meant being chained to a log and fined by the
resident commissioner.
The Eureka stockade rebellion
The alluvial gold on the goldfields soon became exausted, and by
1854 the days of easy "pick and shovel" or sluice mining by
individuals or groups of mates were clearly numbered. There was a
switch towards deep-lead mining, which required shafts to reach the
gold in quartz reefs much further below the surface, together with
capital investment in machinery. The easy going atmosphere of the
Australian gold rush began to slide. The Governor of Victoria, Sir
Charles Hotham, ordered the frequency of licence hunts to be
increased, and tensions between the diggers and the authorities
rose even more.
At Ballarat, miners formed the Ballarat Reform League to campaign
for a relaxation of the licencing system and the vote for every man.
After two further incidents – one being the alleged corruption of a
local magistrate who acquitted an inn owner of the murder of a
miner, and another involving the arrest and religious victimisation
of a crippled Armenian digger (who also happened to be the servant
of a Roman Catholic priest) – the miners took a stand.
Under the leadership of Peter Lalor, an Irish immigrant, a group of
several hundred miners erected a stockade of logs at Eureka near
Ballarat. They withdrew into the stockade and unfurled the
Southern Cross flag to proclaim an oath to fight to defend their
rights and liberties. After a day or so most of the rebel miners
returned to their claims, partly because many had intended the
event to be symbolic, and partly because it took on a distinctly Irish
nature. In any case they were short of arms and ammunition.
Nonetheless, more than 400 troops and police were sent from
Melbourne to crush what remained of the "rebellion". They rushed
the 120 or so miners still inside the stockade, killing more than 20
and trampling their Southern Cross flag into the dust. The rebel
leaders were tried for treason but the juries in Melbourne refused to
pass any guilty verdicts, and the authorities sensibly let the matter
drop. A Royal Commission subsequently condemned the goldfield
administration, and the miners' grievances were eventually
remedied – including their demands for political representation: a
year later, minus an arm lost at Eureka, Peter Lalor (illustrated) was
duly elected to the Victorian parliament.
Life on the Victorian goldfields
Even setting aside the harshness of the licence system, life on the
goldfields was very hard. Diggers sometimes worked ten metres
below the surface, often waist deep in water. Poorly shored up
shafts would collapse, killing those below. Digging frequently
involved accumulating a load of gravel on one's claim and then
carrying it quite long distances to the nearest creek or river to wash
it for gold using pans, puddling boxes, or cradles. Some miners
struck it rich but the hopeful majority enjoyed only moderate
success, or no success at all.
Miners, and the families who chose to accompany their men, lived
in tents. Brawls amongst individual diggers or between different
national contingents were common, as were theft and drunkenness.
Diggers of the same nationality tended to congregate together in
unofficial territories. Others made a good living not from digging but
as small agriculturalists selling mutton and vegetables.
Once a goldfield had been officially proclaimed the state
government would then set up administrative and police personnel
in that area, imposing a semblance of law and order. A resident
Gold Commissioner, protected by a military garrison, provided the
means by which the miners' gold could be weighed, paid for, and
transported under the protection of the gold escort to the
Melbourne Treasury, and thence into canvas bags and down to the
waiting ships to England.
The gold escort, as well as diggers or anyone else travelling in the
goldfield region, was always at risk of ambush by bushrangers – an
Australian type of outlaw. The risk was much greater for a traveller
'coming down' (from the goldfields to Melbourne) rather than 'going
up' (to the goldfields). The robbers liked to adopt witty names like
Captain Melville (Francis McCallum), Captain Moonlight (Andrew
Scott), and Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward). There was also
the Eureka Gang, Black Douglas, and Boogong Jack. Many were
hunted down and killed in pursuit or were rounded up and
imprisoned or executed.
However romantic the notion of digging for gold in the Australian
bush, life on the goldfields remained characterised by squalor,
greed, crime, self-interest – and racism. The diggers had come from
many nations but by far the largest national contingent other than
British and Irish were the 40,000 Chinese who had somehow made
their way to the Australian goldfields.
As the alluvial deposits dwindled there were moves to restrict the
untiring Chinese diggers as they seemed to be comparatively more
successful, able to sustain the viability of their claims longer than
their Western counterparts. They would rework ground abandoned
by Europeans, and continue to work a claim until the whole of the
gold bearing earth had been cleaned. The Chinese did not bring
their wives, intending instead to send their wealth home. In 1855
the Victorian Parliament imposed a tax of £10 a head on all Chinese
entering the colony and a poll tax of £1 per annum levied on every
Chinese person on the goldfields.
Restrictions were eventually placed on Asians in general, to prevent
an influx from other nearby nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the
Philippines. And of course the native Aborigine was rarely permitted
to own gold.
Meanwhile, in the young city of Melbourne a round-the-clock orgy
was going on. Shanty towns sprung up to house the tens of
thousands of immigrants pouring off the ships from England and
Ireland, and in the hotels and grog shops lining the city's jampacked muddy streets the diggers were drinking their gold away.
Intoxicated miners with their pockets bulging with gold dust lurched
from bar to bar and through the newly opened luxury shops,
festooning their girls with jewellery and lighting their pipes with £5
notes. Biddies – unattached young women – were looking for
diggers to marry. Merchants of all kinds flourished in the bonanza,
and gold money began to finance the construction of a more
respectable suburbia in Melbourne, with imported Italian Marble and
English Axminster carpets.
The gold rush in Western Australia
By the turn of the century Australia had become the world's largest
producer of gold, half of which came from Western Australia. Gold
was produced at Kimberley for a short time in 1885, and then at
Southern Cross (1888) and Coolgardie (1892), but it was three
Irishmen – Patrick Hannan, Tom Flanagan, and Daniel Shea – who
triggered the rush in Western Australia in June 1893. While camping
at Mt Charlotte, by chance they discovered some 100 ounces of
gold in alluvial nuggets. After a few days they reported the find to
the mining warden in Coolgardie. As in the east, when the word got
out the rush began. Hundreds of diggers were soon pegging out
new claims around Kalgoorlie, then elsewhere in the region.
The early pickings were rich, but the circumstances were different
from those in New South Wales and Victoria. This was desert and
water was scarce. It was enormously expensive to obtain supplies
of food and equipment in such a remote part of the continent.
Eventually a reservoir was built at Kalgoorlie, by which time the
surface gold was working itself out and highly capitalised companies
financed by British investors were mining gold leads deep
underground. The experience of the gold rush in the east had been
learned.
Hundreds of companies were floated and the population of Western
Australia swelled with people streaming in from Victoria and New
South Wales. As the prosperity of the region improved, large public
works programmes were undertaken. A habour was built at
Freemantle and a railway network linked the dozens of newly
established gold towns, though many townships died when the
seams were exhausted. Nonethless the dramatic improvement in
the state's fortunes tipped the balance of public opinion in favour of
the Federation of the Commonwealth of Australia after the
referendum of 1900.
The British perspective
Before the Australian gold rush, Britain had regarded the distant
colony as little more than a penal settlement. The discovery of gold
brought a marked change in attitude. To the fortune-hunting
optimists who set sail from England in the 1850s, a berth on a ship
to Australia had become worth a life's savings rather than a lifesentence. At the same time, pressure was increasing to end the
transportation of convicts – there were actually empty cells in
British prisons – and the 'purpose' of Australia began to look
different. The British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir John
Pakington, pronounced that the very existence of gold made it "a
solecism to convey offenders… to the immediate vicinity of those
very gold fields which thousands of honest labourers are in vain
striving to reach."
Gold began to tilt not only the order of Australian society as the
wealthy bourgeoisie expanded its power base, but also the feelings
of association with the "old country". Victorians took pride in the
fact that the emerging success of the state was not primarily
founded on the back of convict transportation. In 1852 the mayor,
aldermen, and citizens of Melbourne petitioned Queen Victoria,
protesting against the transportation of convicts to Van Diemen's
Land (now Tasmania) from where, once freed, they crossed over to
contaminate the very colony which bore her name. It was
subsequently ended in 1853, and soon after, to Australia as a
whole.
Patrick Taylor Copyright © 2005-2010
http://www.patricktaylor.com/australian-gold-rush