gold rush in australia essay

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New South Wales

Western australia, other discoveries, immigration boom, life and lawlessness on the goldfields.

Australian gold rushes

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• History Today - The Australian Gold Rush Begins
• kidcyber - Gold Rush in Australia: About Life on the Goldfields from 1851
• State Library of New South Wales - Eureka! The Rush for Gold
• National Museum of Australia - Gold Rushes
• Australian gold rushes - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Australian gold rushes - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

The discovery of gold in New South Wales in 1851 began the first of a series of  gold rushes  in colonial Australia—a defining era of its history. The gold rushes transformed the colonies and shaped Australia’s population and society as the lure of gold attracted miners, known as diggers, from all over the world. The resultant demographic changes, associated economic upheavals, and subsequent development of often rural areas left an indelible mark on the development of the region.

• California Gold Rush (1848–59)
• Cariboo Gold Rush (1860–63)
• Klondike Gold Rush (1896–99)

Gold discoveries

In the 1840s prominent Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison predicted that New South Wales had economically significant deposits of gold. Although his theory soon proved correct, colonial governors kept the early discoveries quiet. The territory had been founded as a penal settlement, and the government feared that news of a gold discovery would lead to an increase in crime or even a convict uprising amongst the miscreant population. Officials were also concerned about the potential economic effects of gold discoveries on agricultural products, which were the colony’s major exports. Specifically, they sought to protect the struggling pastoral industry from a sudden loss of workers in search of riches, and thus suppressed early news of gold.

It was against this backdrop that the earliest known payable gold found in Australia was discovered in New South Wales in 1847 by William Tipple Smith, a mineralogist who had read Murchison’s predictions. Smith sent his first gold sample, taken from the western slopes of the Blue Mountains near the town of Bathurst to Murchison. Murchison notified the colonial government, which declined to take action. The following year Smith found more gold in the Bathurst region. Hoping for a reward that would help offset the costs of his expedition, Smith offered to share the location of the goldfield with government officials, but they declined to pay him. Smith was largely forgotten to history until the late 20th century, when a historian found letters documenting his gold discoveries.

Shortly thereafter, however, the New South Wales government changed its attitude toward gold prospecting after thousands of Australians left the colony for the  California Gold Rush  of 1849. The exodus caused labor shortages and an economic downturn, and, desperate to revive the economy, the government offered a reward for the discovery of commercial quantities of gold within its borders.

The government having ignored Smith’s discovery, Edward Hammond Hargraves was widely credited as the first person to find payable gold in Australia. Originally from England , Hargraves had been one of the many New South Welshmen to join the California Gold Rush. Although he found no gold in North America , he keenly noticed similarities in the geography of California’s goldfields and the landscape near Bathurst and became convinced that the area housed gold. Upon returning to Australia, Hargraves assembled a team of miners consisting of John Lister and three brothers, William, James, and Henry Tom, and taught them how to pan . He also showed them how to build a rocker, or cradle , to more quickly separate gold from other minerals. On February 12, 1851, Hargraves discovered flecks of gold in Lewis Ponds Creek, and Lister and the Tom brothers soon made larger finds of gold nuggets . Claiming to have found the nuggets himself, Hargraves kept the entirety of the government reward and named the area Ophir , after the biblical city of gold. (Lister and the Tom brothers were finally given credit as the real discoverers of the gold in 1890.)

An account of the discovery was published in the  Sydney Morning Herald in 1851, and the news quickly spread worldwide. Within a week more than 400 people had arrived to dig in the area, and the first Australian gold rush was underway. In the year following the Bathurst discovery, around 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia to seek their fortunes on the goldfields.

The New South Wales gold rush generated an economic slump in the newly formed colony of  Victoria as thousands of workers deserted farms and industries to head north to the Bathurst goldfields. In response, the Victorian government quickly formed a gold discovery committee and offered its own reward to anyone who found gold within 200 miles (320 kilometers) of  Melbourne .

Although Australian Aboriginal peoples  and white settlers had previously found gold in the region, the first official discovery was credited to James Esmond, who found gold near the town of Clunes in June 1851 and sparked the Victorian gold rush. Two months later, in August 1851, James Regan and John Dunlop discovered gold in Ballarat , at Poverty Point, and the site would become the most productive alluvial goldfield in the world at that time. Other discoveries followed at Castlemaine , Daylesford, Creswick, Maryborough , Bendigo , and McIvor. Victoria’s deposits were so rich that the colony accounted for more than one-third of the world’s gold production during the 1850s.

On February 5, 1869, miners found the “Welcome Stranger” nugget near the town of Dunolly, north of Ballarat. It remains the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, weighing about 159 pounds (72 kg).

Queensland  was the next colony to join the gold frenzy. In the mid-1850s, when Queensland was still part of New South Wales, the colonial government encouraged the search for gold on the northern frontier with the hopes that a discovery there would attract white settlers from the south. Although Capt. Maurice O’Connell, the leader of a government settlement at Gladstone , reported “very promising prospects of gold” in 1857, it was a discovery made a year later that sparked the first Queensland gold rush. A prospector named Chapple found gold at Canoona, near Rockhampton , in July or August 1858, and by the end of the year some 15,000 hopeful miners had arrived. The Canoona deposits were small, however, and most of the prospectors were disappointed.

Queensland achieved political separation from New South Wales in 1859, and the new colony’s first major gold find came almost a decade later. In 1867 James Nash discovered gold in the small agricultural town of Gympie , about 90 miles (145 km) north of  Brisbane . The find marked the start of the Gympie gold rush, and within months 25,000 people came to the area to try their luck. The influx of miners gave a much-needed boost to the struggling economy of the young colony.

Later discoveries sparked other gold rushes in Queensland. In late 1871 an Australian Aboriginal boy, Jupiter Mosman, found gold in a stream in the northeast. The town of Charters Towers was founded at the site, and miners flooded in. The population reached a peak of 30,000 during the gold rush of the 1870s and ’80s.

Farther north, a find along the Palmer River pulled miners to the frontier in the mid-1870s. Then, in 1882, Edwin and Thomas Morgan made one of Australia’s most important gold strikes at a site known as Ironstone Mountain, near Rockhampton . The brothers renamed the mountain Mount Morgan after themselves, and the so-called “mountain of gold” would become one of Queensland’s richest and longest surviving gold mines. Work would continue at the site until 1981.

The development of  Western Australia  lagged behind that of the eastern colonies for most of the 19th century, in part because of the apparent paucity of mineral resources. Its fortunes began to change when gold was discovered in the 1880s. A short-lived rush to the Kimberley district in 1886 was followed by more promising finds in the Pilbara and Yilgarn districts in 1887–88. The next important discovery was made along the Murchison River in 1891.

The Murchison gold rush was soon followed by Western Australia’s two most celebrated finds. In 1892 Arthur Bayley and William Ford struck gold in the south at a site called Fly Flat , which was soon renamed Coolgardie. Then, in 1893, a prospector named Paddy Hannan, working with Tom Flanagan and Daniel Shea, discovered gold at a site 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Coolgardie. The main deposit of deep rich ores came to be known as the Golden Mile reef, and the area developed as Hannan’s Find . The town that grew there was named Kalgoorlie.

The goldfields of Western Australia posed great challenges for diggers. The harsh desert landscape heightened the risk of disease, dehydration , and heatstroke , and many miners died. Nevertheless, the western gold discoveries brought a flood of migrants from the eastern colonies who eagerly crossed the continent to escape the economic depressions then occurring in New South Wales and Victoria. During the 1890s the population of Western Australia quadrupled, reaching nearly 180,000 in 1900.

Gold was also discovered at other sites in Australia.  South Australia  experienced its first gold rush after a discovery at Echunga in 1852. In the  Northern Territory workers digging during construction of the Overland Telegraph line in 1871 found traces of gold in the stony hills around Pine Creek, south of Darwin . Gold prospectors began arriving through Port Darwin in 1872. In  Tasmania gold finds at a number of sites, including Lefroy in 1869, drew hopeful diggers. However, the quantities of gold unearthed at these sites were much smaller than those in the eastern states and Western Australia, so the gold rushes were smaller as well.

The gold rushes had an immense impact on Australia’s population. News of the 1851 discoveries attracted people from countries around the world, and immigration quadrupled Australia’s population in just two decades, exploding from 438,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. As the population expanded, it also began to diversify. Other than the Australian Aboriginal peoples , the colonial population before the gold rushes consisted almost entirely of people from the British Isles . Although the majority of the new immigrants also came from the United Kingdom , they were joined by prospectors from the United States , Germany , France , Italy , Poland , Hungary , and other countries. The gold rush era was also the first time that Australia experienced a significant influx of Chinese immigrants. By 1861 more than 38,000 Chinese people lived in Australia, making up more than 3 percent of the population. More than 12,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in the year 1856 alone.

Chinese prospectors experienced much hardship, racism , and mistreatment on the Australian goldfields. Most were under contract to Chinese and foreign businessmen. In exchange for their passage to Australia, they had to work until they paid off their debt and could then return to China. The Chinese diggers were particularly hardworking and efficient, and unlike white miners, who worked alone or in small groups, the Chinese prospectors worked together in teams of 30 to 100 miners. They preferred to rework claims that had been abandoned by other miners rather than exploring new ground, and thus often found gold that others had overlooked.

The increasing presence of Chinese prospectors was accompanied by a rise in  xenophobia by white Australian, European, and American diggers. Strong anti-Chinese sentiment arose on the goldfields throughout the Australian gold rushes, and many racially fueled riots erupted. Some of the most violent riots took place at Lambing Flat (now known as Young) in New South Wales in 1860–61. In the last of these disturbances, on June 30, 1861, some 3,000 Australian, European, and American miners attacked a Chinese camp. They beat the Chinese prospectors, burned their tents, and cut off their queues (traditional long hair braids). In a misdirected response to the riots, the New South Wales government passed the Chinese Immigration Act to greatly reduce Chinese migration to the colony. Similar restrictions had already been introduced in Victoria (1855), South Australia (1857), and would soon follow in Queensland (1877) and Western Australia (1886).

Despite the hatred they endured, some Chinese immigrants were able to find success in the goldfields and also beyond them. Early miners were initially prohibited from planting vegetable gardens in an attempt to discourage the establishment of permanent homes, but the Victorian government began to allow vegetable gardening on the goldfields in 1853. The change was a boon to many Chinese immigrants, who soon played a vital role in supplying fresh vegetables to the often undernourished diggers. As the gold supply started to decline, many of these Chinese agriculturists—perhaps the majority of whom had been farmers in southern China—turned permanently to market gardening, putting their knowledge and skills to work. Many became successful business owners and profited more from providing fresh food for the growing settlements than from searching for dwindling gold deposits.

Living conditions on the goldfields were harsh, and hopeful prospectors faced many hardships. To reach the rural goldfields, prospectors usually had to travel long distances on foot because horse transportation was costly. Most lived in simple tents until they could establish more permanent huts. Neither tents nor huts offered much protection from heat, snakes , or thieves, and disease, accidents, and crime were rampant in many places. In the town of Ballarat alone, in 1859 an average of one miner each week was killed in an accident.

Given that only a small number of the many thousands of hopeful diggers ever struck gold, some frustrated prospectors turned to crime as their dreams of riches faded. Claim jumping—taking someone else’s claim (parcel of land to mine)—was common, and disputes often turned violent. Many diggers armed themselves to protect themselves and their claims.

The gold rushes also attracted men who planned from the outset to make a fortune without digging for gold at all. Bandits known as  bushrangers  often attacked and robbed miners traveling between goldfields, taking advantage of the fact that successful diggers had to carry their gold with them and were easy targets in the isolated bush. As skilled horsemen and gunslingers with excellent knowledge of the land, bushrangers were a formidable challenge to vulnerable prospectors.

Without police, judges, or other authorities to keep order, the earliest miners had to work out a system of law and order for themselves. Groups of miners established courts to put accused criminals on trial and to hand out punishments to those found guilty. This makeshift system was eventually supplemented by efforts of the colonial governments. Officials in New South Wales and Victoria, for example, appointed a gold commissioner with troopers (mounted police) and foot police (known by the miners as “joes” or “traps”) to oversee each goldfield. With many police officers having left their jobs to join the gold seekers, colonial governments in the early gold rush years relied on the Native Police, a force made up Aboriginal men whose close knowledge of the land helped them to track bushrangers and other criminals. To supplement this force, however, governments had little choice but to accept anyone who was willing to join the police, including formerly incarcerated individuals and many young, inexperienced recruits.

The gold commissioners regulated the goldfields and resolved disputes between miners. They also offered a service designed to move gold securely from the fields to cities for safekeeping. For a fee, diggers could turn over their gold and have it transported on heavily guarded coaches. The “gold escorts” carried thousands of pounds of gold from remote goldfields to Sydney , Melbourne , and other cities each week. While the gold escorts provided some security, they were also a lucrative target for bushranger attacks.

The most famous gold escort robbery took place in New South Wales on June 15, 1862. Frank Gardiner and his gang, which included  Ben Hall and John Gilbert, held up a coach at Eugowra as it was traveling from Forbes to Orange . The bushrangers escaped with £14,000 in gold and banknotes, an enormous sum. Gardiner was arrested two years later and spent 10 years in prison for the Eugowra robbery. Other famous bushrangers of the gold rush era included Andrew George Scott (known as “Captain Moonlite”), Frederick Ward (“Captain Thunderbolt”), the Clarke brothers, and  Ned Kelly .

To cover the costs of maintaining law and order on the goldfields, the governments of New South Wales and Victoria introduced a license system. Every miner had to pay a high fee—30 shillings a month—for a license, even if they did not find gold. The license had to be carried at all times, and a miner who failed to show one could be fined or arrested. The police charged with enforcing the license system were notorious for corruption and for their brutal methods. Miners also resented that they could not vote and that they had no representatives in the government. For all these reasons, miners reacted to the license requirement with considerable anger.

Opposition to the license system reached its height at Ballarat in 1854, in what became known as the  Eureka Stockade  or the Eureka Rebellion. Diggers formed the Ballarat Reform League and petitioned the government for change. When their demands were refused, they formed military companies, marched to the Eureka goldfield, and built a stockade. On December 3, 1854, police and military troops attacked the stockade and defeated the diggers, killing more than 20 of them. In the aftermath of the rebellion, however, the government met most of the diggers’ demands. The Victorian government replaced the license requirement with a fairer system in which miners paid a tax on gold they found instead of paying whether they found gold or not. Diggers were also given the right to vote and representation in the Victorian legislature. The Eureka Stockade proved to be a defining moment in the development of Australian democracy .

The gold rushes of the 19th century had profound social, political, and economic effects on Australia. The gold rushes spurred the exploration and settlement of remote lands, pushing the frontier in Queensland and Western Australia in particular. The immigration boom led to a dramatic increase in population and began to diversify the colonies’ predominantly British and Australian Aboriginal society. While some foreign immigrants returned to their homelands, others stayed permanently and some went on to become prominent in business, law, or politics.

The economic boost brought on by the gold discoveries was crucial in the modernization of colonial Australia. During the 1850s the colonies accounted for more than 40 percent of the world’s gold production. This rapid rise catapulted Australia onto the international stage and helped create a wealthy society with one of the highest standards of living in the world at the time. Gold profits were used to establish towns and to transform existing cities with new banks, stores, hotels, and other businesses. The flood of miners and money into Victoria made  Melbourne  a boomtown and the continent’s largest city. Rural industries expanded as well, as pastoralists increased production of meat and hides to meet the demand of growing cities. The gold rush era also saw large investments in transportation, with the construction of roads, railways , and bridges to move people to and from goldfields and cities.

The impact on the political development of Australia was long lasting. The Eureka Stockade was a catalyst for change, and people started to demand democratic reforms. This movement was also encouraged by new immigrants who brought with them ideas of democracy and equality from Europe and the United States. The calls for reform began to yield results in 1856, when South Australia gave all adult males the right to vote and South Australia and Victoria introduced the secret ballot . Just 50 years after the fateful find at Bathurst, the British colonies would unite to become the independent Commonwealth of Australia.

Not all Australians shared equally in the progress of the gold rush era, however. The anti-Chinese sentiment that took root on the goldfields in the 1850s continued to build as new Chinese businesses and communities thrived. European colonists resented what they perceived as economic competition. Their anger would eventually be embodied in the  White Australia Policy  of 1901, which severely limited Chinese immigration to Australia for more than 50 years.

Some Australian Aboriginal people found economic opportunities during the gold rushes. They sold food and clothes to the diggers, and some found their own gold and used it for trade. The Native Police were important to the safety of countless diggers, and others played a valuable role as guides and trackers for the white, foreign prospectors who knew nothing of the land. In the end, however, the gold rushes mostly just added to the challenges that Australian Aboriginal peoples had been facing since European colonization began. The miners invaded their lands, caused great environmental damage, and generally disrupted traditional Aboriginal ways of life.

How Did the Gold Rushes Change Colonial Australia? Essay

In the history of nations that throve on the territories of North America and Australia, the nineteenth century is marked by a series of gold rushes that forever changed the ways of development in economical as well as political and social spheres.

Although in Australia minor gold deposits had been discovered already in early nineteenth century, it was only in the 1850s that mass hysteria and search for gold started, acquiring the name of the Victorian gold rush, after the state most abundant in gold. The events connected with the Victorian gold rush transformed colonial Australia by dramatically increasing its population, restructuring the economic system, and promoting a new sense of identity among the nation.

The first and the most obvious transformation Australia underwent as a result of the 1850s gold rush was the immense growth of the population quantity due to immigration rates. Rumors of Australian gold spread in the twinkling of an eye, and the white Australian population which had comprised only 77 thousand people before 1851, rapidly increased by over 370 thousand in only the first year of the rush and constituted 540 thousand people by 1854 (Gold Oz, n. d.).

More settlers arrived to Australia in the several beginning years of the Victorian gold rush than there were prisoners brought to the continent from Britain. By the year 1871, Australian population had trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871 (Australian Government Culture Portal, 2007). Such dramatic increase in population quantity had its consequences both for the economic and political life of Australia.

Large-scale immigration brought about the ever-growing need of Australian population for developing agriculture, manufacturing, and construction industries.

On the other hand, those industries faced hard times due to the fact that laborers fled to the areas where gold was discovered and thus left their work unattended. Agriculture was in fact one of the spheres most negatively affected by the events of the Victorian gold rush. For one thing, tillers inspired by perspectives of fast enrichment, left their farms behind, abandoning the land for the sake of gold mining.

Other farmers switched their production from wheat to meat and tallow, which were more in demand in the domestic market (Attard, 2008). For another thing, sheep wool which had been Australia’s major export product in the first half of the nineteenth century, was replaced by gold, since the latter appeared a more attractive and valuable source of enrichment for the British Empire (Attard, 2008).

In reply to the incredible wealth shipped by Australia, the country profited from a large amount of imports and business investment to it (Gold Oz, n. d.). The two major states where the largest deposits of gold had been discovered, Victoria and New South Wales enjoyed an improved system of transportation with the building of the first railroad, and the rudimentary mining techniques were quickly optimized to more modern capital-intensive forms of gold-mining by large companies (Cultural Heritage Unit, 2010).

Together with economic benefits, Australian gold rush brought about a number of serious developmental issues to the country. With the land overcrowded by hundreds of thousands of new migrants, it was vital to provide people with appropriate living conditions.

For this purpose, large-scale building projects were launched that satisfied the need for housing for the generation of the gold-diggers and their children later on, in the 1880s. The impulse in technology given by the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s helped Australia survive the severe economic depression of the late nineteenth century (Attard, 2008).

Simultaneously with economic development, population expansion during the gold rush inspired major social and political changes in the nineteenth-century Australia. The people who arrived to the country were no more exclusively criminals. Rather, the colony was seen as a land of new opportunities, and therefore the practice of providing criminals with a free ticket to wealth was ceased. Not only the British, but also German, French, Italian, and even American people came to seek luck in the gold mines of Australia (Gold Oz, n. d.).

This turned the country into a multinational ‘melting pot’ distinguished by diversity of men united by a common ambitious idea of coining their own happiness. Huge masses of people demanded new way of organization and government that would correspond to the newly-arisen sense of being in control of their own destiny and building a self-governed democratic state.

Principles of fair treatment and camaraderie led the new Australians to forming small mining clans which in the 1852 Eureka Stockade won the case against unfair mining licensing system. Two years later, another major rebellion resulted in giving the right to vote to the miners, providing more opportunities for buying land, and reforming the administration of goldfields (Gold Oz, n.d.). These events marked the birth of Australian democracy.

Australian gold rush of the nineteenth century proved to provide a major impulse for developments both in economic and social spheres of the country. The drastic increase in population caused by mass immigration of the 1850s spurred not only technological innovations but also the establishments of democracy in the land that is now known for unprecedented cooperation and mutual support among its citizens.

Reference List

Attard, Bernard. 2008. “ The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction ”. EH.Net Encyclopedia , edited by Robert Whaples. Web.

Australian Government Culture Portal. 2007. The Australian Gold Rush . Web.

Cultural Heritage Unit. 2010. Electronic Encyclopedia of Gold in Australia . Web.

Gold Oz. n. d. The History of Gold in Australia . Web.

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HISTORIC ARTICLE

Feb 12, 1851 ce: australian gold rush begins.

On February 12, 1851, the Australian Gold Rush began in New South Wales, Australia.

Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

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On February 12, 1851, a prospector discovered flecks of gold in a waterhole near Bathurst, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Soon, even more gold was discovered in what would become the neighboring state of Victoria. This began the Australian Gold Rush, which had a profound impact on the country’s national identity . Within a year, more than 500,000 people (nicknamed “diggers”) rushed to the gold fields of Australia. Most of these immigrants were British, but many prospectors from the United States , Germany, Poland, and China also settled in NSW and Victoria. Even more immigrants arrived from other parts of Australia. Wages in the region doubled, but it was still difficult to find workers as people abandoned their stable jobs to seek their fortune in the gold fields . These “diggers” forged a strong, unified identity independent of colonial British authority . This concept of “mateship . . . [has] been central to the way [Australian] history has been told,” according to the Australian government.

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Gold rushes

1851: Gold rushes in New South Wales and Victoria begin

‘Deep Sinking’, Bakery Hill, Ballarat, 1853 , ST Gill. National Museum of Australia

The discovery of gold in the 1850s started a series of rushes that transformed the Australian colonies.

The first discoveries of payable gold were at Ophir in New South Wales and then at Ballarat and Bendigo Creek in Victoria.

In 1851 gold-seekers from around the world began pouring into the colonies, changing the course of Australian history.

The gold rushes greatly expanded Australia’s population, boosted its economy, and led to the emergence of a new national identity.

Geelong Advertiser , 14 October 1851:

There are, we should say, about a thousand cradles at work, within a mile of the Golden Point, at Ballarat. There are about fifty near the Black Hill, about a mile and a half distant, and at the Brown Hill Diggings there are about three or four hundred more; to say nothing of hundreds on the ground not yet set at work. Allowing five for each cradle, the population within a radius of five miles must be a population of about seven thousand men.

The gold rush in live-sketch animation, as told by historian David Hunt

Gold mining cradle. National Museum of Australia

Discovery of gold in Australia

There had been multiple gold finds in New South Wales (Bathurst and Monaro), Tasmania and what would become Victoria prior to the ‘official’ discovery of the precious metal by Edward Hargraves near Orange in 1851.

In 1841 Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, one of the earliest geologists in the colony, came across particles of gold near Hartley in the Blue Mountains.

In 1844 he mentioned it to Governor Gipps who reportedly said: ‘Put it away Mr Clarke or we shall all have our throats cut’.

Gipps feared that mutiny would result if the people of New South Wales, the majority of whom were convicts or ex-convicts, found that gold was within easy reach.

In 1848 mineralogist William Tipple Smith found gold near Bathurst and the following year revealed the find to the NSW Colonial Secretary Edward Thomson. Research by one of Smith's relatives, Lynette Silver, established that Smith’s find was the first discovery of payable gold. However, he was denied the recognition and monetary reward, which was ultimately claimed by Edward Hargraves.

The government’s attitude to gold discoveries changed in 1848 with news of the California gold rush. The promise of fortunes to be had across the Pacific led thousands of men to leave the colony, creating labour shortages and economic depression.

Governor Charles FitzRoy had heard rumours of the gold to be found in New South Wales and believed a mineral discovery in the colony could reverse the economic downturn.

He convinced the British Government in 1849 to appoint a government geologist, Samuel Stutchbury, and offered a reward to anyone who found a commercially viable amount of gold.

'Prospectors' by ST Gill. National Museum of Australia

Mr E.H. Hargraves, the Gold Discoverer of Australia, Feb 12th 1851 Returning the Salute of the Gold Miners , TT Balcombe, 1875. State Library of New South Wales

Edward Hargraves

Edward Hargraves was a jack of all trades: farmer, storekeeper, publican, pearl-sheller and sailor. In 1849 he sailed for the Californian gold rush.

He failed to find his fortune but was struck by the topographical and geological similarities between California and the interior of New South Wales.

In January 1851 he returned to the colony and immediately headed inland, convinced he would find gold and, more importantly, claim the government reward.

New South Wales gold rush

Near Bathurst, Hargraves enlisted the support of John Lister and brothers William and James Tom. Within weeks they had discovered a small amount of gold at a site Hargraves named Ophir, after a port city of great wealth mentioned in the Old Testament.

Hargraves returned to Sydney in March 1851 and presented his samples to the government. Samuel Stutchbury was sent to confirm the strike, which he did.

Hargraves was eventually awarded the £10,000 prize, which he refused to share with Lister or the Tom brothers.

News of the find was promptly published in the Sydney Morning Herald and by 15 May 1851, 300 diggers had arrived in Ophir. The rush was on.

Gold Washing. Fitzroy Bar, Ophir Diggings, 1851 , George Angas. National Museum of Australia

Gold Washing. Fitzroy Bar, Ophir Diggings, 1851 by George Angas

Victorian gold rush

In the newly established colony of Victoria, men began to flood north to the New South Wales goldfields. The Victorian Government responded with the offer of a reward of £200 to anyone finding gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. Within six months, gold was discovered in Clunes, and then Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo.

The Victorian rush would dwarf the finds in New South Wales, accounting for more than a third of the world’s gold production in the 1850s.

‘Race to the gold diggings of Australia’ board game, about 1855. National Museum of Australia

Migration boom

The discovery of gold started a series of rushes that transformed the other Australian colonies. Significant deposits were discovered in Tasmania from 1852, in Queensland from 1857 and in the Northern Territory from 1871.

In the 1890s a new series of rushes were triggered by the discovery of huge gold fields at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in Western Australia.

Between 1851 and 1871 the Australian population quadrupled from 430,000 people to 1.7 million as migrants from across the world arrived in search of gold.

The largest non-European group of miners were Chinese, most of whom were bonded labourers who suffered discrimination from the government and fellow diggers. It’s estimated that by 1855 there were 20,000 Chinese on the Victorian diggings.

Among the larger group of migrants were many men and women bringing new political ideas to the young colonies.

Initially, the colonial establishment resisted such progressive thinking as a threat to their authority and the resulting tensions culminated in the Eureka Stockade . But a groundswell of public opinion brought about a series of world-leading social experiments, such as the secret ballot , the eight-hour day and the formation of the Labor Party .

Australia’s huge reserves of gold made the country a destination for people from around the globe and by the end of the 19th century the rushes had helped create a wealthy, liberal society with a standard of living that was the envy of the world.

Curator Stephen Munro on the significance of the Bealiba gold nugget found near Bendigo.

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William Tipple Smith recognised by the New South Wales Government

Robyn Annear, Nothing but Gold: The Diggers of 1852 , Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999.

Weston Bate, Victorian Gold Rushes , McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Fitzroy, Victoria, 1988.

David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s , Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, USA, 1994.

Geoffrey Serle,  Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 , Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, 1977.

Lynette Silver, A fool's gold?: William Tipple Smith's challenge to the Hargraves myth , Jacaranda, Milton, Queensland, 1986.

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Australian gold rushes

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Introduction

The discovery of gold in New South Wales in 1851 began the first of a series of gold rushes in colonial Australia . The gold rushes transformed the colonies and shaped Australia’s population and society. The lure of gold attracted miners, known as diggers, from all over the world. Tens of thousands of people left their homes and jobs to work long hours in overcrowded and dangerous working conditions. On the Australian goldfields, blacksmiths, butchers, farmers, and ex-convicts worked alongside merchants, doctors, lawyers, and priests. Some struck it rich. Most did not. But all contributed to a defining era of Australian history.

Gold Discoveries

Gold had been found at several sites in Australia prior to 1851, mainly in New South Wales . Colonial governors had kept the discoveries quiet. New South Wales had been founded as a penal settlement , and the population still consisted mainly of convicts and ex-convicts. The government feared that news of a gold discovery would lead to an increase in crime or even a convict uprising. Officials were also concerned about the potential economic effects of gold discoveries. They worried that a gold rush would reduce the workforce and hurt the pastoral industry, which was already struggling after a series of poor seasons. Agricultural products were the colony’s major exports, and as a result the economy was already suffering.

New South Wales

In the 1840s a prominent British geologist named Roderick Murchison predicted that New South Wales had economically significant deposits of gold. His theory soon proved correct. The earliest known payable gold found in Australia was discovered in New South Wales in 1847 by William Tipple Smith, a mineralogist who had read about Murchison’s predictions. Smith found gold in the western slopes of the Blue Mountains near the town of Bathurst. He sent a gold sample to Murchison, who notified the colonial government of the find in 1848. However, government officials declined to take action. That year Smith found more gold in the Bathurst region. In early 1849 he offered to tell the government where he had found the gold if officials would give him a reward to help pay the costs of his expedition. The officials were still not enthusiastic about gold finds, though, and they would not pay him. Smith was largely forgotten to history until the late 20th century, when a historian found letters documenting his gold discoveries.

Meanwhile, the New South Wales government changed its attitude toward gold prospecting after thousands of Australians left the colony for the California gold rush of 1849. The exodus caused labor shortages and an economic downturn. Hoping to revive the economy, the government offered a reward for the discovery of commercial quantities of gold in the colony.

With the government having ignored Smith’s discovery, Edward Hammond Hargraves was for many years widely credited as the first person to find payable gold in Australia. He had come to New South Wales from England in 1832. In 1849 he traveled to the United States to try his luck in the California gold rush. Hargraves found no gold, but he did come away with some valuable information. He noticed similarities in the geography of California’s goldfields and the landscape near Bathurst.

Upon returning to Australia, Hargraves was determined to find gold in the Bathurst region. He assembled a team of miners consisting of John Lister and three brothers, William, James, and Henry Tom. Hargraves taught the men panning, the method of collecting gold that he had learned in California. He also showed them how to build a rocker, or cradle, which was a device that sped up the process of separating gold from other minerals. On February 12, 1851, Hargraves discovered flecks of gold in Lewis Ponds Creek. His assistants, Lister and the Tom brothers, made larger finds in the form of gold nuggets. Hargraves bought the nuggets and, in a successful effort to keep the whole government reward, claimed to have found them himself. He named the area Ophir, after the biblical city of gold. In 1890 New South Wales would finally acknowledge that Lister and the Tom brothers were the real discoverers of the gold.

Meanwhile, in 1851 an account of the discovery was published in the Sydney Morning Herald , and the news quickly spread worldwide. The first Australian gold rush was underway. Within a week more than 400 people had arrived to dig in the area, but that was just the beginning. In the year following the Bathurst discovery, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia to seek their fortunes on the goldfields.

When the New South Wales gold rush began, the newly formed colony of Victoria experienced an economic slump. Thousands of workers deserted farms and industries to head north to the Bathurst goldfields. In response, the Victorian government formed a Gold Discovery Committee. It offered a reward to anyone who found gold within 200 miles (320 kilometers) of Melbourne .

The first official discovery was credited to James Esmond, who found gold near the town of Clunes in June 1851. Aboriginal Australians and other white settlers had previously found gold in the region. However, it was Esmond’s find that sparked the Victorian gold rush. Two months later, in August 1851, James Regan and John Dunlop discovered gold in Ballarat, at Poverty Point. Ballarat went on to become the most productive alluvial goldfield in the world at that time. (Alluvial gold refers to gold found in riverbeds, streambeds, and floodplains.) Other discoveries followed at Castlemaine, Daylesford, Creswick, Maryborough, Bendigo, and McIvor. Victoria’s deposits were so rich that the colony accounted for more than one-third of the world’s gold production during the 1850s.

Two discoveries in particular illustrate the extraordinary wealth of Victoria’s goldfields. On June 9, 1858, a group of miners working at Bakery Hill in Ballarat unearthed what at the time was the largest single piece of gold ever found. It weighed approximately 152 pounds (69 kilograms) and was named the “Welcome” nugget. Then, just over a decade later, this record was broken. On February 5, 1869, miners found the “Welcome Stranger” nugget near the town of Dunolly, north of Ballarat. It remains the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, weighing about 159 pounds (72 kilograms).

Queensland was the next colony to join the gold frenzy. In the mid-1850s, when the land was still part of New South Wales, the colonial government encouraged the search for gold on the northern frontier. It hoped that a discovery would attract European settlers from the south. Captain Maurice O’Connell, the leader of a government settlement at Gladstone, reported “very promising prospects of gold” in 1857. But it was a discovery made a year later that sparked the first Queensland gold rush. A prospector named Chapple found gold at Canoona, near Rockhampton, in July or August 1858. By the end of the year, 15,000 hopeful miners had arrived. The Canoona deposits were small, however, and most of the prospectors were disappointed.

The first major find in Queensland came almost a decade later. In 1867 James Nash discovered gold in the small agricultural town of Gympie, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Brisbane . This was the start of the Gympie gold rush. Within months of Nash’s discovery, 25,000 people came to the area to try their luck. The influx of miners gave a much-needed boost to the struggling economy of the young colony.

Later discoveries sparked other gold rushes in Queensland. In late 1871 an Aboriginal boy, Jupiter Mosman, found gold in a stream in the northeast. The town of Charters Towers was founded at the site, and miners flooded in. The population reached a peak of 30,000 during the gold rush of the 1870s and ’80s. Farther north, a find along the Palmer River pulled miners to the frontier in the mid-1870s. Then, in 1882, Edwin and Thomas Morgan made one of Australia’s most important gold strikes at a site known as Ironstone Mountain, near Rockhampton. The brothers renamed the mountain Mount Morgan after themselves. Mount Morgan, the so-called “mountain of gold,” would become one of Queensland’s richest and longest surviving gold mines. Work would continue at the site until 1981.

Western Australia

The development of Western Australia lagged behind that of the eastern colonies for most of the 19th century, in part because no minerals were found. Its fortunes began to change when gold was discovered in the 1880s. A short-lived rush to the Kimberley district in 1886 was followed by more promising finds in the Pilbara and Yilgarn districts in 1887–88. The next important discovery was made along the Murchison River in 1891.

The Murchison gold rush was soon followed by Western Australia’s two most celebrated finds. In 1892 Arthur Bayley and William Ford struck gold in the south at a site called Fly Flat, which was soon renamed Coolgardie. Then, in 1893, a prospector named Paddy Hannan, working with Tom Flanagan and Daniel Shea, discovered gold at a site 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Coolgardie. The main deposit of deep rich ores came to be known as the Golden Mile reef, and the area developed as Hannan’s Find. The town that grew there was named Kalgoorlie.

The goldfields of Western Australia posed great challenges for diggers. The harsh desert landscape heightened the risk of disease, dehydration, and heatstroke, and many miners died. Nevertheless, the western gold discoveries brought a flood of migrants from the eastern colonies. With New South Wales and Victoria in the midst of an economic depression, many thousands eagerly crossed the continent in search of riches. During the 1890s the population of Western Australia quadrupled, reaching nearly 180,000 in 1900.

Other Discoveries

Gold was also discovered at other sites in Australia. South Australia experienced its first gold rush after a discovery at Echunga in 1852. In the Northern Territory , workers digging during construction of the Overland Telegraph line in 1871 found traces of gold in the stony hills around Pine Creek, south of Darwin. Gold prospectors began arriving through Port Darwin in 1872. In Tasmania , gold finds at a number of sites, including Lefroy in 1869, drew hopeful diggers. However, the quantities of gold unearthed at these sites were much smaller than those in the eastern states and Western Australia, so the gold rushes were smaller as well.

Immigration Boom

The gold rushes had an immense impact on Australia’s population. News of the 1851 discoveries attracted people from countries around the world. Over just two decades, immigration quadrupled Australia’s population, from 438,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. As the population expanded, it also began to diversify. Other than the Aboriginal peoples, the colonial population before the gold rushes consisted almost entirely of people from the British Isles. Although the majority of the new immigrants also came from the United Kingdom, they were joined by prospectors from the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and other countries. The gold rush era was also the first time that Australia experienced a significant influx of Chinese immigrants. By 1861 more than 38,000 Chinese lived in Australia, making up more than 3 percent of the population. More than 12,000 Chinese arrived in the year 1856 alone.

Chinese prospectors experienced much hardship and mistreatment on the Australian goldfields. Most were under contract to Chinese and foreign businessmen. In exchange for their passage to Australia, they had to work until they paid off their debt and could then return to China. European and American diggers were suspicious of the Chinese, with their different language, clothes, food, religious practices, and customs. Moreover, they resented the success of the Chinese and their unique mining methods. The Chinese were particularly hardworking and efficient. Unlike European and American miners, who worked alone or in small groups, the Chinese worked together in teams of 30 to 100 men. They preferred to rework claims that had been abandoned by other miners rather than exploring new ground. In this way, they often found gold that others had overlooked.

Strong anti-Chinese sentiment arose on the goldfields, and many racially fueled riots erupted. Some of the most violent riots took place at Lambing Flat (now known as Young) in New South Wales in 1860–61. In the last of these disturbances, on June 30, 1861, some 3,000 European and American miners attacked a Chinese camp. They beat the Chinese, burned their tents, and cut off their queues (traditional long hair braids). In response to the riots, the New South Wales government passed the Chinese Immigration Act to greatly reduce the number of Chinese migrating to the colony. Restrictions on Chinese immigration were also introduced in Victoria (1855), South Australia (1857), Queensland (1877), and Western Australia (1886). ( See also immigration to Australia .)

Life on the Goldfields

Living conditions on the goldfields were harsh for everyone—diggers, women, and children. To reach the goldfields, prospectors usually had to travel long distances on foot, carrying all their possessions, because no roads had been built and horse transportation was too expensive. Once they arrived, they had to set up tents for shelter. Early tents were very simple, usually consisting of a piece of canvas draped over a tree branch. They were not secure, and on many occasions miners had their belongings stolen. The tents also provided little protection from snakes and insects. These conditions are one reason why men usually traveled to the goldfields alone in the early years of a gold rush. Their families would join them later, once diggers had made their dwellings more livable.

If a miner was able to establish a profitable claim, he would typically build a bark hut. Some diggers who decided to stay for a long time or who had brought their families with them built more permanent homes. They constructed huts using wooden slabs, mud bricks, or wattle and daub—a frame of poles and woven branches plastered with mud or clay. These homes were small and cramped, with only one or two rooms for the whole family. The children usually slept together in one bed and the parents in another. A fireplace was used for cooking and for providing heat in winter. Furniture was sparse and handmade using wood and any other materials on hand, such as recycled boxes. Only wealthy miners could afford more elaborate furnishings. On the more populated and profitable goldfields, houses, hotels, and shops were established.

Many people became disillusioned with life on the goldfields. Most foods were in short supply and therefore very expensive. The typical digger’s diet was restricted and repetitive, consisting mostly of meat and damper, a type of bread made with flour, baking powder, water, and salt. Meat was readily available from local pastoralists with herds of sheep and cattle. The staple meat, especially in the early gold rush days, was mutton (sheep). Because there was no refrigeration, meat had to be eaten within a short time. Sometimes meat was preserved by rubbing salt over it. Bacon, ham, butter, and cheese were luxury items that only successful miners could afford.

Clean drinking water was hard to find. Rivers and creeks were polluted by the mining process and, in the absence of a sanitation system, by human waste. Water had to be boiled to make it safe to drink. Diggers drank black tea with most meals. They prepared it by boiling water over a campfire in a tin pot called a billy. They drank it from a tin mug called a pannikin.

In the early gold rush years, miners were not permitted to plant vegetable gardens. This policy was meant to discourage miners from establishing permanent homes. In 1853, however, the Victorian government allowed vegetable gardens on the goldfields. Chinese immigrants played a vital role in supplying fresh vegetables, and the diggers came to rely on this produce. Most of the Chinese prospectors had come from southern China, where they had worked as farmers. As the gold supply started to decline, many Chinese turned to market gardening, putting their knowledge and skills to work. They settled near towns and cities and became successful business owners. Many profited more from providing fresh food for the growing settlements than from searching for dwindling gold deposits.

The poor living conditions on the goldfields made it difficult to stay healthy. Infectious diseases spread easily through the settlements. Many people became ill with typhoid fever , cholera , or dysentery, all of which are caused by ingesting contaminated water or food. Diets lacking in fresh fruits and vegetables led to vitamin C deficiencies and the disease called scurvy. Other common diseases included influenza , pneumonia , scarlet fever , and diphtheria . Medical treatment was hard to find on the goldfields, and it was too expensive for most miners. Those who could not afford a doctor often turned to apothecaries. Apothecaries made medicines using plants and other local ingredients. They also provided medical advice, performed surgery, and delivered babies.

Mining was a dangerous pursuit, and accidents were common. Diggers were trapped by collapsing mine shafts and injured by machinery. They were also exposed to poisonous gases in mine tunnels. Many mining accidents were deadly. In the town of Ballarat alone, one miner was killed in an accident on average every week in 1859.

Men were always a majority on the goldfields, but the number of women grew as the years went on. The Ballarat goldfields, for example, had 4,023 women living alongside 12,660 men in 1854. By 1861 the proportion of women had increased significantly, with 9,135 women compared to 12,726 men. Most of the women on the goldfields were wives who joined their husbands a few years after a rush began, but a small number were single.

Women played an important role on the goldfields in many ways. A few dug for gold, either with their husbands or on their own. Some made clothes, hats, or shoes. Others set up shops or ran hotels. Most women, however, worked in the home, performing domestic duties and raising children. Some chores, such as cooking meals and washing dishes, were done every day. Others were scheduled for certain days of the week. The most difficult day was washing day. After miners spent all day digging in mud or clay, their clothes were very dirty. All clothes and linen had to be washed by hand by soaking each item in soapy water and scrubbing it against a washboard to get the dirt out. Other days were set aside for cleaning, sewing and mending, cooking and baking, and ironing, which was done with an iron heated over a fire. All bread, jams, soap, and candles had to be made by hand. If a family owned a cow, the women milked it and made butter.

Life could be both difficult and exciting for children during the gold rushes. Children were expected to help with many household chores. They fetched water from the well or river, gathered firewood, fed the horses, washed clothes, and looked after younger siblings. Older children often helped on the goldfields. They shoveled rock and gravel, panned for gold, and worked the rocker.

Children were not required to go to school at the time of the gold rushes. Parents who chose to send their children to school had to pay, and some families could not afford the fees. In addition, parents often chose to keep their children out of school so they would have more time to help with chores and prospecting. Some parents sent their sons to school but not their daughters. They thought it was more important for boys to get an education because girls could learn what they needed to know—how to knit, sew, cook, clean, and iron—at home with their mothers. The first classes were held in tents that the teacher could take down and move when miners moved from one goldfield to another. Later, religious groups held classes in churches. Eventually the government built schools in the larger settlements.

When children were not helping at home or going to school, they were expected to amuse themselves with whatever was around. They played marbles , jacks , and quoits , a game in which rings made of rope are thrown over a peg. They played jacks using knucklebones, the small bones found in the joints of sheep and cows. Other common toys included wooden soldiers, rag dolls, jump ropes, wooden blocks, and spinning tops.

Children, along with the rest of the family, took a bath once a week. The water was heated in a kettle over the fire or on a stove and poured into a tin tub. One family member at a time sat in the tub to wash themselves.

Children on the goldfields were at the greatest risk from infectious diseases because of their less developed immune systems. Although a vaccine was available to protect against smallpox, the lack of other vaccines left children vulnerable to deadly illnesses. With poor nutrition, sanitation, and medical supplies, many babies and young children died.

Law and Order

Only a small number of the many thousands of hopeful diggers were lucky enough to find gold. As dreams of riches faded, disappointment and frustration grew. Some diggers resorted to crime. They might steal another’s belongings or his gold. Claim jumping—taking someone else’s claim—was common, and disputes often turned violent. Many diggers armed themselves to protect themselves and their claims.

The gold rushes attracted some men who planned to make a fortune without digging for gold at all. Bandits known as bushrangers attacked and robbed miners traveling between goldfields. Because there were no banks on the goldfields, diggers had to carry their gold with them as they moved from place to place. As they moved through the isolated bush, they were easy targets for thieves.

Without police, judges, or other authorities to keep order, the first miners had to work out a system of law and order for themselves. Groups of miners established courts to put accused criminals on trial and to hand out punishments to those found guilty. Soon this makeshift system was supplemented by efforts of the colonial governments. Officials in New South Wales and Victoria appointed a gold commissioner to oversee each goldfield. The commissioners were assisted by troopers (mounted police) and foot police, who were known by the miners as “joes” or “traps.”

The colonial governments had a hard time finding police because many officers, like thousands of others, had left their jobs to join the gold seekers. In the early gold rush years they relied on the Native Police, a force made up Aboriginal men. The Native Police were effective because their close knowledge of the land helped them to track bushrangers and other criminals. To supplement this force, however, governments had little choice but to accept anyone who was willing to join the police. This meant that the force included ex-convicts, ex-wardens, and many young, inexperienced recruits.

The gold commissioners regulated the goldfields and resolved disputes between miners. They also offered a service designed to move gold securely from the fields to cities for safekeeping. For a fee, diggers could turn over their gold and have it transported on heavily guarded coaches. The “gold escorts” carried thousands of pounds of gold from remote goldfields to Sydney, Melbourne, and other cities each week.

The gold escorts provided some security, but they could not prevent bushranger attacks. Bushrangers typically had excellent knowledge of the land and were skilled at riding horses and using guns. Their attacks became more frequent as the quantities of gold increased. The most famous gold escort robbery took place in New South Wales on June 15, 1862. Frank Gardiner and his gang, which included Ben Hall and John Gilbert, held up a coach at Eugowra as it was traveling from Forbes to Orange. The bushrangers escaped with £14,000 in gold and banknotes, which was an enormous sum. Gardiner was arrested two years later and spent 10 years in prison for the Eugowra robbery. Other famous bushrangers of the gold rush era included Andrew George Scott (known as “Captain Moonlite”), Frederick Ward (“Captain Thunderbolt”), the Clarke brothers, and Ned Kelly .

To cover the costs of maintaining law and order on the goldfields, the governments of New South Wales and Victoria introduced a license system. Every miner had to pay a high fee—30 shillings a month—for a license, even if they did not find gold. The license had to be carried at all times, and a miner who failed to show one could be fined or arrested. The police charged with enforcing the license system were notorious for corruption and for their brutal methods. Miners also resented that they could not vote and that they had no representatives in the government. For all these reasons, miners reacted to the license requirement with considerable anger.

Opposition to the license system reached its height at Ballarat in 1854, in what became known as the Eureka Stockade or the Eureka Rebellion. Diggers formed the Ballarat Reform League and petitioned the government for change. When their demands were refused, they formed military companies, marched to the Eureka goldfield, and built a stockade. On December 3, 1854, police and military troops attacked the stockade and defeated the diggers, killing more than 20 of them. In the aftermath of the rebellion, however, the government met most of the diggers’ demands. The Victorian government replaced the license requirement with a much fairer system in which miners paid a tax on gold they found instead of paying whether they found gold or not. Diggers were also given the right to vote and representation in the Victorian legislature. The Eureka Stockade proved to be a defining moment in the development of Australian democracy.

The gold rushes of the 19th century had profound social, political, and economic effects on Australia. The immigration boom led to a dramatic increase in population and began to diversify the colonies’ predominantly British society. Some immigrants who came up empty in the gold rush went on to become prominent in business, law, or politics. The gold rushes spurred the exploration and settlement of remote lands, pushing the frontier in Queensland and Western Australia in particular.

The economic boost brought on by the gold discoveries was crucial in the modernization of colonial Australia. During the 1850s the colonies accounted for more than 40 percent of the world’s gold production. This rapid rise catapulted Australia onto the international stage and helped create a wealthy society with probably the highest standard of living in the world at the time. Gold profits were used to establish towns and to transform existing cities with new banks, stores, hotels, and other businesses. The flood of miners and money into Victoria made Melbourne a boomtown and the continent’s largest city. Rural industries expanded as well, as pastoralists increased production of meat and hides to meet the demand of growing cities. The gold rush era also saw large investments in transportation, with the construction of roads, railways, and bridges to move people to and from goldfields and cities.

The impact on the political development of Australia was long lasting. The Eureka Stockade was a catalyst for change, and people started to demand democratic reforms. This movement was also encouraged by new immigrants who brought with them ideas of democracy and equality from Europe and the United States. The calls for reform began to yield results in 1856, when South Australia gave all adult males the right to vote and South Australia and Victoria introduced the secret ballot.

Not all Australians shared equally in the progress of the gold rush era, however. The anti-Chinese sentiment that took root on the goldfields in the 1850s continued to build as new Chinese businesses and communities thrived. European colonists resented what they perceived as economic competition. Their anger would eventually be embodied in the White Australia Policy of 1901, which severely limited Chinese immigration to Australia for more than 50 years.

Some Aboriginal Australians found economic opportunities during the gold rushes. They sold food and clothes to the diggers, and some found their own gold and used it for trade. Aboriginal Australians also played a valuable role as guides and trackers for the Europeans who knew nothing of the land. In the end, however, the gold rushes mostly just added to the challenges that Aboriginal Australians had been facing since European colonization began. The miners invaded their lands, caused great environmental damage, and generally disrupted traditional Aboriginal ways of life.

Before the 1850s, Australia was a remote, little-known colony populated mainly by British convicts. But within months of the discovery of gold in 1851, Australia had an international reputation. The changes brought about by the first gold rushes transformed Australia and set its course of development for decades to come. Just 50 years after the fateful find at Bathurst, the British colonies would unite to become the independent Commonwealth of Australia.

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History Hit Story of England: Making of a Nation

10 Facts About the Australian Gold Rush

Peta Stamper

26 jan 2022.

On 12 February 1851, a prospector discovered small fragments of gold in a waterhole near Bathurst in New South Wales, Australia. This discovery opened the floodgates to migration and enterprise which soon spread across the continent, from Victoria and News South Wales to Tasmania, Queensland and beyond.

‘Gold fever’ seemed to have infected the world and brought prospectors from Europe, America and Asia to Australia. Alongside gold, what many of them found was a new sense of identity that challenged British colonial society and changed the course of Australian history.

Here are 10 facts about the Australian gold rush.

1. Edward Hargraves was hailed as the ‘Gold Discoverer of Australia’

Hargraves had left Britain aged 14 to make a life for himself in Australia . A jack of all trades, he worked as a farmer, storekeeper, pearl- and tortoise-sheller and sailor.

In July 1849, Hargraves ventured to America to take part in the Californian gold rush where he gained valuable knowledge in how to prospect. Although he did not make his fortune in California, Hargraves returned to Bathurst in January 1851 determined to put his new skills to good use.

2. The first gold discovery was made on 12 February 1851

Hargraves was working along Lewis Pond Creek near Bathurst in February 1851 when his instincts told him gold was close by. He filled a pan with gravelly soil and drained it into the water when he saw a glimmer. Within the dirt lay small flecks of gold.

Hargraves sped to Sydney in March 1851 to present soil samples to the government who confirmed he had indeed struck gold. He was rewarded with £10,000 which he refused to split with his companions John Lister and the Tom Brothers.

Painting of Edward Hargraves returning the salute of the gold miners, 1851. By Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe

Image Credit: State Library of New South Wales / Public Domain

3. The gold discovery was publicly announced on 14 May 1851

The confirmation of Hargraves’ discovery, announced in the Sydney Morning Herald , began New South Wales’ gold rush, the first in Australia. Yet gold was already flowing from Bathurst to Sydney before the Herald ‘s announcement.

By 15 May, 300 diggers were already on site and ready to mine. The rush had begun.

4. Gold was found in Australia before 1851

Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, also a geologist, found gold in the soil of the Blue Mountains in 1841. However, his discovery was quickly hushed by colonial Governor Gipps, who reportedly told him, “put it away Mr Clarke or we shall all have our throats cut”.

5. The Victorian gold rush dwarfed the rush in New South Wales

The colony of Victoria, founded in July 1851, began haemorrhaging inhabitants as people flocked to neighbouring New South Wales in search of gold. Therefore, Victoria’s government offered £200 to anyone who found gold 200 miles within Melbourne.

Before the end of the year, impressive gold deposits had been found in Castlemaine, Buninyong, Ballarat and Bendigo, overtaking the goldfields of New South Wales. By the end of the decade, Victoria was responsible for over a third of the world’s gold findings.

6. Yet the biggest single mass of gold was found in New South Wales

Weighing in at 92.5kg of gold stuck within quartz and rock, the enormous ‘Holtermann Nugget’ was discovered in the Star of Hope mine by Bernhardt Otto Holtermann on 19 October 1872.

The nugget made Holtermann a very rich man once it had been melted down. Today, the value of the gold would be worth 5.2 million Australian dollars.

A photograph of Holtermann and his giant gold nugget. The two were in fact photographed separately before the images were superimposed onto one another.

Image Credit: American & Australasian Photographic Company / Public domain

7. The gold rush brought an influx of migrants to Australia

Some 500,000 ‘diggers’ flocked to Australia from far and wide in search of treasure. Many prospectors came from within Australia, while others travelled from Britain, the United States, China, Poland and Germany.

Between 1851 and 1871, the Australian population exploded from 430,000 people to 1.7 million, all headed ‘off to the diggings’.

8. You had to pay to be a miner

The influx of people meant limited finances for governmental services and the colonial budget was struggling. To discourage the tidal wave of newcomers, the governors of New South Wales and Victoria imposed a 30 shilling a month licence fee on miners – a pretty substantial sum.

By 1852, the surface gold had become ever harder to find and the fee became a point of tension between the miners and government.

9. New ideas about society led to conflict with the British colonial state

Miners from the town of Ballarat, Victoria, began to disagree with the way the colonial government administered the goldfields. In November 1854, they decided to protest and built a stockade at the Eureka diggings.

On Sunday 3 December, government troops attacked the lightly guarded stockade. During the assault, 22 prospectors and 6 soldiers were killed.

Although the colonial government had resisted the change in political attitudes, public opinion had shifted. Australia would go on to pioneer the secret ballot and the 8-hour working day, both key to building Australia’s representational structures.

10. The Australian Gold Rush had a profound impact on the country’s national identity

As the government had feared, exemplified at the Eureka Stockade, the gold ‘diggers’ forged a strong identity separate to colonial British authority. This identity was centred around the principle of ‘mateship’ – a bond of loyalty, equality and solidarity, particularly among men.

Mateship has become an enduring part of Australian identity, so much so that it has even been suggested the term be included within Australia’s constitution.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware this website contains images, voices and names of people who have died.

‘A thousand cradles at work’

1851: Gold rushes in New South Wales and Victoria begin

Colonial Australia

Learning area

Use the following additional activities and discussion questions to encourage students (in small groups or as a whole class) to think more deeply about this defining moment.

Questions for discussion

1. Take a look at the Defining Moments: Gold rush live-sketch animation as told by historian David Hunt.

(a) Does the animation support what you have found out about the gold rushes in this summary?

(b) Was there any additional information that you found interesting? If so, what was it?

(c) At the end of the video David Hunt says, ‘but who says history is fair’. Why did he say this, and do you agree with him?

Gold rush live-sketch animation

2. Do you agree with the National Museum of Australia that the start of the gold rushes in Australia is a defining moment in Australian history? Explain your answer.

Image activities

1. Look carefully at all the images for this defining moment. Tell this story in pictures by placing them in whatever order you think works best. Write a short caption under each image.

2. Which 3 images do you think are the most important for telling this story? Why?

3. If you could pick only one image to represent this story, which one would you choose? Why?

Finding out more

1. What else would you like to know about this defining moment? Write a list of questions and then share these with your classmates. As a group, create a final list of 3 questions and conduct some research to find the answers.

In a snapshot

When gold was discovered in Australia in the 1850s it brought gold-seekers from around the world to the colonies. The first big discoveries of gold were at Ophir in New South Wales, and then at Ballarat and Bendigo Creek in Victoria. The gold rushes led to growth in Australia’s population and economy , as well as new ideas about how Australia should be organised and governed.

Gold Washing. Fitzroy Bar, Ophir Diggings, 1851 , by George Angas

National Museum of Australia

Can you find out?

1. How did the gold rush begin in Australia?

2. Who was Edward Hargraves and what role did he play in Australia’s gold rushes?

3. Why were the gold finds in Victoria so important, and what were the biggest changes brought by the discovery of gold?

When was gold discovered in Australia?

There were multiple gold finds in New South Wales, Tasmania and what would become Victoria before the 1850s. Governor George Gipps worried that if these discoveries were made public the people of New South Wales would mutiny .

In 1848 the California gold rush began in the United States of America. Many men left Australia hoping to find their fortune in California. This led to a shortage of workers and economic depression in Australia. The colonial governments became interested in finding gold so they could attract and keep people in Australia.

In 1849 the Governor of New South Wales, Charles FitzRoy, convinced the British Government to ask a government geologist , Samuel Stutchbury, to help find gold. FitzRoy also offered a reward for the first person to find a large amount of gold in New South Wales.

In 1848 William Tipple Smith found gold near Bathurst and the next year revealed the find to the Colonial Secretary Edward Thomson. However he was not given the reward, which was later claimed by Edward Hargraves.

Flat-top mining cart

‘Deep Sinking’, Bakery Hill, Ballarat, 1853 , by ST Gill

Gold panning dish

‘Race to the Gold Diggings’ board game

Mr E.H. Hargraves, the Gold Discoverer of Australia, Feb 12th 1851 Returning the Salute of the Gold Miners , TT Balcombe, 1875

Handmade wooden gold mining cradle on rockers

Map of Bendigo

‘Prospecting’, by Samuel Thomas Gill, 1865

State Library of New South Wales FL3222164

State Library of Victoria

‘There are … about a thousand cradles at work … at Ballarat … the population within a radius of five miles must be a population of about seven thousand men.’

Geelong Advertiser , 14 October 1851

Who was Edward Hargraves and why was he important?

In 1849 Edward Hargraves sailed from Sydney for the Californian gold rush, but failed to find his fortune. When he returned to New South Wales in 1851 he immediately headed inland to find gold. Within weeks Hargraves and a few other men had found a small amount of gold at a place he named Ophir. He was given the Governor’s £10,000 prize (which he refused to share). News of the gold find was soon published in the Sydney Morning Herald , and by 15 May 1851, 300 diggers had arrived in Ophir. The gold rush had begun.

The government of the colony of Victoria offered a £200 reward to anyone who could find gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. Within six months gold was discovered in Clunes, and then at Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo. In the 1850s the colony of Victoria produced one-third of the world’s gold. Gold was also discovered in Tasmania (1852), Queensland (from 1857) and the Northern Territory (from 1871). In the 1890s, a new series of gold rushes began when huge gold fields were found at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in Western Australia. 

Research task

Find out how much the Australian population increased as a percentage between 1851 and 1871 because of the discovery of gold.

What was life like on the goldfields?

Life on the goldfields was tough for miners, their families, the police and immigrants from countries like China. There was no guarantee that miners would ever find enough gold to make a profit. Competition over gold, racial tensions and anger over mining licences led to violence on the goldfields. This can be seen in violence between miners and police at the Eureka Stockade Rebellion and the anti-Chinese Lambing Flat Riots.

Do some research to find out how the city of Melbourne was affected by the gold rushes and what it became known as around 1880.

Were there different experiences of goldfields life?

What happened at Ballarat on Wada Wurrung Country during the gold rush? How did First Nations people participate? Hear from Professor Fred Cahir, Sovereign Hill’s Andrew Pearce, Eureka Centre’s Sarah Van de Wouw and a National Library of Australia oral history about a Chinese miner in the Hey History! podcast.

What were the biggest changes brought by the gold discoveries?

The gold rushes helped create a wealthy society with a standard of living that was envied by people across the world. Between 1851 and 1871 the Australian population grew from 430,000 people to 1.7 million as migrants from Britain, China, North America and continental Europe arrived to look for gold. The gold rushes also attracted men and women who had new ideas about how society should be organised and governed. This eventually resulted in world-leading social experiments such as the secret ballot, the eight-hour day and the formation of the Australian Labor Party.

Read a longer version of this Defining Moment on the  National Museum of Australia’s website .

What did you learn?

Related resources, can you strike it rich during the gold rush, 1.5 the discovery of gold: ‘gold fever’, 4.4 1854 blood on the wattle: eureka stockade, gold cradle.

Eureka Stockade

Secret ballot introduced

Australian Gold Rush Lesson

Learning objectives

In this lesson, students will gain an understanding of the role of gold mining had in Australian history. They will develop an awareness of the experiences of people in Australia prior to the 1900s, such as Chinese people on the goldfields in Victoria and New South Wales. Students will have the opportunity to achieve this through choosing their own method of learning, from reading and research options, as well as the chance to engage in extension activities. This lesson includes a self-marking quiz for students to demonstrate their learning.

How would you like to learn?

Option 1: readings.

Step 1: Download a copy of the reading questions worksheet below:

Step 2: Answer the questions by reading the webpage below:

Option 2: Internet research

Download a copy of the research worksheet and use the internet to complete the tables.

Test your learning

Extension activities, resources for subscribers.

What do you need help with?

Download ready-to-use digital learning resources.

Copyright © History Skills 2014-2024.

Contact  via email

Rush for Gold

The “official” discovery of gold in australia in the 1850s started a series of rushes that transformed the country. from across the globe, many people poured into the australian colonies, eager to try their luck..

Revisit early finds and follow the masses of people who chased the yellow metal across the continent. Some historians claim the migrant communities of the goldfields were Australia’s first experience as a multicultural society; although most new arrivals were British, many also came from countries such as the Germany, Poland and China. However, not all cultures were equally welcome, and as time went on, there was increasing hostility and discrimination towards non-Europeans.

First Knowledges

Early finds, gold rush in numbers, to the diggings.

This section was contributed by Deanne Gilson and Tammy Gilson , Wadawurrung Traditional Custodians.

“More than 100,00 years prior to colonisation, the geological land formation of the alluvial goldfields was occupied by the First Peoples of the land, the Wadawurrung , who referred to Ballaarat as ‘a peaceful resting place at home’.

The creator spirit Bundjil made the Country in a way that would benefit all living things; the architecture of the mountains gave form to a rich cultural landscape in harmony with the relationships held between Wadawurrung people and Country. The living nubitj (fresh) waters flow through the countryside, known as the Yaramlok – and later the Yarrowee – River.

With disrespect Wadawurrung were forced away from their homes. Wadawurrung believe that connection to Country has been fractured, however our murrup (spirit) has never been broken.

Prior to the gold rush of 1851, Wadawurrung were known to trade gold with shepherds. Gold was strewn across the country bearing the name of golden soils. Soon followed the discovery of gold and Ballarat was established as a township within the County of Grenville in the newly surveyed Victorian Colony.

Walking tracks once made by Wadawurrung families led early settlers to villages once lived in by Wadawurrung people.

Bundjil the creator spirit brought lore to Wadawurrung people, one being that we only take from Country what we need. The destruction of mining would see the settlers go against this lore and upset the harmony and balance between the land and people.”

First Nations peoples had long quarried white pipe clay for ceremonial purposes. European observers often commented on the presence of;

“...splendid nuggets thickly scattered over the white pipe-clay bottom”.

First Nations peoples were responsible for some of the most important leads of the gold rush. In 1852, prospector Paul Gootch wrote that the rich Eureka diggings of Ballarat had been discovered by an unnamed Wadawurrung man whom Gootch had sent out to search for a horse; “[He] picked up a nugget on the surface. Afterwards I sent out a party to explore who proved that gold was really to be found in abundance.”

Top secret finds

Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, a geologist, came upon gold particles in the Blue Mountains. In 1844, he showed them to New South Wales Governor Gipps, who reportedly said,

“Put it away Mr Clarke or we shall all have our throats cut.”

Gipps feared that chaos and lawlessness would break out if the people of the colony – most of whom were convicts or ex-convicts – knew they had easy access to gold

Very famous “finds”

Englishman Edward Hargraves received support from three others who had already found gold near Bathurst. After his group collected several gold flakes, Hargraves returned to Sydney, and in March 1851, presented the samples to the government.

He was awarded a £10,000 prize and made Commissioner of Crown Lands. A lavish portrait showed him as the “Gold Discoverer of Australia” on top of a mountain.

News of the find promptly appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, and by 15 May 1851, 300 diggers had flocked to the site. The Australian rush had begun in earnest.

Did you know that Charters Towers, one of the richest goldfields in Australia, was discovered by a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy?

As a child, Jupiter was “acquired” – taking First Nations children for servitude was rampant at the time – by Hugh Mosman. Soon afterwards, Jupiter accompanied Mosman and several others to the Cape River diggings. They camped near what is now called Towers Hill where in 1871 Jupiter discovered the gold-bearing quartz of the north Australian reef, the first mine of the Charters Towers goldfield. It made Hugh Mosman rich.

What other untold stories can you find of early gold discoveries in Australia?

The discovery of gold in New South Wales triggered a series of rushes throughout the Australian colonies. People travelled from lead to lead, convinced the next one would make them rich.

NSW versus Victoria

In the newly established colony of Victoria, many left their jobs and families to move to the goldfields in New South Wales. The Victorian Government responded by offering a reward of £200 to anyone discovering gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. Within six months, there were finds in Clunes, and then Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo.

The Victorian gold rush would make the one in New South Wales look small. During the 1850s, Victoria produced more than a third of the world’s gold.

Rushing across the colonies

Major deposits were found in Tasmania from 1852, in Queensland from 1857 and in the Northern Territory from 1871.

In the 1890s, gold fever hit Western Australia with the discovery of huge fields at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie.

Towns and cities quickly sprang up around the diggings. Farming and industry followed to support the mining communities.

Migration boom  

Between 1851 and 1871, the recorded Australian population quadrupled from 430,000 people to 1.7 million as more and more migrants arrived in search of gold.

The largest non-European group were the Chinese. By 1859, approximately one in five men in Victoria was from China.

Who benefited and who did not?

Alongside all the actions taken to dispossess and control the lives of First Nations peoples since invasion, historian Dr Benjamin Mountford points out the impact of the gold rush:

“If you want to engineer an invasion, what better way to do it than to have a gold rush? The influx of thousands of often heavily armed young men, crazy with gold fever, storming into the countryside and tearing up the earth made life almost impossible for many Indigenous communities... The soil was turned over, animals were hunted and waterways were polluted and diverted – all devastating the land. Today, the Dja Dja Wurrung community still refer to the goldfields as “upside down country”.

As the gold ran low, Chinese miners faced growing discrimination from the government and European diggers. These attitudes contributed to the country’s first race-based migration restrictions that would later become the White Australia policy.

A tale of two maps: The map on page 20 of the Powerhouse Museum’s Gold Fever booklet shows where Australia’s major gold discoveries were made between 1851 and 1900.

Compare it to the second map , which attempts to represent all the language, social or nation groups of the First Nations peoples of Australia.

Choose one of the gold towns and identify the Traditional Owners. In what ways do you think they were impacted by the gold rush?

Western Australian laws: From 1886, Western Australia introduced special legislation to ensure that non-British arrivals and First Nations Peoples were excluded from the gold mining industry. You can learn more about these laws here . Who do you think stood to benefit from these laws? Would they be acceptable today?

• Ballarat was considered the world's richest alluvial goldfield during its peak between 1852 and 1853. An estimated 6,000 diggers arrived each week seeking their fortune.
• The gold rush brought migrants from all over the world to Victoria. Over the space of one year, Bendigo’s tent city became a town of 40,000 people.
• The boat journey to Australia took travellers around three months from China and three to four months from Europe. Some historians call the Victorian gold rush a youth movement; in the 1850s, almost half the people on the Australian goldfields were aged between 21 and 35. Most Chinese gold seekers were in their 20s or 30s but many were more than twice as old.
• The Welcome Stranger was the largest gold nugget ever found. It was discovered on 5 February 1869 by Cornish miners John Deason and Richard Oates near Moliagul in Central Victoria. While searching around the roots of a tree they discovered, three centimetres below the surface, a gold nugget weighing 66 kilograms and worth around $4 million based on today’s gold price.
• In some cases, it really was possible to get rich quick. Journalist David Leffman reports that in Palmer, Queensland, one prospector found five kilograms of nuggets worth around $353,990 in just three hours. Another team panned 26.8 kilograms of gold ($1.72 million) in three weeks.

Naarm, 墨尔本的传统之名

Naarm is located on the banks of the birrarung (yarra river) on the unceded land of the wurundjeri and boon wurrung peoples of the kulin nation. when europeans arrived in 1835, it had been a vital gathering place for these first nations peoples for tens of thousands of years:.

“Where the South Melbourne Town Hall stands was once a significant meeting place or Ngargee for the Boon Wurrung people to conduct ceremony. Albert Park Lake was once a wetland as diverse as Kakadu in the Northern Territory.”

- based on Yalukit Willam The River People of Port Phillip by local historian Meyer Eidelson in consultation with the descendants of the Yalukut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung.

In the 15 years before the gold rush, brutal conflicts took place between squatters and Traditional Custodians on their lands. This was part of an intensified effort by squatters to establish the settlement of Melbourne, a process that some historians liken to a military-style occupation. Clare Land describes a “rapid and brutal” process in which “the face of Melbourne changed very dramatically“ and “a lot of Aboriginal people were gotten rid of.” Historians and descendants have only begun to tell the stories of the massacres and resistance of First Nations peoples both here and on other frontiers across Australia.

Frontier Society

Newcomers often observed that Melbourne felt less like an established city and more like a war zone. Ellen Clacy was alarmed by the sound of “revolvers cracking in all directions until daybreak”. It was common for men and women to have several pistols and tomahawks slung in their belts.

Smellbourne  

Other new arrivals pointed out the dust, flies, mud and swamps – and the smell. Slaughterhouses lined the river and factories polluted the air.

The sudden and extreme human interference with the environment meant that rain could transform dirt roads into knee-deep mud. Streets became raging rivers. In summer, people wore veils to keep the dust out of their eyes and noses.

Bursting at the seams

Immigrants leaving Britain in 1852 bought more tickets to Melbourne than anywhere else worldwide. The wharves were jammed with ships, cargo and disembarking arrivals. Though accommodation was expensive, all the lodging in the city was packed, and thousands arrived daily only to find they had nowhere to stay.

Many ended up in the sprawling tent city on the south bank of the Yarra. Others slept on the wharves as they tried to figure out how they would buy all the costly equipment (a tent canvas, a mattress and shovel, gold pans, a wheelbarrow and clean water) they needed. On top of this, there was the problem of how to get to the diggings.

When gold was first discovered in Victoria, there was no transport to the goldfields. Everything had to be carried in wheelbarrows or by horses and bullocks on the 100+ kilometre journey from Melbourne. It could take lost and tired travellers weeks to make it to the diggings.

Whichever way they went, they were at the mercy of the weather. In winter, it was boggy. In summer, it was a dustbowl. In the rain, horses often got bogged up to their bellies in mud. Polish digger Seweryn Korzelinski’s group tried to get their horses to budge but only knew the Polish-language commands.

Most travellers brought too much and the route to the diggings was soon littered with discarded belongings – from trousers to tablecloths to foolishly heavy equipment. After several days of rain, Korzelinski’s group’s mattresses became waterlogged, and they had to dump them with the other rubbish at the side of the track.

Finding the flat, scrubby country hard to read, migrants often relied on First Nations peoples for directions. One remembered, “Aboriginal children along the route would sing out to passing horsemen: ‘Are you off to the diggings?’”

Providing guiding services for money was one of the many innovative ways that First Nations peoples devised to survive and stay on Country in these years of growing dispossession. Especially in the early years these guides often led diggers along traditional trading routes or Song Lines. Other Wadawarrung and Dja Dja Wurrung People built and sold bark canoes or provided ferry services to transport diggers and their gear across the networks of deep rivers and creeks.

Tougher journeys for Chinese travellers

However hard the trek to the goldfields was for the new arrivals from Europe and North America, by 1855 Chinese travellers faced much longer and tougher journeys.

A hefty Victorian tax on ships carrying Chinese migrants meant many arrivals from China had to land and walk all the way from South Australia. For onlookers, the Chinese groups were a memorable sight; walking in a single file of up to 700, they each carried bags or baskets of belongings on a long pole in order to balance the weight.

What became of the objects that travellers disposed of en route to the diggings? This exhibit of Dja Dja Wurrung glass tools made from miners’ discarded glass bottles provides fascinating insight.

Next Chapter

How gold rushes helped make the modern world

David Myers Research Fellow in History, La Trobe University

Associate Professor of Modern US History, University of Oxford

Disclosure statement

Benjamin Wilson Mountford’s gold rush research has been supported by an Allan Martin Award from the Australian Historical Association

Stephen Tuffnell's research has been funded by the British Academy.

La Trobe University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

University of Oxford provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners

This year is the 170th anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history: the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. On January 24, 1848, while inspecting a mill race for his employer John Sutter, James Marshall glimpsed something glimmering in the cold winter water. “Boys,” he announced, brandishing a nugget to his fellow workers, “I believe I have found a gold mine!”

Marshall had pulled the starting trigger on a global rush that set the world in motion. The impact was sudden – and dramatic. In 1848 California’s non-Indian population was around 14,000; it soared to almost 100,000 by the end of 1849, and to 300,000 by the end of 1853. Some of these people now stare back at us enigmatically through daguerreotypes and tintypes. From Mexico and the Hawaiian Islands; from South and Central America; from Australia and New Zealand; from Southeastern China; from Western and Eastern Europe, arrivals made their way to the golden state.

Looking back later, Mark Twain famously described those who rushed for gold as

a driving, vigorous restless population … an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men – not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves…

“The only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together”, Twain reflected , it was “not likely that the world will ever see its like again”.

Arriving at Ballarat in 1895, Twain saw first-hand the incredible economic, political, and social legacies of the Australian gold rushes, which had begun in 1851 and triggered a second global scramble in pursuit of the precious yellow mineral.

Read more: Eureka! X-ray vision can find hidden gold

“The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South Wales three months before,” he observed, “had already started emigrants towards Australia; they had been coming as a stream.” But with the discovery of Victoria’s fabulous gold reserves, which were literally Californian in scale, “they came as a flood”.

Between Sutter’s Mill in January 1848, and the Klondyke (in remote Northwestern Canada) in the late 1890s, the 19th century was regularly subject to such flooding. Across Australasia, Russia, North America, and Southern Africa, 19th century gold discoveries triggered great tidal waves of human, material, and financial movement. New goldfields were inundated by fresh arrivals from around the globe: miners and merchants, bankers and builders, engineers and entrepreneurs, farmers and fossickers, priests and prostitutes, saints and sinners.

As the force of the initial wave began to recede, many drifted back to more settled lives in the lands from which they hailed. Others found themselves marooned, and so put down roots in the golden states. Others still, having managed to ride the momentum of the gold wave further inland, toiled on new mineral fields, new farm and pastoral lands, and built settlements, towns and cities. Others again, little attracted to the idea of settling, caught the backwash out across the ocean – and simply kept rushing.

From 1851, for instance, as the golden tide swept towards NSW and Victoria, some 10,000 fortune seekers left North America and bobbed around in the wash to be deposited in Britain’s Antipodean colonies alongside fellow diggers from all over the world.

Gold and global history

The discovery of the precious metal at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848 was a turning point in global history. The rush for gold redirected the technologies of communication and transportation and accelerated and expanded the reach of the American and British Empires.

Telegraph wires, steamships, and railroads followed in their wake; minor ports became major international metropolises for goods and migrants (such as Melbourne and San Francisco) and interior towns and camps became instant cities (think Johannesburg, Denver and Boise). This development was accompanied by accelerated mobility – of goods, people, credit – and anxieties over the erosion of middle class mores around respectability and domesticity.

Read more: All that glitters: why our obsession with putting gold on food is nothing new

But gold’s new global connections also brought new forms of destruction and exclusion. The human, economic, and cultural waves that swept through the gold regions could be profoundly destructive to Indigenous and other settled communities, and to the natural environment upon which their material, cultural, and social lives depended. Many of the world’s environments are gold rush landscapes, violently transformed by excavation, piles of tailings, and the reconfiguration of rivers.

As early as 1849, Punch magazine depicted the spectacle of the earth being hollowed out by gold mining. In the “jaundice regions of California”, the great London journal satirised: “The crust of the earth is already nearly gone … those who wish to pick up the crumbs must proceed at once to California.” As a result, the world appeared to be tipping off its axis.

In the US and beyond, scholars, museum curators, and many family historians have shown us that despite the overwhelmingly male populations of the gold regions, we cannot understand their history as simply “pale and male”. Chinese miners alone constituted more than 25% of the world’s goldseekers, and they now jostle with white miners alongside women, Indigenous and other minority communities in our understanding of the rushes – just as they did on the diggings themselves.

Rushes in the present

The gold rushes are not mere historic footnotes – they continue to influence the world in which we live today. Short-term profits have yielded long-term loss. Gold rush pollution has been just as enduring as the gold rushes’ cultural legacy. Historic pollution has had long-range impacts that environmental agencies and businesses alike continue to grapple with.

Read more: The world protests as Amazon forests are opened to mining

At the abandoned Berkley pit mine in Butte, Montana, the water is so saturated with heavy metals that copper can be extracted directly from it. Illegal mining in the Amazon is adding to the pressures on delicate ecosystems and fragile communities struggling to adapt to climate change.

The phenomenon of rushing is hardly alien to the modern world either - shale gas fracking is an industry of rushes. In the US, the industry has transformed Williston, North Dakota, a city of high rents, ad hoc urban development, and an overwhelmingly young male population – quintessential features of the gold rush city.

Read more: Why increasing shale gas production won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions

In September last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a new gold rush was under way in Texas: for sand, the vital ingredient in the compound of chemicals and water that is blasted underground to open energy-bearing rock. A rush of community action against fracking’s contamination of groundwater has followed.

The world of the gold rushes, then, is not a distant era of interest only to historians. For better or worse, the rushes are a foundation of many of the patterns of economic, industrial, and environmental change central to our modern-day world of movement.

Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell’s forthcoming edited collection A Global History of Gold Rushes will be published by University of California Press in October 2018. A sample of their work can also be found in the forthcoming volume Pay Dirt! New Discoveries on the Victorian Goldfields (Ballarat Heritage Services, 2018).

• Global perspectives

Research Fellow, Water Resources & Climate Change

Integrated Management of Invasive Pampas Grass for Enhanced Land Rehabilitation

Economics Editor

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services)

Program: Modern day gold rush moves up a gear

Program: The World Today

Presented by

The price of gold is breaking records now on an almost weekly basis.

Bulk gold -- or bullion -- surged above $US2,700 US per ounce last week for the first time, extending its gain this year to 31 per cent.

While the metal is always hard to come by, some investment experts warn the gold surge is a signal to tougher economic times ahead.

More Information

Henry Jennings, Senior Markets Analyst, Marcus Today  Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank

• David Taylor, Reporter

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Modern day gold rush moves up a gear (  erik_and_so_on via pixabay )

Sally Sara : A modern-day gold rush has moved up a gear, with the price of the precious metal breaking records now on an almost weekly basis. Bulk gold, or bullion, surged above US$2,700 an ounce last week for the first time, extending its gain this year to 31%. While the metal is always hard to come by, some investment experts warn that the gold surge is a signal of tougher economic times ahead. Business reporter David Taylor has more.

David Taylor: The rise in the price of gold is, well...

Henry Jennings: It is a bit nuts, I have to say. It's certainly been one of the best performing assets this year by a long shot.

David Taylor: That's Markers Today Senior Markets Analyst, Henry Jennings. The precious metal hit a record of AU$4,000 an ounce this week, which is up by a third so far this year.

Henry Jennings: Yes, it's been extraordinary. There's been a combination of factors, I guess, Middle East geopolitical events. We've had central bank buying as well, which continues, although not at the same pace that we have seen.

David Taylor: Henry Jennings also says global investors are hoarding the commodity ahead of the US election early next month.

Henry Jennings: There's also a fear, I guess, of what's going to happen with the US election. Neither candidate has really addressed the growing US deficit, AU$32-33 trillion and counting. And if you say that quickly, it doesn't sound too bad, but it is starting to get to be quite a lot of money. And gold is being seen as one of those safe havens at the moment. Extraordinarily, and you know, in Aussie dollar terms, AU$4,090 an ounce. So very bullish.

David Taylor: What Henry Jennings means by bullish is that many investors are enthusiastically buying in the market. But could that be because there's a feeling that global financial markets, including share markets, have gotten ahead of themselves? Well, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Andrew Hauser, says he thinks maybe they have, in comments made to a Commonwealth Bank investor briefing this week.

Andrew Hauser: I mean, global financial markets have been spectacularly optimistic, particularly the equity market, about the probability of a soft landing, you know, really throughout the post-COVID period.

David Taylor: The deputy governor even provided his personal assessment of the enthusiasm in global financial markets.

Andrew Hauser: Certainly my personal view is that the outlook that's been embodied in a number of those assets, you know, has been sort of primed for perfection. It might well be true. It might well still turn out to be true, but it's at one end of the distribution.

David Taylor: But Henry Jennings says investors are betting on a Donald Trump victory in the upcoming US election, which is perceived to be a positive for the world's biggest economy.

Henry Jennings: It's such a strong economy, and we have seen that time and time again in the last few weeks with economic data.

David Taylor: Henry Jennings, you've been in the markets for decades, though. How can you reconcile the idea of a record soaring gold price, which you've said yourself is an indication that people are potentially preparing for a hard landing or a global recession? And this idea that, you know, the US is actually going, the US economy, the world's biggest economy is actually going gangbusters at the moment.

Henry Jennings: Well, I think it's just, you know, it has been one way linear traffic the whole way for the last year or two in terms of, you know, that straight line up. And inevitably with markets, they don't go up in straight lines forever. And just when everybody gets, you know, fixated on a particular view, then that does tend to come undone.

David Taylor: The price of silver is also proving strong, rising more than 30% this year. It's now trading at its highest level since 2012.

Sally Sara : That's David Taylor.

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Modern day gold rush moves up a gear

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AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ai gold rush new apac research reveals major gap between ai leaders and followers.

• AI Leaders are setting themselves apart through approaches to strategies, skills, governance, and trust
• 40% of APAC organisations are expecting at least 3x ROI on AI investments
• Over $110 billion is set to be invested in AI across the region by 2028

SINGAPORE , Oct. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The IDC Data and AI Pulse: Asia Pacific 2024 study, commissioned by SAS , has revealed Asia Pacific (APAC) organisations are rushing to jump onto the AI bandwagon, with nearly half (43%) planning a large investment increase in AI of over 20% in the next 12 months. While organisations are investing heavily in AI, only 18% of APAC businesses consider themselves as AI Leaders, leaving a large gap between those AI Leaders driving long-term transformational change, and AI Followers experimenting with numerous projects and lacking a clear AI strategy.

Of those surveyed, AI Leaders indicated their top business outcomes from AI initiatives are focused on driving new revenue growth (32%), increasing operational efficiency (31%) and increasing profits (26%). By comparison, AI Followers indicated improving customer service (27%), expanding market share (25%) and faster time to market (25%) as their top business outcomes.

“The disparity in target outcomes between AI Leaders and AI Followers demonstrates a lack of clear strategy and roadmap. Where AI Followers are focused on short-term, productivity-based results, AI Leaders have moved beyond these to more complex functional and industry use cases,” said Shukri Dabaghi , Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and EMEA Emerging at SAS.

“As businesses look to capitalise on the transformative potential of AI, it’s important for business leaders to learn from the differences between an AI Leader and an AI Follower. Avoiding a ‘gold rush’ way of thinking ensures long-term transformation is built on trustworthy AI and capabilities in data, processes and skills,” said Mr. Dabaghi.

“The IDC Data and AI Pulse: Asia Pacific 2024 study is an important snapshot of how hundreds of large APAC organisations are approaching adoption and implementation of AI, highlighting the leaders and followers across industries,” said Chris Marshall , Vice President, Data, Analytics, AI, Sustainability, and Industry Research at IDC Asia/Pacific. “These insights give us the opportunity to unpack the barriers to successful AI implementation, allowing businesses to make wiser investments into these new and emerging technologies, without being caught-up in the gold rush”. 

Generative AI is only one part of the AI journey

While a great deal of AI hype has focused on generative AI, the study reveals that organisations have been investing into predictive and interpretive AI technologies. In 2023, generative AI accounted for just 19% of AI investment but by 2024, and is predicted to increase to 34% reflecting a more balanced distribution across these three AI categories.

IDC’s latest spending guide suggests AI spending in Asia Pacific will reach US$45 billion in 2024, rising to US$110 billion by 2028 at 24% CAGR (2023-2028). [1]

The research reveals that organisations are reallocating budgets for the 2024 increase in generative AI investment, with a third saying it will come from redistributing funds away from infrastructure modernisation and 37 percent from application modernisation.

Expectations are high when it comes to ROI

The study reveals this prospective gold rush fuelled by inflated expectations of AI’s potential return on investment. The research found that 40% of organisations surveyed expect at least a three-fold return on investment, with the “fear of missing out” continuing to spur AI spending. As a result, the research shows AI has at times been adopted without a clear alignment between investments and their outcomes and business value.

With 43% of organisations planning to increase their AI investment by 20% or more in the next 12 months, organisations risk being disillusioned with AI because of these tactical investments’ likely returns. Instead, business leaders should realise that building an AI capability takes time and requires solid AI foundations to ensure long-term value add.

“While consumer access to generative AI tools made AI feel magical, integrating it into an enterprise environment takes a lot of work, the right infrastructure, and often the high expectations placed on these tools are unrealistic,” says Mr. Dabaghi. “Understanding these pitfalls provides us the opportunity to learn how we tackle these issues, enabling a higher success rate, and meeting business objectives when it comes to adopting and successfully implementing AI.”

Pulse of AI across industries

The study provides a detailed analysis of how AI is impacting different industry sectors in the APAC region, with key focus areas including banking, insurance, healthcare, and government sectors.

The skills-gap remains a consistent challenge across industries when it comes to successful AI adoption and implementation. This skill-gap is felt the most within the healthcare industry (41%), followed by the government sector (38%), insurance industry (32%), and less so in banking (29%). Despite this challenge, these industries continue to invest in improving their data and AI capabilities to deliver more streamlined decision-making, greater automation, faster time to market for new products and services, cost savings, and a host of other benefits.

Nonetheless, some use cases are being consistently and successfully deployed – in banking for instance, with its top three use cases: liquidity risk management, asset and liability management and financial crime analytics. In insurance, the research suggests we are seeing AI use cases for insurance claims fraud, omni-channel delivery of products and intelligent pricing. In health care, notable use cases include health care fraud and cost containment, while in government, the popular AI use cases relate to ensuring social benefits programme integrity, supporting emergency response, and tax and revenue compliance.

AI adoption trends vary across countries

The AI landscape in APAC varies by country, with each market showing unique adoption trends. China is leading in AI investments, showing a large increase in AI projects over the next 12 months (59 per cent), with India and Japan following suit (51 per cent; 46 per cent respectively). Furthermore, China and South Korea are advancing more rapidly in AI adoption and integration than the others. This disparity is driven by factors such as investment levels, regulatory frameworks, and the availability of AI talent and infrastructure. The lack of skilled personnel is a national as well as an industry concern in Japan , Australia and South Korea and many parts of Southeast Asia .

The research highlights the opportunities and the challenges associated with increasing AI investments across APAC in the coming years. It suggests that to unlock AI’s full potential, companies must develop in-house skills, build a strong portfolio of strategic use cases and plan for AI costs and risks from the start. By doing so, they can achieve some of the promised higher returns and foster greater trust in future AI investments.

The full report is available through the eBook: Data and AI Pulse: Asia Pacific 2024 .

Methodology

The study, conducted in June 2024 , includes 509 executives across eight Asia Pacific markets ( Australia , China , India , Japan , Korea, Malaysia , Singapore , and Thailand ) and sampled organisations across banking and finance, manufacturing, government, and health care & life sciences. Leaders were surveyed to examine their AI investment decisions, how they want AI to serve their organisations, challenges to deployment, and their approaches to managing these processes to achieve trusted AI outcomes.

SAS  is a global leader in data and AI. With SAS software and industry-specific solutions, organizations transform data into trusted decisions. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW ® .

[1] IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, August 2024

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