Australian gold rushes

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.

Gold discoveries

New South Wales

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.

Victoria

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.

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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.

Did You Know?

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

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.

Western Australia

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.

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, 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.

Life and lawlessness on the goldfields

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.

Impact

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.