Program  >  Conference Theme: Local Stories  >
  

THEME STORY: THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN GOLD RUSH

Gold at Bathurst
 
Many history books proclaim that gold was first discovered in Australia at Bathurst by Edward Hargreaves.
 The true story was a little more complicated than that.
 
Edward Hargraves did come to the Bathurst district after spending time in the goldfields of California.  He was keen to claim the reward offered for finding the first payable gold in Australia.  He searched in a number of creeks and found a few specks of gold, although the initial find was little more than had been found from time to time for the previous half a century, and certainly was not ‘gold in a payable quantity’.
 
To widen his search, Hargraves gave instruction to a number of local lads, William Tom Jnr, James Tom and  John Lister, on how to build and use a cradle to wash alluvium for gold and on the best places to look.  IThey made many fruitless searches, and Hargraves abandoned the hunt and returned to Sydney.
 
Shortly after this, in April 1851, William Tom and John Lister continued the search down Lewis Ponds Creek to its junction with Summerhill Creek.  There they found gold and recovered 4 ounces (120g) in all.  The story is told that when they returned triumphantly with their find, their father William (Parson) Tom quoted his Bible: ‘And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold’ (I Kings 9.28).  Recalling this reference to the city that sent so much of the precious metal to King Solomon, the location of the find was later named Ophir.
 
The first gold samples were sent to Hargraves who promptly claimed the credit – and all of the gold reward – and, against the wishes of Tom and Lister, made a public announcement of the Ophir gold field in May 1851.   Hargraves was presented to Queen Victoria in 1854 and received a substantial reward, while Tom and Lister had received nothing.  It took until 1891 for a Select Committee of the NSW Legislative Assembly to find that ‘Messrs. Tom and Lister were undoubtedly the first discoverers of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity.’  Forty years after their momentous discovery, Tom and Lister received £1,000 each. 
 
The fever spreads
 
Despite the Governor’s concerns about an ability to keep order, the first Australian gold rush was well and truly under way – by June 1851 some 1,700 men were encamped at Ophir trying their luck.  The Ophir gold rush was the second major gold rush in the world after California, and brought hopeful and excited prospectors from all over the globe to the Central West of New South Wales.
 
Many new discoveries followed in widely separated areas as diggers worked out what they were looking for and how it could be recovered - the genie was out of the bottle.  Echoing San Francisco papers of 1849 and 1850, Australia's press reported that a 'complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community.'  The road over the Blue Mountain was choked with a winding column of men.  
 
Other gold field areas close to Bathurst included Hill End, Sofala, Wattle Flat and Trunkey Creek.  Hill End was the source, in 1872, of  what was then the world's largest specimen of reef gold, named 'Holtermann's Nugget'.  It weighed 285kg (627lbs) and measured 150cm by 66cm (60ins x 26ins) with an average thickness of 10cm (4 ins). 
  
The discovery of gold in Victoria helped to stem the flow of population to New South Wales.  The first find was at Ballarat in 1851, six months after the Ophir find, gold was discovered at Ballarat, and a short time later at Bendigo.  Discoveries were soon made in other colonies, including Western Australia in the early 1850s and Queensland in 1853.
 
In marked contrast to the depression endured in the colonies during the 1840’s, gold fever became an epidemic through the 1850’s and 60’s.  The number of new arrivals to Australia was greater than the number of convicts who had landed in the previous seventy years, and the total population trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871.  
 
The gold fields attracted diggers from all around the world. The majority were British but also included Americans, French, Italian, German, Polish and Hungarian people, along with 40,000 Chinese.  
  
The influx of migrants brought with it skills, professions, resources, knowledge, growth and wealth.  The gold bullion which was exported to London each year generated a huge flow of imports, while gold fields were a magnet for business investment.   Barely ten eyars after a depression, the economy was expanding and booming, bringing with it investment in railways and modern telegraph communications.
 
A nation is built 

In the social realm, the discovery of gold accelerated the abolition of convict transportation to the east coast of Australia, and ultimately to the rest of the colonies.  Continuing to send convicts to the eastern colonies would be giving free passage to potential gold diggers.
 
Gold would also help to subvert the class systems of British society by enabling peasant farmers and simple labourers to become wealthy.  This overturned the social structure of the colonies which had been established with a population of peasant farmers and convict labourers.  This also shifted feelings of association with the 'old country', as colonists took pride in the fact that their emerging success was not primarily founded on the back of convict transportation.  
 
Gold also ensured the financial viability of Victoria and New South Wales, and Britain would no longer have any excuse for withholding self-government from the Australian colonies.  As the population continued to rise, separate self-governing colonies were formed in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland.
 
In this way the Ophir gold rush, and those that followed, helped to trigger and sustain independent and democratic ideas, which led to the development of Australia as a nation in its own right.
 
More individually, aspects of the Australian 'character' are commonly associated with the first gold rush era.  Ophir was was where the Australian word 'digger' was first used in a widespread way, later extended to Australian troops at Gallipoli and in other theatres of war.  Skirmishes between gold diggers and government agents over licensing also help to frame a perception of a (largely healthy) disrespect for authority.  The ill-fated rebellion at the Eureka Stockade in Victoria was one defining moment in the relationship between diggers and the authorities, and the Eureka flag of the Southern Cross has become an icon of the struggle to uphold the rights of 'the common people'.
 
Australian gold today  
 
Australia is the world's third largest  producer of gold (behind South Africa and the USA), with large quantities derived predominantly from Western Australia and Queensland.  
 
The site of the Tom and Lister find at Ophir has continued to yield gold to the present day, making it the oldest continually worked gold field in Australia.  In a symbolic link with the historic significance of the area, each of the gold medals awarded in the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games was plated with 6 grams of 24 carat gold sourced from Ophir and from other mines in the Central West region.

Back to Conference Theme: Local Stories 

---

Text and HTML © 2007-08 Mark Butz
Last update 07 April 2008
Email for feedback or enquiries

---

Please consider sustainability and the environment before printing this document