Gold Rush Days

The Australian gold rush of 1851 changed this country from a backwards penal colony into a formidable industrial and agricultural leader.
If gold had not been discovered in 1849 in California, it's possible that Australia would still be a wilderness populated solely with aborigines and convicts. However, the gold fever in California ignited the imaginations of the rest of the world -- even after the worlds immigrants found nothing more than poverty and a land that had very little law.
One of these immigrants was Edward Hammond Hargraves, an Australian who had tried his luck in California, but returned home after no success. Despite his lack of success in America, Hargraves was convinced he could locate gold deposits in his native land. After all, gold had previously been found in the territory of New South Wales in 1823 and 1842.
The government originally discouraged mining because they feared the population and economic surges that would follow the finding of gold would have too many unwanted side effects. However, the discoveries in California had whetted the government's appetite, so when Hargraves found gold in Bathurst, New South Wales, in February of 1851, he was rewarded with £12,881 and a pension for life.
Australian diggers from around the country came to work in the newly-discovered gold fields. Towns were left deserted. Owners of the sheep and cattle ranches lost their workers to the gold fever. In the cities, businesses closed down, schools emptied, and ships crews abandoned their posts. There were reports which claimed that almost every adult male in Melbourne had left for the mines.

Most countries in the world were represented during this period, but by 1861 only 7.5% of the miners were non-British - the Chinese had been used for a long time as a cheap source of labour at the gold mines. Resentment and fears of unions led to severe government restrictions on all Asians, hoping to quell the huge crowds of immigrants who would undoubtedly have poured in from nearby Indonesia, Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. As a result of this ban, which was not changed or altered until 1966, only about 15% of Australia's 15 million people are Asian.
It was not long before news of the gold strike had travelled around the world. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into the tiny coastal cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. In 1852, reports showed that 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia. Over 300 international ships were docked at the city of Port Phillip in that year, increasing the towns population by 100,000. Australia's population was only 405,356 but ballooned to over one million in one decade.
One thing that almost all of these immigrants had in common was a dissatisfaction with the politics of their old lands - which gave them a willingness to fight for changes in the policies of the new. With the lower class increasing, resentment was growing against the privileged upper class, and changes of reform and independence were apparent. They wanted to eliminate the costly licenses needed for digging gold and prices lowered on land. Above all else, they wanted political equality. They were interested in making laws that the common people would benefit, a law for those who had long been ignored by the government.

In these Territories once thought to be untameable, civilization was coming fast. Vote by ballot became law in Victoria in March of 1856 and in South Australia that April. By January 1, 1901, just fifty years after the first gold strike, Australia had declared itself an independent country.
Before any of the gold miners could even begin to think about changing the country, they had to find a way to support themselves. Mining camps and towns appeared overnight near a new vein, then were abandoned just as quickly when the gold ran out and the race was on to beat one another to the next promised site.
Most of the miners and their families lived in tents with a fire outside the door, labouring in mines and streams with picks and shovels hoping to strike it rich. Most of them, however, encountered one of two extremes: a few became fabulously wealthy, but most lost everything they owned.
The camps were very similar to the ones in California with bar fights and bushranging, but some historians claim that the Australian government was more effective in keeping order and reducing hangings and lawlessness. In fact, there was only one major riot in the entire history of the gold rush at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat in 1854.

The effects of the great Australian gold rush are still apparent today. Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane are now bustling cities with three to five million people each and Australia is the world's third largest producer of gold, accounting for 11% of the total yield. In the grand scheme of things, the gold rush may have been a short-lived burst of prosperity, but the people it drew to Australia forever changed and improved the country.

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