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More than 160,000 women were among the 600,000 who arrived in Victoria between 1851 and 1860.

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The Victorian Goldfields - Slim pickings for Women - Lola Montez, Star Attraction - Culture Victoria

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In this video, academic Clare Wright discusses women on the Victorian goldfields: their presence, th…

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What was life like during the Australian Gold Rush?

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Below are resources you may use to help find out what life was like for women during the Gold Rush. You may use books or the Internet in addition to the information below.

In the early years of the gold rush there were very few women on the gold fields. A small number of women worked as shop keepers or diggers. Most women stayed at home with the children and waited for their husbands to find gold!

Women and children would wait for conditions to improve or gold to be found before heading to the gold fields. The women who lived on the gold fields duties consisted of washing, ironing and cooking. A very small number of women also travelled around as entertainers.

Life on the diggings was very tough and many women died while giving birth, as there was very little medical assistance available to them.

An 1854 census of the Ballarat goldfields found there were 4023 women compared to 12,660 men living on the diggings and only 5 percent of these women were single.

You will find images of Women and the happenings of Gold Rush by viewing the below:

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Below are resources you may use to help find out what life was like for women during the Gold Rush. You may use books or the Internet in addition to the information below. In the early years of the gold rush there were very few women on the gold fields.

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Explorers and squatters had already disrupted traditional ways of life for Aboriginal people in the Victorian gold fields region. Flocks of sheep and cattle had already changed the environment and now crowds of men left significant scarring on the natural landscape.

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Exploration/Law and Order
This Blog may contain images and names of deceased people, it may also contain words and descriptive terms that may be offensive to Indigenous Australians.
Often the perceptions that are held of Aboriginal people during the Gold Rush period of Australian history were that; Aboriginal people were marginalised and only involved on the periphery of mining areas, that they did not understand what was happening and, the experience of Aboriginal people was very negative. Now a new book is casting a whole different perspective on Aboriginal involvement in Goldfields history. "Black Gold" by Dr Fred Cahir of the University of Ballarat provides a wider view of the contributions made by Aboriginal people during the Gold Rush era of Australian history. Dr Cahir gives specific examples to show the contribution to goldfields life by Aboriginal people, in exploration, and Law and Order in Goldfields society.

Aboriginal Gold Exploration

Rather than standing aside and watching on as Europeans explored for gold, there is much evidence of Aboriginal people not only leading the Europeans to rich deposits, but when they realised the value placed on gold by the newcomers, Aboriginals started to mine the metal themselves. One example of this search for gold appears in the Melbourne Argus on October 3rd 1866:
"On Saturday morning", says the Maryborough Advertiser, "a party of aborigines commenced a search for gold on the pipeclay at the White Hills, near Mark Drewin's store, and in a very short time they discovered pieces which they sold for 12shillings, 15shillings, and 10 pounds odd. They say the same party were successful some time since in the neighbourhood of Amherst and Talbot"...
This is just one article that mentions Aboriginal people searching for gold, there are many more and a quick search of Trove will uncover many more. Here is one example worth searching: The Melbourne Argus 26 July 1864.

Law and Order

One of the most obvious contributions made by Aboriginal people to Law and Order on the goldfields was the Native Police Corps. These were the first police on the goldfields, and they were an important presence helping to search for unlicensed diggers and upholding the law especially on the Ballarat diggings. William Strutt , an artist and miner described the Native Police in his journal:
...fine and interesting corps of aboriginal black Troopers did their share of duty here before they were unwisely disbanded... The useful black troopers were for a time made to escort prisoners to town (as also drawn by me) these fine fellows were at first the only mounted police, and indeed performed all the police duty at the Ballarat Diggings...
Strutt painted a watercolour of two Native policemen escorting a prisoner from Ballarat to Melbourne which is owned by the Victorian parliament. You can view a reproduction of this image on the Public records office website , which also has a more detailed account of the Native Police.

This Blog has only touched on the contributions made by Aboriginal people to goldfields history. If you want to find out more you could read "Black Gold" by Fred Cahir, leave us a comment or you could try these web resources:
http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/golden-victoria/life-fields/aborigines-gold-rush http://www.egold.net.au/biogs/EG00007b.htm http://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=53 http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/online-exhibitions/nativepolice/background.html

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Exploration/Law and Order This Blog may contain images and names of deceased people, it may also contain words and descriptive terms that may be offensive to Indigenous Australians. Often the perceptions that are held of Aboriginal people during the Gold Rush period of Australian history were that; Aboriginal people were marginalised and only involved on...

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Gold in Australia: On Aboriginal Land.  

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Gold in Australia: On Aboriginal Land.  

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Page 14-15

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Trade

Until 1750s China had been a mysteriously isolated nation from the rest of the world when the Chinese Emperor first allowed foreign traders to establish warehouses in Canton.

China's tea, silk and sugar were also in high-demand in European countries, but the Chinese wanted very little of what the Europeans could offer in return - they wanted silver. The British economy was based on gold, so it meant they had to buy the silver (which was expensive) before they could trade.

This created a trade imbalance, and China had a strong upper hand. To try and reverse this imbalance the British began to increase the amount of the addictive drug opium that they sold to China because there was a local demand for it. Opium came from British controlled India, so it was easy and cheap for them to access.

The Chinese Emperor saw this as a threat to his people and tried to ban it, ordering the seizure of the goods and restricting foreign trade. This led to war with European powers (known as the Opium Wars) in which the Chinese were heavily defeated by strong and industrialised military forces.

As a result European powers forced their way into new areas of China (Hong Kong), dramatically expanding their control over trade in and out of that region.

Chinese immigration to NSW & reaction (1840-60)

By the 1840s Chinese men were trying to come to Australia because war, political instability and environmental conditions were making life hard in southern China.

Once here they did a lot of the hard, physical agricultural work that was required as the colony continued to grow - work that had previously been done by convicts. The first contracted workers arrived in 1848 and all up around 3000 had arrived by 1853.

This practice of importing cheap labour was not unique to Australia during the 19th century - for example the Transcontinental Railway in the USA was built by Chinese labourers on work contracts as was the Canadian Pacific Railway.

After gold was discovered in NSW thousands more Chinese tried to come; as their numbers continued to grow, sections of the European population resented and questioned their presence in the colony.

From the 1860s government legislation was used to try and restrict Chinese people arriving and in 1861 the NSW Gov. passed the 'Chinese Migration Act', which introduced a tariff for Chinese people only.

Anti-Chinese legislation in NSW (1861-1880s)

By the 1880s anti-Chinese sentiment in NSW was very strong. For example, the premier at the time - Henry Parkes - reflected the view held by many when he stated: "There can be no...intermarriage or social communion between the British and the Chinese." (H. Parkes - 1888)

In 1888 his government passed The Chinese Restriction and Regulation Act -'to [protect] the Colony from dangers of Chinese immigration'.

In 1889 it passed the Immigration Restriction Act, which required any prospective immigrant to write out a passage in a 'European language' chosen by the immigration officer in order to be eligible. It could be ANY European language.

Federation 1901

In 1901 the now federal government of Australia passed the Immigration Restriction Act - unified national legislation that acknowledged state/ territory's anti-Chinese stance.

The federal Act retained the clause that an immigrant must write out a passage in a European language to be allowed to enter. It also applied the term 'prohibited immigrant' to those who arrived illegally or were not able to meet the strict requirements.

The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was the beginning of what is now known as the White Australia Policy; it was not fully repealed until the 1970s.

This Act had an enormous personal impact on the Chinese community living in Australia.

*This content has been adapted from an education program run during the Celestial City exhibition.

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By the early 1850s, news of a gold rush in Australia had reached southern China, sparking an influx in Chinese migration to Australia.It is thought that approximately 7000 Chinese people came to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.

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Chinese miners

In 1861, there were more than 24,000 Chinese immigrants on the Victorian goldfields of Ararat, Ballarat, Beechworth, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Maryborough. There were over 11,000 Chinese on the New South Wales goldfields of Armidale, Bathurst, Binalong, Braidwood, Burrangong, Lambing Flat (Young), Carcoar, Lachlan, Mudgee, Tambaroora, Tamworth and Tumut.

As the southern gold deposits were depleted, there was a corresponding drop in the number of Chinese miners in these areas. However, in the 1870s there was an influx of Chinese miners to Queensland after the discovery of gold in the Palmer and Hodgkinson rivers and in Cooktown.

Chinese miners not only worked gold but also other metals such as tin, copper and wolfram.

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Harvest of Endurance is a 50-metre-long scroll, representing two centuries of Chinese contact with, and emigration to, Australia.

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Chinese Immigrants and the Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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Chinese immigrants first arrived in San Francisco in 1848. By the end of the 1850s, they made up one-fifth of the population in the Southern Mines.