To raise funds, but also to discourage the flood of people moving to the diggings, New South Wales Governor Charles Fitzroy and Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe of Victoria, imposed a 30-shilling a month licence fee on miners.

This was a substantial sum for most miners. When the easily obtainable surface gold began to run out in 1852, the licence fee became a point of contention.

In 1852, the 35,000 miners on the Victorian goldfields were producing about 5 ounces of gold per head. By 1854 the population had almost tripled while production had dropped to 1.5 ounces per head.

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.

From the National Museum 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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His bad luck ended, however, when he noticed gold glinting from a clod of earth alongside the road. He dug the 22-ounce nugget out with his hands, then washed it in a nearby stream to confirm he had discovered gold.

The next day Mr Stewart formed a syndicate with mail contactor Gordon McDowell and a farmer and his son both named Tom Wright. They called their syndicate ‘Stewart’s Surprise’, took out miner’s rights and pegged a claim around the spot where the nugget was found.

The discovery caused a minor gold rush with people arriving from surrounding areas eager to find more gold. On 1 July, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that hundreds of people were fossicking around Bealiba with picks, shovels and pans.

Although the Victorian goldfields were famed for the gold nuggets that they yielded, including some of the largest ever discovered, very few of these survive in their original form. Soon after being discovered most nuggets were melted down so that the gold could be weighed and sold.

A few months after the Bealiba nugget was discovered it was purchased by the Australian Amateur Mineralogist, a magazine that ‘advocated for the retention of more of Australia’s magnificent specimens for the sake of future generations’.

The National Museum of Australia purchased the nugget in 2011. It helps tell the story of the impact that gold had on Australia and Victoria.

National Museum Australia

In 1850 Victoria was known as the Port Phillip District, an administrative division of the colony of New South Wales. The population of the district was about 77,000 and the main economic activity was wool growing.

Many Indigenous people, whose ancestors had lived in the region for countless generations, remained in the area, but by this time they had mostly lost control of their land.

Melbourne, although still a relatively small pioneer settlement, had grown steadily since its foundation in 1835, and the city’s leaders were so confident in the district’s future that they had waged a 10-year campaign lobbying for its separation from New South Wales.

On 5 August 1850 a British Act of Parliament separating Victoria from New South Wales was signed by Queen Victoria, and the separation was formalised when the New South Wales Legislative Council passed enabling legislation on 1 July 1851.

By this time, gold had been discovered beyond the Blue Mountains in Ophir, near Bathurst, New South Wales, and the rush that ensued included many individuals from Victoria.

Fearing a loss of labour, economic downturn and a lowering of property values in Victoria, Governor La Trobe assembled a Gold Discovery Committee on 9 June 1851, which offered a £200 reward to anyone who found payable amounts of gold within 200 miles of Melbourne.

This was soon claimed, and the rush to central Victoria began with a number of new goldfields opening up throughout the early 1850s.

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The discovery of gold in Victoria changed the fledgling colony forever. It soon overtook New South Wales as the main producer of gold in the Australian colonies, and news of the discoveries quickly spread overseas.

The gold rush period had a massive impact on Australian and Victorian society in terms of population, demography, economics, social hierarchy, popular culture and a sense of Australia’s place in the world.

New towns and cities sprung up and Melbourne grew from a small settlement to one of the richest cities in the world.

The shallow alluvial deposits first discovered at Ballarat in 1851 were the basis of the initial Victorian gold rush but these were soon exhausted and the rush was relatively short lived.

A second boom, however, soon sprang up after miners discovered gold in the alluvial deposits associated with ancient, long buried rivers.

The method used to reach these buried rivers was deep lead mining involving the sinking of shafts, often hundreds of feet deep. Deep lead mining was a major undertaking, and this led to the population in Ballarat becoming less transient, with the wealth of the gold discovered reinvested locally.

Shaft sinking was a virtually impossible job for a single person, so miners were forced to organise themselves into co-operative groups in order to continue mining.

Because sinking shafts was such a time-consuming exercise, deep lead miners had to wait sometimes months before the possibility of finding gold, unlike surface fossickers who could strike gold at any time.

Meanwhile, each miner remained subject to the government’s mining tax. This created an atmosphere of discontent in the deep lead mining regions, which contributed to the armed rebellion in 1854 known as the Eureka Stockade.

Following a meeting of miners on 29 November 1854 expressing outrage over how the goldfields were managed, a stockade was constructed at Eureka, with miners swearing allegiance to the rebel ‘Southern Cross’ flag.

Several days later, the authorities stormed the stockade, killing around 20 diggers. There was widespread support for the miners’ cause, however, and the Eureka Rebellion ultimately led to social change across all the Victorian goldfields.

In Bendigo, quartz reefs were mined after the shallow alluvial deposits were exhausted. At first, quartz outcrops at the surface were exploited using hammers and picks, but soon the reefs were followed underground, eventually to depths of thousands of feet.

Like Ballarat, this time-consuming mining method led to a less transient population and the forming of companies to provide the necessary labour and capital for what was an increasingly difficult process.

The Museum’s Victorian Goldfields collection includes a range of objects reflecting the methods used for gold mining in the late 1800s. For example, ladders, safety hooks and compact picks able to be used in the confines of an underground tunnel.

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On 30 November 1854 miners at Ballarat in Victoria swore allegiance to the Southern Cross flag at Bakery Hill and built a stockade at the nearby Eureka diggings. They were disgruntled with the way the colonial government was administering the goldfields.

Early on the morning of Sunday 3 December 1854, when the stockade was only lightly guarded, government troops attacked. At least 22 miners and five soldiers were killed.

The rebellion of miners at Eureka Stockade is a key event in the development of Australia’s political systems and attitudes towards democracy and equality.

Eureka leader Peter Lalor, December 1854:

"It is my duty now to swear you in, and to take with you the oath to be faithful to the Southern Cross. Now hear me with attention. The man who, after this solemn oath does not stand by our standard, is a coward at heart … We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties."

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In early 1851 the New South Wales government announced that gold had been discovered near Bathurst by Edward Hargreaves, John Lister and William, James and Henry Tom. In June 1851 the Victorian government also reported discoveries of gold.

In the 19th century gold was a catalyst for great change in Australia. The belief that you could dig your own fortune attracted people from across the country and around the world.

In the years between 1851 and 1860, Victoria’s population increased from 76,000 to 540,000.

This massive influx of people was a serious challenge for the government. There were limited finances to provide services to citizens and the colonial budget was in deficit.

National Museum Australia

Conflict on the goldfields

From 1853 miners began to gather at ‘monster’ meetings to voice their concerns about the licencing system. They alleged the police were extorting money, accepting bribes and imprisoning people without due process. Delegations presented their concerns to Governor La Trobe, but he was unreceptive to the requests.

Many of the miners were politically engaged – some had participated in the Chartist movement for political reform in Britain during the 1830s and 1840s. Others had been involved in the anti-authoritarian revolutions that spread across Europe in 1848.

The situation on the goldfields was tense as police regularly ran ‘licence hunts’ to track down miners who hadn’t paid their fees.

Murder at the Eureka Hotel

On 6 October 1854, Scottish miner James Scobie was killed in an altercation at the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat. The proprietor, James Bentley, was accused of killing Scobie.

A court of inquiry was held and Bentley was quickly exonerated. The miners sensed a miscarriage of justice, in part because one of the court members, John D’Ewes, was a police magistrate known to have taken bribes from Bentley.

On 17 October 1854 about 5,000 people gathered to discuss the case. They decided to appeal against the decision. After the dispersal of the crowd, a small group decided to set fire to the Eureka Hotel. They were arrested by police and the situation became more tense.

Eureka and the Southern Cross flag

Over the next weeks the miners met and elected delegates. On 27 November 1854 the delegates approached the new Victorian Governor, Charles Hotham.

The delegation demanded the release of the men who burned down Bentley’s Eureka Hotel. Governor Hotham took offence to having demands made of him and dismissed the grievances. He sent 150 British soldiers of the 40th Regiment of Foot to Ballarat to reinforce the police and soldiers already stationed there.

Sensing a change in the government’s approach, the miners held another meeting on 29 November 1854 at Bakery Hill. There, the newly created Eureka flag was unfurled. The use of the flag, featuring a depiction of the Southern Cross on a navy background, has become a symbol of the labour movement in Australia.

National Museum Australia

The police were unsettled by the hostility building among the miners and decided to implement a licence hunt the next day. On the morning of 30 November 1854, as police moved through the camp, the miners decided they’d had enough.

The miners gathered and marched to Bakery Hill. There, Irish miner Peter Lalor became the leader of the protest. Lalor led the miners to the Eureka diggings, where the men and women joined him in an oath: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross, to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties’.

The miners gathered timber from nearby mineshafts and built a protective stockade.

Conflict at Eureka

Over the next two days, men and women remained in and around the stockade, many performing military drills in preparation for possible conflict. This was too much for the Commissioner of the Ballarat goldfields, Robert Rede. He called for the police and army to destroy the stockade at first light on Sunday 3 December 1854.

That morning almost 300 mounted and foot troopers, and police attacked the stockade. The assault was over in 15 minutes, with at least 22 miners – including one woman – and five soldiers losing their lives.

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Police arrested and detained 113 of the miners involved in the Eureka Stockade. Eventually 13 were taken to Melbourne to stand trial. Governor Hotham called for a Goldfields Commission of Enquiry on 7 December 1854.

The citizens of Victoria were opposed to the government’s actions at Ballarat and one by one the 13 leaders of the rebellion were tried by jury and released.

Goldfields Commission of Enquiry

In March 1855 the Commission of Enquiry released its recommendations. The licence fee was removed, replaced by an export duty and a nominal £1 per year miner’s right. Half the police on the goldfields were fired and one warden replaced the multitude of gold commissioners (who had issued the licences), many of whom were corrupt.

Twelve new members were added to the Victorian Legislative Council, four appointed by the Queen and eight elected by people who held a miner’s right. One of these elected members was Peter Lalor.

Legacy of the Eureka Stockade

The Eureka Stockade was a short-lived rebellion that continues to influence Australian politics to this day. In the words of Doc Evatt, former Leader of the Australian Labor Party and High Court judge, ‘Australian democracy was born at Eureka.’

National Museum Australia

Life for Chinese labourers in Australia before the 1850s was often one of physical hardship in harsh conditions. In this scene Chinese labourers in search of work walk along a winding country road past bullock teams. The central composition depicts Chinese workers clearing bushland to makeroom for growing settlements.

Shortfall in the labour supply and Chinese workers

The transportation of convicts to New South Wales had ceased in 1840, bringing about a shortfall in the labour supply. British and Chinese agents responded by shipping out indentured labourers from China.

Most of the Chinese immigrants were from the densely populated southern provinces of Guangdong (Kwangtung) and Fujian (Fukien). Conditions in China, particularly in the south, were difficult and a significant rise in population had put pressure on the available resources. There were also foreign invasions, rebellions, severe floods and famines between the years 1849 and 1887.

On arrival in Australia, the Chinese labourers were assigned numerous jobs that helped to open up the growing settlement. Jobs included clearing the bush, digging wells and irrigation ditches, and working as shepherds on the new properties. Many new immigrants also started market gardens.

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Discovery of gold

When gold was discovered in Australia, the volume of Chinese immigration significantly increased. The highest number of arrivals in any one year was 12,396 in 1856.

In 1861, 38,258 people, or 3.3 per cent of the Australian population, had been born in China. This number was not to be equalled until the late 1980s.

The majority of Chinese immigrants to Australia during the gold rush were indentured or contract labourers. However, many made the voyage under the credit-ticket system managed by brokers and emigration agents. Only a small minority of Chinese people were able to pay for their own voyage and migrate to Australia free of debt.

The Chinese immigrants referred to the Australian gold fields as ‘Xin Jin Shan’, or New Gold Mountain. The Californian gold rush was in decline by the 1850s and had become known as ‘Jiu Jin Shan’, Old Gold Mountain.

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.

National Museum Australia

Violence against Chinese miners

Central New South Wales was the scene of some of the worst violence against Chinese miners. European diggers feared economic competition and misunderstood Chinese mining methods and cultural practices.

As frustration grew, attacks on the Chinese miners increased. A weak police presence was unable to contain the situation. Several anti-Chinese riots occurred at the Lambing Flat camps (around the present-day town of Young) over a period of 10 months, between 1860 and 1861.

One of the most serious riots occurred on 30 June 1861 when approximately 2000 European diggers attacked the Chinese miners. Although they tried to get away from the violent mob, about 250 Chinese miners were gravely injured and most lost all their belongings. Some Chinese miners later petitioned the colonial government for compensation.

In November 1861 the New South Wales Government passed the Chinese Immigrants Regulation and Restriction Act to restrict the numbers of Chinese in the colony.

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Victorian Parliamentary Library

Author and miner, William Howitt

Old Treasury Building

Old Treasury Building

The diary includes the account of a fire that killed 11 people, the murder of a butcher, theatrical performances by Lola Montez, Charles Thatcher and others, the arrival of new prostitutes in town, even the escape of a Bengal tiger from the Montezuma Circus into Ballarat's Main Street. But it is the author’s description of daily life on the goldfields that makes this diary so interesting!

Daily life

The diary contains descriptions of daily chores, meals and weather conditions.

It opens with the following typical entry:

Got up about 9 o’clock. Had breakfast and accompanied John Adams, Dugie Weir, Jim Young & Bill Douglas out to Magpie Gully to assist in erecting their log hut. Engaged all day in getting up the logs and building chimney. Returned after sunset pretty tired and hungry.

One of the lucky ones

The first rush to Ballarat was in 1851 when nuggets of gold could be found in the shallow surface soil and the lucky ones could make small fortunes easily and overnight. This miner arrived in time for the second rush, when miners had to work in incredibly trying conditions, sinking deep shafts and tracing the underground leads.

Some found great nuggets on the Ballarat field. Others, like the miner, discovered some gold, enough to pay his way: ‘Took home our tools and on getting home, dried gold and cleaned it & weighed it out. ‘This is the last of the Tucker Hole and a good hole it has been.’

‘Such work… will finish me, but there is no help. I shan’t give in.’

Mining was hard, hazardous, dirty work, with no certain return at the end of it. This miner worked in shifts, day and night, in deep shafts up to 40-feet deep. He was often waist-deep in water: ‘Got to work and went down and sunk until about one o’clock. Shaft dreadfully wet. It fairly spouted mud and water out of the drifts above. Before I was 5 minutes down I got such a soaking as I would have on being plunged into a creek.’

Labouring in the cold, dark, wet earth took its toll: ‘Feel very stiff & sore after my drenching. Hands and arms fearfully cut up, cracked and smashed. Such work for a month will finish me, but there is no help. I shan’t give in.’

Tent living

Life on the goldfields was exciting but conditions were harsh. The miner lived in a simple tent; canvas thrown across a timber frame, pegged to the ground over a dirt floor. For more comfort, he built a mudbrick fireplace at one end.

The tents were cold in winter, hot and stuffy in summer and unpleasant when it rained: ‘Got home and found the tent afloat and my blankets wet’. Flies and ‘troublesome fleas’ were a scourge during the summer months, as was the ‘incessant mosquitoes’.

With very few women on the goldfields, men had to perform what was traditionally female work. The miner took it in turns to cook and keep the tent, but he wasn’t particularly good at it though: ‘Kindled fire and cleaned up tent. Boiled kettle and prepared supper. Ironing my blankets, I burned one of them.’

A simple diet

The miner’s diet was very simple. It consisted mostly of mutton and duff (‘duff’ is a flour pudding boiled in a bag), with the occasional potato. Such diets, with almost no fresh fruit and vegetables, left diggers prone to all manner of ailments, including scurvy. The diet certainly accounted for the continual festering of abraded hands and knuckles, which few diggers could afford, and aggravated the incidence of the infectious diseases which were a feature of digging life.

Disease

Hygiene was an issue on most goldfields, especially in the 1850s. Streams around the diggings were soon polluted by gold washing, refuse and worse, causing widespread dysentery, then the dreaded typhoid fever. Other common inflictions were the respiratory diseases, rheumatism and cramp produced by working in water and sleeping in damp clothes or on wet ground.

The author had numerous bouts of dysentery, each time making him ‘too weak to work’. He also suffered from an ongoing bronchial complaint, ‘easily tired today cough being rather troublesome.’ His cough became so bad that his doctor advised, ‘the sooner I cut my acquaintance with the Diggings the better for me.’

A dangerous job

A digger’s life was dangerous and many died trying to make their fortune. Accidents were common. Mine shafts collapsed, killing diggers trapped under rock and timber. Shafts flooded with water while men were working in them, or filled with poisonous, deadly fumes, known as ‘foul air’.

In his diary the miner tells of a man ‘smothered today in a shallow sinking’, and recounts the death of two men working near him:

The accident arose from foul air. One of the men having went down the shaft and the air having caught him when about 60 feet from bottom he dropped out of the bucket and was killed. This lad who was working for me t'other day then jumped into the bucket and sd. lower away cheerily boys to we see what's up. Poor fellow, he got served out the same way and was awfully smashed.

Old Treasury Building

- Alfred Clarke, The Geelong Advertiser, 19 September 1851

Old Treasury Building

- Author and miner, William Howitt

Old Treasury Building