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Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. A William Heinemann book Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060 www.randomhouse.com.au First published by William Heinemann in 2010 Copyright © David Hill 2010 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry Hill, David, 1946– Gold! / David Hill. ISBN 978 1 74166 925 1 (pbk). Gold mines and mining – Australia – History. Australia – Gold discoveries – Economic aspects. Australia – Gold discoveries – Social aspects. Australia – History – 1851–1891. 994.031 Cover photograph by Richard Ashworth/Robert Harding Travel/Photolibrary Cover design by Richard Shailer Internal design by Xou, Australia Typeset in Sabon by Xou, Australia Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). Griffin Press holds FSC chain of custody SGSCOC-005088. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests. Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Preface In May 1851, the discovery of gold in western New South Wales by Edward Hargraves triggered one of the world’s biggest gold rushes. Over the next half a century, gold fever spread from New South Wales to Victoria, New Zealand, Queensland, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and Western Australia. Only South Australia did not expe- rience a major rush. For 50 years, from the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, hardly a year passed when men were not scrambling to a newly discov- ered goldfield somewhere in Australia. Hundreds of thousands hurried from overseas. In the first two years after news of the gold discovery reached Europe, more people arrived in Australia than had come in over 60 years since the First Fleet had arrived to estab- lish the convict colony in 1788. Gold was attractive because it was one of the few ways in which the overwhelming majority of men, who were poor and had little or no capital, could become rich – and often fabulously so. The gold era brought sweeping and lasting changes. It produced great wealth and ensured the financial viability xiii Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Gold! of the precarious Australian colonies. It stimulated a dramatic increase to Australia’s population, put an end to convict transportation, challenged the British class system, laid the foundations of Australian egalitarianism and played a key role in the establishment of Australia as a nation. Gold! is the story of the characters who chanced every- thing to cross great tracts of land and sea in the quest for great wealth. Some succeeded, but many failed. The dan- gers of the goldfields were legion, and the outcomes far from certain, yet nothing could stop the prospectors from coming in their thousands. xiv Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. CHAPTER ONE Hargraves Wellington N E W S O U T H Molong WALES Ophir Guyong Lucknow Bathurst Mount Victoria Blackheath Carcoar Penrith Katoomba Sydney N Sydney 0 50 kilometres Western New South Wales ‘This,’ I exclaimed to my guide, ‘is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum.’ 1 Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. n a fine summer morning on 12 February 1851, O34-year-old Edward Hargraves left his tiny hotel on horseback and headed north from Guyong along the Lewis Ponds Creek, where later in the day he would find a few specks of gold that would spark the rush that would for- ever change Australia. Edward Hammond Hargraves was born in Gosport, near Portsmouth in England, on 7 October 1816, the youngest of three sons of an army lieutenant in the Sussex militia. Whereas his two older brothers were both found appointments with the East India Company Navy Service, Edward had to settle for a job as a cabin boy on a mer- chant ship from the age of 14, after some preliminary schooling at Brighton and Lewes in East Sussex. He later said he saw ‘most parts of the world’ over the next three years but was forced to ‘toil incessantly’ while experienc- ing ‘great hardship’.1 In 1832, at the age of 17, Hargraves said he found him- self in Australia, where he later bought some cows and bullocks and became a farmer. He recorded very little about his family other than to say that he married and first became a parent at 19, ‘which was early enough . for a young man to marry, and have the cares and troubles of life crowd in upon him’.2 For the next 15 years, he worked as a publican and storekeeper but mainly as a farmer west of Bathurst, more than 200 kilometres from Sydney. The country had been opened up to farming after John Oxley had explored as far west as the Wellington Valley in 1817, which he had named in honour of the Duke of Wellington two years after the Battle of Waterloo. By the late 1840s, now 33 years old, Hargraves had 2 Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. HArGrAves little to show for his 15 years in Australia when news reached Sydney in December 1848 of the discovery of large quantities of gold in California. Hargraves said that few believed the news at first, as ‘the very existence of California’3 was little known in Australia at that time, and there was no regular contact between San Francisco and Sydney. But this all changed when the ship Colonial Times arrived in Sydney with gold aboard in February 1849, and, within a month, ships crowded with passengers were leaving Port Jackson bound for California:4 When, in due course, a vessel arrived with 1200 ounces of the precious metal aboard, the most incredulous were convinced. The immediate result was the outpouring of a tide of immigration, which, to compare small things with great, resembled the more recent ‘exodus’ from Ireland.5 In the first six months of 1849, 25 ships full of passengers left from Sydney for California, along with eight from Hobart, two from Adelaide and one from Melbourne.6 Hargraves said that the discovery of gold in California had a bigger impact on Australia than it had on Britain: [If] the discovery of gold on the west coast of north America in the autumn of 1848 . at first so astounding . could disturb the quiet and the even tenor of the ways of the orderly, industrious and sober minded people of [Britain] . how much more must it have excited the inhabitants of Australia – men who for the most part have spent their whole lives in adventure . men who have been content, in search of a rude and often precarious 3 Copyright © 2010 David Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Gold! subsistence, to penetrate the dense forests, to make their way over trackless mountains, and locate themselves in far distant spots completely isolated from the haunts of men, except it be those of the native savages of the bush! To men so circumstanced, and so habituated to toilsome adventure, a simple voyage to an unknown and distant land was no impediment.7 Confessing that fortune had not smiled so favourably on him since he had first arrived in Australia, Hargraves became one of about 6000 who joined the rush to California8 when he boarded the Elizabeth Arden bound for San Francisco in July 1849.