West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
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leading the comfortable life of a successful explorer, his team members
fought bitterly for recognition of their part in the initial finds at Lewis
Ponds and Summerhill Creeks. Their tenacity was rewarded in 1853
with a £1,000 reward each and then in 1890 with full recognition by
the legislative assembly that “Messrs Tom and Lister were undoubtedly
the first discoverers of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity”
(cited in Mitchell 1972, 347). In the end, however, Hargraves’s story
remains the founding myth of Australia’s gold rush, and it is his name
that has been associated ever since with the initial finds of 1851.
Throughout the decade of the 1850s New South Wales’s goldfields
produced about 140 tons of the precious metal and attracted diggers
from throughout the world.
Gold in Victoria
In February 1851 just a month after Hargraves and Lister’s initial
gold finds, the south coast of Port Phillip suffered from the Black
Thursday fires, which burned from Westernport in the east to the
South Australian border in the west (Molony 2005, 121). The fires
resulted from a tremendous drought the previous year, so that by mid-
summer the entire landscape was parched. A north wind on February
6 whipped a small fire out of control until a quarter of the territory
that would become Victoria just six months later had been burned; 12
people died, along with thousands of cattle and at least a million sheep
(Romsey Australia 2008).
As a result of the fires, as well as a loss of population to the newly
established goldfields around Bathurst, when the new colony of Victoria
was proclaimed on July 1, the new government was anxious about its
survival. The new legislative assembly offered a £200 reward for the
first significant amount of gold found within 200 miles of Melbourne
(Commonwealth of Australia 2007). The gambit worked, and in early
August Thomas Hiscock, a blacksmith from Buninyong, discovered gold.
His find was announced in the Geelong Advertiser on August 12, and soon
Buninyong was the third-busiest town in the colony, after Melbourne and
Geelong (Buninyong and District Historical Society, Inc. 2005). Soon
news of even greater finds was reported from nearby Ballarat, which
at the time was nothing more than a sheep station, and by November
the world’s richest goldfield had been opened on and around Mount
Alexander in what is today Castlemaine (Molony 2005, 122).
Within days of the publication of Hiscock’s find in Buninyong, the
Victorian government had changed its attitude toward gold prospectors.
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
From offering a financial reward for the discovery of gold, the govern-
ment under Lieutenant Governor LaTrobe began staking a claim to all
the gold found in the colony. British law at the time stated clearly that
mineral rights were retained by the Crown rather than private land-
owners or individual diggers. Rather than claiming all Victorian gold
for itself, however, the legislative assembly began charging prospectors
and diggers a licensing fee of 30 shillings (one pound, 10 shillings) per
month. Many prospectors took great umbrage with this fee, which had
to be paid prior to commencing any search for gold, and on August 25,
1851, the first protests against the fee erupted in Buninyong on the very
day the policy was announced there (Buninyong and District Historical
Society, Inc. 2005).
During the 1850s miners and independent diggers took more than
1,000 tons of gold out of the ground in Victoria; when that was com-
bined with that removed from New South Wales, Australian gold con-
stituted 40 percent of the world’s production for the decade (Molony
2005, 122). As a result of this tremendous boom, the population of
Victoria exploded, from a mere 80,000 people in 1851 to more than half
a million in 1861 (Clarke 2003, 116); the total population of Australia
hit 1 million in 1861. The initial gold finds in New South Wales and
Victoria also led prospectors to search the rest of the Australian con-
tinent. In 1859 gold was found in Canoona, Queensland; in 1867 in
In the 1860s Ballarat was one of the busiest cities in Australia, owing to its goldfields.
(Picture Collections, State Library of Victoria)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
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Gympie, Queensland; in 1873 in Palmer River, Queensland; in 1872–73
in the Northern Territory; in 1885 in the Kimberley district of Western
Australia; and in the 1890s the continent’s last gold rushes occurred at
Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, both in Western Australia (Johnson 2007,
25). Today gold mining continues at various sites in Australia, espe-
cially in Western Australia and South Australia, making the country the
third-largest extractor of this metal in the world (Geoscience Australia
2008).
Social and Economic Changes
Although Australian society had undergone significant changes in each
decade from 1788 onward, the first decade of the gold rush produced
some of the most long-lasting and significant changes. The first to be
felt at the local level was large-scale population movement away from
cities and agrarian towns to the goldfields. This affected every aspect of
life in the Australian colonies, from law and order to food production.
By the end of 1851, Melbourne was down to just two police constables,
the rest having quit their jobs to prospect for gold in central Victoria
(Johnson 2007, 25). Wheat production in Victoria plummeted almost
75 percent in the first two years of that colony’s gold rush, from 30,023
acres (12,150 ha) in 1851 to 8,006 acres (3,240 ha) in 1853 (Cowie).
Sheep and cattle were left untended as well, sparking fear of mass star-
vation throughout the colonies. As a result of these shortages, the price
of food skyrocketed and even the simplest fare of bread, cabbage, pota-
toes, and eggs could cost a day’s wages or more (Symons 1982, 60).
About six months after the initial exodus from Australia’s towns
and cities into the goldfields, the colonies began to experience a mas-
sive influx of migrants seeking instant mineral wealth. Britons, many
of whom had forsaken the possibility of wealth in California because
of the reputation of its goldfields for lawlessness, flocked to Australia,
with its well-established British laws and customs. British and Irish
miners were also joined by young, educated, and largely middle-class
men from France, Germany, Italy, and the Americas, as well as others
from throughout the world.
While all miners suffered the difficult conditions of payment of
licenses and standing in pits that rapidly filled with water and occa-
sionally collapsed, killing the miners inside, two groups stand out as
having had the worst experiences: Chinese and Aboriginal people. The
former, who first arrived in Victoria in about 1855, numbered 24,062
by 1861 (Clark 1995, 140). They arrived in large teams of 600 to 700
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
men, mostly as indentured laborers, who searched for scattered remains
of gold in abandoned mine shafts and other locations that had been
vacated by European miners. Most had little to show for their hard
work because their contracts stipulated that they turn over the pre-
ponderance of their earnings to the headmen who had sponsored their
voyages. Despite these factors, white miners reacted with fear to the
presence of this culturally and racially distinct group (Johnson 2007,
26). As a result, the legislative councils of both Victoria and New South
Wales passed laws restricting Chinese entry to the colonies and limit-
ing the movement of those already there. Nevertheless, the pull of gold
was so great that Chinese miners began landing in South Australia and
walking hundreds of miles to Victoria’s goldfields, often in single-file
lines of up to 700 men (Clark 1995, 141–142). Fearful of loss of their
jobs and reduction of their wages, white miners occasionally took the
law into their own hands, for example, in 1857 at the Buckland River
in Victoria and in 1861 at Lambing Flat in New South Wales. Nearly
1,000 people participated in the storm of violence in 1861, when even
European women and their children suffered if they were found to be
associated in any way with Chinese miners. The all-white, all-male juries
that heard the cases in Goulburn formally acquitted every plaintiff on
Fear and distrust of the Chinese were rampant in Australia from the early 1850s until well
into the 20th century. Popular images of the time did nothing to educate the public as to the
true conditions under which these men lived and worked.
(Rare Printed Collections, State
Library of Victoria)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
64
the charges of rioting, while the more serious and accurate charges of
murder and rape were never taken to court (Clark 1995, 142).
The displacement of the Aboriginal populations of central Victoria
and New South Wales that had begun in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries was completed in the 1850s by the large influx of whites,
Chinese, and other miners. A few Aboriginal communities attempted
to maintain their small-scale food-collecting way of life, but for the
most part those who remained in these regions became an impover-
ished lower class. Some Aboriginal men worked doing odd jobs in and
around the goldfields and towns or traded fish, game, or handmade
tools and artwork, while some Aboriginal women were pulled into
prostitution or begging. A few Aboriginal men took up positions as
shepherds or stockmen to replace the white laborers who left to dig
for gold, but even these positions were tenuous; when the white men
returned, having been largely unsuccessful in their diggings, Aboriginal
men were immediately turned out. Some men and women suffered
from alcohol abuse, and most children were at least partially malnour-
ished. Introduced European diseases, from influenza to syphilis, further
eroded the viability of Aboriginal communities, and the murder of
Aboriginal people was not an uncommon occurrence in the goldfields.
The few Aboriginal families and individuals who escaped the ravages of
these features of colonial life struggled to survive on the margins of the
white world. Just as other diggers were, they were required to purchase
licenses to engage in mining, and the argument that the land and thus
its resources belonged to them failed to hold sway with the goldfields
commissioners (Clark and Cahir 2001).
Starting in about 1855, coincidentally the same year as the first
Chinese arrived in southeastern Australian goldfields, once readily
accessible alluvial gold became more difficult to find. From this period
forward, the real money was made by companies with the capital to
invest in machinery rather than by individual diggers. Miners who
remained in the fields mostly sold their labor to these large companies
and perhaps did a bit of digging and panning on the side. As a result
of this shift, many of those who had left their urban and agrarian jobs
throughout Australia went back to them.
Merchants and others who catered to the nouveau riche were par-
ticularly fortunate, and many grew wealthy by importing foodstuffs
such as Irish butter, English ham, and American ice and “champagne”
(Symons 1982, 60–61). But laborers, too, benefited from the influx of
wealth in Australian society, and many were able to buy homes and
luxuries that only the richest in European society could afford. In 1859
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
Henry Kingsley wrote in his novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn
that the Australian condition was a “working-man’s paradise” (cited in
Symons 1982, 62), and just a year later Australians were the wealthiest
people per capita in the world (Harcourt 2008), with per capita income
50 percent higher than in the United States and 100 percent higher than
in Britain (Molony 2005, 136–137).
Political Changes
The many social and economic changes wrought on Australian society
in the 1850s had both immediate and long-term political ramifications.
The most immediate occurred in December 1852, when the British
authorities decided to end all convict transportation to Australia’s east
coast. This decision was made partly in response to pressure brought
to bear by free settlers and Australian-born leaders who wanted to see
their country prosper as a real colony rather than the final resting place
of Britain’s criminal class. The other factor in the decision, however,
was gold. With thousands of middle-class migrants paying for their pas-
sage to the gold fields of New South Wales and Victoria, it made little
sense to spend governmental funds to ship criminals to a place where
they could potentially become millionaires at the end of their sentences
(Clark 1995, 131). The last convict ship, the St. Vincent, arrived in Van
Diemen’s Land in early 1853, and in late winter that year, on August 10,
a festival was held to celebrate the closure of this phase of the island’s
history.
While the end of transportation had been a central political issue in
both Australia and Britain for several decades prior to Hargraves’s find
near Bathurst, some of the other ramifications of his discovery were the
direct result of either the gold itself or the activities it engendered. One
of the most widely cited examples is the Eureka Stockade and miners’
revolt in Ballarat in late 1854.
From almost the first week that gold was discovered in Victoria the
colonial government had been charging miners a 30-shilling fee for a
miner’s license. For miners who struck it rich in Ballarat or Bendigo
this was easily affordable; however, many miners considered it unfair
to charge them for the license prior to their finding any gold. They also
thought that they were unfairly paying to maintain a colonial govern-
ment that they had had no say in choosing. The final indignity was
from the commissioners on the goldfields, who had the right to request
that a miner show his license at any time. Starting in 1852, when they
were allowed to keep half the fees they collected from illegal miners,
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
66
these commissioners took their jobs very seriously and began using
harassment and violence to check licenses (LaCroix 1992, 208).
As a result of these outrages, as well as the poverty many miners suf-
fered when surface or alluvial gold disappeared from the fields by 1853,
there were occasional demonstrations and publications rallying against
the license fee scheme and the lack of representative government
(Public Record Office 2003). The most important of these stemmed
from the Ballarat Reform League, whose 1854 charter was a statement
of democratic ideals that challenged the colonial status quo on every
level. Instead of working with the miners to resolve their issues, the
goldfields commissioner, Robert Rede, increased the pressure on them,
leading to a riot on October 30.
This riot was probably the last straw in a series of events that were
building toward the eventual denouement of the Eureka Stockade,
Australia’s only armed rebellion against the British. On the evening
of the 30th the miners met on Bakery Hill and raised the flag of the
Southern Cross, which, with its blue background and white cross
and stars, represents the most obvious constellation in the Southern
Hemisphere. Using the flag as their sacred object, the miner Peter Lalor
led hundreds of others in swearing an oath of allegiance: “We swear by
the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our
rights and liberties” (Eureka Centre 2008). The flag was later moved to
the Eureka diggings, and, on December 1, a large wooden stockade was
erected around about an acre of land to protect the flag and men.
At dawn Sunday, December 3, 1854, Commissioner Rede and the
numerous soldiers in his command finally put an end to the miners’
protest. The battle was over almost before it even began. Only about
150 miners were stationed behind the walls of the stockade, and most
of them had abandoned their watch posts in favor of a night’s sleep.
On the government’s side, no such relaxation was permitted. By 3:30
a.m. a contingent of about 276 soldiers and police had encircled most
of the stockade, but it was not until 4:45
a.m. that a sentry within the
stockade noticed the soldiers less than 300 yards away and fired a warn-
ing shot. Lalor reacted immediately to the warning by standing on a
stump to warn his troops to wait until the soldiers were closer before
firing; by placing himself in such a position, he received several gun-
shot wounds and had to have his arm amputated after the event. Many
other leaders were not even present for the brief, 15- to 20-minute skir-
mish. Nonetheless, the battle was not without its dramatic moments.
For example, the Canadian miner Captain Ross died defending the
Southern Cross flag, thus allowing Constable John King to haul it down
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
and carry it away. At least 23 other miners also died on that day, and
dozens of others were wounded by the superiorly armed soldiers, of
whom five or six perished and 12 were wounded (Goodman 1994).
By 7:00
a.m. the same day, the police and soldiers had arrested 120
diggers, torn down the stockade, and cleaned up the remains of the
battle. Most of these 120 men were later released without charge, but
13 were charged with high treason and tried in Melbourne in January
(Public Record Office 2003, Goodman 1994). The first man tried on
these charges was John Joseph, an African American, while all the other
Americans arrested as part of the revolt had previously been released on
petitions by the U.S. consul in Melbourne. Not a single miner, includ-
ing Joseph, was convicted, and many of the rebellion’s leaders later held
important positions in the colony. Peter Lalor, who evaded capture on
the day because of his injuries, went on to become the speaker of the
legislative assembly of Victoria.
The ramifications of the Eureka Stockade, as this event has become
known, have been a source of debate among both historians and politi-
cal scientists ever since. At the time it led to significant changes in the
goldfields, including the replacement of license fees with a one-pound
“miner’s right” fee, which allowed a miner to vote, and a 3 percent
export duty (LaCroix 1992, 214). The Gold Fields Act of 1855 also cre-
ated miners’ courts, with nine elected members to settle disputes and
set claim sizes (LaCroix 1992, 215).
Over the long run, however, the consequences of the Eureka
Stockade have been more difficult to pinpoint. For example, the histo-
rian Manning Clark saw in the events the birth of Australian national-
ism and democracy, while others have been more circumspect in their
analysis. David Goodman believes that the most the events achieved was
a slight transformation in public opinion against colonial government
(Goodman 1994). Without a doubt, however, the Eureka Stockade was
an important moment in Australian history.
Governments
One of the most significant changes to the Australian colonies in the
1850s was the provision for self-rule that the British Parliament had
conceded to all but Western Australia by 1859. The process actually
began as early as 1842, when New South Wales gained the right to self-
rule through a legislative council. In 1850 this was expanded with the
Australian Colonies Act, which not only separated Port Phillip from
New South Wales but also created legislative councils for Victoria, Van
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
68
Diemen’s Land, and South Australia when it took effect in July 1851.
After much consideration and political maneuvering both in Britain
and in the colonies, an electoral formula was agreed upon: Ten mem-
bers, or one third, of each council would be appointed by the governor
of each colony while 20 members would be elected, with priority given
to large landowners.
The next phase in the gradual establishment of self-rule was at the
end of 1852, when the colonial office in London invited the four leg-
islative councils to begin penning constitutions, continuing the almost
inevitable march toward independence. The vociferous discussions
that this invitation engendered led to the hardening of two radically
different views of the kind of society Australians wanted to see in their
newly emerging country. Conservatives wanted the new constitutions
to reflect the interests of large landowners, while liberals favored a more
democratic system.
While at first conservatives were able to dictate the form of govern-
ment to be established in each colony, this period lasted for only a
couple of years. Between 1856 and 1858 New South Wales and Victoria
had given all men the vote for the lower house and had lifted the prop-
erty ownership requirement for serving on that body; by 1861 the same
had occurred in South Australia and Tasmania, as Van Diemen’s Land
was called after 1855. When Queensland was created in 1859 from
the northern regions of New South Wales, that colony adopted the
same amended constitution as New South Wales. While women and
Aboriginal people still had many years to wait for the franchise, the
democratic process had begun to break down the British class system
inherited by the colonies.
Governing the Land and Its People
While the period 1850–59 was a decade of establishing governments in
the five free Australian colonies, the 1860s was a decade in which lib-
erals used those governments to transform the societies in which they
lived. Manning Clark calls the period from 1861 through 1883 “the
Age of the Bourgeoisie” (1995, 151), while Frank Clarke refers to it as
“the Long Boom” (2003, 121). The expansion of wealth produced by
the gold rush of the previous period led to a desire for greater political
involvement among previously unrepresented groups, such as mer-
chants and laborers. As a result, the squatters or exclusives, who had
dominated all aspects of Australian colonial life until the 1850s, began
having to listen to and even act upon the wishes of others. One of the
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
first wishes of the newly emerging classes of influential people was
opening up access to the millions of acres of land that had previously
been tied up by pastoral squatters. In 1861 a liberal government in New
South Wales dominated by Premier Charles Cowper, John Robertson,
and Henry Parkes passed two land acts, the Alienation Act and the
Occupation Act, which finally allowed for the purchase of Crown lands.
The price was set at one pound per acre, with 20 percent due at the time
of sale and the rest within three years. The idea was originally despised
by the conservative landowners who dominated the upper chamber
of parliament but did eventually pass and thus served as a model for
Victoria’s Duffy Act in 1862 and later Queensland’s Selection Act in
1868 and South Australia’s Strangways Act in 1869.
Despite the intention of providing access to land, the judgment of
history on these acts has largely been negative (Davidson 1981). Most
“selectors,” the term coined in 1868 to refer to people who purchased
the 80- to 640-acre (32- to 260-ha) parcels of land (Johnson 2007, 45),
remained miserably poor as they struggled with infertile soil, inconsis-
tent rainfall, and plots that were too small to provide an adequate living
under these conditions. Victoria and New South Wales experienced a
rapid rise in bushranging in these decades as the sons of marginal farm-
ers found other ways of occu-
pying themselves when family
plots failed or simply could
not be divided among a group
of brothers. The most famous
of these selector-era bushrang-
ers was Edward “Ned” Kelly
(Clarke 2003, 128). Henry
Lawson, one of Australia’s
best-known writers, was also
a selector’s son but instead of
taking to a life of crime, the
young Lawson moved to the
city and began eulogizing the
rural way of life in his poems
and short stories.
Perhaps because of differ-
ences in the implementation
of their land acts, or differ-
ences in climate and ecology,
selectors in South Australia
Ned Kelly’s armor from the firefight at
Glenrowan in June 1880
(Neale Cousland/
Shutterstock)