AUSTRALIA--FORTUNE LAND

By Roderick O’Hargan

Author of “The Forty-Niners,” “The Comstock Lode,” etc.


    Though the Government officials hushed up the discovery,
    fearing that it might lead to an “utter disorganization
    of society,” gold will out--and when it came out Australia
    experienced a stampede of the wildest sort, with nuggets
    of wondrous size and fortunes picked up overnight.


There was a celebration at the Stag’s Head saloon, Downieville,
Sierra County, California. A dozen or more gold-seekers from the
nearby bars on the Yuba River were on hand to say good-by to
“Sailor” Hargraves. The great California gold rush of 1849 was
approaching its crest. “The City,” as San Francisco was known
throughout the diggings, was overflowing with wealth. Crowds of
red-shirted miners from the creeks, anxious to exchange their dust
for something--anything--anything that caught their eye--met and
mingled with the vast horde of adventurers drawn from all parts of
the world. From the over-taxed saloons came the droning cry, “Money
on the bar,” indicating a lucky man inviting the world to celebrate
with him.

Even Downieville, born only a few months before, was bubbling with
excitement. The guest of the evening, Edward Hargraves, was
returning to Australia with the avowed intention of discovering a
goldfield even greater than that of California. Like many others, he
had come hotfoot to the California diggings one year before. He had
not been successful as a miner, this soldier, sailor and bushman.
Perhaps he was more of a talker than a worker. He certainly had a
flair for the theatrical and was given to boasting of Australia.

Half a century before this little farewell celebration took place,
England’s political heads were puzzling over what to do with a huge
island in the Southern Seas. A penal colony! Good idea! So for fifty
years she had dumped her convicts there--some cut-throats of the
lowest type, others misguided idealists who had queer political
views. As a result about one-half of the population of Australia
were either convicts or “emancipists”--the latter, convicts who had
served their terms but were not permitted to return to the
motherland.

“Even if you did discover a goldfield in Australia, Hargraves, that
old queen of yours wouldn’t let you have the gold,” an emancipist
from Australia sneered, while Hargraves boasted.

“Queen Victoria, God bless her, will be informed that I have
discovered a great goldfield and will make me one of her Gold
Commissioners and perhaps afterward a peer of the realm,” Hargraves
replied, striking an attitude.

Curiously enough a large part of this childish boast was destined to
come true!

Arrived in Sydney, New South Wales, Hargraves tried to induce old
friends and acquaintances to put up funds for him to make an
expedition into the “back-blocks” to discover a goldfield. He
pointed out that he had just come from California and was an expert
at both discovering and washing gold. His friends refused to put
their money into such a wild speculation. Nothing daunted, he
invested the few dollars that represented all his capital in a
saddle horse. He then rode across the Blue Mountains, through
Bathurst, to Guyong, where he picked up a native guide and plunged
into the wilderness.

About fifteen miles from the settlement, at a point on Lewis Pond’s
Creek, a tributary of the McQuarie River, the two men prepared their
first meal. Having eaten, Hargraves, probably regretting that he had
no larger audience, informed the native of the object of their
expedition. The eyes of the “blackfellow” bulged with excitement.
This slight encouragement was sufficient to cause Hargraves to get
to his feet. “Right where we are now resting is a goldfield,” he
announced. “It is all about us. I will prove it to you.”

He took a dishpan and washed a pan of dirt. It showed a few grains
of gold! In all he washed five pans in rapid succession and four of
them showed colors. Later he admitted that his talk had been bluff;
he had only hoped that gold was there!

A few weeks later, Hargraves walked into the office of the Honorable
Deas-Thompson, Colonial Secretary, at Sydney, and opened a
mysterious paper package. The official was in a cheerful frame of
mind. He listened to his visitor with patience and good humor.

“By Jove, my man, it is gold!” he finally exclaimed, adjusting his
eyeglasses. “I believe your story. I will have it investigated.”

                *       *       *       *       *

Hargraves’ dramatic discovery was not the first time gold had been
talked of in Australia. Nearly thirty years before, one of the
convicts at Botany Bay showed a specimen of gold-splashed quartz he
claimed he had found. When asked to show the place of discovery, he
was unable to find it again and was awarded one hundred and fifty
lashes for his “deception.” A few years later a gang of convicts
building a road through the Blue Mountains found a number of gold
specimens, but the news was promptly suppressed because it was
feared that the convicts would get out of hand.

In 1841, ten years before Hargraves returned from California, a
bushman named Adam Forres found a good size nugget and showed it to
W. B. Clarke, a geologist. Clarke took it to Governor Gipps, who
dismissed the matter by saying, “Put it away, Mr. Clarke, put it
away, or we shall all have our throats cut.” Clarke thereupon
advised his friends, who were excited about the find, that he would
not make it public as he feared it might lead to the “utter
disorganization of society.”

The investigation of Hargraves’ discovery promised by Secretary
Deas-Thompson took place. Again the official mind was stubborn!

“I can see no evidence whatever of the precious metal in the
district indicated,” Mr. Stutchburg, the Government geologist,
reported.

But Hargraves was so earnest and so insistent that the geologist
made a second visit and watched Hargraves wash out a dozen pans of
dirt, several of which showed a string of colors. Moreover, half a
dozen men who had caught the trick from “the forty-niner” were
panning on the creek and showing colors in pan after pan. The
geologist was forced to admit the gold was there. The news was
reported in the press. The stampede was on! What a Government
geologist said or thought did not matter now; he was brushed aside
like a chip in the wind. Within a few days four hundred amateur
miners were milling around the spot where Hargraves had washed his
historic pan of dirt.

Before Hargraves’ find was fully accepted, two new fields were
discovered, one on the Turon River and another on the Abercrombie,
and these were followed almost immediately by the “Kerr strike.” At
a little sheep station on the banks of the Merro River, a “blackboy”
horsebreaker, idly chipping at a quartz boulder, struck harder than
he had intended and split the rock, revealing to his astonished gaze
a core of solid gold bigger than his fist. Two other similar
boulders were promptly broken up, bringing to light even larger
chunks of solid gold. One of these, had it remained unbroken,
probably would have been the biggest sample of native gold in the
world.

The news ran through Australia like wildfire. Within a few weeks
from almost every point of the compass reports of new discoveries
were coming in, one on the heels of the other. There were:

    Clunes            on July 8th
    Buninyong         on August 8th
    Anderson’s Creek  on August 11th
    Ballarat          on September 8th
    Mount Alexander   on September 10th
    Broken River      on September 29th

Four of these discoveries became great producers. Mount Alexander,
for instance, produced more than ten thousand ounces of gold in the
first fifteen days of existence. Any man with a spade and tin dish
could be a successful miner. Indeed, few knew anything of mining,
shown by the fact that many claims were abandoned and re-abandoned
only to yield fortunes to second and third comers. One such
abandoned claim, the “Poor Boy” at Eureka, yielded a nugget of pure
gold weighing over six hundred ounces. In another instance, a pillar
of earth, left as a support in a deserted claim at Bendigo, calved a
nugget weighing more than five hundred ounces.

The effect of these discoveries was two-fold; to the officials, it
was a calamity; to the masses, it was a windfall. The officials saw
in it only a possible uprising of the convicts and demoralization of
the laboring classes. The Commissioner of Lands at Bathurst, hearing
of Hargraves’ activities, sent a special message to the governor
advising “that steps be taken to prevent the working classes from
deserting their regular employment for the goldfields.” Gold, to the
masses, spelled quick fortunes and trade revival.

Australia had been passing through a period of great commercial
depression. People were drifting away, especially to California. The
gold strike was a lifesaver. First timidly, then boldly, committees
of wealthy citizens offered cash rewards for gold discoveries. Men,
women and children gave part or all of their time to the search,
often looking in the most unlikely places, yet sometimes not without
results. A stagecoach driver in his spare time found the Ding-Dong
deposits and realized a fortune.

                *       *       *       *       *

It was as if some electric shock ran through every town, village and
house in Australia. Almost the entire male population poured along
the roads that led to the goldfields. Men forsook their ordinary
vocations. The shearer left the sheep station; the driver his team;
lawyers and even judges forsook their courts; the merchant his
counting-house, and the clerks their desks. Geelong, Melbourne and
Sydney became almost empty towns. In Hobson’s Bay on January 6th,
1852, there lay forty-seven merchant ships abandoned by their crews,
who had set out for the goldfields to wash a fortune out of a tin
dish. The police resigned in scores; even warders in lunatic asylums
left their patients. Business reached a standstill. Schools were
closed. In some places not a man was left.

At Melbourne, out of forty-four constables, only two remained on
duty. The governor issued a circular to department heads in Sydney,
asking how they were affected by the gold “disturbance.” The police
chief reported, “Although a great increase of pay has been offered,
fifty of my fifty-five constables have gone to the goldfields.” The
postmaster, “An entire disruption has taken place in this department
and immediate measures must be taken.” The harbor master reported,
“I have only one man left.”

Society was cast into the melting pot; all disappeared over the rim
of the horizon in a breathless race to where they had been told gold
nuggets were being dug up like potatoes. Thus had the whisper of
gold risen to a shout of gold, and it ran round the world and turned
the stems of ships on every sea toward Australia. It was the day of
the clipper ships of New England, and their skippers went after this
new trade with Yankee keenness.

During this time passenger traffic between Australia and San
Francisco was greater than it has ever been since--Australians
stampeding to California and Californians rushing to Australia. In
five months eleven thousand immigrants passed through the principal
Australian ports. In the next four years over four hundred thousand
immigrants arrived, almost all drawn there by the lure of gold.

After the first rush to the diggings had subsided the cities began
to fill up again. Supplies for the new mining camps became a
commercial factor, and this, together with the handling of the horde
of overseas stampeders, caused a big expansion in business. Then
when the miners began to take their vacations from the diggings,
these Australian cities, formerly quiet sheep towns, experienced
their first period of rushing business and wild extravagance.

The lucky diggers became the outstanding figures of local society.
Their wagerings at the race track or gaming table put former
plungers into the shade. They imported the world’s best race-horses,
the world’s largest diamonds, and built fine homes. Until that time
the wealthy in Australia were almost exclusively the “official”
class, aristocrats from England, but with the coming of gold men
rose from poverty to wealth almost overnight and the old social
lines were thrust aside. The forceful and hard-fisted bosses of the
mining camps became the leaders and dominators of commerce, finance
and society.

As in American get-rich-quick communities, a plague of human
parasites began to infest these easy-money centers. Bands of
bushrangers sprang into existence and preyed upon the traffic
between the goldfields and the cities, but the authorities, if slow,
were sure. They stamped out crime with a deadly thoroughness that
cowed the rough element. Hold-up--“robbery under arms” it was
called--was a crime punishable by death. Australia’s period of
lawlessness, in many ways romantic and interesting, was of short
duration. The citizens formed no Vigilance Committees. Putting down
crime was left to the Mounted Police, and they made a good job of
it.

                *       *       *       *       *

The returns in the first few months after gold was discovered made a
dazzling record. The first dolly set rocking at Golden Point yielded
four and one-half pounds of gold in two hours. At Canadian Valley,
in the same district, the wash and rubble yielded an average of
about thirty-five pounds weight of gold per claim. At Blacksmith’s
Hole, on the Canadian River, one party of mates in one day obtained
over fifteen hundred dollars per man, the average of the claim being
one ounce of gold to every bucket of earth. This claim was worked
twice after being abandoned and in all yielded more than one ton in
weight of the precious metal.

From one fraction, only twelve feet by twelve feet, at Gravel Bend,
one hundred and twenty-five pounds weight of gold was taken out in
less than thirty days. Another syndicate of eight men, working
nearby, pocketed one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The
Prince claim was leased for one week and yielded about eighty
thousand dollars; then, for a two-week period, yielding forty-five
thousand dollars. Before the end of the year 1851 over thirty
thousand miners were working in the Victoria goldfields. In the
following year this province alone yielded gold to the value of
forty-eight million dollars, and in the succeeding year one hundred
and five million dollars, and this golden flood spelled prosperity
to the whole of Australia.

Australia too, startled the imagination of the world by the large
size of the chunks of gold occasionally found. For several years the
industry of mining was mostly a matter of luck. It was a
tenderfoot’s paradise. Barbers had equal chance with geologists, and
jockeys with experienced miners. There is no other example in the
history of mining such a succession of great nuggets. One expert has
made a calculation of the world’s famous nuggets, one hundred and
fifty in number. Of these one hundred and nineteen were found in
Australia, the United States trailing along a poor second with only
nine.

The “Welcome Stranger” nugget, found at Dunolly, only a few inches
below the surface, was a block of gold twenty-four inches long and
ten inches thick and yielded two thousand, two hundred and
forty-eight ounces of pure gold, valued at just under forty-nine
thousand dollars. The “Welcome” nugget, found at Ballarat, weighed
two thousand, two hundred and seventeen ounces and was sold for
forty-six thousand dollars. The “Blanche Barkly,” picked up at
Kingower, at a depth of only fifteen feet, yielded seventeen hundred
and forty-three ounces and was worth thirty-four thousand dollars.
Another, weighing sixteen hundred and nineteen ounces, was part of a
small rock slide that rolled into Canadian Gully.

This nugget was picked up by a widow just out from England and
forthwith sold for twenty-six thousand dollars. This fortunate woman
was of the stuff that make real pioneers. She had a family to
support and, hearing of the Australian goldfields, she stowed her
family aboard a sailing ship and came--and in the fifties a voyage
more than half way around the world was no picnic. It could be said
of her in truth, “She came; she saw; she conquered”--for the finding
of this nugget was only the beginning.

“What any man can do, I can do,” she said, and she did, both in
Australia and in England, where, for thirty years after, she was a
power in financial and social circles.

And what of the original stampeders? Few of the world’s adventurers
have been more suitably rewarded than was Edward Hammond Hargraves,
officially recognized as the discoverer of gold in Australia. He
gained wealth, a good position and a title, wore showy uniforms and
became a public functionary, surrounded by an army of satellites. He
received the appointment of Commissioner of Crown Lands. The British
Government bestowed upon him a gift of fifty thousand dollars. The
Government of Victoria a gift of twenty-five thousand dollars. New
South Wales gave him a life pension of two thousand five hundred
dollars per annum. Hargraves became a great man.

Of the others, Thomas Hiscock, who discovered Ballarat, died before
he enjoyed much material reward. Harry Frenchman, discoverer of
Golden Gully at Bendigo, became a wealthy woolman. Fortescue, the
brilliant emancipist attorney, tossed away a fortune in the cause of
his oppressed brethren in Ireland, but died poor. Marshal owned
race-horses, envied alike by English peers and South African
magnates. Nat Bayley and Charles Ford, the pair who later found gold
in Western Australia, retired with great wealth.

The Australian gold rush must be reckoned among the world’s great
stampedes, one which yielded huge prizes to the few and good prizes
for nearly all who had the high courage and cool foresight to take a
chance.


[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the June 5, 1921 issue
of The Frontier magazine.]