Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  8 May 1851, Bathurst, Hargraves holds court, and most of the cards

  Tonight is a long way out of the usual for the sleepy town of Bathurst. On this evening, if you haven’t heard, Edward Hammond Hargraves himself has come to speak with select gentlemen at the Carriers Arms Inn on a subject he knows will interest them all: gold.

  It is to be found in their region! ‘From the foot of the Big Hill to a considerable distance below Wellington, on the Macquarie,’ he says, ‘is one vast gold field.’25

  There is one particular place where the gold is so plentiful that he has already established a company of nine miners who, right now, are digging at a ‘point of the Summer Hill Creek near its junction with the Macquarie, about 50 miles from here, and 30 from Guyong. Ophir, from the “city of gold” in the Bible, is the name given to these diggings.’26

  Upon the revelation of the gold’s location, there is a stirring through the small assembly, like a strong gust of wind passing over a field of wheat. They shift, they sway, they lean in closer, hanging on his every word.

  From the character of some of the country explored, Hargraves concludes, ‘gold will be found in mass’ and he ‘would not be surprised if pieces of 30 or 40 lbs. should be discovered’.27

  While Bathurst had been a sleepy town, it is now wide awake. Soon after the meeting breaks up late that night, all of the township is abuzz. In the wee hours, as the light of the lantern matches the strangely feverish gleam in their eyes, men closely scan local maps to work out that ‘point of the Summer Hill Creek, near its junction with the Macquarie’, where the gold apparently lies. The first of the rush begins the following day, as Bathurst begins to empty …

  Even before the Bathurstians arrive, however, the diggings have received an interesting visitor in the form of the local Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Green. Having heard of Hargraves’s boasts, he has realised that unlawful activity is taking place. And, sure enough, when he arrives at Ophir, there they are - eight men digging for gold! Alas, when he orders them off for trespassing, they barely look up.

  Morning of 14 May 1851, the Ophir Diggings are rushed

  Moses would have been no less pleased to show his people the Promised Land.

  On this sparkling morning, a supremely proud Edward Hargraves leads no fewer than 37 horsemen - including the government geologist, Samuel Stutchbury - through the bush, around the hills and down into the gully to his now not-so-lost El Dorado. There they find William and James Tom as two relatively anonymous men - bar the fact that they are the only ones so furious they can barely raise spit - amongst hundreds of men similarly trying their luck. These include, as the Bathurst Free Press notes, so many men from so many walks of life, ‘including magistrates plying their picks and cradles most laboriously’ that ‘there appears every probability of a complete social revolution in the course of time’.28

  But not to worry about all that for now. This is Hargraves’s big moment, and he turns in a bravura performance. Oh, people, surely Beethoven never played the piano, nor Stradivarius presented a newly made violin, nor Shakespeare taken up a quill with more pride than Hargraves now flourishing his pan as he sets to work on some soil by the creek to instantly produce, voila, ‘21 grains of fine gold’!29

  On the spot, the impressed Samuel Stutchbury issues Hargraves a certificate to the effect that payable gold has been found, which will be forwarded to the Colonial Secretary.

  Yet, even before the Colonial Secretary receives that report, the Bathurst Free Press has no hesitation in reporting on the matter of Stutchbury’s visit: ‘The fact of the existence of gold is therefore clearly established, and whatever credit or emolument may arise therefrom, Mr Hargraves is certainly the individual to whom it properly belongs.’30

  Needless to say, John Lister and the Tom brothers are not equally convinced of their partner’s greatness and, in fact, are seething. After all, they had an agreement with Hargraves to keep it all secret for the moment and he has broken it, all so he can claim to be the discoverer of the gold and get the reward.

  15 May 1851, Sydney seethes with excitement

  It is like a stone thrown into a pond where instead of the ripples getting smaller the wider they travel, they actually get larger. For on this clear, crisp, late autumnal dawn in Sydney Town, the stone comes in the form of the first edition of The Sydney Morning Herald thudding down on doorsteps in the city and handed by newsboys to the first of the city workers.

  There! Have you seen it? There!

  The magic headline comes on the top of page three:

  DISCOVERY OF AN EXTENSIVE GOLDFIELD

  (FROM THE BATHURST FREE PRESS)

  THE existence of gold in the Wellington district has for a long time been an ascertained fact, but public attention has never until now been seriously drawn to the circumstance.31

  The story goes on to detail the information released by Hargraves, including his magic phrase that the area around Bathurst is ‘one vast goldfield’, and, for the first time, the exact location of where the gold is to be found!

  But, careful, everyone - the paper also gives a small word of warning:

  In the statements made we do not intend to incur any responsibility. We tell the story as ‘twas told to us. The suddenness with which the announcement of a discovery of such magnitude has come upon us - a discovery which must, if true, be productive of such gigantic results not only to the inhabitants of these districts but to the whole colony, affects the mind with astonishment and wonder in such a manner as almost to unfit it for the deductions of plain truth, sober reason, and common sense.32

  And whatever else, the last part is most certainly true: the colony’s collective mind is indeed affected with such ‘astonishment and wonder’ that ‘sober reason and common sense’ are soon in singularly short supply. A collective madness appears to take hold, so much so that on this very day people from all walks of life are seen to leave their lives in the city, buy picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and every digging implement they can get their hands on, and head up Parramatta Road towards the Blue Mountains and beyond. Before the week is out, that first small thud from the Herald dropping on front verandahs across Sydney causes a growing thunder as whole human waves hit the diggings. First in their dozens, then in their hundreds, they come!

  Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, from the lowest of the low, right up to an aide of Governor FitzRoy himself - they answer the siren’s call.

  For, as they say in California, there really is gold in them thar hills! Each fresh discovery, each nugget, each story that circulates of someone who left their work on a Monday as a poor man only to be a rich man ‘fore seven days have passed causes the excitement to grow.

  The Sydney Morning Herald captures the mood on 20 May 1851: ‘A complete mental madness appears to have seized every member of the community, and as a natural consequence there has been a universal rush to the diggings. Any attempt to describe the numberless scenes - grave, gay, and ludicrous - which have arisen out of this state of things, would require the graphic power of Dickens.’33

  Only ten days after the announcement, no fewer than a thousand men are at Ophir.

  When, just four months earlier, Hargraves had ventured up this very track he had looked like a lone man on a horse. In fact, as it now transpires, he had been something of a cross between a trailblazer and the vanguard for an entire gold-digging army.

  What can the authorities do? The answer is very, very little, no matter how hard they try. Although Colonial Secretary Thomson replies to his Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Green, that he must take his Inspector of Police with some men to halt the diggings, it is the same as before - while Commissioner Green and the police do indeed hand out notices to desist, the diggers barely look up. The authorities will have to come up with a different system. One with teeth. What is certain is that, unable to stop the masses from digging, they’re going to have to find a way to make them pay for the privilege.

  The
Sydney Morning Herald is also far from happy with the course of events, strongly editorialising: ‘The mania for emigrating to the gold-fields of California, which at one time threatened to decimate our population and which naturally filled sober-minded colonists with an anxiety bordering on alarm, has often occupied our most serious alarm, but that mania, compared with the one which we are now menaced with by the discovery of gold within our own borders was as nothing …

  ‘Should our gold prove to be abundant in quantity, rich in quality and easy of access, let the inhabitants of New South Wales and neighbouring colonies stand prepared for calamities more terrible than earthquakes and pestilence.’34

  The government geologist, Samuel Stutchbury, writes from the diggins at Summer Hill Creek to the Colonial Secretary. Mr Stutchbury begs to inform him that ‘gold has been obtained in considerable quantity’ and that ‘the number of people at work and about the diggings (that is, occupying about one mile of the creek), cannot be less than 400, and of all classes’. The gold, he says, is not merely in the creek, but also on the ground all around it.

  He also adds as a word of warning, ‘I fear, unless something is done very quickly, that much confusion will arise in consequence of people setting up claims.’35

  ‘Excuse this being written in pencil,’ he concludes, ‘as there is no ink yet in this city of Ophir.’

  21 May 1851, the New South Wales Governor issues a proclamation

  It is the equivalent of trying to stem a flood by planting a single stop sign in front of the rushing waters. For on this day a ‘PROCLAMATION’ appears in The NSW Government Gazette, to be picked up by other papers in the coming days, asserting that, as Australia is a British colony, all of its land is Crown land, meaning all gold found upon it belongs to Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria … and all those who want to dig for it will have to pay Her Majesty’s Government 30 shillings a month, in advance, to work a claim of eight feet by eight feet, totalling 64 square feet.

  And as the proclamation makes clear, the consequences of failure to pay that fee are serious: ‘Therefore, I, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, the Governor, aforesaid, on behalf of Her Majesty, do hereby publicly notify and declare, that all persons who shall take from any Lands within the said Territory, any Gold Metal, or Ore containing gold … without having been duly authorised in that behalf, by her Majesty’s Colonial Government, will be prosecuted, both Criminally and Civilly, as the law allows.’36

  Most importantly - for this is the major measure to try to ensure social stability, the measure insisted upon by the squattocracy - the license can only be granted to men who ‘had been properly discharged from employment or were not otherwise improperly absent from hired service’.37 And it has to be carried on that person at all times.

  And yet … no-one cares.

  They don’t even care - can you believe it? - that Governor FitzRoy has the right to do this, as established by the sixteenth-century lawsuit R. v. Earl of Northumberland (‘Case of Mines’), which was decided in 1568. They all keep digging regardless. And from Sydney, others keep heading out to join them.

  Reports from letters to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald over the next few days gives the flavour:

  About 30 seamen as well as the mechanics and labourers at the new buildings in George Street left this morning for the diggings.

  Sydney is going stark, staring mad. Gold, gold, gold is the one and only topic, from the merchant down to the chimney sweep. Little else is thought of or talked about. Labourers and tradesmen are striking for wages and leaving in all directions. Sailors are deserting their ships, and young men in good situations giving notice or throwing up employment at once.

  The population of Sydney is in a fearful state of commotion from the prevalence of the gold mania. Numbers come round the coach office, eager to catch the news on the arrival of the mail. The probable number who left Sydney for the diggings on Monday last was 1000, and in less than a week it is expected ten times the number will start for Bathurst.38

  This proves a prescient prediction, for within days the roads leading out of Sydney are packed with an unending cavalcade of drays and carts, each more heavily laden than the last with ‘tents, rockers, flour, tea, sugar, mining tools, etc. - each accompanied by from four to eight men, half of whom bore firearms’.39 The less wealthy are seen to be pushing mere wheelbarrows with their supplies and implements, while one extraordinary conveyance is seen to be pulled along by four bulldogs!

  Already the number of people on the streets of downtown Sydney is noticeably thinner, while Parramatta - that much closer to the diggings and therefore all the more tempting for its population - looks so deserted it may as well have dingos running down its main street.

  Everywhere, the shops have adapted to the gold rush by putting in their front windows and on their principal display shelves everything that might attract the attention of a man heading off for the goldfields from the standing start of no provisions: shovels, picks, axes, saws, pots, pans, dungarees, heavy shirts and heavier boots, and most particularly … cradles.

  ‘The gold washing machine, or Virginian “cradle”,’ runs one contemporary account, ‘hitherto a stranger to our eyes, became in two days a familiar household utensil, for scores of them were paraded for purchase.’40

  And, yes, the hands that rock those cradles are frantically grasping, reaching for ever more supplies, but it is not hard to see why it is so and why the rush is filled with people from all walks of life. The price of gold at this time is around PS3 an ounce, while the average labourer is earning little more than PS20 and certainly no more than PS30 for an entire year’s work. With just one nugget, one lucky find, you could earn many times more than your annual wage.

  The Maitland Mercury sagely notes: ‘Many persons are now going to dig for gold who are wholly unfit for such work; men who would hesitate to walk the length of George Street in a shower of rain are going, at the beginning of winter, to a district where the climate is almost English, and where they will not be able to get shelter in even the humblest hut.’41

  Not for nothing does the alarmed Governor write to the Colonial Secretary in London, informing him that the rush is already ‘unhinging the minds of all classes of society’.42

  Will unhinged minds agree to pay the license fees? This is far from sure, and it is the Government Surveyor, Samuel Stutchbury, still on site at the diggings, who is the first to pinpoint the problem, in a letter to his masters in Sydney on 25 May: ‘Up to this time the miners are quiet and peaceable, but almost to a man armed. With such numbers as will without doubt in a very short period be brought together, good order will very much depend upon the government adopting wise measures for collecting dues, which should be made as easy as possible in the mode of payment; as I fear that no police power could enforce the collection of dues against the feelings of the majority.’43

  And there will be many more diggers coming, so extraordinarily munificent are these goldfields proving to be. He estimates there to be currently 1000 people there, ‘and with few exceptions they appear to be doing well, many of them getting large quantities of gold. Lumps have been obtained varying in weight from 1 oz to 4 lbs, the latter being the heaviest I have heard of’.44

  Upon reading such reports, the authorities are not long in concluding that the rush will soon get a whole lot more intense. Clearly something must be done to maintain order, as well as putting in a structure to collect the license fees, and on 23 May the government announces the appointment of its first Commissioner over the Gold Region, with the former Police Magistrate of Parramatta, Mr John Richard Hardy, being appointed to the post. It will be for him to oversee Her Majesty’s peace and ensure that the law and regulations are being obeyed. As ‘the Crown writ small’, he will have the responsibility of issuing the licenses and, most importantly, collecting the fees.

  The appointment of such a figure is an obvious course, but The Sydney Morning Herald thinks the authorities have picked the wrong man: ‘We feel particularl
y curious to know upon what grounds Mr. Hargraves is overlooked [as Gold Commissioner], or if not overlooked, why his claims are the last to be considered [when] to Mr. Hargraves, and Mr. Hargraves principally, does the merit of the discovery belong …

  ‘Already, a general feeling of indignation has been expressed, and more particularly at the diggings, at the apparent slight with which Mr. Hargraves has been treated in this matter.’45

  Within a little over a week, the government caves in and agrees to appoint Edward Hargraves. Again, the Herald is honoured to report it, in an edition that also carries an apology for the fact that many recent editions have been delivered late, because ‘our runners being found wanting, have rushed for the Diggings without leave or license, at least without ours’.46

  The good news is that the Herald pronounces itself ‘satisfied, as will be the Colony and the parent country, extreme gratification in learning that the local government, as a preliminary bonus to Mr. Hargraves, have presented that gentleman with the sum of PS500, and the appointment of Commissioner of Crown Lands, for the purpose of exploring such districts as he may judge desirable of investigation for further discoveries of gold’.47

  Hargraves himself is of course extremely gratified, not just with the remuneration and the position as Commissioner, with its handsome salary of PS250 per annum, but with something else that rivals it for pleasure. The position also comes with a uniform, boasting a great deal of gold lace and a peaked cap, and on those goldfields he is always to be accompanied by two mounted policemen. Heaven!

  Yes, there is an ongoing outcry from the squatters at the government’s seeming accommodation of the mass of labourers who continue to leave their jobs to go to the diggings, but when their man on site, Samuel Stutchbury, reports that ‘there is no doubt that auriferous deposits exist throughout a very great extent of country, and that very shortly the export of gold from this will rival that of San Francisco’,48 it is obvious that there is not a lot they can do.