The Australian Gold Rush

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It's February the 12th, 1851, New South Wales, Australia.

The morning sun beats down on the grassy plains of Lewis Ponds Creek as a man splashes through a stream.

His bare chest glistens with sweat, and water washes over his feet.

31-year-old Edward Hargraves is a prospector by trade.

As he walks, he carries two metal pans, which are filled with water from the stream.

Sloshing and swaying in his grip, they spill their cold contents over his hands, so he stoops over again to fill them back up.

Now, with the pans brimming, Hargraves clambers out of the river and makes his way to a nearby clearing.

There, three men are waiting, John Lister and brothers William and James Tom.

They're gathered around a wooden contraption known as a cradle.

Shaped almost like a baby's crib, it's made of layered wooden slats at one end and a set of metal sieves at the other.

Beside it are bucketfuls of earth they've excavated from nearby, and it's in this pile that they're hoping to find the greatest treasure of all: gold.

Rumors of the precious metal are rife in this part of the country.

The men have even heard gossip that one lucky man has already found flecks of it, and they're confident that there will be more where that came from.

The two brothers carefully decant a bucket full of dirt into the cradle while Hargraves pours water from the first pan over the top.

They all watch intently as the liquefied dirt sloshes through the sieves, along the wooden slats, and into a basin.

Eyes peeled for any shiny impurities that might be glistening in the residue.

But they're disappointed.

The only solid objects are rocks, stones, and a few unlucky insects.

Unperturbed, Hargreaves pats the men on the back and instructs them to try again.

There's plenty more water and piles of soil, the fruits of digging since sunrise.

As the sun climbs overhead, the men continue filling the cradle with dirt, rinsing it through with water and scanning for any traces of gold.

But with each bucket that's emptied through, their optimism wanes.

That is, until Hargraves spots something sparkling in the sieve.

His colleagues haven't seen it yet, so he bends closer, not daring to believe his eyes.

He reaches into the water.

In amongst the soggy soil, his fingers close around several tiny, solid objects.

Holding them up to the light, he lets out a whoop of happiness.

After all this time, after weeks of blood, sweat, and tears, he has finally found gold.

When Edward Hargraves discovered gold at Lewis Ponds Creek in 1851, the initial amount was minuscule, barely more than 120 grams.

Though his friends wanted to keep digging for more, Hargraves had his eye on the glory of being the first to discover it.

Not to mention the reward promised by the Australian government.

Hargraves' life was transformed by the £10,000 cash prize, but the effect on Australia itself was immeasurable.

When word got out about his good fortune, thousands of individuals flooded New South Wales to join the gold rush.

Within two decades, Australia's population had quadrupled.

But what fortunes awaited those hopeful men and women who abandoned jobs, families and livelihoods to chase the allure of gold?

What were conditions like on the gold farms and fields?

How did the rush impact Australia's First Nations people?

And in what ways did it shape the country?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network.

This is a short history of the Australian gold rush.

The Australian continent has been inhabited by Aboriginal Australians, also called First Nations people, for thousands of years.

But it's not until the 17th century that the first Europeans arrive.

Michaela Harkins Foster is a curator for the National Museum of Australia.

There's a long and complicated sort of history of European encounters with the Australian landmass.

There was always these abiding rumours and expectations that there was a great southern land that must exist at the bottom of a map that nobody had found yet.

And nobody knew it was there for certain, but everybody hoped that it was.

On February the 26th, 1606, Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon lands on the Cape York Peninsula in northern Australia.

He travels along the northern coast, charting his journey.

and providing the very first maps of the continent.

Yanzun's voyage kick-starts decades of Australian exploration.

Over a century later, British captain James Cook becomes the first European to explore its eastern coast and claims Australia for Britain.

Subsequent voyages follow, bringing glory to explorers who document their findings in maps and record the previously unknown species of plants and animals they encounter.

Obviously, everybody knows Australia is a big place.

The continent covers around 7.74 million kilometres squared, and it's a huge mix of environments: desert, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, beaches, and mountains, snow, you name it, we probably have it.

The Dutch happened to encounter parts of Australia that didn't really make it seem all that appealing for a settlement, and it didn't make sense to them at the time to claim a landmass that looked basically inhospitable.

So, initially, the Europeans don't settle there.

But in the 1780s, Britain has an idea.

For some years, it had been exiling its prisoners and convicts to its colonies in America.

But since losing the American War of Independence, that's no longer an option.

Now, the British government turns to Australia.

It ticks all the boxes.

Sitting in the blistering heat on the other side of the world, deportation to Australia would surely be an effective deterrent against crime.

And it would make a nice addition to Britain's expanding empire.

The decision to turn Australia into a penal colony is approved by the British government in August 1786.

Two years later, after nine months at sea, the first shipful of convicts arrives in New South Wales on the southeast coast.

The reaction from the Aboriginal Australians who have already lived there for thousands of years is mixed.

Some resist, actively trying to prevent the white settlers from moving onto their land, while others avoid the new towns and cities of the colonizers at all costs, for fear of being shot or captured.

For the most part, the British show little regard for the locals.

Quickly settling in, the immigrants put their convicts to work, farming, building roads, bridges, and houses, while the newly appointed governors lay down the laws of the land.

For many, Australia is a fresh start.

Most convicts choose to remain on the continent once they've served their sentences.

After all, the opportunities are boundless.

Swathes of land, forests full of animals, oceans, creeks, and lakes for fishing.

And soon, there is the promise of something even better.

In 1841, a man named Reverend William Branwhite Clark, he was a geologist.

He found small amounts of gold in the Blue Mountains.

He informs the colony's governor, but to his surprise, the news gets a frosty reception.

The then governor of New South Wales, Governor Gibbs, asked him to keep the information quiet because they actually feared that there would be an insurrection and mass revolt when the population, who were mostly convicts, found out that gold was so close.

They were really worried that they would face a giant riot and that everybody would leave leave to go looking for their fortune.

So the story is that he rather dramatically said something like, put it away, Mr.

Clark, or we shall all have our throats cut.

But it's as though the gold wants to be found.

Unofficial digs continue over the years, and more fragments of the precious metal crop up throughout the colony.

It's not, however, the only place where the coveted metal is making an appearance.

In January 1848, a carpenter called James Marshall discovers flecks of gold at Sutter's Mill near the Sacramento River in California.

His find sparks a rush of excitement, and soon, thousands of men and women from all over the world flood the town in the hope of getting rich quick.

For some, the American gold rush is a dream come true, and California's first millionaire is made during the era.

But conditions on the goldfields are tough.

Most miners live in tents pitched along the land hunting for fragments from dawn till dusk.

Diseases spread unimpeded and lawlessness is around every corner.

This is the Wild West after all.

News of how California is growing richer by the day reaches the governor of New South Wales.

Anxious to achieve the same kind of wealth seen in California, in 1849 he U-turns on his former opinion.

He convinces his superiors in Britain to offer a monetary reward to whichever lucky person first finds a commercially viable amount of gold on Australian soil.

That person just so happens to be Edward Hargraves.

Hargraves was an Englishman.

He was born in 1816 in Hampshire, and he was educated, but then went to sea at the the age of 14 and he arrived in Sydney in 1832.

He's known as somewhat of a jack of all trades and did too many jobs to name while initially in Australia.

But some of the more interesting ones include collecting sea cucumbers in the Torres Strait.

He was a farmer and at one point he left his wife to become a hotelier.

Later, upon hearing rumours of gold in California in 1848, he boarded the next available ship and joined the rush.

But after 18 months, he was forced to return to Australia, pockets empty and tail between his legs.

But when he now gets there, he spots something which will completely change his fortunes.

When he'd been in California, he'd noticed some of the similarities in the landscape between California and inland New South Wales.

And he sort of thought, oh, well, if California looks like this and there's a really kind of big, rich gold theme that runs right underneath it, surely that means there's something in the middle of New South Wales.

That's where I'm going to go.

Hargraves, though, has competition.

Ever since the Australian government announced their incentive scheme, dozens of hopefuls have been digging the fields.

None have been successful yet.

and Hargraves can only pray it stays that way.

Determined to get his hands on the treasure first, Hargraves mounts his horse and sets off.

Anticipating that gold will lie inland, he turns away from the coast and heads to Wellington, 150 miles or so northwest of Sydney.

In a pub en route, he meets a local man, John Lister, along with brothers William and James Tom.

Hargraves persuades them to join him, promising to teach them the gold mining methods he learned in California.

True to his word, Hargraves shows his new friends how to construct and use a wooden cradle by pouring water and dirt into the sieves at the top and watching the impurities slide down.

He also teaches them the method of gold panning using small spades and buckets to sift through water, dirt, and hopefully gold in the rivers.

And in January of 1851, after a month of work at Lewis Ponds Creek in eastern New South Wales, they strike gold.

From the riverbeds of the creek, the prospectors extract a handful of tiny golden flakes.

Impatient to capitalise on their find, Hargraves writes to the Governor of New South Wales right away.

So they discovered flecks of gold and Hargraves left and took those to go to Sydney to negotiate claiming the reward while the others continued working in the creek.

They then found larger nuggets that Hargraves purchased from them and took as evidence of his find.

The government cannot deny the value of Hargraves' samples.

They declare him a national hero, showering him in praise and adulation.

Most importantly to him, They hand over the prize he's been after, a fat check for £10,000.

It's enough to set him up for life.

Though it's undoubtedly the gold discovered by Lister and the Tom brothers that made this prize possible, Hargraves fails to mention their efforts.

He doesn't share a penny of his prize money with them, and it won't be for another 40 years that they're finally recognized for their discovery.

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In May of 1851, the Sydney Herald announces that Lewis Ponds Creek is the location of plentiful gold fields, and Hargraves, newly appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Gold Districts, has the privilege of renaming the town.

He chooses a biblical title, Ophir,

after a prosperous city in the Old Testament.

And so, with the success story filling newspapers around the country, Australia's gold rush begins.

The first few months of the gold rush in Australia were crazy.

The news of payable gold at Ofa was confirmed in Sydney in March, and by early May, around 300 diggers had already arrived to take their chances on the goldfields there.

which is no small feat considering the distances people had to travel and the minimal infrastructure that existed to even get them there.

Men also began a mass exodus to flood north from the newly established colony of Victoria, which caused the Victorian Parliament to offer their own reward to anyone finding gold within 200 miles of Melbourne, attempting to stem the tide of people leaving.

Within six months of them offering that reward, gold was discovered in places like Clunes, Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo.

People from all walks of life became involved in the rush.

Ex-convicts dug alongside doctors, alongside butchers.

And it's not just Australians who are struck by gold fever.

Thousands of immigrants travel from all over the world.

Britain, America, Germany, Poland, and China.

They've all heard about the gold rush and are desperate for a slice of the prize.

But that prize won't just go to those who work the hardest.

So it really depends depends on who you were and how lucky you got as to how successful diggers were during their time on the gold fields.

Some people found their fortune while searching for gold while others never found a thing.

In the initial stages of the rush there was a greater abundance of surface gold which is easier to mine and required less equipment and less machinery and those sorts of things.

So you didn't need to have as many resources to be able to get at that surface gold, which meant that the people who got there early probably did have more success.

The influx of diggers to the Australian colonies completely transforms them.

While urban cities such as Sydney become ghosts of what they once were as people desert them to chase gold, the rural gold cities thrive.

Keen to take advantage of the growing population and wealth, new businesses pop up to cater to the miners' needs, and shopkeepers fill their stores with all manner of mining wares.

You can't walk down a street without seeing adverts for gold-digging gloves, all-weather overalls, mining boots, blankets, tents, and other camping goods.

All day long, the gold fields are crowded with hopeful miners digging with trowels, panning in rivers, and sifting through cradles of dirt.

At the end of each day, the nuggets of gold are added to miners' collections or sold to private companies or the government for a profit.

Some are exchanged, like currency, for items such as food, liquor, or new mining equipment.

Businesses boom as miners spend their hard-earned cash in the cafes and pubs, hotels, and hostels.

Australia's economy begins to revolve around gold.

Summer gives way to autumn and eventually to winter, and more and more people flood New South Wales.

Within a few years, over 500,000 diggers have made the colony their home.

But there is also the small matter of the people who lived here first.

When the gold rush began in 1851, the immigrants believed that much of New South Wales was uninhabited.

In reality, it's already home to hundreds of thousands of of men, women and children.

First Nations Australians have a history of more than 65,000 years on the Australian continent and they make up the oldest continuing culture in the world today.

Population estimates for the time range between about 300,000 and 950,000 people living on, growing with and nurturing their traditional country.

So country for First Nations Australians is a term that is really broad and far-reaching and it encompasses not just the physical lands, waterways and the seas of a particular group but includes really complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spirituality, cultural practice, family and identity.

But while the land may be sacred to Aboriginal Australians, to the European miners, it is simply a place of profit.

By that time, people had already experienced many waves of cultural disruption, dispossession and loss due to things like inland exploration and pastoralism.

The discovery of gold, establishment of settlements and tent cities and the ongoing expansion of the physical gold fields themselves, not to mention just the sheer number of people moving across the landscape, created just another of these kind of waves.

But one of the biggest things is that the gold rush forever altered the physical landscape of the country and that has a huge impact on culture and cultural connection.

It's not just the landscape, it's all-encompassing and it's about the lives and the ways that people practice their culture and how they live.

Prospectors burn the scrubland, tear down trees and dirty the waters with their gold washing.

Animals are driven away by urbanization or hunted to near extinction.

But it's the new diseases brought over by the immigrants that pose perhaps the most immediate danger to the indigenous population.

Having built no immunity to viruses from other continents, many First Nations experience devastating losses.

Take the Jajarwarung people living near Ballarat in Victoria.

At the start of the 1850s, they number around 3,000.

By the time the decade is out, this will fall to just 225.

Many believe it is a direct consequence of gold rush settlement.

However, despite the significant hardships, some Aboriginal Australians find ways to adapt.

If the Europeans are making money on their gold fields, why can't they capitalize on the good fortune too?

It's a spring morning in 1852 and the sun is rising above a cluster of wooden houses in Bendigo Creek, Victoria.

A young Jajarwurung man stretches sleepily and rolls over on his mattress.

as the first rays of sun warm his skin.

He forces himself out of bed and gropes around for his clothes.

Despite the warm weather, he pulls on a white shirt, blue trousers, and a stiff navy blue jacket with red piping.

Next, he picks up a sword from the corner of the room and hooks it to his belt before making his way to the kitchen where his family are already gathered around the breakfast table.

They look up as he walks in.

dressed from head to toe in the uniform of the Native Police Corps, an organization recently created by the government to assimilate the Aboriginal Australians.

As an employee, he receives housing and a regular wage of three pence per day.

In return, he must carry out a number of duties, from tracking down people lost in the bush to patrolling the goldfields and checking every miner is there legally.

If the workers don't have a permission slip to dig, known as a gold license, the native corps officer will have to tell them to leave.

Helmet in hand, the young officer kisses his mother goodbye and heads out the front door.

Following the dusty track, he passes green forests and fields full of healthy livestock before he closes in on the gold fields.

Here, the landscape starts to change.

The forests become thinner and the sound of birdsong fades.

The stream that runs parallel to his path is dirty with mud and sludge and moves at a crawl.

This is his destination, the Bendigo goldfields.

Miles of dry, sandy-colored land, peppered with trees and wooden shacks, creeks and sparse shrubs stretching as far as the eye can see.

and dozens of men digging, sifting and washing the soil, desperate for a find that could change their lives.

The officer approaches the first prospector, an elderly gent panning for gold in a shallow creek.

The old man wearily withdraws his license as soon as he sees the officer and hands it over with a nod.

Thanking him, the young man steps over the narrow creek to where two more prospectors are bent over a ditch.

One is shoveling piles of soil to the side.

while the other picks his way through it.

Except, this time, when he asks for their license, they pretend not to have heard.

The officer clears his throat and asks again, an edge to his voice that wasn't there before.

At this, the two men stop their work and straighten up.

They glare at the young native Corps officer, gripping the tools in their hands like weapons, and tell him he has no right to order them around.

Their response is nothing new.

The goldfields are renowned for outbreaks of violence between miners and members of the Corps.

Though it's Aboriginal land they're churning up, the miners see them as trespassers, unwelcome foreigners coming to take away their right to dig.

But despite their aggression, the officer stands his ground, and eventually they relent.

After all, he's got the force of the law behind him.

Colonial governments in New South Wales and Victoria imposed a licence fee to dig for gold.

Having a license entitled a miner to claim an area of land that they could process, but that area of land was only about eight feet or 2.4 meters square.

So a license didn't buy you a lot.

And they're also incredibly expensive at 30 shillings a month, over £100 in today's money.

Even so, they're mandatory by 1852, and those who fail to produce a valid license on demand can expect a hefty fine or even a prison sentence.

Unsurprisingly, the miners of Australia hate the tax.

They grumble that it's unfair to charge a monthly fee when there's no guarantee of finding gold.

With many of them having left steady employment and sold all of their possessions to travel to the goldfields, it's near impossible to find the necessary fee.

Miners had to pay these fees whether they found gold or not.

So usually they were paying through the nose with these license fees but had no income coming in, especially if the tiny plot of land that their license bought them was dry.

So license fees as well as the mistreatment of miners who couldn't afford to buy a license by the government and the police led to a general feeling of distrust and anger towards the colonial governments who imposed them.

And the tax isn't just a financial issue, it's a political one too, thanks to Australia's legislative system.

At the start of the 1850s, the only people in Australia able to vote are men who own land worth at least £100

or rent property for more than £10 a year, conditions way beyond the reach of the majority of gold miners.

Barred from voting, the miners have no say in the laws of the land and no representation in government.

Which leads many to ask, why should our hard-earned cash go to a government we're excluded from influencing?

A few decades earlier, maybe they'd have accepted it as one of life's many inequalities.

But by the mid-19th century, the world is changing.

Many miners have emigrated from America where the popular slogan, no taxation without representation, fueled the revolution towards the end of the last century.

Why shouldn't the same logic apply in Australia?

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As if the financial and political implications of the tax aren't bad enough, the physical conditions that the miners live in add insult to injury.

So living conditions on the gold visits within Australia were tough.

There's not really any other word for it.

In the early years of the gold rush, life for diggers basically consisted of continuous manual labor, hard work, dirt, mud, and sweat.

Miners in these years didn't use mechanised machines.

It all relied on muscle power and the men working them work themselves to the bone, basically.

In the majority of the gold rush cities, there isn't enough affordable housing to cope with the influx of people.

Tent cities spring up, with families pitching their canvas homes near to their claims, where they'll work for months at a time.

Without access to home comforts, they cook on camping stoves and use communal toilets, foregoing any kind of privacy.

With basic hygiene forgotten and hundreds of people living in close quarters, disease spreads like wildfire.

Typhoid, dysentery, and cholera become endemic, and heat stroke is a constant threat.

As the gold rush continues throughout the 1850s, it becomes increasingly hard to find a fortune.

Most diggers have to accept that their funds will just about cover the cost of their taxes and equipment and perhaps one hot meal a day if they're lucky.

As the supply of gold dwindles, desperation to find whatever is left rises.

and turns to jealousy.

Established prospectors are hostile to newcomers, in particular those who have crossed the sea from China.

The 1850s saw more than 38,000 Chinese people arrive.

There was a few lines of tension between European and Chinese migrants and diggers.

One of them was that the Chinese diggers worked in a different way than European miners.

So European miners tended to team up in groups of between three and six people, whereas Chinese diggers tended to work in much larger groups between 30 and 100.

And because of that, they were really efficient at digging, which kind of led to a bit of a resentment from the smaller European teams.

The Chinese miners also, because of this efficiency,

often would take over claims that had already been dug by European miners in order to find anything that had been left behind.

And because of their efficiency, they usually were able to get gold out of claims that had already been dug over by the Europeans.

And so there was a little bit of a perception that they came in behind people and took things that should have belonged to the first person on the claim.

Racially fueled riots break out across goldfields.

And in Bendigo in July 1854, a series of anti-Chinese demonstrations turns violent.

The Australian government responds not by punishing the perpetrators, but the victims, introducing a £10 entry tax on every Chinese immigrant arriving in Melbourne.

Tension is rising on the goldfields, and it's only a matter of time until it reaches breaking point.

One night in October 1854, a 27-year-old Scottish-born miner, James Scobie, heads to a pub in Ballarat for an evening drink.

Finding the door locked, he and his friend walk around to one of the windows and try to enter that way.

Somehow, the window smashes.

Having seen the miners loitering, the pub owners presume they're responsible for the damage and furiously chase the young men through the street.

Though Scobie cries out that he is innocent, he is eventually caught and beaten on the head with a battle axe.

The young miner dies instantly.

Weeks later, a judge acquits Scoby's killers on the grounds of insufficient evidence, despite Scoby's friend, who was with him at the time, explaining in detail what happened.

This miscarriage of justice whips the already tense miners into a frenzy.

They have no votes, no representation, no money, and now no legal protection.

The Ballarat miners decide something needs to be done.

Within a few weeks, two men rise to the challenge.

Irish-born prospector Peter Lawler and Scottish-born miner John Basson Humphrey.

Drawing on experience gained in the Chartist movement back home in Britain, in which working-class men and women fought for rights and representation, Lola and Humphrey organised the miners into a union.

Calling themselves the Ballarat Reform League, their first action is to issue a Charter of Rights.

The Ballarat Reform League Charter was a reflection of universal democratic values that were inspired by the Chartist movement and other international democratic movements at the time.

In the Charter of Rights, the Ballarat miners asked for things like a full and fair representation, manhood suffrage, no property qualifications of members for the Legislative Council, payment of members of parliament, and a short duration of parliament.

The Charter also insists that there must be no taxation without representation.

5,000 miners and their families sign the League's petition.

But when it's presented to the governor in Melbourne, it's rejected.

Furious at the snub, 10,000 miners now gather at Bakery Hill above the Ballarat Goldfields on November 30th, where they burn their hated gold licenses beneath the flag of the Southern Cross.

The rebellion is only the start of what's to come.

Over the first few days of December, around 200 miners head to the Eureka Goldfields in Ballarat and hastily construct a stockade, a defensive enclosure made from wooden posts.

They load up with rifles, shotguns, all manner of weapons.

They've had enough of compliance, continuing to work themselves to the bone while paying tax for the privilege.

Now the miners of Ballarat stand in and around their stockade.

protesting the rejection of their charter and blocking any outsider from entering the fields.

Guns slung over their shoulders, they dare the government to try to tax them again.

It's daybreak on Sunday, December the 3rd, 1854.

On the flats of the Eureka Goldfield, 200 miners are gathered around a wooden stockade, at the center of which is the Southern Cross flag.

One of the miners, father who's here with his teenage son, rubs his eyes sleepily and stifles a yawn.

Like many of those around him, he's recovering from a late night of drinking.

His son mumbles over his shoulder, complaining that he doesn't see why they have to stand here this morning.

It's Sunday, after all, he says, the day of rest.

No authorities are going to bother them today.

But the older man has barely begun to reply when the horizon darkens.

The miner and his teenager squint in confusion as hundreds of men on foot and horseback approach, heavily armed.

As they thunder towards the Eureka Flats, the other miners look up.

Panic etched on their faces, they look to their leader, Peter Lawler, who instructs them to remain where they are.

He assures them that the authorities won't make any arrests or force them to pay their taxes.

The raid is probably no more than an intimidation tactic.

The father, though, isn't convinced.

Every second brings the army closer and they're not slowing down.

Ignoring Lola, he grabs his son's arm and pulls him away from the group.

They run towards their tent, shoving the other protesters out of the way and paying no attention to the accusatory shouts of cowardice.

If they can reach their tent, maybe they'll be safe.

But they are too late.

The authorities have already reached the Eureka flats, and without warning, they open fire.

Policemen on foot tackle the miners to the ground and beat them with their battens before locking their wrists in handcuffs.

Those on horseback charge through the stockade, scattering the crowd.

The father pushes his boy behind a tree and instructs him to remain where he is, out of sight and, he hopes, out of danger.

Seizing a pickaxe, he rushes back into the stockade, but he is no match for the trained authorities.

With their guns, truncheons, helmets, and horses, they are undefeatable.

The miner is knocked off his feet with a single blow, landing heavily on the dusty ground.

As blood pours from his nose, he tries to make sense of the chaos around him.

Soldiers are setting fire to the tents.

Women and children are screaming as they wake up to find their homes ablaze.

In the end, it takes the government forces barely 10 minutes to crush the Eureka rebellion.

It's a monumental defeat for the miners, who are outnumbered and unprepared.

22 miners and six soldiers are killed in the melee,

while 113 of the rebels are arrested.

In the immediate aftermath, the authorities crack down further on the goldfields.

A curfew is introduced, police presence is increased, and the threat of capital punishment looms over anyone who dares step out of line.

However, when the trials of the rebels take place weeks later, something surprising happens.

The jury sides with the protesters.

Not a single rebel is found guilty.

Incidentally, the only person who receives a night in jail is a member of the public who's charged with disorder for clapping too loudly in the courtroom.

The acquittal is just the first in a long line of changes triggered by the events at Eureka.

Opinion gradually shifts in the forthcoming months, and by April 1855, the Victoria government government agrees to the demands of the Ballarat Charter.

In the immediate sense the rebellion led to changes in Victorian governance that gave minors seats in parliament, in turn providing them with a direct path of influence in the colonial government.

This change in the ways that working or everyday classes were able to participate in politics sowed the seeds for democratic participation by people from all walks of life, which culminates in the system of governance that that Australia has today.

One of the first men to fill the new legislative seats is Peter Lawler.

Along with political representation, the miners are given a tax break and the hated system of licenses is revoked.

It's replaced by a miner's right, which costs just £1 a year.

and guarantees the miners the right to lay claim to land wherever they wish.

They can even erect a cottage on it and a garden.

No more tent cities or sleeping rough.

But though democracy is extended, Australia's First Nations people still face strict regulations that prevent them from voting, and they won't achieve full national equality with other electors until 1984.

The miners' right also represents a further wave of dispossession for Aboriginal Australians as more of their land is taken and given to the European settlers.

The significance of the Eureka stockade is a bit contested by modern historians.

There's absolutely no doubt that it played a really pivotal role in the development of fairer systems, goldfield administration and governance that eventually had much wider implications for Australian democracy as a whole.

However, it's important to acknowledge that the event at the time probably wasn't envisaged by the people involved as a be-all-end-all fight for democracy, only in the sense that they had a very specific purpose in their actions, and that was to improve their position in the treatment of minors in the Victorian colony.

But the small rebellion, combined with the work of other political activists across the colonies at the same time, and in the decades after, people who include women, by the way, has led to changes that made Australia one of the most progressive democracies in the world.

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Towards the end of the 1850s, Australia enters a new age, the Industrial Revolution.

At first, the influx of modern technology and scientific developments helps propel the momentum of the gold rush.

Railways speed up the transportation of gold, goods, and people, as do new roads and bridges, making it easier for miners to travel between sites.

Meanwhile, the fields themselves see the introduction of new techniques and equipment.

Hydraulic mining enables miners to cover greater areas by using enormous hoses to spray high-pressured jets of water over the land.

Elsewhere, steam-powered machinery speeds up the mining process.

Thanks to the industrial developments, mini gold rushes crop up all over Western Australia, like Fly Flat in Koolgadi in 1892.

followed by Kalgoorlie and Mount Charlotte the next year.

Their newfound wealth triggers an immense migration west.

After the initial discoveries in New South Wales and Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia all experienced some level of gold rush.

And even today, gold is still one of Australia's major resources and exports.

So

miners who came to Australia for the rush, depending on when they arrived and the resources that they had access to, had a number of choices.

Once things kind of started to slow down where they had ended up, they could use the skills that they'd built where they had started and move to the next major gold discovery, following gold around the country sometimes for decades.

But the mini gold rushes aren't to last.

And within a few years, the Industrial Revolution has outgrown the mining industry.

Promises of reliable wages, comfortable accommodation, and a more fast-paced urban way of life lure the younger generations away from the fields and back to the cities.

There's also no denying that the gold is running out.

There just isn't as much being found in the mountains, creeks and fields anymore, no matter how advanced the mining equipment.

By the final years of the 19th century, the legendary gold rush draws to a close.

And those who had tried to make their fortunes on the fields are forced to bid it farewell.

Some people who had trades or skills before the rush returned to their original jobs and others re-skilled and trained and did new work.

Industries like farming, pastoralism, wool production, etc.

were huge across the country and provided opportunities outside of cities and towns.

Some people returned to their home countries, either with the wealth they had hoped to find or with empty pockets and broken dreams, basically.

Others actually didn't return to their home countries and moved to other goldfields in places like Canada or South America with hopes of finding better luck in a new country.

By the new millennium, Australia is a country vastly changed from the land originally inhabited by First Nations people alone.

Though the gold rush is now firmly in Australia's rearview mirror, the nation has gold to thank for its rapid development.

Gold rushes absolutely contributed to the development of a modern Australia.

The colonies were no longer seen as convict backwaters.

There was instead this kind of growing reputation as the desired destination for travel and migration.

The influx of miners from 1851 onwards saw Australia's population quadruple from 430,000 to 1.7 million in just two decades.

It became a mixing pot of nationalities.

Britons, Americans, Germans, Polish, Chinese and more.

Such an array of backgrounds and ideologies has transformed the infrastructure of the country.

And by the time the 20th century rolls around, Australia's forward-thinking parliamentary and justice systems are the envy of the world.

Economically too, the gold rush irrevocably changes Australia.

There's a lot of wealth bouncing around that came not just from the gold itself, but also from the establishment of businesses and infrastructure and servicing the growing population's requirements.

There was an expansion of industry by skilled migrants and the availability of goods and services widened so Australians were able to access more of the world and the world was able to access more of Australia.

However, while the Gold Rush may be celebrated for its political and financial successes, its legacy is one plagued by controversy.

The rapid expansion of settlements in gold rich areas definitely led to the forcing out of First Nations Australians from their traditional country and a disruption of that cultural connection and practice, especially with relation to the land.

The destruction of physical landscapes not only had an environmental impact, but would certainly have meant the destruction of important and sacred places which are integral to First Nations ceremony dreaming and everyday life too.

The mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians in the decades-long frenzy for gold is still being debated today.

We're asking questions like, was it the birthplace of Australian Australian democracy?

Did the miners have the intent to change everything about colonial systems of government or were they just looking for fairer treatment in their own particular situation?

How do we view the Eureka flag?

How does Australia today typify the Eureka spirit?

And they're all questions that we're sort of grappling with as we move forward now.

And gold continues to be found all over Australia.

In 2022, it was ranked third in the world among gold-producing nations, with its mines producing over 300 tons of the precious metal each year.

With thousands of tons of gold believed to be hidden beneath the Australian soil, it's no surprise that the industry employs over 30,000 people in Australia.

People lured in, perhaps, by the dream of a glimpse of yellow metal that could change their lives,

just like the prospectus of almost two centuries ago.

Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of Nelson Mandela.

His genius always lay in how one goes about when presenting oneself in a way that embodies the spirit of the time.

So in the 1950s, he was the dapper lawyer in expensive clothes and a good car and understood that that exuded a very, very powerful image of black dignity.

In 1960, he understood that the turn to violence required a very different image, and that's when he grew his hair and put on a trench coat and projected himself as a gorilla.

In 1964, he switched to being a martyr, and strangely enough, in prison, he watched this mythical Nelson Mandela form on the outside, quite detached from him, and learned to play it, learned very quickly who this Nelson Mandela evolving in international cultural circuits was and cottoned on and began to to play him very well.

That's next time.

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