Mining and the Gold Rush
Photos
Refer the 1858 studio of Antoine Fauchery and Richard Daintree.
Richard Daintree surveyed Victoria’s coal deposits and mapped the geology of the Bellarine Peninsula.
It was on January 24, 1848, that John W. Marshall, a carpenter, glanced into a newly dug sawmill ditch at Slitter's Mill, California, and saw gleams of gold. The- real rush got into full swing the following year.
Gold was discovered on the Fish River in 1823 and this gave the area a boost in population. There have been many silver and copper mines in the district and the area is still well known for its sapphires and gemstones which attract many fossickers.
Fish River, a perennial stream[1] that is part of the Macquarie catchment within the Murray–Darling basin, is located in the central western district of New South Wales, Australia near Oberon.
The early pioneers knew Oberon as Bullock Flat.
Permanent settlement in the district began in 1839 but it was not until 1863 that the name was changed to Oberon (taken from the King of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and it was declared a village. From a town population of 200 in the 1880s it is now growing to 2,700 in 2006.
People on Victorian goldfields:- Gold miners often led an itinerant life, following rushes from lead to lead, so tracking their movements can be difficult. Birth, death, marriage, cemetery and inquest records may all be useful when you are tracing a miner's movements and life story. The birthplaces of children can also provide clues about where their miner father lived, worked or visited over time. You can search many birth indexes by father's name to find any children fathered by a miner.
The Gold Rush 1851
The discovery of gold provided a new surge of hope and interest after it was first discovered in South Australia in 1846 and then Victoria and New South Wales. This was a new world, a land of opportunity in which rewards for labour and ingenuity were possible and bondsmen were granted Tickets of leave and full pardons for the crime that landed them in Australia.
Gold was predicted by Edward Hammond Hargraves who arrived from the California gold rush of 1849, and understood the geology and features in a promising landscape. Hargraves believed he saw the elements in the Bathurst landscape and proposed that Australia was a vast storehouse of gold. The Colonial Secretary, Edward Deas Thomson, saw a great future for the country.
The Sydney Morning Herald Wednesday 20 November 1946 / In The Paths Of The Explorers_Gold Brings Australia Wealth Written and Illustrated by ALLAN M. LEWIS
"HARGRAVES is my name,"a tall black-bearded bushman introduced himself. He placed on the table a small package. Wrapped inside it were seven tiny grains of gold.
Those few grains meant much to Australia, and also to Hargraves. Presence of gold in Australia had been whispered abroad before, but Government officials kept all findings secret for fear of disorganising the young colony. This Colonial Secretary, however, saw a great future for the country when Hargraves proved his theory that Australia was a vast storehouse of gold. Hargraves had been in the California gold rush and knew gold country, when he first saw it, round Bathurst. The news spread like wildfire, and soon the race was on from coast to gold fields. Flocks were left untended, drovers deserted their teams merchants and lawyers rushed from their desks and entire ships' crews, captains included, marched off to seek their fortunes.
The precious metal was found in many ways — sometimes by simply washing sand in a tin dish (a method Hargraves introduced from California). It was also hammered out of gold-bearing quartz and occasionally picked up in nuggets just under the earth's surface. The "Welcome Stranger" nugget was 24 inches long by 10 inches thick. It yielded 2,248 ounces of pure gold valued at £9,934. Never before in history had gold been found in such huge quantities. Fortune-hunters came from the four corners of the globe. Australia increased her population five times over in a period of 20 years. Wealth poured into the treasury coffers. In Victoria alone in the year 1852 miners washed gold in their dishes to the value of over £9,000,000. Not all the diggers were successful though. After a time many disappointed men left the fields. On one occasion a group of miners threatened to drown Hargraves for having misled them! Daring robberies took place and bushrangers flourished, but among the miners themselves there was a certain code of honour.
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1956) Saturday 10 September 1949
Looking Back to Our Golden Past By LESLIE PEARCE
A year after Marshall made his discovery in California, Melbourne seethed with excitement. Gold had been found in the Pyrenees.
On January 31, 1849, a special "edition of THE ARGUS announced:
"We hasten to apprise our readers of the important discovery of an extensive goldfield in this province, yielding the virgin metal in such quantities as to all appearances will completely throw California in the shade . . . The Sydney cry of 'Off to California!' seems likely to be changed to 'Hey for Buninyong and the bonny Pyrenees!' " THE ARGUS news was based upon
a find made by Thomas Hood, a shepherd, who liad sold a considerable quantity of big gold to a Melbourne jeweller. But when a party accompanied him back to the Pyrenees, the place where he had unearthed his nuggets could not be located, and "so the excitement subsided 'till 1851.
ON JULY 8 of that year a find was made at Clunes; three days later another was reported from Warrandyte, and then in the following month came news of really sensational discoveries, and the name Ballarat went around the civilised world, and turned the flood of fortune-seekers from California to Australia. Into the golden heart of Victoria that region extending roughly from
the south of Ballarat to the north of Bendigo, back to St Arnaud, and down to Stawell (a region of about 75 miles square) flocked diggers from all parts of the globe. Tent towns of anything between 20,000 and 40,000 diggers would mushroom almost overnight as one discovery followed another within that small area. Victoria had everything- California had nuggets, gold escorts, stage coaches, excitement, and fortunes for thousands of lucky diggers.
Extract from Ballarat guide website: Black Hill Reserve
"The Black Hill precinct includes the Black Hill public reserve and some privately owned land in Clissold and Chisholm Streets. Black Hill was originally known as 'Bowdun' by the Watha Wurrung people and was described as "Black Hill" by William Urquart the government surveyor who surveyed the region in 1851."
"Black Hill forms part of the auriferous quartz ranges in the Ballarat region. The post contact history of Black Hill was characterised by gold mining over three different eras. Shallow alluvial mining occurred in 1851 - 1852, followed by the working of deep alluvial lead form 1853 - 1875 and finally the development and working of quartz reefs in the underlying bedrock in 1854-1918."
"Black Hill was a difficult area to mine, as the area had no water supply to wash dirt and remove the gold. Miners had to bag the dirt, roll the bags down the hill and wash it in the Yarrowee Creek. By 1853/54 a windmill was erected to supply power to drive a four-head battery. In 1855 the battery was relocated to the Historical Overview bottom of the hill and converted to run on steam power. It is thought that this battery was the first to be erected in Australia. Changes in technology also wrought changes to the landscape. From the late 1850's to early 1900's the landscape was pitted with shafts, mullock heaps, debris, tramway trestle bridges over the Yarrowee Creek and almost bare of vegetation. South of the Yarrowee Creek contained water reservoirs and mullock heaps on land now bounded by Princes, Morres and Newman Streets. Six companies were working the area by 1860."
"Open cut mining commenced in earnest in the late 1850's by the Black Hill Quartz Crushing Company, later became the Black Hill Company Limited Open cut mining became the sole method of mining until 1864. IN 1861, a new sixty-head battery was installed and the Black Hill Company was processing 100 tons of quartz per week. The company purchased the surrounding claims and held about 40 acres, encompassing much of the hill and land to the south of Yarrowee Creek."