How did the gold rush change Australia?

Gold in the creek gravel

Gold had been found in Australia before 1851, but nobody had rushed to dig it up. That changed in 1851. In March, a prospector named Edward Hargraves showed gold from near Bathurst, New South Wales, to the government, and the news spread. In July, gold turned up at Clunes in Victoria. By the end of the year there were finds at Ballarat, Bendigo and Mount Alexander as well.

Most of this gold was alluvial gold. Water had washed tiny flakes and nuggets out of hard rock and left them in creek gravel and clay, close to the surface. Gold is very heavy, so it sinks when gravel is swirled in water. Diggers used a tin pan or a cradle, a wooden box rocked on curved runners, with a sieve on top and ridges inside. The water washed the lighter dirt away and the gold stayed behind. A digger bought a licence, marked out a claim about 2.4 metres square, and started work with a pick and a shovel.

A world on the move

The news travelled by ship and by word of mouth. Men left farms, shops and ships all over Australia. Others sailed from Britain, Europe, North America, New Zealand and China, a voyage that took months. At the 1851 census, taken before the rush began, Victoria had about 76,000 settlers. By 1860 it had about 540,000, roughly seven times as many. Across Australia the population grew from about 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871, about four times as many.

All that gold made the colonies rich, and Australia became one of the world's biggest gold producers. But Melbourne was not ready for the crowds. Rooms were scarce and expensive, so thousands of newcomers lived in a tent suburb south of the Yarra River that people called Canvas Town. Farms and businesses struggled to find workers, because so many men had left for the diggings.

The rush did not last. By the late 1850s most of the shallow gold had been found. Reaching gold deep in hard rock took machines and money, so most miners ended up working for wages for mining companies. New rushes followed in other places, including Queensland from 1857 and Western Australia in the 1890s.

Licences and the Eureka Stockade

Every digger had to buy a licence, and it ran out after one month. Diggers had to pay for a new one whether or not they had found any gold. Police and gold commissioners went on 'licence hunts', and anyone who could not show a licence could be fined or jailed. Most diggers also had no vote, because they did not own land. They had no say in the laws that made them so angry.

In late 1854 the anger boiled over at Ballarat. On 29 November a big meeting at Bakery Hill raised a new flag, the Eureka flag. The next day, after another licence hunt, the miners built a rough timber barricade called the Eureka Stockade. Early on Sunday 3 December, almost 300 soldiers and police attacked it at first light. The miners were overpowered quickly. At least 22 miners and six soldiers were killed, and 113 miners were arrested.

Thirteen of the arrested miners were put on trial in Melbourne for treason, but the juries found them all not guilty. Many people in Victoria were on the diggers' side. In 1855 the licence was scrapped and replaced by a miner's right that cost just £1 a year. Victoria's Legislative Council gained 12 new members, and eight of them were elected by people who held a miner's right. One of those elected was Peter Lalor, the leader at Eureka, who had been shot in the arm during the fight. Eureka was one step on the road to votes for men in Victoria in 1857, when every male British subject aged 21 or over could vote.

A harder welcome for Chinese miners

Tens of thousands of Chinese men joined the rush. Most were young and came from Guangdong province in southern China, where war and hardship made life hard. They called Victoria the 'New Gold Mountain'. At the peak, in the late 1850s, there were more than 30,000 Chinese people in Victoria, almost all of them young men. On the goldfields, estimates say about one in every five men was Chinese. They were often pushed off rich claims and had to work new ground or sites that others had left.

Many European diggers saw them as rivals, and newspapers warned of a Chinese 'invasion'. In 1855 Victoria passed a law that made every Chinese person landing from a ship pay a £10 poll tax, and limited how many Chinese passengers a ship could carry. Other passengers paid no such tax.

Ship captains found a way around it. They landed their Chinese passengers at Robe in South Australia, and about 16,000 people then walked to the Victorian goldfields, a trek of hundreds of kilometres. In 1857 South Australia brought in its own tax, which checked the flow of arrivals.

Chinese miners also faced violence. In July 1857, at Buckland Valley in Victoria, armed mobs attacked Chinese camps, burnt tents and belongings, and drove hundreds of people away. Several Chinese miners died. In 1861, at Lambing Flat in New South Wales, more than 2,000 European miners attacked Chinese camps, and soon afterwards New South Wales passed its own law to limit Chinese arrivals. These laws were early steps on the road to the White Australia policy of the 1900s.

Chinese Victorians did not accept this quietly. They wrote petitions, held protests and found ways to avoid the taxes, in a campaign that lasted from the mid-1850s until the taxes were removed in 1862 and 1863. Many stayed and made Australia home, setting up market gardens and shops. In 2017 the Victorian Premier apologised in Parliament for the unjust treatment of Chinese people in the gold-rush era.

Whose Country was it?

Gold was found on Aboriginal Country. Ballarat is on Wadawurrung Country, and Bendigo and Castlemaine are on Djandak, the Country of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. These communities had already suffered from disease, and from sheep and cattle that trampled waterholes and ate their food plants. Then thousands of diggers arrived. They cut down trees, muddied and diverted creeks, and turned the ground over into heaps of clay. Public Record Office Victoria describes the gold rush as a second wave of dispossession for many of Victoria's First Peoples.

Aboriginal people were more than bystanders. Many newcomers depended on Aboriginal guides to find the way, and on local people to find food, bush medicine and waterholes. Aboriginal people were also skilled gold seekers. One report from 1852 says that an Aboriginal man picked up the nugget that led to the rich Eureka diggings at Ballarat. Look for the Aboriginal people in the middle of the painting at the top of this page.

So how did the gold rush change Australia? It made the colonies rich and crowded, built boomtowns, and brought people from around the world, which was the beginning of a more multicultural country. It helped win the vote for more men. It also took land and water from First Peoples, and it treated Chinese newcomers unfairly. Good history keeps all of those stories together.

📚 Words to know

Alluvial gold

Gold that water has washed out of rock and left in creek gravel, sand and clay. It lies near the surface and can be dug by hand.

Cradle

A wooden box rocked on curved runners. Water and gravel go in the top, and the heavy gold is caught by ridges inside.

Licence

Official permission, bought from the government, to dig for gold on a claim.

Stockade

A fence or barricade, usually made of timber, built for defence.

Poll tax

A tax charged on each person. Victoria's 1855 poll tax charged £10 for every Chinese person landing from a ship.

🧪 Try this: pan for pretend gold

1. Ask an adult to help. You will need a big bowl or tub of water, a cup of sand or garden soil, a handful of small stones, a few small metal items such as steel washers or nuts (your 'gold'), and a shallow plastic dish. Work outside or over a sink, and keep the small metal pieces away from little children and pets.
2. Mix the sand, stones and 'gold' together in the dish, then lower the dish into the water until everything is wet.
3. Hold the dish just under the water. Tilt it a little and swirl it gently, then tip the muddy water over the low edge. Do this again and again. What is left in the bottom of the dish?
4. The heavy metal pieces should stay behind while the lighter sand and mud wash away. Gold is much heavier than sand, so real diggers' pans and cradles worked the same way.
5. Challenge: try swirling faster, or tilting the dish further. Do some of your 'gold' pieces wash away too? Why did diggers need patience as well as strong arms?