Other Rushes · From 1851
The Australian Gold Rushes
1851: payable gold is found at Ophir, Ballarat and Bendigo
Australia's rushes of the 1850s tripled its population, produced a third of the world's gold, and sparked the Eureka Stockade, a turning point for Australian democracy.
Just two years after California, gold fever leapt to the other side of the world. Australia's gold rushes of the 1850s transformed a scattering of British colonies into a wealthy, fast-growing society, and produced a rebellion that Australians still treat as a founding moment of their democracy.
Hargraves and Ophir
In February 1851, Edward Hammond Hargraves, who had tried his luck in California and learned to pan and cradle there, found payable gold at Ophir, near Bathurst in New South Wales. He named the site after the biblical land of gold and publicized the find loudly. (Later credit for the actual discovery went to associates including John Lister and the Tom brothers.)
Ballarat and Bendigo
The richest fields lay south, in Victoria. Gold at Ballarat (from August 1851) and Bendigo set off a stampede that dwarfed the New South Wales rush. In the 1850s, Victoria alone produced more than a third of the world's gold. Immigrants poured in from Britain, Europe, China and the Americas; in the decade after 1851 Australia's population roughly tripled.
The Eureka Stockade
The Victorian diggings also produced a political explosion. Miners resented the expensive mining licenses they had to buy whether or not they found gold, enforced by heavy-handed police "license hunts," and they had no vote or representation. At Ballarat, grievances boiled over.
On December 3, 1854, after forming the Ballarat Reform League and burning their licenses, several hundred diggers built a wooden stockade at the Eureka diggings. Colonial troops stormed it at dawn, killing more than twenty miners in a brief, one-sided fight.
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Defeat that won the argument
Eureka was a military rout but a political victory. Public sympathy swung to the diggers; the hated licenses were replaced with an affordable miner's right that also carried the vote, and Victoria moved quickly toward broader male suffrage and the secret ballot. Many Australians regard the Eureka Stockade as a birthplace of their democratic tradition, the closest thing the country has to a revolution.
The Australian rushes proved that California was not a one-off but the start of a global age of gold. And in the muddy diggings of Ballarat, a scuffle over mining licenses became a milestone in the history of democracy.
