Stories abounded of nuggets worth a fortune picked up off the ground; of gold by the pound dug from shallow pits after only a couple of days' labour. For a few, these tales came true; for most, they became something to dream of, something to keep spirits buoyant through long days of gruelling work, digging shafts, carting gravel, rocking a cradle or panning for gold. But these were the gold-rushes and it was always possible that the next stoke of the shovel would be the lucky one, and nuggets would gleam in the dirt, as thick as plums in a pudding.
The gold-rushes were a pivotal era in Australian history. They ushered in a long period of prosperity and underpinned the development of a modern industrial base in the eastern colonies. The gold-seekers brought to Australia a range of skills and professions unthought of prior to the discovery of gold. Their sheer numbers created markets of a size few in Australia had dreamed of before gold. Moreover, these immigrants were often young, educated and energetic. With these qualities they transformed the political and cultural landscape of Australia, just as the wealth they dug from the earth transformed the economy.
Nor was their influence limited to New South Wales and Victoria, where the major gold-rushes of the 1850s occurred. As easily won gold in these colonies became exhausted, gold-seekers began to search further afield. In the decades between the gold-rushes of the 1850s and the end of the nineteenth century diggers opened up a string of goldfields along the eastern side of Australia and across to New Zealand. They ventured into the far north of Queensland, across the top of the continent and then down into Western Australia. There, in the early 1890s, immensely rich discoveries at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie provoked one of the last great gold-rushes.
The economic effects of the gold-rushes are well known and, indeed, have been frequently celebrated by Australian historians. But there was another side to the gold-rushes. Observers at the time often commented on the way diggers ravaged the landscape, cutting wide swathes through virgin forest, upturning great expanses of earth, diverting and befouling streams in their single-minded pursuit of gold. They created a landscape in which, as one writer put it, "every feature of nature is annihilated." It is only in recent years that historians have begun to consider the environmental effects of the gold-rushes. And, as yet, little attention has been paid to the effects of the gold-rushes on the Aboriginal people so peremptorily dispossessed by gold-seekers.
Gold Fever!, however, deals with the earliest phase of the Australian gold-rushes, a period when such long term effects were either uncertain or eclipsed in turmoil. This period begins in February 1851, with the discovery of gold at Lewis Ponds Creek, near Bathurst in New South Wales, by Edward Hammond Hargraves. His discovery, and the publicity campaign he orchestrated to promote it, triggered the first Australian gold-rush.
By 1855, at the end of the period treated in Gold Fever!, the eastern Australian colonies had been transformed by the gold-rushes. Nowhere had these changes been more apparent - or more charged with tension - than in Victoria. In this colony a long series of clashes between diggers and the Government over the administration of the goldfields culminated in the bloody suppression of a miners' protest at the Eureka Stockade at Ballarat. In the aftermath of this event sweeping changes were made to the administrative system and these, combined with the gradual decrease in easily won alluvial gold, encouraged larger scale mining requiring more capital and a work force of wage-earning miners. The changes marked the end of this first phase of the Australian gold-rushes.
Although the early years were characterised by the heady mixture of excitement and a surrender to the lure of gold, it was also a period of uncertainty. Amidst the chaos created by the discovery of gold and the sudden flood of gold-seekers there were those who found it difficult to believe that the gold-rushes could provide any lasting benefit to the Australian colonies.
Even before the first gold discoveries in New South Wales, the world was already gripped by gold fever. The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 had triggered off the first great gold-rush. The American discoveries excited considerable interest in Britain, but although many people were tempted, most prospective diggers held back. California lay at the end of a long and dangerous journey. Moreover, the Californian diggings were widely portrayed as dangerous hellholes, where life was the only thing that was cheap, and where lynch law alone reigned.
The discovery of gold in the Australian colonies was a different matter. Here, few of the deterrents to Californian migration applied. British law was well established and, despite the lingering convict taint, early reports described the diggings as peaceful and orderly. Although long and arduous, the sea route to Australia did not involve months of dangerous overland travel across America, passage of the disease-ridden Isthmus of Panama, or the rounding of notorious Cape Horn.
Several other factors also magnified the lure of the Australian goldfields. People and organisations that had been trying to encourage emigration from Britain to Australia for some years saw the excitement created by gold as a heaven-sent opportunity to achieve their aims. Throughout 1851 and 1852 Charles Dickens, for example, published in his periodical Household Words a constant stream of useful information about the goldfields and the favourable prospects for active young Britons in Australia. The effect of such publicity was heightened by public spectacles such as the diorama of a voyage to Australia created by the artist John Skinner Prout and exhibited in London during 1852.
And then there was simply the gold discoveries themselves. From the time, in the middle of 1851, that word of Hargraves' discoveries reached Britain, it seemed that almost every ship arriving from the colonies brought word of new and richer gold finds. Within six months news of finds in Victoria began to eclipse those of New South Wales and names like Ballarat, Mt Alexander and Bendigo became familiar overnight. Almost immediately an exodus of unprecedented volume began, soon to descend upon ill-prepared settlements half-way around the globe in Australia.
Excitement over prospects of instant and seemingly limitless wealth quickly built to fever pitch, but the enthusiasm of those in authority was tempered by concern. In New South Wales the colonial government had greeted Hargraves' discovery of gold with some relief, as means to divert the stream of people leaving for California, thereby causing labour shortages and depressed rents in Sydney. In Victoria, newly separated from its mother colony of New South Wales, the fledgling government viewed with increasing alarm the movement of its population to goldfields across the newly drawn border. Rewards were offered for the discovery of gold. They were soon claimed.
By early 1852 it seemed as though central Victoria was one vast, immensely rich goldfield. It also appeared that almost the entire population of the colony was heading for the diggings. Inland towns, and even Melbourne itself, were almost deserted. The government struggled to cope as most of its employees left their posts; eighty per cent of the police force resigned to go gold digging, and other departments were similarly affected. By the middle of 1852, as the first waves of gold-seekers from overseas arrived, all needing accommodation, food and transport, the government was fully aware that the discovery of gold had created more intractable problems than it had solved.
The concerns of the government were matched by many close observers of the gold-rushes. They were troubled, not just by the immediate problems, but by the possible lasting effects. To these observers it seemed that the gold-rushes threatened to destroy social stability. Gold digging was a lottery. On the goldfields education, upbringing and class meant nothing. A labourer was just as likely to strike it rich as his erstwhile master. Indeed, because of the necessity for continuous back-breaking work on the diggings, the labourer may have had an advantage over his "betters". To some this situation seemed like an inversion of the natural order of society. The inability of the lower orders to sensibly enjoy the fruits of their fortune, and their futile attempts to copy the behaviour and dress of higher classes was a constant - and rather reassuring - source of merriment throughout the early days of the gold-rushes.
Threats to social stability appeared to be magnified by the arrival of gold-seekers from non-British countries. Initial concerns centred on gold-seekers from the United States. With experience gained on the Californian goldfields, the Americans were active and successful in Australia, especially in businesses. Their republican origins, and the reputation of Californian gold-seekers as desperadoes, armed to the teeth and ready to take the law into their own hands on the slightest excuse, created some unease. In 1854 the disquiet over the presence of foreigners shifted focus as a trickle of Chinese diggers reached the diggings. Campaigns to oust them erupted across the goldfields, based on racism and fear of competition for dwindling amounts of easily found gold.
Amongst those earlier colonists who held political power in Victoria, concern about particular national groups was less than the fear that the diggers could enforce democratic tendencies by sheer weight of numbers. Between 1851 and 1854 there were numerous clashes between miners and the Government. These usually focused on issues specific to the goldfields - the injustice of the licensing system, police corruption, and the inefficiencies of the Government, for example - but occasionally included demands for a more general political emancipation. In late 1854 diggers on the Ballarat goldfields protested over the mishandling of a murder inquiry by local officials, but the scope of their grievances grew progressively wider. By the time the police and military were ordered to attack their stockade on the Eureka lead, the diggers' demands included the right to vote. A small number of the insurgents also began to speak of the severance of links with Britain.
This, then, is the turbulent period examined by Gold Fever! It was a time of great excitement mingled with unease. It was a time of immense wealth and abject poverty; a time in which popular traditions of mateship and tolerance existed alongside a system of arbitrary authority and expressions of blatant racism.
It was also a period in which an enormous interest was focused on the experiences of those people who joined in the gold-rushes. To meet the demand a plethora of words and images flooded into circulation. Innumerable books and paintings, newspaper articles and prints, diaries, letters and sketches were produced. Even children's games and theatrical spectacles were created to satisfy the fascination and interest. These works were intended to record an individual's own adventures, to reassure loved ones left behind, to inform - or misinform - prospective diggers, or simply to satisfy the curiosity of armchair travellers.
Gold Fever! turns this material to another purpose. This exhibition focuses on the experiences of men and women who flocked to the Australian goldfields of the early 1850s, using their words and images, and the artefacts they carried with them, to tell their own stories.
They are stories told with a wealth of detail and colour. The words and images have an immediacy often lacking in later, more considered depictions of the gold-rush scene. But that is not to say that the works included in this exhibition are straightforward representations of the truth. Indeed, this is far from the case. Given the enormous appetite for information on the gold-rushes at the time, almost every description of the diggings and the digger's life could become a public document. Many a letter was written from the diggings in the knowledge that it would be circulated widely at home, many a sketch was pencilled with at least half an eye to later publication.
This shaping of the work to make it suitable for public circulation can sometimes be seen to have involved a conscious selection of subjects. For instance, S.T. Gill's fondness for the picturesque and his practice of contrasting pairs of images - lucky and unlucky diggers, men of high and low degree - creates a different and more extreme impression of the diggers' appearance than do sketches of diggers by J. Gilfillan.
As images of life on the diggings became popular and began to circulate widely, a type of visual shorthand was adopted to signify gold-rush scenes. The so-called diggers' uniform of cabbage tree hat, long red or blue shirt, nondescript pants, boots, belt and knife - became an easy way to indicate that figures were diggers. In three works in this exhibition, a night scene on the diggings by John Skinner Prout and two later versions of this image, a group of people gathered around a campfire is transformed into an almost archetypal scene of revelry on the diggings by the addition of clothing understood to be typical of the diggers - and a bottle!
Such devices remind us that all descriptions, whether written, painted or drawn, are cultural artefacts. They are produced at a certain time, in specific social and cultural contexts and, inevitably, they bear traces of those contexts. Gold Fever! draws attention to these processes of cultural production not in order to devalue the historical accuracy of such images but, on the contrary, to show how people at the time actually saw the Australian gold-rushes. They are evidence of a way of seeing as much as they are of what was seen.
This theme is developed further in the final section of Gold Fever! which deals with later images of the gold-rushes. By the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century the generation of gold-rush immigrants was passing. For a time, too, it seemed that the long era of prosperity which gold had underpinned was also drawing to a close. At a time of growing nationalism in Australia, a new generation began to look back at the gold-rushes with different eyes. For them, the diggers were natural democrats; self-sufficient, but ready - as at Eureka - to stand shoulder to shoulder with their mates to oppose injustice. The gold-seekers embodied the myths of Australian nationalism.
These potent myths have persisted. They still condition our vision of the gold-rush era. We see the digger and his mates; hard working, hard-drinking men; we struggle to see beyond the myth to its contradictions, to the squalor of the diggings, the consuming self-interest of many miners, and to the women who worked alongside them. The aim of Gold Fever! is, ultimately, to challenge these myths and, by examining how people at the time saw their own gold-rush experiences, to challenge our own perception of that turbulent and vital era of Australian history.
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| Project Coordinator UOB - Heather Mays [E-Mail : hjm@mfs1.ballarat.edu.au] |
 | Australian National Maritime Museum - Paul Hundley [E-Mail : paulh@anmm.gov.au] |
| Sovereign Hill - Peter Hoban [E-Mail : sovhill2@fs3.ballarat.edu.au] |
 | Queries ? Please contact Thoshan Ruberu [E-Mail : tar@mfs1.ballarat.edu.au] |