The Discovery of Gold in Australia
In 1848 gold was discovered in California,
which led to a gold rush and mass excitement and hysteria around the
world. Thousands of colonials from
Australia joined the rush to the Californian goldfields. This out-pouring of people and resources
contributed to the colony suffering an economic depression. By 1851 the notion of a California-style
gold rush seemed very attractive to an impoverished colonial government, and a
reward of £500 was offered for the first person to discover a payable gold
field in Australia.
In January 1851 a tall New South Welshman,
Edward Hammond Hargraves, returned home after two years in California, where he
had been unsuccessful in searching for gold.
A big man, he weighed 18 stone and had in the past been a sailor, a
publican and a shopkeeper. While in
California he learned the craft of prospecting for gold with pans, rocking
cradles and excavation. He also learnt
the characteristics of gold bearing country.
The area west of the Blue Mountains impressed him as having the same
characteristics as the Sierra Nevada region in California. There were the same kind of hills and
gullies, and rocky outcrops of granite, slate and quartz. He therefore felt there was a good chance of
finding payable gold.
Hargraves announced his intentions to find
gold to the Inspector General of the New South Wales Police, who in response
told him it was "a wild and unprofitable undertaking". When Hargraves returned to Sydney, very few
wanted to hear of the portly man's ambitions.
Those who returned from California without great riches were paid little
attention in the colony. Without even
visiting his family in Gosford, north of Sydney, Hargraves headed west towards
the Blue Mountains on February 5, 1851.
After travelling through the Blue Mountains,
Hargraves descended onto the Bathurst plains.
He arrived in Guyong, a small town not far from Bathurst, and the
Cornish Settlement (later called Byng).
A retired ship captain, John Hardman Lister, and his wife Susannah (nee
Pymble) had set up an inn at Guyong.
John Lister had died the previous year, on 12 July 1850, so his wife
Susannah was running the inn. Hargraves
stayed at the Wellington Inn, and here he met John’s son, John Hardman
Australia Lister, a man who had already found small traces of gold in a nearby
creek. John Lister Junior agreed to
show Hargraves where he had seen the gold.
In his autobiography, Hargraves fails to even mention Lister's name, let
alone the fact that his man had led him to the exact spot of discovery.
On February 12, 1851, Hargraves and John
Lister rode down to Radigan’s Gully and searched for gold in Lewis Pond Creek,
a tributary of the Macquarie River. The
exact spot that they searched was 4 km up from the junction with the Macquarie
River, near Guyong. The two men began
working the river with a pick and trowel, and were rewarded with four out of
five pans producing specks of alluvial gold.
Hargraves and Lister also prospected at the junction itself but failed
to find any there. It is reported that
Hargraves exclaimed to Lister
"This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted,
and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British
Museum."
Hargraves and Lister then met up with some
friends of Lister, the Tom family.
William Tom (known as Parson Tom) and his wife Ann (nee Lane) lived with
their family at the Cornish Settlement.
In the front room of the family home, Hargraves showed them all how to
build a rocking cradle. He then
demonstrated how to use the strange device, by rocking it with a cradle-like
motion.
William
Tom sitting outside his home, in Guyong, near Orange, with the rocking cradle
John Lister, William Tom, James Tom, and
Edward Hargraves agreed to work together, and with heavily laden packhorses,
they set out to search for gold. After
a week of working along the Lewis Ponds Creek, using the pans and the rocking
cradle, the men returned without any gold.
Hargraves, who was feeling disillusioned with their lack of success,
decided to leave and travel to Gosford to visit his family.
After he left, William Tom, James Tom and
John Lister set out again to search for gold.
On April 7, 1851, only eleven miles from the family home, William Tom
made the first find of payable gold.
The men had been searching along Summer Hill Creek, which was below the
junction with the Macquarie River, when William found a heart shaped gold
nugget on a rock bar in the creek. They
weighed the nugget and found it to be 1/2 ounce in weight. Encouraged by this find, the men spent the
next 3 days cradling and panning for more gold. Further down the creek, John Lister found a gold nugget snared in
the roots of a creek-bank tree, which was 2 ounces in weight. They also found a quantity of alluvial gold
with the pans and the rocking cradle.
In all, the three men had been able to recover 4 ounces of gold out of Summer
Hill Creek, enough to prove that this was a payable gold field.
Summer Hill Creek, Ophir (1890) - the site of the
first discovery
of “payable” gold in Australia in 1851
"And they came to Ophir and fetched
from thence gold." (1 Kings, 9-28)
Parson William Tom suggested the name of Ophir for the area where the
men had found the gold, which was a biblical reference to King Solomon's
gold. Parson Tom then travelled to
Sydney, and took the 4 ounces of gold to show Edward Hargraves. William Tom, James Tom and John Lister did
not hear further from Hargraves. They wrote again but no reply came. Hargraves took the gold to the then Colonial
Secretary, Mr E. Deas Thomson, and claimed all the credit for himself.
On 15 May, 1851, a paragraph appeared in the
Sydney Morning Herald stating that Edward Hargraves had found the first payable
gold in Australia, at Ophir near Orange. The two Tom men and Lister were said
to be Hargraves' associates, not his partners.
The Ophir gold rush was only the second
major gold rush in the world after California, and brought hopeful and excited
prospectors from all over the globe to the Central West of New South
Wales. Over the 10 year period from 1851, the
population of NSW increased from 197 265 to 350 860, and brought with it
skills, resources, knowledge, growth and wealth to the previously depressed
colony. Echoing San Francisco papers of 1849 and 1850, Australia's press
reported that a "complete mental madness appears to have seized almost
every member of the community."
The road over the Blue Mountain was choked with a winding column of
men. The Ophir gold rush and the others
that followed it also triggered independent and democratic ideas, which led to
the development of Australia as a nation in its own right. In a strange twist of fate, the discovery of
gold in Australia eliminated Australia's position as a penal colony. With a
quarter of Britain's subjects clamoring for tickets to the Australian
goldfields, being vanquished to Australia no longer held terror in the mind of
men.
Other gold fields would soon overshadow
Ophir in size and richness but to Ophir belongs the honor of being the first
field. It was also where the Australian
word, digger, was first used. The
miners worked up Lewis Ponds Creek and down Summer Hill Creek, digging and
cradling along the creeks and gullies. Visitors to the field write of the
constant din of the cradles by day (except on Sundays) and the glow of
campfires through the hills at night. A
small settlement developed at the Junction with hotels, stores, blacksmiths,
and because of the liquor laws, a great many illegal sly grog shops. Observers of the day suggest that at its
height in the middle of 1851, there may have been close to 2,000 diggers on the
Ophir gold fields at any given time.
However the highest number recorded for the issue of monthly miner's
licences was only 466, in July 1851.
Ophir had the dubious honour of being the first field to experience both
the licence system and a system of licence evasion. As police worked their way along the valley checking licences, a
raven's cry would warn unlicenced diggers to pick up their cradles and scatter.
As a result of the discovery of gold,
Hargraves received the £500 reward, and in 1853 the NSW government paid him a
further £10,000 and officially recognised him as the first discoverer of
payable gold. In 1854 he travelled to
England, where he was presented to Queen Victoria. In 1855 he published a book entitled “Australia and its
Goldfields”, which glorified his involvement in the discovery at Ophir. In 1877 the NSW government granted Hargraves
an annuity of £250 per year for the rest of his life. He also received £2318 from the Victorian government, in
recognition of his part in helping to stimulate the Victorian gold rush, through
the discovery of gold in NSW.
This recognition of Hargraves as the
discoverer of gold aroused a hotly debated dispute, which raged for 40 years,
and has indeed continued even to this day.
Lister and the Tom brothers had been upstaged by their supposed partner,
who claimed all the credit and obtained nearly all of the rewards, despite
being at Gosford when the gold was found.
After many more years of disappointment at
the lack of recognition of their find, the three men petitioned the NSW
government and a Select Committee of the NSW Legislative Assembly was appointed
on 25 August, 1891. The Select
Committee had the power to send for persons and papers, to inquire into and
report upon the claims (if any) of William Tom, James Tom, and J.H.A. Lister for
remuneration as the first discoverers of gold in Australia.
The Select Committee submitted their agreed Report to the NSW Legislative
Assembly, and it was printed on 2 September 1891. It reads as follows:
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Your Committee having carefully considered the Report referred to them, find as
follows:-
(1) That although Mr. E.H. Hargraves is entitled to the credit of having taught
the claimants, Messrs. W. and J. Tom and Lister, the use of the dish and
cradle, and otherwise the proper methods of searching for gold, which his then
recent visit to the Californian gold-fields enabled him to do, your Committee
are satisfied that Messrs. Tom and Lister were undoubtedly the first discoverers
of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity.
(2) It has been alleged that the existence of gold in the Colony of New South
Wales was known and that small quantities or "colours" had been
found; but, so far as your Committee have been able to gain any information on
the subject, what is now known to practical miners as "payable gold"
was not known until the month of April, 1851, when the Messrs. Tom and Lister,
after persistent and determined search, under very great difficulties,
unearthed 4 oz. of the precious metal, which being handed to Mr E.H. Hargraves
were by that gentleman exhibited to the then Colonial Secretary, Mr E. Deas
Thomson, whereupon Mr. Hargraves was thus recognised as the first discoverer of
gold in Australia, and subsequently was rewarded by a gratuity of £10,000 from
the Government of this Colony, and upwards of £2,300 from the Colony of
Victoria, and in addition to these sums has been in receipt for several years
of a pension of £250 per annum from this Colony.
(3) Considering the severe depression, almost stagnation, of trade and of
business generally, which existed prior to the discovery of gold, and the
marked improvement which immediately followed and has since continued,
enriching the Colonies to an extent that can scarcely be even estimated, your
Committee are of opinion that the Messrs. Tom and Lister have not received that
consideration which the magnitude and importance of their discovery entitled
them to.
(4) Mr. Hargraves appears to have abandoned the search for gold after his first
course of prospecting with Messrs. Tom and Lister, until they informed him that
they had found 4 oz. of gold, which, according to his own evidence, they
discovered when he was not within 100 miles of them; and as he acknowledges to
having received such 4 oz. of gold from them on 6th May, 1851, and that he
immediately took it to the Colonial Secretary, your Committee have no doubt
that this was the cause of the issue of the famous proclamation of gold
announcing the discovery eight days afterwards, on the 14th May, 1851, from
which may be dated the new era and the commencement of the sudden and
marvellous increase in the value of all kinds of property and of the great
strides in progress which the Colonies have since made.
(5) Your Committee regret that they have to report the death of one of the
party Mr. J.H.A. Lister, who expired on the day upon which he was to have given
his evidence; but a few days before his death he had written a full statement
of his case, which is appended to the former Report, and which your Committee
believe to be quite truthful.
(6) Your Committee therefore recommends the claim of Messrs. William Tom, James
Tom, and J.H.A. Lister to the favourable consideration of the Government.
JAMES TORPY
Chairman
No. 2 Committee Room
Sydney, 2 September, 1891
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Even today, Edward Hammond Hargraves is pictured and stated to have been the
first to discover a payable gold reserve in the region of Ophir in 1851 and
William Tom, James Tom, and John Lister are referred to as Hargraves'
associates. The pity of it was that John Lister did not survive to hear and
read the report of the Select Committee; there are many who still have not read
it, so it seems.
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John
Hardman Australia Lister
circa 1880
Footnote:
Captain John
Hardman Lister is my daughter, Rosemary’s, great, great, great grandfather
Parson William Tom is my daughter’s great, great, great, great grandfather
John Hardman Australia Lister, William Tom and James Tom are therefore her ancestral uncles