The gold rushes of the 1850s

Abstract

The 1850s gold rushes in eastern Australia occurred in a post-invasion landscape. Aboriginal people had so recently been in possession of the lands on which gold was discovered that contemporaries quite naturally compared the new invaders’ mode of living to that of the Indigenous inhabitants. A reporter sent to Australia’s first significant gold rush at Ophir in New South Wales in 1851 noted that ‘the whole settlement has the appearance of a vast aboriginal camp’. An observer of the Ballarat diggings in Victoria in 1856 wrote that ‘a solitary tree here and there, and prostrate trunks lying about, proclaimed the recent nature of the invasion of the haunts of the wildman by the gold-seekers’. ..