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The Australian gold rush

The Australian gold rush
JCF Johnson, A Game of Euchre, col. wood engraving, Australasian Sketcher Supplement [Melbourne], 25 December, 1876. Image courtesy of the : nla.pic-an8927787. The gold rushes of the nineteenth century and the lives of those who worked the goldfields - known as '' - are etched into our national . There is no doubt that the gold rushes had a huge effect on the Australian economy and our development as a nation. It is also true to say that those heady times had a profound impact on the national psyche. The camaraderie and '' that developed between diggers on the goldfields is still integral to how we - and others - perceive ourselves as Australians. Indeed, mateship and defiance of authority have been central to the way our history has been told. Even today, nothing evokes more widespread national pride than groups of irreverent Aussie 'blokes' beating the English at cricket, or any other sport for that matter! The discovery that changed a nation Gold frenzy A nation transformed Racism Gold Rush

http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-gold-rush

Australian Gold Rush In fact they only got worse. A powerfully disruptive hysteria seemed to grip the State along with the rest of the country. Farmhands simply left their employers with harvests they could no longer reap and thousands of workers fled Melbourne leaving empty industries in their wake.

The Australian Gold Rush www.patricktaylor.com | articles First published April 28th, 2006 The Australian Gold Rush - Diggers (State Library of NSW) Many people associate the Gold Rush with California or the Klondike, but the Australian gold rush remains the world's richest. The discovery of Australian gold Isolated gold finds had been reported in New South Wales since the 1820s, but it was another thirty years before a fully-fledged gold rush would take its hold on the British penal colonies in Australia. Gold Rush in Australia! The transportation of convicts to Australia was phased out between 1840 and 1868. By 1860, the continent of Australia had been divided into FIVE separate colonies (not officially states yet, mate but seperation away from New South Wales), each not seeing eye-to-eye and exhibiting more loyalty to London to each other. A major force within the colonies was the “squatocracy” – the rich officers and settlers a.k.a. opportunists who had followed the explorers into fertile hinterlands. They simply laid claim to or “squatted” upon enormous tracts of land, often 20,000 acres and more.

Gold rush Sailing to California at the beginning of the Gold Rush A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold deposits. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States, while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were several major gold rushes. The permanent wealth that resulted was distributed widely because of reduced migration costs and low barriers to entry. Chinese at the Australian Goldfields Chinese at the Australian Goldfields At the time that news about the Australian goldrush reached China in 1853, the country had been suffering from years of war and famine. In order to raise money for the fare to Australia, a man would take a loan from a local trader, agreeing to make regular repayments.

Australian gold rush timeline, Discovering gold, Gold and mining, SOSE Year 6, SA The first major mineral discovery - gold - was a watershed (a turning point or landmark) for Australian society. The initial stages of the gold rush were responsible for tremendous changes in the community, bringing Australia's first great waves of immigration from countries other than England and Ireland. Ambitious prospectors from Asia, Europe and America made the trek to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo in Victoria, and Bathurst in New South Wales, in the hope of striking it rich. Australian gold rush timeline, HSIE, Discovering gold, Gold! Year 6, NSW The first major mineral discovery - gold - was a watershed (a turning point or landmark) for Australian society. The initial stages of the gold rush were responsible for tremendous changes in the community, bringing Australia's first great waves of immigration from countries other than England and Ireland. Ambitious prospectors from Asia, Europe and America made the trek to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo in Victoria, and Bathurst in New South Wales, in the hope of striking it rich.

GOLD The gold fields were Australia’s first experience of a truly diverse population. The largely British population expanded to include people from all over the world, creating a diverse mix of language and culture. Polish digger Seweryn Korzelinski wrote in his memoirs "a happy-go-lucky German tailor, a brawny English smith, a slightly-built French cook, a Polish Jew, an American or Dutch sailor, watchmaker, confectioner, a Swiss hat-maker, an impoverished Spanish hidalgo, gather near a mound of earth and one can see amongst them here and there a black Negro head, a brown Hindu face or the olive countenance with slanting eyes of a ‘child of the sun’. The Clarke Brothers : About New South Wales © the State Library of New South Wales John and Thomas Clarke were born near Braidwood to their emancipated Irish convict father and Irish mother. Although his father was a trained cobbler, he instead made a living through stealing cattle and horses then claiming the reward for their return.

Gold rush history - Australia's Golden Outback The Western Australian gold rush began with the first discovery of gold in the late 1890s. News of the gold spread as fast as the region’s wildfires and soon gold prospectors were arriving to seek their fortune and set up gold rush towns in the dusty landscapes of the Kalgoorlie, Goldfields and Murchison regions. They came slowly at first, but as the finds grew so too did the population. Lonely clusters of tents and rough bough sheds were soon transformed into booming Western Australian gold rush towns. Grand hotels lined the main streets and bustling town centres soon boasted butchers, bakers, schools and churches.

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