Activity 1 - What was the Gold Rush?

 6H Welcome to your first history activity on the Gold Rush!

Now pop on your history hats and let's go all the way back to 1851.

For your first activity please watch the below BTN video. You will see the transcript underneath the video if there are any parts that you do not understand and would prefer to read.

While watching the video, take notes on how the Gold Rush started, who came to Australia to mine gold and how the Gold Rush impacted Australia.

TRANSCRIPT

The year was 1851, the place, a creek outside of Orange in New South Wales, when a man named Edward Hargraves made a huge discovery.

EDWARD HARGRAVES: It's gold.

It was just five little flecks, but it was the start of a gold rush that would change the Australian colonies forever. It wasn't the first-time gold had been found in Australia. Since the early 1800s there had been small finds. Although authorities at the time didn't want to spread rumours of gold because they didn't trust the convicts that made up a lot of the population.

GOVERNOR: Put it away Mr Clarke or we shall all have our throats cut.

But their attitude changed pretty quickly in 1848, when the California Gold Rush began. It brought huge riches to America and lured much-needed workers away from Australia. So, governments in New South Wales and the new colony of Victoria, offered rewards to anyone who found a gold deposit big enough to be mined. Hargraves, who had just returned from the Californian goldfields, was one of hundreds who set out to claim the reward. He had help from an innkeeper's son named John Lister and brothers William and James Tom. Not that Hargraves shared any of the prize money or the credit.

On May 22nd, the New South Wales government announced the find and hundreds of diggers came to the site which Hargraves named Ophir. In July that year gold was found in Victoria and soon the gold rush had spread to other parts of the colonies. The population exploded as people came to Australia from all over the world, Europe, the Americas and China, bringing with them new skills, new ideas and different ways of life. At first gold was found along rivers and creeks. It was called alluvial gold and you only needed basic tools to get it out. But that was all snapped up pretty quickly, so diggers had to mine the gold from the earth and that was difficult and dangerous, and only a lucky few managed to get rich.

There was a lot of discrimination against Chinese miners, who tended to work in big groups and mine more successfully. There was also anger towards authorities who forced diggers to pay for mining licenses and gave them no say in the way they were governed. In 1854, that unrest led to a dramatic confrontation at the Eureka goldfield near Ballarat. Tens of thousands of miners came together to protest. They burned their licenses, built a stockade and raised their own flag. They fought soldiers and police officers and 22 people died, but in the end the miners' demands were met including eventually their right to vote.

As the gold rush continued, so did the transformation of Australia. As the population and the economy grew there were new roads, railways, libraries and theatres, and eventually electricity. The environment was also impacted as small diggings were replaced by big mining operations.

Today you can still see the lasting impact of the gold rush to massive modern mining sites that are still producing hundreds of thousands of ounces every year bringing our golden history into the future.