First Australian Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 26-27:

THE POLYNESIAN also circulated to Sydney, Australia, via Pacific whaling ships, bringing news of California gold to the antipodes. Between April 1849 and May 1850, some eleven thousand people left Australia for California. Mostly they came from Sydney, a combination of fortune seekers and former convicts. White Americans on the goldfields disliked the Australians, considering them to be criminals of rough and immoral character, claim jumpers and “hardened thieves and robbers.” The stereotype contained an element of truth in the predations of a San Francisco street gang known as the Sydney Ducks, so called for the convicts’ bowed legs and peculiar gait that resulted from years of wearing leg irons. But most Australian gold seekers were not former convicts; the California census of 1852 showed that Sydney men were more likely to be married with children, working, and noncriminals than Americans.

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Colonists in New South Wales had noted the presence of gold since at least the 1840s, but authorities had not encouraged prospecting. In 1844 Governor FitzRoy quashed news of gold discoveries in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, believing it would inflame rebellion and disorder among the large population of convicts and former convicts; in 1849 Charles LaTrobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip district, broke up a minirush near Melbourne on grounds of trespass on crown lands. But news of California gold convinced colonial leaders that Australia’s future prosperity might lie in gold, not least to spur “a healthy emigration” of miners and workers to diminish the influence of convicts and paupers. FitzRoy appointed a geological surveyor in 1850 and announced his offer of a prize.

Hargraves set out to find gold. “I knew I was in gold country for 70 miles,” he wrote, before finding water to wash the earth at Auroya Goyong, near Bathurst, in February 1851. He enlisted three young men to help him, teaching them how to use a pan and build a rocker, skills he had learned in California. Hargraves claimed the reward (cutting out his three assistants), renamed the spot Ophir, and publicized his findings broadly. Within a few months there were several hundred people at the diggings, farmers and shepherds from the countryside and clerks and mechanics from Sydney.

The Australian gold rush was on. Observers remarked that Sydney virtually emptied of people as carpenters dropped their tools, merchants shuttered their shops, and house servants fled their masters’ homes. Not a few people from Port Phillip (Melbourne) trekked north up to Bathurst, but prospecting spread westward in earnest. In July 1851 the Port Phillip district of New South Wales separated and founded the new colony of Victoria. A month later gold seekers hit a rich strike north of Geelong. By mid-October upward of ten thousand people made their way to the central midlands of Victoria; many diggers were taking out an ounce of gold a day (£3). Most important, perhaps, Hargraves had introduced the “California rocker” to Australia, which enabled more efficient washing than tin pots and dishes. Over the next decade 170,000 colonial settlers (nearly half the entire nonnative population) moved to the goldfields, and another 573,000 gold seekers arrived from abroad, mainly from the British Isles, as well as continental Europe, California, and China. Chinese called Victoria Xinjinshan, or New Gold Mountain, and renamed California Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain. To this day Chinese call the city of San Francisco Jiujinshan.

Honolulu was, and still is, called Tanxiangshan (Sandalwood Mountain) in Chinese.