1853
1851

1852

1852 was the year that NSW’s goldrush started to face up to a reality check.
The intoxicating opening months of the gold saga when anything seemed possible and no one could guess at what would happen next had been and gone leaving behind a serious hangover.

Flooding on the western goldfields had inundated many creekbed workings on the Turon and disrupted mail and gold escort services. Meanwhile unrest over the gold regulations was stirring amongst the diggers while news in from England was demanding to know how the government had let a hundredweight of gold be grabbed with no recompense to the state coffers.

Still – there was much gold there to be had and amidst all this people went about the business of getting what they could.

Left: From lithograph sketches 1853-1874 by S.T. Gill
Reproduced courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (a1833043)
The general mood of proceedings was one of a sober festive season, with many diggers taking a summer break – perhaps to drop back home and catch up with family connections put on hold in the rush to the goldfields.

2nd January 1852

The first of the fields to occasion comment in the media was the TURON – still the pivotal field then in play on the western goldfields in spite of competition hotting up from the newer ventures of Louisa Creek and Meroo just south of Mudgee around the locale of Kerr’s Hundredweight.

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2nd January 1852

The news from the OPHIR field at the start of the new year is especially informative. First up it reported that several diggers had returned to the field after finding the new ground at Araluen not to their liking. This was an expression of confidence in Ophir that the correspondent was pleased to emphasise along with other stories of success.

Of particular note is the account of torrential storms over Christmas and the fact that the overall season was so damp that “Such a moist season the inhabitants of this and the adjacent counties have seldom witnessed”.

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10th January 1852

Not-with-standing the amount of rain falling on the district, LOUISA CREEK on the tableland country south of Mudgee still struggled with lack of water to process the gold in what was clearly a very rich field indeed.

Significantly operations focussed not so much on surface workings as they did on mining the deeper alluvial leads underpinning the area. Alongside these a new reef mining venture was also in the process of setting up operations.

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26th January 1852

In relation to developments on the ORANGE goldfields at this time, things seem to have been very quiet, as the correspondent’s report mentions much about the weather – but nothing of the gold!

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20th Febuary 1852

Weather reports however were something uppermost in the minds of all the miners on the western fields at that time.

In the case of the TURON field and the town of SOFALA, the floods on the river had resulted in a many miners deserting the field for the drier, rich grounds of Louisa Creek to the north. This was very bad news for the storekeepers who had newly established themselves at Sofala with the report from February noting that it would be “difficult to imagine a more melancholy looking, doleful set of men”.

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scrabbling to look after the government’s interests

One of the challenging aspects of the gold fields for both social commentators and government officials alike was the way in which claims assumed de facto property rights for their occupants, such that they could sell them at great profit without the government benefiting in any way from the transaction.

12th January 1852

This very issue was addressed at length in an article that relates in detail both the operation of the license system and the fact that because it was not being adequately enforced, it promoted the opportunity for people to both sell their claims (which they did not own) and also to salt them in order to defraud the easily tricked newchums.

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… and finally – it’s stopped raining!

Now this was good news – especially for the troubled Turon field. Once people could get back to working the creekbed, the attractions of the dry plateau country around Lousia Creek suddenly seemed less rosy and the human tide turned around to drain back down off the escarment into the river valleys.

6th March 1852

Suddenly also one wonders about how genuine those long faces of the Turon storekeepers were! It turns out that to cheer themselves up when the floods were on they purchased many of the claims from departing miners. Now things had dried out, they were then in the process of employing others to work their choice ground for them!

Elsewhere news from TUENA spoke of rich finds that beckoned a bright future for this fledgling field.

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3rd March 1852

Nor was OPHIR yet to be discounted in the 1852 Goldfields Stakes it seems. Though many made merry at the mere prospect of anyone taking this ancient goldfield seriously, several indeed still did and were none the worse for their efforts.

Beginning a call that would long echo across the goldfields, the correspondent visiting the diggings lamented the want of capital claiming “if only capitalists could be induced to turn their attention to digging, employing men at fair wages, they would undoubtedly have returned no inconsiderable amount of profit”.

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one year on – and what a year it was …

On 8 May, NSW celebrated the anniversary of the gold discoveries announced by Edward Hargraves 12 months previously. For us the occasion is most notable for the accounts and summaries it generated telling of the hectic year that had unfolded in the wake of these discoveries.

8th May 1852

Of all the statistics trotted out in support of the success of the first year’s operations, one impressive figure stands out. That is the fact that Year 1 produced over 300,000 ounces of gold valued at around £1 million. Today this represents around $450 million injected into the economy of the fledgling colony (if not into the government coffers!).

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14th July 1852

Just as the anniversary reports of the NSW gold operations provide a valuable reference to determine exactly where things stood at that time, so also does a parliamentary report on the present and future state of the Western and Southern goldfields tabled on 24 June. At that time it listed 5 fields in the western district: OPHIR, TURON, MEROO, TAMBAROORA and ABERCROMBIE / TUENA CREEK.

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14th July 1852

Of particular interest here in this account of the western goldfields is a new name not much reported on in the press prior to this time. This is the field of TAMBAROORA sited up on the tableland west of Sofala and just north of the Turon River.

In time this highly profitable gold mining centre would be upstaged by the reef gold mining undertaken at Hill End just up the road from it. For two decades however, it was definitely “the” gold mining centre at the end of the plateau overlooking the confluence of the Turon and Macquarie rivers.

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couldn’t manage a chook raffle, let alone a gold rush …

8th August 1852

The centrepiece of the Times’ objections to proceedings in the colonies was the notion that the mineral wealth of the government was being plundered without due recompense to the public purse. To address this it recommended amongst other matters “sending without delay to the colony a sufficient armed force to enable her Majesty’s Government to assert the dignity of the law and protect the property of the public.”

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21st August 1852

Another matter of serious international concern over the new colonial gold rush was the impact it may have on the value of gold and its role as a monetary standard. Coming hard on the heels of the Californian gold rush as it did, the Australian goldfields had the world considering what the impacts on its currencies would be as a result of a very substantial increase in the amount of the world’s gold reserves.

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23rd October 1852

Finally in response to both London’s and domestic strident criticism of its inability to enforce the license system and get a meaningful return from gold miners, the government in October hurriedly introduced a major new piece of legislation. A significant feature of this bill was the way in which it dramatically increased the power of the gold commissioners to enforce license fees and the sanctions for offenders caught trying to evade them. In the process it laid down the seeds of much future discontent and major conflict was only narrowly avoided on the NSW diggings.

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Life on the goldfields

In order to get a clear idea of just what life on the goldfields was really like at this time, we need to turn to the accounts of casual correspondents – those erudite souls who were commissioned to tour the diggings and wrote up detailed accounts of what they saw for the Sydney media. In this way, a series of articles published in late 1852 give us a clear idea of the state of the western goldfields 18 months into their development.

12 November 1852

The first stop of the special correspondent’s field trip was the SOFALA goldfield accesed via the road to Bathurst

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27th November 1852

Next up it was the TAMBAROORA field to visit and then on to LOUISA CREEK.

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1st December 1852

And once at Louisa Creek, MEROO was just next door.

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1st December 1852

And finally it was wrap up time – what did it all amount to really and what were the long term prospects for the fields at the end of 1852? In this the correspondent provides a very candid account of the limitations and brutality of the license system and the need to strongly promote collective enterprise – or gold associations – to reduce the risks and perils of individual mining ventures and ensure social stability while also making revenues both easier and more civilised to collect.

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