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  The Tom brothers and Lister then moved their search for gold to the banks of Summer Hill Creek, near the junction with the Macquarie River, just 11 miles from the Tom family home. Within a very short time, William Tom had found a nugget weighing half an ounce, and soon afterwards Lister found another weighing 2 ounces.

  Within a matter of days they had panned and sluiced more than 4 ounces of gold from the riverbank, sufficient to confirm that there was payable gold in the region. They then returned home carrying the gold and full of excitement, which was shared with the Toms’ father, ‘Parson’ William Tom Senior, a lay preacher. On seeing the gold, Parson Tom, who was forever quoting passages from the Bible, exclaimed, ‘And they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold.’ This reference from the first book of Kings in the Old Testament led the Toms and Lister to decide that the area around where the gold had been found should become known as ‘Ophir’.

  Trusting individuals that they were, the Tom brothers and Lister agreed that Parson Tom should take the 4 ounces of gold to Sydney to show Hargraves. On seeing the gold, Hargraves asked that it be left with him, and the trusting ‘parson’ obliged.

  Neither the Tom family nor Lister heard from Hargraves again – and it soon became apparent why. Hargraves took the gold straight to the Colonial Secretary, Edward Deas Thompson, claiming the discovery was his own and that he was entitled to a reward for being the first person to find payable gold in the colony.

  Little more than four weeks after the Tom brothers and Lister had made their discovery, the news was made public in the Sydney Morning Herald. But instead of stating that there had been five men involved, the story read that Hargraves alone had found the gold, while the others had been merely associates and not his partners in the search.

  Hargraves went on to live a lavish life thanks to the £10,000 reward he received after the government agreed he was entitled to it. Today this offer would be roughly equal to $1.4 million. His lot improved even more when, in 1877, he was granted an annuity of £250 per annum for the rest of his life. Soon after receiving the initial payment, he was also employed by the government as the Commissioner of Gold Fields, his task being to locate new gold deposits across the country. However, he proved to be so inept in this position that his services were dispensed with after a very short time.

  For two decades after Hargraves received the £10,000, the Toms and Lister tried desperately to right the wrong via political channels, but were unsuccessful. Still, they persisted until 1884, when William Tom decided to use the power of the press over political persuasion to present their case to the nation. In a letter dated 22 July 1884, written at Sunrise, Guyong, and titled ‘First Gold Discovery’, he wrote:

  The following evidence touching the first gold discovery in Australia was prepared by us in 1876 and will read accordingly. It was prepared to read to a Committee of the New South Wales Parliament, but having tried by all legitimate means for 20 years to obtain a hearing by that August body without success we now adopt the Pres[s] (the only alternative left to us) in order that the public mind may be disabused of its error in supposing Mr. Hargraves to be the sole discoverer of the first payable gold, or in supposing that he ever did more to the discovery than introducing the tin-dish system and finding some less than a farthing’s worth of gold to which he was taken by John Lester [sic] and James Tom. We can assign no reason whatever for why the public mind should not receive the truth and be undeceived . . . If this letter under the circumstances it was written does not show most clearly to the reader the unfair, wily, and deep-designing character of Mr. Hargraves whom we have had to contend with we have no idea of anything that will show him . . . It will show most clearly how he wished to hoodwink the Government; to deceive the public, and bamboozle us and Mr. James Tom, – in all of which he has tolerably well succeeded.

  William Tom then persisted with presenting his case against Hargraves, but it was another seven years before due recognition was confirmed. On 2 September 1891, a Select Committee of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly presented its report to the assembly regarding the matter. The first few lines said it all:

  Your Committee having carefully considered the Report referred to them, find as follows:–

  (1) That although Mr. E.H. Hargraves is entitled to the credit of having taught the claimants, Messrs. W. and J. Tom and Lister, the use of the dish and cradle, and otherwise the proper methods of searching for gold, which his then recent visit to the Californian gold-fields enabled him to do, your Committee are satisfied that Messrs. Tom and Lister were undoubtedly the first discoverers of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity.

  Ironically, the proclamation from the government came just eight weeks before Hargraves’s death in Sydney. Unfortunately for the Tom brothers and Lister, the mighty gold rush that followed their find was, by this time, well and truly over, and there was no reward available to them.

  *

  As a consequence of the discovery by Lister and the Toms, a simple article on page four of the local newspaper – the Bathurst Free Press – on 10 May 1851 brought Australia’s first gold rush to life in spectacular fashion. The article declared:

  The suddenness with which the announcement of a discovery of such magnitude has come upon us – a discovery which must, if true, be productive of such gigantic results not only to the inhabitants of these districts but to the whole colony, affects the mind with astonishment, and wonder in such a manner as almost to unfit it for the deductions of plain truth, sober reason, and common sense . . .

  This story actually jumped the gun: it came before colonial geologist Stutchbury had confirmed that payable gold had been found in the region. Those few words, however, were sufficient to change the face of Australian society almost overnight. Everyday life as it was known became paralysed as would-be gold diggers abandoned their families and livelihoods and made haste towards the diggings. The news was sufficient for seventeen seafarers to immediately desert their ships in Sydney Harbour and join the rush – the first of many.

  Within days, the same newspaper was fuelling the frenzy: ‘A complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community, and as a natural consequence, there has been an universal rush to the diggin[g]s.’ On 15 May, the Sydney Morning Herald painted a word picture describing the impact Sydney was experiencing: ‘go where you will, talk with whomsoever you may, diverge into any other subject you like, you will begin and finish with the diggings’.

  In the inevitable stampede that followed, the route west from Sydney across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst and beyond to Ophir, over nearly 200 miles of winding, rocky, undulating and rugged dirt road, was soon clogged with one-way traffic. Hundreds of men on horseback, driving horse-drawn carts or travelling in stagecoaches were all bound by a common thread: they had abandoned their senses, believing that gold would be easily found, and in considerable amounts. Even the Sydney Morning Herald propagated the notion in verse in late May 1851:

  The Bathurst way is steep and long,

  The mountain airs are keen and strong;

  The winter rains are heavy, too,

  And food is scarce, and dwellings few.

  These things are disagreeable, no doubt,

  But virgin gold is lying all about.

  The gold seekers soon extended their search well beyond the area around Ophir. Many moved their focus to areas some distance away from where the Tom brothers and Lister had made their initial find. All were toiling away in the expectation of discovering their own bonanza, but this was, of course, a delusion in the majority of cases. Rarely was a nugget weighing more than 1 ounce recovered from the pans and cradles, and what was recovered was usually in the form of small grains.

  However, there was no cure for gold fever, no stopping the massive migration to Ophir and its surrounds. It is believed that within a few days of the announcement of the discovery there were more than 1000 prospectors working their way along the banks of Ophir’s creek. By late May, 100 more were
arriving each day, and by early June it was estimated by the Sydney Morning Herald that there were 1700 men searching for their fortune in the area. All that in less than three weeks.

  Inevitably, local businesses benefited to an enormous degree, as did a large number of opportunistic individuals making haste towards Bathurst, Guyong and Ophir with the plan of profiting from the rapid growth of these communities. In Bathurst the Free Press noted: ‘The blacksmiths of the town could not turn out the picks fast enough, and the manufacture of cradles was the second briskest business of the place.’ Not surprisingly, the price of everything, from food to footwear, tools to tents and liquor to laces, rose at an astronomical rate, just as had been the case in California.

  In a matter of months, word of the discovery of gold had reached every populated point of the continent, resulting in a mass exodus of men headed for the Bathurst region. More importantly, just as the colonial government had hoped, every ship departing Sydney bound for England, America or continental Europe was transporting the news of Australia as the new land of golden opportunity.

  The growing city of Melbourne didn’t escape the associated upheaval, as a merchant there, William Hall, noted:

  I cannot describe the effect it had upon the sober, plodding and industrious people of Melbourne. Our labourers left us by ship-loads for the fields of Ophir and Sophala [Sofala], and it became difficult to carry on trade, labour became so scarce and valuable.

  Realising the detrimental impact the discovery at Ophir was having on Melbourne’s population and commercial activities, on 9 June the local superintendent, Charles LaTrobe, established a Gold Discovery Committee. This authority’s first task was to find a way to counter the negative influence of the gold finds further north. In a matter of days, it was decided that a reward of £200 would be offered to the first person to find payable gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. The hope was that a gold rush would then head Melbourne’s way.

  *

  When Edward Hargraves returned to Sydney from California in 1851, there was another prospector aboard the same ship, James William Esmond, who was harbouring similar ambitions. The men apparently did not meet during the voyage, but they were equally determined to be the first to find payable gold on home turf. The one difference was that while Hargraves headed inland from Sydney towards Bathurst, Esmond boarded a coastal steamer and sailed south for Melbourne.

  Unbeknown to the new Gold Discovery Committee when it announced the offer of a reward, gold had already been discovered by pastoralist William Campbell in March 1850 on a grazing property at Clunes, 75 miles north-west of Melbourne. However, the landowner, Campbell’s brother-in-law Donald Cameron, had decided to stay mum on the find for fear that his property would be overrun by hundreds, if not thousands, of inconsiderate diggers. Still, that didn’t stop the rumours from circulating.

  Meanwhile, Esmond headed to Buninyong (now an outer suburb of Ballarat), where he had been working prior to his unsuccessful stint in the Californian goldfields. There he encountered a German physician, Dr George Hermann Bruhn, who had earlier departed Melbourne to research ‘the mineral resources of this colony’. He had recently been in Clunes and spoken to Donald Cameron, and he told Esmond of a quartz reef he had seen in the area. Esmond headed there with his workmate James Pugh, hiring two sawyers to help, and announced a finding of marketable gold in July 1851 – the same month as what had been known as the Port Phillip District became an independent colony and was named Victoria.

  Within days, another discovery had been made near Warrandyte, in the Yarra Ranges north-east of Melbourne. A month later, more gold was found in the Buninyong area, and it was quickly realised that nearby Ballarat was also located atop a gold mass of grand proportions. In September, a further find at Forest Creek (renamed Castlemaine in 1854) was quickly followed by a rush to nearby Bendigo, which would prove to be the richest goldfield of them all. By the end of 1851, Victoria could boast one of the world’s largest gold-bearing regions, encompassing hundreds of square miles between Ballarat, Bendigo, Clunes and beyond. The gold-finding frenzy had led to nineteen significant confirmed discoveries since the first find at Ophir. The most notable individual find in that time was Kerr’s Hundredweight, a mass of gold and quartz weighing 136 kilograms, of which 50.8 kilograms were gold. It was found in July 1851 by an Aboriginal stockman on a property near the village of Hargraves, 135 miles west, as the crow flies, of the New South Wales coastal town of Newcastle.

  The combined returns from the Victorian and New South Wales goldfields were nothing short of astonishing. Within eighteen months an estimated £16 million sterling worth of gold had been unearthed.

  But the value of the gold rush went well beyond that. Equally important was the bonus of mass migration to Australia that it delivered. In little more than twelve months, Australia’s migrant intake had exploded from around 100,000 individuals annually to some 340,000. It was an increase aided in no small way by the grossly exaggerated stories that accompanied the euphoria of the rush, like the rumour that miners ‘were picking up golden nuggets like potatoes being gathered from a field’. Regardless, the fact was that the colonial governments of New South Wales and Victoria could not have wished for a better result from their carefully controlled policies relating to the discovery of gold.

  By February 1852 newspapers across Great Britain were making their readerships aware of the arrival of the first shipment of gold from Australia on board the clipper Phoenician, and confirming the vast extent of the gold discoveries. A report in the Liverpool Mercury on 7 February, concerning the discoveries in Ballarat, told readers: ‘This is the El Dorado of the world . . . the whole country for hundreds of miles around is one immense goldfield.’

  While this sounds like an outlandish statement, time would prove that there was a great deal of truth in it. In the decade following the discovery of Kerr’s Hundredweight, Australia was responsible for one-third of the world’s gold production, and by the end of the century was the world’s largest producer of the precious metal. Until then wool had been the principal income earner for the colonies – but not any more.

  Suddenly the world viewed Australia as the new land of opportunity – especially ship owners and builders in England and America. For them, the run there and back would soon become more lucrative than any other: carrying hundreds of would-be prospectors on each outbound voyage, and returning home with valuable cargoes of wool and gold. Shipping lines were experiencing their second boom time in less than three years.

  Colonial censuses in the early 1850s suggested that there were approximately 440,000 settlers in Australia at the time, and that the figure was escalating rapidly. This was certainly evident by 1861, when official figures revealed the country’s population had more than doubled to 1.2 million.

  Certainly, not everyone sailed to the Antipodes with the intention of finding gold, but those not searching for it would, more than likely, have benefited indirectly through the associated boom time. Many migrants – families and single women in particular – were travelling to the major centres of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane on assisted passages, while the remainder paid their own way – and all were seeking a new lifestyle, one way or another. Some planned to set up a business, and others who held no desire to go to the goldfields were seeking any form of employment they could find in the towns, outlying villages or remote rural areas. Many, but not all, would succeed. Of all employment opportunities, most were associated with farming, since an alarming number of farm workers had abandoned their jobs overnight and disappeared across the countryside in the general direction of the goldfields.

  Of the many hundreds of new businesses established in Australia in the era of the gold rush, the Cobb & Co coach company was among the most famous. It was the entrepreneurial mind of twenty-three year old Freeman Cobb from Massachusetts, allied with the commercial expertise of three of his countrymen – John Murray Peck, James Swanton and John Lambert – that saw an opportunity ripe for exploitation
. When their company was formed in 1853, travel from Melbourne to outlying centres was slow, arduous and extremely uncomfortable. All the coach companies operating at the time were using heavy, rigid-bodied, English-built vehicles which, while perfectly suited to the well-made roads of the Mother Country, were totally inappropriate for the rough Australian terrain.

  Cobb and his associates seized on the opportunity to provide a faster and far more comfortable mode of travel using Concord coaches, which they imported from America. These carriages had been designed for the rugged trails of the American ‘Wild West’, and had proved so successful that they had become the mainstay of passenger transport for the famous Wells Fargo company. Even today, one of the enduring images of America in the mid–1800s is that of a Wells Fargo six-horse Concord stagecoach thundering across the arid west loaded with gold. In 1870 author Mark Twain referred to the Wells Fargo Concord coach as ‘an imposing cradle on wheels’. Little wonder, then, that the Concords completely outclassed their English counterparts in Australia.

  Being lighter, the Cobb & Co coaches were considerably faster than their rivals: on the company’s first journey from Collins Street in the heart of Melbourne to the Forest Creek diggings, the travel time was halved. This success was due in part to the decision of the company founders to establish ‘changing stations’ every 10 or 20 miles, while their opposition travelled far greater distances between stops. The Cobb & Co drivers were able to bring fresh horses into harness each time they stopped, and thus were able to maintain a greater average speed for the duration of a trip.

  The company was a success from the outset, and in 1856 Cobb and his partners decided to sell the business for a figure reputed to be £16,000 (more than $2.1 million today). The purchasers, a consortium of nine men led by James Rutherford, took Cobb & Co to the pinnacle of its success over the next five decades. An extensive web of travel routes was established across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, where, as well as carrying travellers, the coaches provided a lifeline to isolated communities through the delivery of mail and packages.