Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (11 page)

In the meantime, they would just have to put up with the heavy exodus of men.

11 November 1850, Melbourne, news is received at ‘The Chalet’

If there is a little bit of Europe in Melbourne at this time, it is to be found at the end of the long carriage driveway on the estate of
Jolimont en Murs
, past the grotto, shrubberies and bountiful diamond-and-sickle-shaped garden beds in the latest style, to the flowering-creeper-adorned house where Charles La Trobe and his family live. It is a place known by many a loyal subject as ‘The Chalet for its uniquely Continental form.

‘Small as our establishment is,’ La Trobe had described it to his older sister Charlotte in England, ‘I assure you that there is not a more comfortable, well regulated and more tasty one in this part of the world both without and within.’

Though modest by London standards, the estate is really something compared to the rest of Melbourne and, though the setting is a triumph of taste rather than treasure, at least the glassware is crystal and the silverware actual silver. Invitations are highly prized and, on this particular night, while Charles La Trobe presides at the head of the table and one of the guests is regaling the assembly with a very jolly story of how in India – if you can
believe
it! – they use leaves of the banana plant for plates, he is interrupted by the sound of thundering hooves and carriage wheels coming to a halt on the gravel driveway. In an instant, the insistent pounding of at least
two
sticks comes on the door. Whoever has arrived is in a desperate hurry.

Charles La Trobe is not perturbed, however, and as one of the servants answers the summons he neatens up his neckerchief and comments that perhaps the pounding on the door has come from ‘a new governor in search of a night’s lodging!’

Begging your leave, Your Honour, but the new arrivals prove to be the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, William Nicholson, and his immediate predecessor in the post, Augustus Frederick Adolphus Greeves. Nicholson, who for some reasons has a rag tied around one of his fingers, is flourishing an Adelaide newspaper that has just arrived – highly prized, for that city usually gets its news from England between five and eight days earlier than Melbourne.

‘Your Honour,’ he says, ‘allow me to draw your attention to the fact that the Separation Bill has passed through both Houses. The news is spreading quickly, and I shall be unable to restrain the people.’

La Trobe, of course, understands only too well the import of the revelation, that the British Parliament had actually passed this Separation Bill on 1 August, a little over three months earlier. It is what his colony has been straining towards for well over a decade: separation from New South Wales. It means that its six parliamentarians will return from the New South Wales Legislative Council in Sydney, and, if elected or appointed, instead be part of a separate Legislative Council set up in Melbourne . . .

They would have, as the other colonies would have, their own Constitution, their own Supreme Court! In the Port Phillip District – soon to be renamed ‘Victoria’ under the legislation, in honour of the Queen – they would no longer be subject to Sydney’s capricious whims but would be able to rule themselves, to make laws and gain control over general revenue from taxes and levies on the colony’s subjects (even if the Crown would retain control over the revenue from the sale of land).

La Trobe – who realises he is about to go from being a mere Superintendent to a Lieutenant-Governor, while the Governor of the senior colony, New South Wales, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, will be installed as the ‘Governor-General’ – is gracious enough to allow that the people
may
celebrate that night, at which point the Lord Mayor thanks him profusely and immediately heads off to light his private bonfire, the signal the good people of Melbourne have been waiting for that their general jubilation may be unfettered.

And of course it does not stop there. For not only do those celebrations continue well into the night, but the general joy is so profound that they go on for many days more, too.
The Melbourne Morning Herald & General Daily Advertiser
sets the tone on its front page with its special-edition headline the next afternoon:

Extraordinary

GLORIOUS NEWS! SEPARATION AT LAST!!

7 January 1851, on the approaches to Port Jackson, impatience builds

He is a huge man, nervously twirling his black moustache and anxiously pacing the deck of the good ship
Emma
as it blow-bobs its way through the heads of Port Jackson and into Sydney Harbour. When he had left this same harbour two years earlier to try his luck on the Californian goldfields, it had been with the hope that he would return, travelling first class, laden with treasure. Instead, all he truly brings back is an idea – an idea that because the landscape of the Californian goldfields is reminiscent of a valley he had once seen

17 years earlier, up Bathurst way, perhaps that valley might have gold too! True, an American acquaintance in whom he had confided this view had been derisive.

‘There’s no gold in the country you’re going to,’ he’d said. ‘And if there is, that darned Queen of yours won’t let you dig it . . .’

Rising to the occasion, 34-year-old Edward Hammond Hargraves had taken off his hat, adopted what he assumed to be a magisterial pose and replied, ‘There’s as much gold in the country I am going to as there is in California; and Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, God bless her, will make me one of her Gold Commissioners.’

Hargraves remains so convinced he is right that, shortly after landing on the Sydney docks, he borrows £105 from a friend to buy a horse and some supplies, and on 5 February 1851 sets off from Sydney heading west.

Five days later Hargraves and his exhausted nag arrive in the rough region of their destination and pull into the Wellington Inn at Guyong, which he knows to be run by Captain John Lister of the ship
Wave
, the one that had brought him to Australian shores 18 years earlier.

Upon entering this rustic establishment, Hargraves learns that only a little more than six months earlier, alas, the good captain was killed when, on a trip to Bathurst, he was thrown from his gig. The establishment, however, is still being run by Lister’s widow (who remembers Hargraves at once after he mentions his name) and her 22-year-old son, John Hardman Australia Lister. Over dinner Hargraves decides to confide in her precisely why he has come, the theory he has nurtured for nearly a year now, that not far from where they are now seated there are riches beyond a man’s imagining!

Yet, he would later write: ‘It occurred to me that I could not prosecute my plans efficiently without assistance . . . After dinner, therefore, I disclosed to her the object of my visit, and begged her to procure a black fellow as a guide to the spot I wished to visit first . . . She entered with a woman’s heartiness into my views, and offered me the assistance of her son . . . who, she assured me, knew the country well.

And so John Lister does – and neither is the young man a stranger to the idea that there is gold in this region. As a matter of fact, upon the mantelpiece of the inn are two chunks of quartz from the Upper Turon that he proudly shows Hargraves. On carefully examining the samples, Hargraves tells Lister that one of them resembles rock found near goldmines.

Thus acquainted, on the morning of 12 February 1851, the two head off with their two horses and a fresh packhorse. From the relatively open country around Guyong, within a very short time the gullies start to fall away, the trees close in, and the men are soon nudging and trudging their way down the summery, dry creek bed of Lewis Ponds Creek.

The further they go, the more excited Hargraves becomes as the country starts to resemble more and more the gold-bearing landscape he saw in California.

Some 14 miles on, Hargraves is beside himself with excitement as the familiar quartz, granite and slate outcrops become more apparent and, the tree-cover aside, the hills and gullies start to look exactly as they did in the Sierra Nevada.

‘I felt myself surrounded by gold; and with tremendous anxiety panted for the moment of trial, when my magician’s wand should transform this trackless wilderness into a region of countless wealth.’

First things first, however . . . Not even gold should get between a 20-stone man and his luncheon. Two miles further up the creek bed, in the middle of the day, he and John arrive at a particularly pleasant spot where Lewis Ponds Creek intersects with Radigan’s Gully, where water is easily obtained and the horses can slake their thirst. To this point, Hargraves has not shared his excitement with young Lister, but now is as good a time as any. After they wolf down their cold beef and damper, washed down by billy tea, he tells him straight.

All around them, right now, Hargraves begins, and right beneath them in the creek that Lister has just been wading through, there is gold –
gold
!

Lister stares back with complete astonishment, but Hargraves is quite serious.

And now,’ the older man announces portentously, ‘I will find some gold.’

The young man watches intently as Hargraves takes his pick and digs a small amount of dirt from a rock formation that runs at right angles to the creek before taking his trowel to fill a pan with sodden earth. The tin pan, which he has brought all the way from California, is some 18 inches across the top, 12 inches across the bottom, and its sloping sides run four inches deep. Taking a stick, he mixes the dirt into a fine batter and then begins his careful ‘panning’. Slowly, bit by bit, he sluices the earth out of the pan with the water from the nearby creek. The soil thins and washes away, leaving . . . leaving . . . leaving some pebbles and . . .
there
! . . .
a very small speck of glittering gold!

‘Here it is!’ he exclaims.

The effect is instantaneous. This news is not just promising, not just good, not even great. This news, Hargraves knows from the moment he sees the gleam in his pan, is life-changing for him and his companion, and it will lift the entire country. The older man repeats the process five times and pans some specks of gold on four occasions.

Drawing himself up and puffing himself out, he makes a considered pronouncement to the stupefied John Lister, indeed to all the world, as if he is standing behind a pulpit: ‘This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum.’

Blank-faced, Lister blinks up at this self-proclaimed aristocrat. Hargraves is not joking, at least not totally. At this instant he really does feel himself ‘to be a great man’. All that is necessary now, he says, is for them to discover ‘[payable] gold, and it will be the luckiest day that has happened to New South Wales.’

Once back at Lister’s Inn, Hargraves is so excited he can barely speak. Already, above and beyond whatever personal fortune he might make at these diggings, he knows that if he can just follow up on this initial discovery by finding gold in greater quantities to prove that it is ‘payable’ – of sufficient quantity and accessibility to ensure economic profit – it will be of enormous benefit to the colony, and, far more importantly, of enormous benefit to
him
.
Beyond seeking an appropriate reward for founding such an industry, he will surely have his dream realised and be made a commissioner of the goldfields, in the same way the government already has a commissioner of Crown lands. (The prestige! The
salary
!)

Oddly, when Hargraves and young John arrive back at Guyong, the rest of the Lister family remains quietly unimpressed with the ‘discovery’ – as a matter of fact, they say they can barely see it.

‘There!
There
!
Can you not see it
now
?’
No, no . . . no, they can’t. In the end, it is only with the aid of a glass tumbler placed upside down over the specks that they acknowledge they can see it after all. Just. If you say that really is gold.

Clearly, it is going to take something more than what the men have already found to impress the government.

Still, before turning in for the night at Mrs Lister’s inn, Hargraves writes a ‘memorandum of the discovery’:

Wednesday 12th February, 1851

Discovered gold this day at - - -
;
named the Diggings Hargraves, who was the first Discoverer in New South Wales of the metal in the earth in a similar manner as found in California. This is a memorable day.

The most obvious place to continue the search is towards the Macquarie River, in the area first penetrated by Europeans in the person of the great explorer Charles Sturt a little over two decades earlier. The following morning, young Lister suggests that his great friend James Tom, who lives over yonder at the Cornish Settlement, Byng, is the man who knows the land best.

Why not take him as their guide, John suggests, in the same way that John had been the guide along Lewis Ponds Creek? Hargraves is agreeable and makes what the other two would ever after swear is a firm commitment: ‘Whatever arises from the discovery, we will share in it. It will be a very handsome thing if we find payable gold.’

The trio search over the next eight days down Lewis Pond Creek towards its junction with Summer Hill Creek, itself a tributary of the Macquarie River in the area known as Yorkey’s Corner. Although they find small particles of gold everywhere, they do not manage to find it in the greater, payable quantities they need. More than a little disappointed, they return to Guyong, where they come to another agreement: they will now split up. Lister and James Tom will continue searching in the area around the Upper Turon River, while Hargraves will set off for the gullies around Dubbo.