feb 12, 1851 - Discovery of Gold In Australia

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On February 12th, 1851, a prospector came across a fleck of gold in a waterhole near Bathurst, New South Wales. After the great discovery, a lot more gold was being discovered in our neighbouring, state of Victoria. After the revolutionary discovery, Australian Gold Rush started to began, which had an intense impact on the country’s national identity.

Within a year, over 500,000 people soon nicknames the diggers dashed towards the dusty busy goldfields of Ballarat Australia. At the time most immigrants were mostly British, but several of the prospectors were either from the United States, Poland Germany or China and by 1852 were completely settled into Victoria. Because of the increase in population, the wages in the region doubled. The difficulty of people to find jobs were becoming harder and harder because they were abandoning their old jobs to find their new fortune in the goldfields but entering in the goldfields was a much harder thing to do then you might think. The police officers were very strict and a lot of rules were implied. The overall outcome of the Australian goldrush impacted most because it changed the convict colonies into much more progressive cities with the influx of free immigrants; it also ended in Western Australia joining the move for Federation.

Throughout the time in 1854, a lot of miners wanted to change and were angry at the rules being made and enforced. Some of these rules included of paying the gold licences so they decided to burn the licenses in a sense of protest and raised the Eureka flag. The miners fought the soldiers and police officers to protect their rights. This impacted on there being fight now known as the Eureka Stockade.

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