Old writer on the block: Not Your Usual Gold Stories

Monday 2 October 2023

Not Your Usual Gold Stories

Seized back from Five Mile Press which made a mess of the marketing and went belly-up. They failed to answer my emails, and under my Use It or Lose It principle, they lost it. New material, new research.

These are the other stories about gold.

All Australian children are given an account of the chase for gold in Australia that runs like this: Nobody knew there was gold in Australia, Edward Hammond Hargraves discovered gold in New South Wales in 1851, and then the rushes began.

This is false history. T he first claim of a 'gold mine' was a fraud in 1788; the first real gold find was in 1824; the first working gold mine was in South Australia in 1843; a shepherd, Hugh M'Gregor regularly sold gold in Sydney in the 1840s; the first gold rush was in Victoria in 1849, but the authorities choked it off; and Hargraves never discovered gold. What Hargraves did was to provoke a gold rush that could not be stopped, by declaring that there was gold over wide area, stretching from the site of the 1824 find to where M'Gregor was collecting gold.

This book is written for readers of all ages. The only qualification is that you should curious about Australia's past, and unwilling to accept the mindless pap that is regurgitated in Australian schools. Forget about how Hargraves was the first to discover gold: he wasn't the first, and if the truth be known, he never did find gold. He was, however, a consummate conspirator, and by his actions an claims, he triggered off Australia's gold rush.

The new cover reveals one of the secrets of finding where gold is. You look for mud in a stream, and follow it to its source. How does it work? Read the book...

Don't look for a detailed rehash of the Eureka business here. Yes, it rates a mention, but there were many other acts of violence, perpetrated on the goldfields, and I don't even deal with all of them.

This book offers fresh history. Here, you will read about

How a convict called Daly "discovered" gold in 1788 (he was lying, and he was later hanged for other offences);
How an unnamed convict on the Bog Hill, the western side of the Blue Mountains, found a nugget in 1823 or 1824, and was flogged;
How "Old M'Gregor" came in to Sydney with gold from the Wellington Valley for many years;
How others saw gold just below the Big Hill;
How Australia's first gold mine was opened in the 1840s near Adelaide;
How gold was found in Victoria in 1849, but the authorities put a lid on it;
How Edward Hammond Hargraves learned of Old M'Gregor's and other people's finds;
How Hargraves studied the start of a gold rush;
How Hargraves did not find gold, but announced a goldfield stretching from the Big Hill to the Wellington Valley;
How Hargraves and a henchman conspired to stop any rush being blocked by the authorities;
How people heard about the gold;
How they went after gold;
How they found gold;
Who made the big profits;
What the diggers ate, drank and slept in;
How some of the diggers died;
How people came to Australia from all over the world;
How the Chinese gold seekers were singled out for attack;
The many, many ways of robbing and cheating on the gold fields;

and much more.

This is not the "history" you learned at school. I hated that rubbish as well. One of my hopes in writing this book is that I will manage to subvert the staid and hackneyed curriculum.