Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/347

 Exchange of Sydney a horrid rumour ran" that a great gold-field had been found near Bathurst. Very soon small "nuggets"—the word is Californian—arrived in the city, and were handed about as curiosities. Thereupon a few score pedestrians, chiefly of the humblest class, set out to walk to Bathurst, 140 miles.

By the 2nd May there was no longer any doubt about the diggings; crowds of all ranks streamed across the Blue Mountains; the governor's proclamation gave official currency to the dazzling fact; the gold fever commenced.

When whispers and rumours had grown into a great fact, every body wondered that the discovery had not been made before, as it had been so often prophesied by various individuals, none of whom seem to have had, like Mr. Hargreaves, sufficient confidence in their own judgment to travel to the district, and put a spade into the ground.

The history of the gold discoveries in Australia lies in a very short compass, but is worth telling. It illustrates many curious things.

The first written reference to the existence of gold in Australia is to be found in a despatch (not published at the time) addressed by Sir George Gipps, 2nd of September, 1840, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which he encloses a report from Count Strzelecki, mentioning under gold "an auriferous sulphuret of iron, partly decomposed, yielding a very small quantity of gold, although not enough to repay extraction," which he found in the Vale of Clwdd. It was known to a few that an old shepherd of the name of Macgregor was in the habit of annually selling small parcels of gold to jewellers; but those who watched him could discover nothing, and the common belief was that he sold the produce of robberies which had been melted up to destroy suspicion. The Rev. D. Mackenzie, in his "Gold-digger," states that this old man has recently acknowledged that he obtained his gold from a place called Mitchell's Creek, beyond Wellington Yalley, about 200 miles west of Sydney.

The Rev. W. B. Clarke, one of the colonial chaplains, and a geologist of considerable acquirements, in 1846, privately, but unsuccessfully, directed the attention of some of his brother colonists, among others of Mr. Manning to the gold-bearing regions of Bathurst. While in England Sir Roderick Murchison read a paper before the Royal Geographical Society, in 1844, compared the eastern chain of Australia to the Ural Mountains. In 1846, a year before the Californian discovery, he addressed the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, recommending unemployed Cornish tin-miners to emigrate to New South Wales, and dig for gold in the débris and drift of what he