Explain Why Was The Australian Gold Rush A Tragedy For Overseas Immigration

Why Was The Australian Gold Rush a Tragedy For Overseas Immigration?

The Australian Gold Rush was disastrous for people coming from different countries. The main focus of this essay is to argue that the Australian Gold Rush was a tragedy for immigrants. Oversea immigrants had to suffer intense racism and pay taxes that no else had to pay. Immigrants also had to dig in fields that have already been dug in.

The gold rush started in 1851 when gold was first struck in NSW. This was the first time gold was found in Australia and it started a frenzy all around the world to start looking for gold in Australia. It started when a man from California called Edward Hargraves came to Australia to look for gold. Edward and a man named Lister started

panning around the Lewis Pond Creek and found gold on the 12th of February 1851. By May many citizens of Sydney had left jobs to go work in the goldfields in hope of striking lucky. In August huge amounts of gold where found in Victoria in the Buninyong Ranges near Ballarat. By the end of the year many ships where coming to Australia, the nationalities consisted of Britain’s, Scots, the Irish, U.S, Chinese and Germany. After that one find people from around the globe to try their luck in the goldfields of Australia. Edward Hargraves was given a reward of $10,000 plus a life pension for finding that one grain of gold .The gold rush is one of the most important times in Australian history as it helped developed the nation. The ‘mateship’ that was developed during the gold rush is still how we and others look at ourselves at Australians. He gold rush also had the effect of thousands of people leaving their jobs, so naturally wages increased to try and keep people where they are, simple house servants wage got increased to 65-70 pounds a year with rations to keep them working. The gold rush is found upon as a great time for Australia, but those who have looked deeper find that the gold rush might not have been such a good thing. A great poem written by Henry Lawson sums up the gold rush.
“The night too quickly passes
And we are growing old,
So let us fill our glasses
And toast the Days of Gold;
When finds of wondrous treasure
Set all the South ablaze,
And you and I were faithful mates
All through the roaring days.”

There were many reasons why people for around the world came to mine for gold. Many came with just the thought of quick and easy money, others came over to repay debts and some extremely noble men came to mine and give it back to their home towns. After one year of the discovery of gold 370,000 immigrants came to Australia, most of them were young men hoping to find a fortune early in their lives and spend the rest of it on easy street. Two years after gold was found Australia’s population went from 77,000 to 540,000 people, by 1871 the population had gone up to 1.7 million. Because so many people were going to and from the gold fields the government decided to build the first railway in Australia. 1.7 million people came to Australia in the hope of finding gold for either themselves, to payback others or to send it back to their home towns. .The gold rush had made Australia a lot of money even without the gold, the taxes that were enforced onto the immigrants, the money given to small businesses on the gold fields to pay for food, the gold rush made many businesses get bigger and better. The gold rush attracted so many people because once one person gets rich everyone else wants to get rich, so when news about gold reached other countries their greedy sides came into view and they caught the first boat to Australia to dig for gold. The gold rush still looks good but soon after that is when things started to settle down and got possessive about the digging areas things started to get out of hand for the immigrants.

The immigrants started to get mistreated and found as lesser beings than the Australians.

The Australians got possessive of their digging sites and they began to insult the newcomers, the immigrants also had to dig in fields that have already been dug out by the Australian miners. The Australians first protested the idea of having the Chinese working on the gold fields because of racism and fear of new competition. The Australian diggers had a mateship which meant they had certain rules, but with the newcomers they didn’t know the rules and were often accused of doing something wrong they didn’t know was wrong. The Australians also thought that the Chinses will find more gold as they are known as untiring workers, so they were insulted and forced to live with other people from the same nationality for protection, the Immigrants were beaten up and insulted a lot and in some cases they were even murdered by the Australians. As if the racism was not enough the Chinese also had to pay a tax of 10 pounds when they arrived in Victoria that no other immigrants had to pay, so some landed at Robe S.A and walked to the Ballarat gold fields .All the Chinese immigrants forced the government to act, so they made laws that restricted that amount of Chinese workers in one area developing the idea of the White Australian Policy. The Chinese were also criticized of stashing the gold they found to take back to China when they should’ve invested it in Australia. The Chinese gold diggers were also treated as second class citizens on the gold fields, the Australians invented numerous sayings to convey their sense of superiority over the Chinese. A quote by an angry group of European and American miners met in Bendigo in 1854 and declared that a "general and unanimous rising should take place… for the purpose of driving the Chinese off the goldfield". Many were killed in these riots. But when the gold discoveries started to dwindle the Chinese left Australia to return to their homeland,

only a few stayed in Australia.

In conclusion the Australian gold rush was a tragedy for immigrants, especially the Chinese. They had to live with racism, riots, taxes that weren’t given to other immigrants, forced to dig in already dug fields. This is why the gold rush was an absolute tragedy for the Chinese.