FIRST DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN QUEENSLAND. I15 
I once owned a copy of “ Dampier’s Voyages to Australia.” It 
was published nearly 200 years ago, and is now in the Government 
Library of the Government Botanist. In it old Dampier figures the 
animals and plants he saw on our north coast—iguanas, bananas, 
&c.--but he never names gold; nor do Captains Cook and 
Flinders, in any of their notes on New Holland hint at it. Sir 
Thomas Mitchell and Leichhardt, whatever minerals they saw in 
their explorations, seemed never to have suspected the existence 
of gold, though the latter traversed the Cape River and the Gilbert 
River, both the sites of famous golden reefs. 
Leichhardt disappeared in 1847, and it was not until the 
beginning of the next year, when the bullets were flying about in 
Paris over the Louis Phillipe revolution in February, that London 
was startled by the still more momentous news of the gold in 
California, then newly acquired by the United States from Mexico. 
This led, indirectly, to the discovery of the metal in Australia, 
in 1851, through Hargreaves noticing the resemblance of the 
formations in Australia with those of California; and—strange to 
say—it was first found in both countries on the land of a Mr. 
Suttor. Mr. Toms disputes with Hargreaves the merit of being 
the first to drop on to the gold in New South Wales, but the latter 
got the reward. 
Neither of them, however, was the first to find it. I was in 
Melbourne in March, 1851, and in the window of a jeweller’s shop 
in that city, I saw, suspended by a thread, a lump of pure gold 
the size of a musket ball, and labelled ‘from Clunes.” Knowing 
people in Collins Street shrugged their shoulders, and said ‘‘ from 
California,” and pooh-phooed the Clunes idea, or that of gold in 
Australia at any price; but, Clunes proved golden later on. How- 
ever, on roth May, 1851, New Holland attained her majority, and 
Australia became of age; for on this day the Sydney “‘Government 
Gazette” officially announced to the world that gold existed in the 
colony; apropos of which I may here be allowed to express 
my surprise that such an anniversary is not kept regularly as a 
supreme holiday, seeing how much more important a bearing the 
4,300,000,000 of gold unearthed in the past has had on the 
destiny and expansion of Australia, than the few hundred of con- 
victs, landed on the 26th January, 1788, at Port Jackson have had. 
Yet, this latter event is religiously observed. But we shall, I hope, 
grow wiser intime. I say nothing here of the £1,000,000,000,000 
of gold that has yet to be dug out in ourcontinent. My argument 
is sufficient without that. 
