116 FIRST DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN QUEENSLAND ; 
The discoveries in New South Wales in 1851 were quite eclipsed 
by the gold finds in Victoria in 1852, in the November of which 
year the gold came rolling into Melbourne at the regular rate of 
£400,000 a week, enough to demoralise a poverty-stricken city then 
smaller than Brisbane, and having no export but wool, tallow, and 
hides up to that period. Let anyone try to imagine what would 
come over Brisbane if gold were found at this rate within 100 
miles of our General Post Office. 
People now began to wonder if ‘‘ Moreton Bay” (as we were 
then called) had any gold; but it was voted in Sydney that the 
Darling Downs (the supposed garden of Australia then) and gold 
together, would be ‘‘too much joy” for any one place, and people 
there scouted the idea, as the Collins-street men did the Clunes 
gold of March, 1851. However, at the end of 1853, Mr. 
Stutchbury, the Government Geologist of New South Wales, was 
sent up here to explore, and he, in about December of that year, 
found gold near Port Curtis, at the Calliope, and this was the first 
authenticated discovery of gold in the territory of Queensland. 
The Dawson River was at that time the very outside limit of 
settlement, 
Messrs. Charles Moore (of the Sydney Government Gardens) 
and P. L. C. Shepherd (nurseryman of the same place) were up 
in Brisbane about the same time on a botanising tour. They 
stayed at the same hotel with me for a month, and they informed 
me that, although looking for plants and not for minerals, they had 
found gold by washing in the same locality that Mr. Stutchbury did. 
The next discovery of gold in Queensland was in August, 1856. 
I was up in Warwick then, and a shepherd on Canning Downs 
brought in from ‘Lord John’s Swamp” 8 dwts. of gold, which 
I bought and still have by me, the oldest uncoined specimen now 
extant of Queensland gold, I suppose. I had as far back as 1854 
noticed the quartz formation at Talgai, and anticipated the dis- 
covery of gold in the reefs there. About this time further 
discoveries of gold took place. Brisbane, a village, and weary of 
waiting for separation and finding trade dull, sent out expeditions, 
one of which found gold at Boonoo Boonoo, New South Wales, 
and another at Emu Creek, on the way to Gympie; but these 
were small affairs by the side of the Canoona rush, which came 
off in 1858, and for a time left Brisbane cut off from the world, 
every Northern steamer and schooner from Sydney being diverted 
to the Fitzroy River trade for the time being. Apropos of which 
I remember writing, from the Union Club, a letter in 1857 to the 
