COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL 



THE MINING INDUSTRY. 



HE romance of history contains few chapters fuller of exciting 

 interest than that which records how, for countless ;i 

 Nature had secretly stored up, in an Island Continent, tin- 

 very existence of which was unknown to ever)' one of the 

 great nations of antiquity, mineral treasures, equalling in 

 magnitude and value anything that even the glowing imagina- 

 tion of an Oriental story-teller had ventured to conceive. 

 And just as the discovery of America coincided with the 

 need for new channels to be opened out, into which the 

 pent-up .energies of Europe might be directed, and was 

 followed, in due time, by the revelation of immense mines 

 of gold and silver, the produce of which stimulated and 

 expanded the commerce of the Old World ; so the discovery 

 and occupation of Australia in the eighteenth century, was 

 succeeded seventy years afterwards by an exposition of the 

 fact that mineral treasures, as great as those found in 

 Mexico and Peru in the times of Cortes and Pizarro, lay 

 hidden in the soil of the new-found land ; and this led, not 

 only to a re-animation of industry by an augmentation of the 

 metallic currency of the Old World, but to a remarkable 

 migration of its redundant population to the fifth Continent 



of the globe. In brief, when the momentous consequences of the discovery of gold in 

 Australia shall be accurately weighed and estimated a century hence, that incident will 

 be recognized as one of the great turning-points in the progress of the human race. 



There has been some dispute as to the person to whom the honour of the discovery 

 is due. Count Str/lecki, as a scientific traveller, noted and reported the geological indi- 

 cations of gold ; but the local Government dreaded any discovery, and discouraged any 

 mention of the matter. The Rev. W. 13. Clarke, an enthusiastic geologist, also 

 repeatedly noted auriferous indications, but he did not disclose any workable gold-field. 

 A shepherd from the west had brought in a nugget, but it failed to set people searching. 

 The man who actually started the gold-mining industry of Australia was undoubtedly Mr. 

 Edward Hammond Hargraves. He was living near the town of Bathurst, in Xew South 

 Wales, when the news of the "rush" to the Californian Dorado penetrated to that inland 

 town. He had been well-nigh ruined, as .a squatter, by the drought which prevailed between 

 1844 and 1848, and, with the small remnant of his fortune, he resolved to retrieve his 

 losses, if possible, on the Pacific Slope. In this hope he was disappointed, but he was 

 forcibly struck by the identity of the geological formation of the auriferous regions of 



