The discovery of gold in Australia, though destined to effect great and sudden changes, both social and political, was made many years before those changes were produced by abrupt disclosure that it existed in enormous quantities, and could be obtained by simple methods at what were called “alluvial diggings;” i. e. those, where by digging pits, extracting the goldsprinkled earth, and washing it at the water-side in a wooden cradle (with a series of checks to arrest the gold as the mud and water escaped) large quantities of granular or laminated fragments of gold were collected without scientific knowledge or appliances, and by unskilled labour.

Edward Hammond Hargraves was the unscientific person who disclosed the fact. He had migrated from New South Wales to California. When seeking for gold there, and observing the facility with which it was washed from the detritus or alluvium in which it was imbedded, it occurred to him that he had seen in New South Wales places in which the soil and conformation were like those which yielded gold in America. Possessed of the knowledge needful to test the matter practically, he returned to Sydney. But long before that time gold had been picked up in Australia, and had excited eager but evanescent curiosity. Count Strzelecki, in 1839, reported to Sir G. Gipps that he had found in the Vale of Clwydd, “an auriferous sulphuret of iron yielding a very small quantity of gold, although not enough to repay extraction.”