Edward Hargraves

Edward Hargraves (1816–1891), adventurer and speculator, left his native England as a teenager and eventually ended up in Sydney. He worked as a farmer, publican and shipping agent before heading to the Californian goldfields in 1849. After eighteen months he came back to New South Wales determined to earn the reward on offer to anyone who located substantial gold deposits in the colony. With the assistance of three other men and employing the fossicking methods he’d learned in California, Hargraves found flecks of gold in the Macquarie River in February 1851 and soon afterwards returned to Sydney to claim the £500 reward. Meanwhile, his partners had found gold in promising quantities. Despite being urged to secrecy, Hargraves announced the location of the finds at a meeting in Bathurst in May. Within days, the gold rush had begun. Hargraves was awarded a further £10,000 by the government and appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands. He was later invited to prospect for gold by the governments of South and Western Australia, but his lavish lifestyle left him virtually penniless by the time of his death. In 1890, after years of petitioning, Hargraves’s partners in the 1851 find were finally acknowledged as ‘undoubtedly the first discoverers of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity'.