Gold rush Australia
such as On the Road, Life Under Canvas, Entertainment, New Chums, Mining Techniques, Lucky Diggers, Eureka Stockade and the Gold Petition. The latter refers to the Bendigo goldfields petition of 1853 which has been digitised and indexed with over 5,000 miners signatures.
Digital discoveries
Another digitised goldfields treasure on the State Library of Victoria website is the diary of Charles Evans ( handle.slv. vic.gov.au/10381/ 236326), which covers the period 1853 to 1855. The diary is one of the few eyewitness accounts of the Eureka uprising in Ballarat in December 1854.
Keyword searching of Australian digitised newspapers may also help to discover mining ancestors. Newspapers have a wealth of information in them and it is much easier to search for a person’s name or place. Results can also be filtered by state, and dates can be narrowed down to a decade, a year or even a month. You may even find a direct reference to a mining ancestor and the community in which they lived.
Trove ( trove.nla.gov. au) is the National Library of Australia’s free online portal for digitised newspapers. Reports of individual rushes can also help us to imagine what it was like for everyone who rushed to a new discovery. For example, on 28 July 1867, The McIvor Times and Rodney Advertiser (Heathcote, Victoria) reported on the Myers Creek rush:
“Last week made a wonderful difference to the appearance of the new rush at Myers Creek. Tents, huts and even habitations of a more pretentious style of architecture have sprung up in all directions, and judging from the quantities of building material lying about we should say that many more dwelling places of one kind or another will be erected during the ensuing week… Many miners from other parts of the colony are being attracted to Myers Creek. By the last night’s train about a dozen men with swags arrived.”
Outback History ( outback familyhistory.com.au) is a wonderful website for anyone who had ancestors who were miners in the central goldfields of Western Australian goldfields in the 1890s. The site includes cemeteries, hotels, maps, electoral rolls, post office directories and other resources which have been indexed by name and place and are free to search. The Miners Memorial Register lists the name of the miner, their age, the date of death, the name of the mine and where.
A similar site for Queensland is maintained by Judy Webster ( judywebster.com.au) who has indexed a number of North Queensland hospital records which include many mining areas. Other indexes include missing friends, asylum records, police gazettes and other records which may include miners. The online indexes are free to search but only show a person’s name with no other identifiable information. Some of the indexes are also available through Findmypast.
New mining resources are being published all the time, especially online indexes and digitised records so repeat your searches from time to time. Also remember that not everything is online and that you still may need to research in person at the relevant repository or employ someone to look at the records for you. Shauna Hicks is the author of TracingYourMiningAncestors (Unlock the Past, 2014)