WHAT THE GOLD RUSH WROUGHT.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY years ago this summer Edward Hammond Hargraves, stout, moustachioed, thirty-something man with an idea, rode out from Sydney into the Blue Mountains on a borrowed horse. California-style, he panned stream-bed soil near Bathurst and found a few specks of gold before a small rustic crowd. And the Antipodes were never the same again. The great gold rush had begun.

Rather unusually for Australian history, the story is one of successes one upon the other. It was that rare blessing, the opposite of a disaster waiting to happen.

In ten years the Australian population tripled, the wealth soared, the old convict continent's international reputation was reversed. Well-built towns and cities were rising from what Europeans had thought of as the wilderness, or what had at best been rutted streets of bark-roofed clay-and-slab humpies.

A hundred years, as the centenary of federation shows us, is d long time, but 150 years is longer. It is real history, so long ago that not only was nobody alive now alive then, but almost nobody remembers anybody who was alive then. The memory passed on orally through families has almost gone too, frayed away over six generations. Australian society is not so very new any more.

The discovery of gold was one of the four cornerstones on which modern Australia was built, along with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the grazing boom of the 1830s and Federation in 1901. However, it has left much the greatest physical footprint of these, in the many towns and buildings originating in gold rush times but also in the people--possibly about half the present population have gold rush forebears.

Hargraves' gold wash near the junction of Summer Hill and Lewis Ponds Creeks, east of Orange, on 12th February 1851 is usually taken as the starting point of the rush, but as is usual with great historic events, it was more complicated than this. Hargraves' discovery lit the spark that exploded the powder-keg, but there had been several lesser discoveries over the previous twenty-five years.

The usual view is that governors and graziers suppressed publicity about previous earlier sightings of gold, fearful of the upheaval it would cause in a convict colony finding its way in wool-growing, but this is open to debate. Geoffrey Blainey, for one, in The Rush That Never Ended does not accept it. A solid mine or two, he argues, could have been a good way of employing convicts.