Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Gold & Revolution
In 1871 an Aboriginal stockman named Jupiter spotted gold glinting in a waterhole near
Charters Towers. His find triggered a gold rush that attracted thousands of prospectors,
publicans, traders, prostitutes and quacks to the diggings. For a few exhilarating years, any
determined miner, regardless of class, had a real chance of striking it rich. By the 1880s,
Brisbane itself had grown prosperous on wool and gold but, by then, life on the goldfields
was changing radically. The easy gold was gone. The free-for-all had given way to an in-
dustry in which the company boss called the shots.
As displaced prospectors searched for work, the overheated economy of eastern Aus-
tralia collapsed, throwing thousands of labouring families into the miseries of unemploy-
ment and hunger. The depression of the 1890s exposed stark inequalities as barefoot chil-
dren scavenged in the streets. But this was Australia, 'the working man's paradise' - the
land where the principle of 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work' was sacred. As employ-
ers tried to drive down wages, a tough Queensland working class began to assert itself.
Seamen, factory workers, miners, loggers and shearers organised themselves into trade uni-
ons to take on Queensland's equally tough bosses and shareholders.
The result was a series of violent strikes. The most famous of these erupted in 1891 after
angry shearers proclaimed their socialist credo under a great gum tree, known as the 'Tree
of Knowledge', at Barcaldine in central Queensland. As the strike spread, troopers, right-
wing vigilantes and union militants clashed in bitter class warfare. The great radical poet
Henry Lawson expected revolution:
'We'll make the tyrants feel the sting/O' those that
they would throttle;/They needn't say the fault is ours/If blood should stain the wattle!'
The striking shearers were defeated and their leaders jailed by a government determined
to suppress the unrest. Despite this loss, trade unions remained a powerful force in Aus-
tralia and the Barcaldine strike contributed to the formation of a potent new force in Aus-
tralian politics: the Australian Labor Party.
