Free Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution by Peter Fitzsimons Page A

more, too. The Melbourne Morning Herald & General Daily Advertiser sets the tone on its front page with its special-edition headline the next afternoon:
     
    Extraordinary
    GLORIOUS NEWS! SEPARATION AT LAST!!
     
    7 January 1851, on the approaches to Port Jackson, impatience builds
     
    He is a huge man, nervously twirling his black moustache and anxiously pacing the deck of the good ship Emma as it blow-bobs its way through the heads of Port Jackson and into Sydney Harbour. When he had left this same harbour two years earlier to try his luck on the Californian goldfields, it had been with the hope that he would return, travelling first class, laden with treasure. Instead, all he truly brings back is an idea – an idea that because the landscape of the Californian goldfields is reminiscent of a valley he had once seen
    17 years earlier, up Bathurst way, perhaps that valley might have gold too! True, an American acquaintance in whom he had confided this view had been derisive.
    ‘There’s no gold in the country you’re going to,’ he’d said. ‘And if there is, that darned Queen of yours won’t let you dig it . . .’
    Rising to the occasion, 34-year-old Edward Hammond Hargraves had taken off his hat, adopted what he assumed to be a magisterial pose and replied, ‘There’s as much gold in the country I am going to as there is in California; and Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, God bless her, will make me one of her Gold Commissioners.’
    Hargraves remains so convinced he is right that, shortly after landing on the Sydney docks, he borrows £105 from a friend to buy a horse and some supplies, and on 5 February 1851 sets off from Sydney heading west.
    Five days later Hargraves and his exhausted nag arrive in the rough region of their destination and pull into the Wellington Inn at Guyong, which he knows to be run by Captain John Lister of the ship Wave , the one that had brought him to Australian shores 18 years earlier.
    Upon entering this rustic establishment, Hargraves learns that only a little more than six months earlier, alas, the good captain was killed when, on a trip to Bathurst, he was thrown from his gig. The establishment, however, is still being run by Lister’s widow (who remembers Hargraves at once after he mentions his name) and her 22-year-old son, John Hardman Australia Lister. Over dinner Hargraves decides to confide in her precisely why he has come, the theory he has nurtured for nearly a year now, that not far from where they are now seated there are riches beyond a man’s imagining!
    Yet, he would later write: ‘It occurred to me that I could not prosecute my plans efficiently without assistance . . . After dinner, therefore, I disclosed to her the object of my visit, and begged her to procure a black fellow as a guide to the spot I wished to visit first . . . She entered with a woman’s heartiness into my views, and offered me the assistance of her son . . . who, she assured me, knew the country well.
    And so John Lister does – and neither is the young man a stranger to the idea that there is gold in this region. As a matter of fact, upon the mantelpiece of the inn are two chunks of quartz from the Upper Turon that he proudly shows Hargraves. On carefully examining the samples, Hargraves tells Lister that one of them resembles rock found near goldmines.
    Thus acquainted, on the morning of 12 February 1851, the two head off with their two horses and a fresh packhorse. From the relatively open country around Guyong, within a very short time the gullies start to fall away, the trees close in, and the men are soon nudging and trudging their way down the summery, dry creek bed of Lewis Ponds Creek.
    The further they go, the more excited Hargraves becomes as the country starts to resemble more and more the gold-bearing landscape he saw in California.
    Some 14 miles on, Hargraves is beside himself with excitement as the familiar quartz, granite and slate outcrops become more apparent and, the