Free Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution by Peter Fitzsimons Page B

tree-cover aside, the hills and gullies start to look exactly as they did in the Sierra Nevada.
    ‘I felt myself surrounded by gold; and with tremendous anxiety panted for the moment of trial, when my magician’s wand should transform this trackless wilderness into a region of countless wealth.’
    First things first, however . . . Not even gold should get between a 20-stone man and his luncheon. Two miles further up the creek bed, in the middle of the day, he and John arrive at a particularly pleasant spot where Lewis Ponds Creek intersects with Radigan’s Gully, where water is easily obtained and the horses can slake their thirst. To this point, Hargraves has not shared his excitement with young Lister, but now is as good a time as any. After they wolf down their cold beef and damper, washed down by billy tea, he tells him straight.
    All around them, right now, Hargraves begins, and right beneath them in the creek that Lister has just been wading through, there is gold – gold !
    Lister stares back with complete astonishment, but Hargraves is quite serious.
    And now,’ the older man announces portentously, ‘I will find some gold.’
    The young man watches intently as Hargraves takes his pick and digs a small amount of dirt from a rock formation that runs at right angles to the creek before taking his trowel to fill a pan with sodden earth. The tin pan, which he has brought all the way from California, is some 18 inches across the top, 12 inches across the bottom, and its sloping sides run four inches deep. Taking a stick, he mixes the dirt into a fine batter and then begins his careful ‘panning’. Slowly, bit by bit, he sluices the earth out of the pan with the water from the nearby creek. The soil thins and washes away, leaving . . . leaving . . . leaving some pebbles and . . . there ! . . . a very small speck of glittering gold!
    ‘Here it is!’ he exclaims.
    The effect is instantaneous. This news is not just promising, not just good, not even great. This news, Hargraves knows from the moment he sees the gleam in his pan, is life-changing for him and his companion, and it will lift the entire country. The older man repeats the process five times and pans some specks of gold on four occasions.
    Drawing himself up and puffing himself out, he makes a considered pronouncement to the stupefied John Lister, indeed to all the world, as if he is standing behind a pulpit: ‘This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum.’
    Blank-faced, Lister blinks up at this self-proclaimed aristocrat. Hargraves is not joking, at least not totally. At this instant he really does feel himself ‘to be a great man’. All that is necessary now, he says, is for them to discover ‘[payable] gold, and it will be the luckiest day that has happened to New South Wales.’
    Once back at Lister’s Inn, Hargraves is so excited he can barely speak. Already, above and beyond whatever personal fortune he might make at these diggings, he knows that if he can just follow up on this initial discovery by finding gold in greater quantities to prove that it is ‘payable’ – of sufficient quantity and accessibility to ensure economic profit – it will be of enormous benefit to the colony, and, far more importantly, of enormous benefit to him . Beyond seeking an appropriate reward for founding such an industry, he will surely have his dream realised and be made a commissioner of the goldfields, in the same way the government already has a commissioner of Crown lands. (The prestige! The salary !)
    Oddly, when Hargraves and young John arrive back at Guyong, the rest of the Lister family remains quietly unimpressed with the ‘discovery’ – as a matter of fact, they say they can barely see it.
    ‘There! There ! Can you not see it now ?’ No, no . . . no, they can’t. In the end, it is only with the aid