Edward Hammond Hargraves (1816–1891), adventurer and speculator, claimed credit for the discovery of payable goldfields in New South Wales. A soldier’s son who ran away to sea at fourteen, he arrived in Sydney in 1832 and tried his hand at various ventures, farming and hotel-owning among them, before financial strife forced him to sell up and head for the Californian goldfields in 1849. After eighteen fruitless months there, he came back to New South Wales hell-bent on claiming the reward on offer to anyone able to locate substantial gold deposits in the colony, and set out for the Wellington district in January 1851. En route, he enlisted the assistance of local man John Lister, and in February the pair found flecks of gold in Lewis Ponds Creek, near the site that later became the town of Ophir. With Lister and another two men, brothers James and William Tom, Hargraves then panned for gold in the Macquarie River, which also showed promise, and in mid-February he wrote to an acquaintance in Sydney declaring his opinion that ‘the Gold Mines of New South Wales are more extensive than those of California, the richness of which I cannot as yet form the most remote idea’. Hargraves introduced his partners to the fossicking methods he’d picked up in California, most particularly the use of the cradle, which worked by sifting the heavy grains of gold from river gravel. In March 1851, though the finds were modest, Hargraves returned to Sydney hoping to convince the Colonial Secretary of his entitlement to the £500 reward. Meanwhile, in early April and using a cradle they had made themselves, Lister and the Tom brothers extracted gold in much more promising quantities. Though they urged him to keep the site of the finds secret, Hargraves tried to underline his claim by writing of the discovery to the Sydney Morning Herald, which in early May confirmed reports that ‘there is gold over a considerable district’ in New South Wales. In mid-May, the reward now secured, Hargraves made public the location of the finds at a public meeting in Bathurst. Within days, the gold rush had begun. Despite the spuriousness of his claim and the shifty manner in which he’d secured it, Hargraves was awarded a further £10,000 by the NSW government and appointed commissioner of crown lands for the gold districts. In England in 1853-54, he was presented to Queen Victoria, and in 1855 he published Australia and its goldfields. But he was soon broke again, and in 1861 attempted to claim the balance of a £5000 Victorian government reward for the discoveries of gold made there ten years earlier. When this bid failed, he accused Victorian politicians of corruption. In 1877, he was granted a pension of £250 per year and later retired to his home in Sydney. He died there in 1891, leaving an estate worth less than £400. Lister and the Tom brothers were eventually compensated for Hargraves’ deceit to the comparatively paltry tune of £1000 each. In 1890, a select committee found that they were ‘undoubtedly the first discoverers of gold obtained in Australia in payable quantity'. The myth of Hargraves’ claim to such a title persisted nevertheless.
