Changes Caused by the Goldrushes

As not all diggers found success on the goldfields, there soon arose a need to provide them with other means of earning a living. One way was to make Crown land available for agriculture or mixed farming. In New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland (a separate colony from 1859), the 1860s saw a series of Selection Acts passed that provided for the purchase of Crown land in small lots. This movement gave impetus particularly to wheat cultivation.

There was another major element in the migration caused by the gold discoveries. Also prominent among those seeking gold were Chinese. A trickle of Chinese migrants had begun arriving in the Australian colonies in the 1840s to work as shepherds and labourers on pastoral runs. With the discovery of gold, this migration swelled, with tens of thousands reaching the diggings in New South Wales and Victoria, where their physical and cultural differences, and often their success through sheer hard work aroused much social prejudice in the Europeans. There were violent clashes at Buckland River in Victoria in 1857, and at Lambing Flat in New South Wales in 1860-1. This situation in all its main elements was then repeated in Queensland at Gympie and Rockhampton in the late 1860s, and on the Palmer and Hodgkinson Rivers in the 1870s.

There were some 25,000 Chinese (almost all of them male) in Victoria in 1861, and some 13,000 in New South Wales. In Queensland in 1881 there were about 11,000. Many Chinese returned home after their time on the diggings, but a substantial number also stayed, turning their hands to station work, market gardening, laundering, cabinet-making and shopkeeping. Up until the time of the Second World War, there was a prominent "China Town" in Cairns, for example.