A Rich source of imagery relating to Australia during the gold rushes is to be found in the Illustrated London News, with the paper carrying 60 relevant images for the period 1851-54. (These images are listed in the Appendix to this article.) By contrast, in the 11 Australian papers launched during the decade of the 1850s, there are only 26 images relating to gold.1 The reason for this discrepancy was that none of the Australian illustrated newspapers was in circulation at the time of the initial gold rushes to the Bathurst region in New South Wales, and slightly later, to Mount Alexander and Ballarat in Victoria. Most of the illustrated Australian papers were not launched until the second half of the 1850s, after the excitement of the initial gold rushes had died down and many diggers had returned to their former professions and trades, including those relating to the press: journalism, illustration, compositing, printing and wood engraving. By contrast, the Illustrated London News was already a well-established paper when the news of the discovery of gold in Australia reached London.

Yet there was to be a paradox to this coverage. For in mid-1852, when the gold rushes in Victoria were first reported, there was a perplexing mismatch between image and text in their representation. This mismatch can be understood by considering the definition of an illustration as a pictorial image which complements the text of its accompanying article.2

Before mid-1852, illustrations in the Illustrated London News depicting the gold rushes to the Bathurst region had conformed with this definition in their depiction of adventurous young men swarming to newly discovered goldfields: gold-seekers en route to the diggings, landscapes of the country being passed through, and life on the goldfields. A particularly good example of this type of image is ‘Fitzroy Bar, Ophir, at the junction of the two creeks’ from the Illustrated London News of 20 December 1851 (see p. 26). It depicts a hive of activity with gold-seekers strung out along the edge of a creek, panning or cradling for gold, whilst in the middleground, on the left, there is a collection of tents and bark huts which can be readily imagined to extend beyond the picture frame. In the accompanying article, the scene is described:

Image and text combine to give the reader in Great Britain an idea of what a gold rush site in its infancy may have looked like.

However, with the discovery of gold in Victoria, the articles accompanying images, plus text-only articles, grew increasingly anxious in tone as English commentators consider the impact that the discoveries might have on the colonial work force. In late January 1852, the Illustrated London News reported the discovery of gold at Buninyong near Ballarat:

At this stage, there were mixed feelings in England about the impact of gold. Whilst its discovery in Victoria was likely to compound the labour shortage that had long been a problem for the colony's expanding wool-based economy, it was also recognised that gold might make emigration to Australia more attractive. Indeed, from reading the Illustrated London News, if there was one issue with regard to Australia at this time that was more pressing than the discovery of gold, it was how to persuade a greater number of Great Britain's poor to make the penultimate sacrifice for their land of birth by leaving it, both for their own good and for the greater well-being of those who remained behind.

Following the initial reporting of the discovery of gold in Victoria, there was to be a tantalising three-month break in the receipt of news from Australia due to the vagaries of relying on ship-borne mail for news. Thus it was not until early May that the scale of the discoveries and their impact on the young colony came to be appreciated. There followed a four-week period (from 22 May to 19 June) when the possibility of gold having a beneficial effect on the emigration of the poor receded into the background as commentators grappled with what was happening in Victoria itself and the implications for Great Britain. The crux of British concern, expressed in the lead article of the Illustrated London News of 22 May 1852, titled ‘The gold fever in California and Australia’, was that gold had become a magnet for Australia's pastoral work-force, thereby threatening the collapse of its pastoral industry, which in turn could lead to the downfall of the Yorkshire woollen industry:

So it was that a defining feature of this mid-1852 period of anxiety about the Australian gold rushes was their interpretation solely in terms of their potential impact on Great Britain rather than of their benefits for Australia.

Several factors contributed to this extreme negativity about the possible effect of gold on Great Britain. In the first place, there was considerable uncertainty about what impact new supplies of gold would have on the world economy, particularly in terms of price levels, interest rates, balances of payment and volume of employment.6 There were two camps in the debate, which, it must be remembered, occurred at a time when the study of economics was still in its infancy. This helps to explain why much of the debate, to a present-day reader, appears to blow out of all sense of proportion the impact that gold would have. One group of economists believed more gold would result in price increases, inflation and the waste of resources, given that gold-seeking was seen to be a non-productive use of labour compared with agriculture and manufacturing.7 By contrast, an opposing group believed gold could be an instrument for social improvement and reform in Great Britain, its rationale being that gold would accelerate the emigration of surplus population, meaning higher wages for those who remained behind, especially when gold would be a stimulus to manufacturing. There was even a particularly optimistic argument that manufacturing would be stimulated to the extent of raising employment levels and thus reducing emigration.8

The issue of emigration leads to the second factor, for in 1852 the centre of the British Empire was still struggling to shake off its ‘Condition of England’ syndrome from the previous decade, despite the extraordinary success of the Great Exhibition in giving a boost to the spirits of the nation. One of the key features of this syndrome had been concern about the poor being a drain on Great Britain's wealth — the Irish who had been devastated by the Potato Famine, the Scottish Highlanders displaced by the clearances, and the English agricultural labourers usurped by the growing mechanisation of farming9 — a concern which, at the beginning of the 1850s, was made all the more acute by the knowledge that for the past decade the Australian colonies had been calling for more immigrants in order to boost the size of their pastoral work force. In the article previously quoted, the Illustrated London News also observed:

A final factor was the unease felt by many British commentators that Australia could sacrifice the sanctity of cultivating the soil in favour of the lottery of gold.11 These were commentators who found it distasteful to think that men could become independent and wealthy more by dint of good luck than by steady, industrious labour over many years. Mind, it was also this latter path to prosperity which fitted in neatly with the concern of landed wealth in Australia to preserve a subservient pastoral work force which at best aspired to a yeoman farmer ideal.12 To quote again from the lead article, ‘The gold fever in California and Australia’:

Despite its editorial position, the paper continued to include illustrations which depicted men who were seized by the spirit of adventure, freedom and independence that was invoked by gold. Hence the mismatch between text and image, most evident in the Illustrated London News of 29 May 1852, in which four illustrations accompany the second instalment of a two-part article on the rush to Buninyong, contributed by Edward Dunn, a Western District pioneer from Mount Emu, south-west of Ballarat (see pp. 28-29).14 The first image depicts a Buninyong landscape when it was still being used for pastoralism; a lone shepherd tends his flock. The next three images depict different aspects of daily life and toil on the goldfields. Dunn's accompanying description of Buninyong marvels at the gold seekers revelling in the opportunity to reap the rewards of hard work for themselves rather than having capitalist squatters and merchants benefiting from their labour. In the process, he pinpoints what the English author of the previously discussed lead article had failed to appreciate about gold; that gold seekers were former pastoral workers, tradesmen and clerks, who had exchanged a life of wages and deference to social superiors for one of independence and, hopefully, wealth:

It was the twin attractions of wealth and independence which not only became beacons for a tide of emigrants to Australia as the news of gold spread throughout Great Britain and the Continent but, more immediately, catalysts for a period in Victoria when society had all the appearance of having been turned upside down.

Of the four images, then, ‘Gold diggers resting’ is of particular interest because the scene depicted could readily serve as the setting for a widely circulated story about the inverting of society in the early days of the gold rushes. This was the period before the first emigrants from Great Britain arrived in September 1852, and hence a time when the only emigrants to the goldfields were men from other colonies.16 However, in the conceit of wanting to stay free of the taint of convicts, there was considerable fear in Victoria of a deluge of Vandemonians. The guardians of law and order did not want reformed convicts free to roam as they pleased in pursuit of gold. Despite this concern, in the last four months of 1851, of an estimated 4,500 arrivals from Tasmania 40 per cent were ex-convicts. Most would have been honest, hardworking men.17 Nor would they have been slow to show off their new-found independence. It is not difficult to imagine them being the protagonists in the following story:

It is conceivable that the net effect of the anecdote in the issue of 1 May, further reports of the growing level of social upheaval caused by gold in the issue of 22 May,19 and Dunn's two-part account and accompanying illustrations in the issues of 22 and 29 May led to the doleful tone of the next article to be found in the paper concerning gold in Australia, ‘Australian gold diggers and Yorkshire weavers’. Whilst its clinching argument was the potential of gold to disrupt the Yorkshire woollen industry, much of the article was concerned with the short-sightedness of Great Britain's emigration policy over the past two decades, whereby Australian squatters had asserted their preference for single men over married men. The following article celebrates in part the benefits that could have flowed for Australian squatters if they had been more appreciative of the advantages of encouraging married men who aspired to be yeomen to emigrate to Australia:

Whilst there is very much a sense that the writer was clutching at straws in seeking to apportion blame for the seemingly unavoidable collapse of the Yorkshire woollen industry, this article also points to how the British response to the discovery of gold was inextricably entwined with the longer standing issue of encouraging emigration to Australia. Yet it still comes as a surprise to find in the following week's issue, the Illustrated London News doing an about-turn in its approach towards gold and its implications for Great Britain. In a lead article titled ‘Our colonial empire’, the paper was now considering the broader issues concerning Australia in the wake of the discovery of gold by saying that the time was ripe for a reappraisal of the empire, and of the Australian colonies, in particular. The article then proceeds in two directions; firstly, by considering the value of Australia as a new home for destitute and discontented labour:

Secondly, there was the potential for gold to stimulate an increase in the volume of trade between Great Britain and Australia, an issue which was explored further in the following week's issue in an article titled ‘Gold in Australia’. It begins, though, by acknowledging that gold no longer posed a serious threat to the Yorkshire woollen industry:

The article then goes on to discuss how trade could provide a boost to British manufacturing, with the stimulus being, of all things, an increased demand for the best quality female attire:

It was this perceived cure of Great Britain's manufacturing woes which sets the scene for one of S. T. Gill's best-known images of the Victorian gold rushes in all their heady glory: ‘The Diggers’ Wedding’. Its depiction of two newly married diggers and their wives cavorting in an open carriage being drawn through the streets of Melbourne is testimony to there being at least a grain of truth about an anticipated increased demand for quality female attire coming from Australia.

With the future of the Yorkshire woollen industry no longer an issue for the Illustrated London News, the tension between image and text concerning gold in Australia disappeared. For the remainder of 1852 and on into 1853, the paper continued to devote full pages and double pages to various scenes of life on the Australian goldfields, from both Victoria and New South Wales, in a style similar to those depicting Buninyong (pp. 28-29 above). Yet it is these same Buninyong images which drew my attention to the mismatch between image and text in the Illustrated London News of mid-1852, and how they contradicted the definition of an illustration as a pictorial image which complements the text of its accompanying article. On the one hand, the images convey a sense of novelty and excitement of the goldrushes as young men search for gold as the means of undreamt-of wealth and independence. On the other hand, most of the stand-alone articles from this same brief period were preoccupied with predictions of the dire consequences that gold would have for the Yorkshire woollen industry. We are left with a perspective of the Victorian gold rushes 150 years later which has perhaps been lost sight of in all that subsequently happened.