Exploration , Surveyor General, 1822 In October 1795
George Bass and
Matthew Flinders, accompanied by
William Martin sailed the boat
Tom Thumb out of
Port Jackson to
Botany Bay and explored the
Georges River further upstream than had been done previously by the colonists. Their reports on their return led to the settlement of
Banks' Town. In March 1796 the same party embarked on a second voyage in a similar small boat, which they also called the Tom Thumb. During this trip they travelled as far down the coast as
Lake Illawarra, which they called Tom Thumb Lagoon. They discovered and explored
Port Hacking. In 1798–99, Bass and Flinders set out in a sloop and circumnavigated
Tasmania, thus proving it to be an island. Aboriginal guides and assistance in the European exploration of the colony were common and often vital to the success of missions. In 1801–02 Matthew Flinders in
The Investigator lead the first circumnavigation of Australia. Aboard ship was the Aboriginal explorer
Bungaree, of the Sydney district, who became the first person born on the Australian continent to circumnavigate the Australian continent. In 1824 the Governor, Sir
Thomas Brisbane, commissioned
Hamilton Hume and former Royal Navy Captain
William Hovell to lead an expedition to find new grazing land in the south of the colony, and also to find an answer to the mystery of where New South Wales's western rivers flowed. Over 16 weeks in 1824–25,
Hume and Hovell journeyed to Port Phillip and back. They made many important discoveries including the
Murray River (which they named the Hume), many of its tributaries, and good agricultural and grazing lands between
Gunning, New South Wales and
Corio Bay,
Victoria.
Charles Sturt led an expedition along the
Macquarie River in 1828 and discovered the
Darling River. A theory had developed that the inland rivers of New South Wales were draining into an inland sea. Leading a second expedition in 1829, Sturt followed the
Murrumbidgee River into a 'broad and noble river', the Murray River, which he named after Sir George Murray, secretary of state for the colonies. His party then followed this river to its junction with the
Darling River, facing two threatening encounters with local Aboriginal people along the way. Sturt continued down river on to
Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea in what is now
South Australia. Suffering greatly, the party had to then row back upstream hundreds of kilometres for the return journey. Surveyor General Sir
Thomas Mitchell conducted a series of expeditions from the 1830s to 'fill in the gaps' left by these previous expeditions. He was meticulous in seeking to record the original Aboriginal place names around the colony, for which reason the majority of place names to this day retain their Aboriginal titles. In 1836 a new
colony of South Australia was established, and its territory separated from New South Wales. The Polish scientist/explorer Count
Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducted surveying work in the
Australian Alps in 1839 and became the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak, which he named
Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish patriot
Tadeusz Kościuszko.
Gold Rush A golden age of a new kind began in 1851 with the announcement of the
discovery of payable gold at Ophir near
Bathurst by
Edward Hargraves. In that year New South Wales had about 200,000 people, a third of them within a day's ride of Sydney, the rest scattered along the coast and through the pastoral districts, from the
Port Phillip District in the south to
Moreton Bay in the north. The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a huge influx of settlers, although initially the majority of them went to the richest gold fields at
Ballarat and
Bendigo, in the Port Phillip District, which in 1851 was separated to become the colony of
Victoria., unearthed in 1872 Hill End, also near Bathurst NSW was a locality that grew, boomed and faded with the New South Wales Gold Rush. Called Bald Hills in 1850, Forbes in 1860 and finally Hill End in 1862, it was part of the Tambaroora district. At its peak, its population was 7,000. Completely reliant on mining, the town's decline was dramatic once the gold ran out. Hill End is famed for the unearthing of the Holtermann Specimen (also known as the Beyers-Holtermann Specimen), being the largest single mass of gold ever discovered in the world, a record that stands today. Found in 1872 at the Star Hope Mine, this single mass of quartz and gold weighed and when crushed produced an estimated of gold, thus holding more processed gold than from the largest nugget ever found, that being the Welcome Stranger from the Victorian Goldfields. Holtermann recognising the significance of the find attempted to preserve it by buying it from the Company of which he was one of a number of directors. His efforts were in vain. It is reported that a larger mass was discovered a few days later in the same mine but was broken up underground. Victoria soon had a larger population than New South Wales, and its capital,
Melbourne, outgrew Sydney. But the New South Wales gold fields also attracted a flood of prospectors, and by 1857 the colony had more than 300,000 people. Inland towns like Bathurst,
Goulburn,
Orange and
Young flourished. Gold brought great wealth but also new social tensions. Multiethnic migrants came to New South Wales in large numbers for the first time. Young became the site of an infamous anti-Chinese miner riot in 1861 and the official
Riot Act was read to the miners on 14 July—the only official reading in the history of New South Wales. Despite some tension, the influx of migrants also brought fresh ideas from Europe and North America to New South Wales—Norwegians introduced
Skiing in Australia to the hills above the
Snowy Mountains gold rush town of
Kiandra around 1861. A famous Australian son was also born to a Norwegian miner in 1867, when the
bush balladeer
Henry Lawson was born at
the Grenfell goldfields. In 1858, a new gold rush began in the far north, which led in 1859 to the
separation of Queensland as a new colony. New South Wales thus attained its present borders, although what is now the
Northern Territory remained part of the colony until 1863, when it was handed over to South Australia. 1858 also saw the passing of the Chinese Immigration Bill through the Legislative Assembly under pressure from miners' representatives. It failed to pass the Legislative Council to the surprise of many. Members of that house were squatters and pastoralists keen to cheap Chinese labour in the country. The separation and rapid growth of Victoria and Queensland mark the real beginning of New South Wales as a political and economic entity distinct from the other Australian colonies. Rivalry between New South Wales and Victoria was intense throughout the second half of the 19th century, and the two colonies developed in radically different directions. Once the easy gold ran out by about 1860, Victoria absorbed the
surplus labour force from the gold fields in manufacturing, protected by high
tariff walls. Victoria became the Australian stronghold of
protectionism,
liberalism and
radicalism. New South Wales, which was less radically affected demographically by the gold rushes, remained more conservative, still dominated politically by the squatter class and its allies in the Sydney business community. New South Wales, as a trading and exporting colony, remained wedded to
free trade. At
Broken Hill, New South Wales in the 1880s,
BHP Billiton (now a major global mining and gas company) began as a silver, lead and zinc mine operation. By 1891, the population of the Outback town had passed 21,000, making Broken Hill the third-largest town in the colony of New South Wales.
Cultural development with the
Australian Museum under construction in the distance, 1842 In the course of the 19th century the increasingly ambitious colony established many of its major cultural institutions. The first
Sydney Royal Easter Show, an agricultural exhibition and New South Wales cultural institution, began in 1823.
Alexander Macleay started collecting the exhibits of Australia's oldest museum—Sydney's
Australian Museum—in 1826 and the current building opened to the public in 1857. The
Sydney Morning Herald newspaper began printing in 1831. The
University of Sydney commenced in 1850. The
Royal National Park, south of Sydney opened in 1879 (second only to
Yellowstone National Park in the USA). An academy of art formed in 1870 and the present
Art Gallery of New South Wales building began construction in 1896. The
New South Wales Rugby Union (or then, The Southern RU – SRU) was established in 1874, and the very first club competition took place in Sydney that year. In 1882 the first
New South Wales team was selected to play
Queensland in a two-match series (initially popular, the sport would become secondary in popularity in New South Wales after the creation of the
New South Wales Rugby League as a professional code in 1907). In 1878 the inaugural first class cricket match at the
Sydney Cricket Ground was played between New South Wales and Victoria.
The Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 showcased the colonial capital to the world. Some exhibits from this event were kept to constitute the original collection of the new
Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum of New South Wales (today's
Powerhouse Museum). Two Sydney journalists,
J. F. Archibald and
John Haynes, founded
The Bulletin magazine: the first edition appeared on 31 January 1880. It was intended to be a journal of political and business commentary, with some literary content. Initially radical, nationalist, democratic and racist, it gained wide influence and became a celebrated entry-point to publication for Australian writers and cartoonists such as
Henry Lawson,
Banjo Paterson,
Miles Franklin, and the illustrator and novelist
Norman Lindsay. A
celebrated literary debate played out on the pages of the Bulletin about the nature of life in the
Australian bush featuring the conflicting views of such as Paterson (called
romantic) and Lawson (who saw bush life as exceedingly harsh) and notions of an Australian 'national character' were taking firmer root.
Self-government and democracy was key in the establishment of self-governance in New South Wales is
Australia's oldest parliament.
William Wentworth established the
Australian Patriotic Association (Australia's first political party) in 1835 to demand
democratic government for New South Wales. The reformist
attorney general,
John Plunkett, sought to apply
Enlightenment principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality before the law, first by extending jury rights to
emancipists, then by extending legal protections to convicts, assigned servants and
Indigenous Australians. Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the
Myall Creek massacre of Aboriginal people with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark
Church Act 1836 disestablished the
Church of England and established legal equality between
Anglicans,
Catholics, Presbyterians and, later, Methodists. provided support to poverty-stricken women migrants In 1838, the celebrated humanitarian
Caroline Chisolm arrived at Sydney and soon after began her work to alleviate the conditions for the poor women migrants of the colony. She met every immigrant ship at the docks, found positions for immigrant girls and established a Female Immigrants' Home. Later she began campaigning for legal reform to alleviate poverty and assist female immigration and family support in the colonies. In 1842, the
Sydney City Council was established. Men who possessed property worth at least £1000 were able to stand for election and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each in elections. Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the
New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. The
Australian Colonies Government Act in 1850 was a landmark development which granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania and the colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions which produced democratically progressive parliaments—though the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as representative of social and economic "interests"—and all established
constitutional monarchies with the
British monarch as the symbolic head of state. The end of transportation and the rapid growth of population following the gold rush led to a demand for "British institutions" in New South Wales, which meant an elected parliament and
responsible self-government. In 1851 the franchise for the Legislative Council was expanded, but this did not satisfy the settlers, many of whom (such as the young
Henry Parkes) had been
Chartists in Britain in the 1840s. Successive Governors warned the Colonial Office of the dangers of
republicanism if the demands for self-government were not met. There was, however, a prolonged battle between the conservatives, now led by Wentworth, and the democrats as to what kind of constitution New South Wales would have. The key issue was control of the pastoral lands, which the democrats wanted to take away from the squatters and break up into farms for settlers. Wentworth wanted a hereditary upper house controlled by the squatters to prevent any such possibility. The radicals, led by rising politicians like Parkes and journalists like
Daniel Deniehy, ridiculed suggestions of a "
bunyip aristocracy." 1855 saw the granting of the right to vote to all male British subjects 21 years or over in
South Australia. This right was extended to Victoria in 1857 and New South Wales the following year (the other colonies followed until, in 1896, Tasmania became the last colony to grant universal
male suffrage). The
New South Wales Constitution Act 1855 (
18 & 19 Vict. c. 54), steered through the
British Parliament by the veteran radical
Lord John Russell, who wanted a constitution which balanced democratic elements against the interests of property, as did the Parliamentary system in Britain at this time. The Act created a
bicameral Parliament of New South Wales, with a lower house, the
New South Wales Legislative Assembly, consisting of 54 members elected by adult males who met a moderate property qualification (anyone who owned property worth £100, or earned £100 a year, or held a pastoral licence, or who paid £10 a year for lodgings, could vote). The Assembly was heavily
malapportioned in favour of the rural areas. The Legislative Council was to consist of at least 21 members (but with no upper limit) appointed for life by the Governor, and Council members had to meet a higher property qualification. These seemed like formidable barriers to democracy, but in practice they did not prove so, because the Constitution Act could be modified by simple majorities of both Houses. In 1858 the property franchise for the Assembly was abolished, and the
secret ballot introduced. Since the principle that the Governor should always act on the advice of his ministers was soon established, a
Premier whose bills were rejected by the Council could simply advise the Governor to appoint more members until the opposition was "flooded": usually the threat of "flooding" was enough. The ministry of
Charles Cowper marked the victory of colonial liberalism, although New South Wales liberals were never as radical as those in Victoria or South Australia. The major battle for the liberals, unlocking the lands from the squatters, was more or less won by
John Robertson, five times Premier during the 1860s, who passed the
Robertson Land Acts to break up the squatters' estates. From the 1860s onwards government in New South Wales became increasingly stable and assured. Fears of class conflict faded as the population bulge resulting from the gold rushes was accommodated on the newly available farmlands and in the rapidly growing towns. The last British troops left the colony in 1870, and law and order was maintained by the police and a locally raised militia, which had little to do apart from catching a few
bushrangers. The only issue which really excited political passions in this period was education, which was the source of bitter conflict between
Catholics,
Protestants and
secularists, who all had conflicting views on how schools should be operated, funded and supervised. This was a major preoccupation for Henry Parkes, the dominant politician of the period (he was Premier five times between 1872 and 1889). In 1866 Parkes, as Education Minister, brought in a compromise Schools Act that brought all religious schools under the supervision of public boards, in exchange for state subsidies. But in 1880 the secularists won out when Parkes withdrew all state aid for church schools and established a statewide system of free secular schools. New South Wales and Victoria continued to develop along divergent paths. Parkes and his successor as leader of the New South Wales liberals,
George Reid, were
Gladstonian liberals committed to free trade, which they saw as both economically beneficial and as necessary for the unity of the
British Empire. They regarded Victorian protectionism as economically foolish and narrowly parochial. It was this hostility between the two largest colonies, symbolised by Victorian customs posts along the
Murray River, which prevented any moves towards uniting the Australian colonies, even after the advent of the railways and the telegraph made travel and communication between the colonies much easier by the 1870s. So long as Victoria was larger and richer than New South Wales, the mother colony (as it liked to see itself) would never agree to surrender its free trade principles to a national or federal government which would be dominated by Victorians. ==Statehood==