New South Wales gold rush

Australia's gold rushes started here, with Edward Hargraves's find at Ophir near Bathurst in February 1851, though an 1890 parliamentary committee credited John Lister and William Tom with the first payable gold. Within weeks of the find being announced that May, more than 2,000 people were digging around Bathurst, and over the next decade the colony's population rose from about 200,000 to 357,000. The money paid for the Sydney Mint, opened in 1854 as the first branch of the Royal Mint outside England. Later rushes left towns such as Hill End, Forbes and Gulgong, and at Lambing Flat, now Young, European miners attacked Chinese diggers in 1861, violence that shaped relations between the two communities for decades.