Sydney in the 1850s

Edward Hargraves found payable gold in a creek near Bathurst in February 1851, named the place Ophir, and was voted £10,000 by the New South Wales parliament as its discoverer, with a £250 pension added in 1877. A later committee concluded that the men who actually turned up the first payable gold were two of his companions, the Tom brothers and John Lister, who handed it to him. By the middle of May there were three hundred men on the ground and within four months more than a thousand. Governor FitzRoy reported on 29 May that tradesmen and mechanics were deserting "certain and lucrative employment" for the chance of gold, and that the population of Sydney had visibly diminished.

Sydney's own reaction was to draw itself. A hand-coloured plan of the city and its wards is dated 1853, and Smith and Hinton's map of Sydney and its suburbs followed in 1854 — the city surveyed twice inside two years, for a colony that had abruptly come into money and a great many strangers who needed to find an address. There were about forty-four thousand people in Sydney in 1851, and something like half that in Melbourne. Melbourne got the richer fields, passed Sydney within three years, and ran away with the decade.

What the mapmakers were drawing was still very small. Howell's mill worked by both wind and water on the Parramatta River. Fort Macquarie stood on the point where the Opera House is now, painted across the water from Pinchgut. A creek still fell through a gully at Glenmore in Paddington, drawn in 1859 as the Cascade. The Inner Lighthouse at South Head was new: lit in 1858, the year after the *Dunbar* went onto the cliffs outside the Heads with one survivor of 122 aboard.

And a lithograph of the Sydney Sailors' Home carries the date 1859 — the year a committee of citizens formed to raise the money for one. The building they eventually put up in George Street at The Rocks was not finished until 1864.

Look for the mastheads. This is still a city that arrives by water.