Gallery highlights

A convict's token of remembrance

Some 160,000 convicts were sent to the Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868.

One of those convicts was Thomas Lock. He was convicted of highway robbery and sentenced to 10 years' transportation to New South Wales.

Before Lock left England, as he waited in prison for his sentence to be carried out, he used a penny to make a token of remembrance to leave behind. The inscription reads:

WHEN / THIS YOU / SEE / REMEMBER /
ME WHEN / I AM FAR / FROM the[e] /
THOMAS / LOCK / AGED 22 / TRANSPed /
10 Years

Lock gave this memento to a loved one when he sailed for Australia. He arrived in Sydney in September 1845. It is not known if he ever returned to England.

Read more about the convict tokens

 Listen to 'Stories of sadness and loss' audio
Collector and consultant Peter Lane detailed his research on convict tokens in a presentation at the National Museum on 13 June 2009. The talk also covered the Alexander Mussen ambrotype and the Muriel McPhee trousseau.

Transportation of an Irish rebel

Parliamentarian William Smith O'Brien was convicted of high treason in the 1840s for leading a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. He was transported to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania.

These Staffordshire figures, made in 1848, both portray William Smith O'Brien.

The standing figure shows O'Brien in chains and convict clothing, though in Van Diemen's Land, he was not required to dress in convict uniform or wear irons. This figure was based on the popular image of a convict.

The seated figure was made about the time of O'Brien's arrest. It shows him in the clothes of an aristocrat, wearing the chains of his imprisonment.

  Listen to 'Captured in Staffordshire: Staffordshire figurines of Irish nationalist, parliamentarian and convict William Smith O'Brien' audio
Curator Rebecca Nason detailed her research on the William Smith O'Brien figurines in a presentation at the National Museum on 11 June 2008.

Discovery of gold in New South Wales

Edward Hammond Hargraves is credited with the discovery of gold at Ophir in Australia in 1851.

He returned to Australia from the Californian goldfields determined to find gold in New South Wales. In Bathurst local men John Lister and William, James and Henry Tom showed Hargraves sites where they had found gold specks.

Using a cradle similar to those Hargraves had seen in California, the men washed the first payable gold, and started the gold rush in Australia.

This cradle, collected in the Ballarat area of Victoria, is one of thousands of cradles used by miners to extract surface alluvial gold from sites across Australia in the mid-19th century.

Made of Douglas fir imported to Australia or recycled from packing crates or other objects, the cradle has handmade metal nails and corner fixtures.

Preserving the Welsh language in Australia

The 1850s gold rush drew thousands of Welsh immigrants to Victoria. A Welsh chapel was built in La Trobe Street, Melbourne, in 1857. A church was erected on the same site in 1871.

At the Welsh Church, settlers and sojourners from Wales could sing and worship in Welsh — for most their first language. Presbyterian services in the Welsh language continue there to this day.

This Welsh hymnal from 1869 was used in the Melbourne Welsh Church. An organ which accompanied services at the church from the 1880s to the 1930s is also on show in the Australian Journeys gallery.

Chinese industry on the goldfields

In 1859 the Bendigo Advertiser reported that A'Fok, Fok Sing and Co. had applied for a lease of ground near the Chinese encampment to build a brick kiln.

One hundred and forty-five years later, archaeologists from Heritage Victoria excavated the site of the kiln, recovering bricks including this one, believed to be part of an arch.

Some 4000 Chinese men and women migrated to the Bendigo goldfields in the 1850s. They were entitled to mine surface alluvial gold but the authorities excluded them from delving for the deeper quartz deposits.

As a result, many gave up mining and started businesses in service industries instead, doing laundry, market gardening, shopkeeping or, like A'Fok, Fok Sing and Co., making bricks.

Lent by Heritage Victoria.

Explore two centuries of Chinese contact with Australia in the Harvest of Endurance scroll (Flash or HTML)

Australians seeking gold overseas

Charlie Lloyd, a successful Australian gold miner had this flag made for a boat that he and six other Australians had made on Lake Bennett at the head of the Yukon River, Canada in 1898.

In 1899 Lloyd wrote: 'We had an Australian flag, which we got painted there. It was a devil of a job to give the Yankee an idea of a kangaroo. We interviewed every Australian on the field to try to get a drawing, but the attempts were not a success'.

The Australians had joined the rush to the Klondike goldfields. Gold was discovered in the Klondike River in 1896 and a year later the rush to the Klondike began. The Klondike became known as one of the greatest and most brutal of the gold rushes.

Lloyd made the long trek to Dawson City – the town closest to the goldfields – only to be disappointed by what he found. Lloyd stated that the boom was ‘caused by the shipping and trading companies, aided by an unscrupulous and lying Seattle press.’