Look there are countless moments that make up the story of Australia,
but every now and then there's a special moment, a defining moment.
I’m Mikey Robbins and I’m here at the National Museum of Australia
to check out their project Defining moments in Australian history.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to go behind the scenes,
we’re going to check out some objects that tell the stories
about these moments, about who we are.
Gold, but not just any gold … this is the Bealiba nugget.
It’s one of our objects in the Defining moments of Australian history.
I’ve got Stephen Monroe here, who’s a curator. G’day Mikey. G’day mate.
Why is this so indicative? Why is this a defining moment in Australian history?
Well, what this nugget represents is the Victorian goldfields.
Even though it wasn’t found at the time of the Victorian gold rush,
it was found in an area where people were discovering gold in the 1850s.
In 1851 we have gold discovered in New South Wales and Victoria ...
and this is what it was all about,
this is what people were literally rushing all over the world to try to discover.
This was discovered in Bealiba, which is just west of Bendigo.
It really is that part of Australia where the gold rushes really took off.
And the gold rush transformed this country?
It absolutely transformed the country.
You can really look at that moment in 1851 where gold was discovered
and Australia transformed from before 1851 and after 1851, enormous wealth generated …
it really is a defining moment for the nation.
Because around about that time we actually had a tradition ... for want of a better phrase ... of celebrity nuggets.
Yeah. The Victorian goldfields especially was really a rich field for gold nuggets.
We had the Welcome Nugget, which was found in 1858 ...
so this is in the early stages of those gold rushes near Ballarat.
It’s a 69 kilogram gold nugget. That’s just enormous compared to this even.
Ten years later the Welcome Stranger was found, and that made world headlines as well.
That’s still considered one of the biggest gold nuggets ever found.
Apart from being an object that signifies one of our defining moments,
there’s a great story about how this nugget was found.
Arthur Stewart, he’s a sheep farmer from the Bealiba region.
And this is like in the 1950s?
This is 1957, so it’s about 100 years after the full gold rush.
It’s an area where gold had been found previously, but he was riding along on his bike because his car had broken down.
He was on his pushie?
Yeah, he was on his pushbike riding along. So he's had a bit of bad luck. The car’s broken down,
Riding along and then his chain’s broken as well. What sort of bad luck is the guy having?
He’s on the side of the road trying to fix his chain,
and then he sees something on the side of the road … what’s that? It looked like a bit of a gold glint.
He goes over, digs it out with his hand. He’s got a 600-gram gold nugget that he pulls out.
He walks down to a stream just near the road and washes it off.
There it is he’s found gold, a 21- ounce gold nugget.
So he’s gone from having a run of bad luck to literally having that good fortune.
We’ve chosen the gold rush as a defining moment because ... well, it did shape our nation, particularly when it comes to population.
How much did the Australian population explode?
Well in Victoria, for example, I think they went from a population of 77,000 or so to half a million within ten years.
It built the city of Melbourne ...
Melbourne and then cities like Ballarat and Bendigo grew.
But we also had immigration ... obviously from the British Isles but China as well.
A lot of Chinese migrants came out during the gold rush.
There were Americans who came out and other European countries.
It really changed the demography and the population of Australia.
That’s my point: you could say that the gold rush was the birth of multicultural Australia.
Yes, you could say that.
There’s no doubt that that did add a real influx of people from countries that probably would not have normally come here.
What do you feel personally when you look at this amazing object?
I guess for me, this gold was created 350 million years ago.
Down deep in the earth you had these processes occurring where this gold was created.
Then about 65 million years ago there was erosion and so forth,
and the rivers started carving through these granite rocks where this gold was held
and deposited it in streams and into creeks and so forth.
Then there were deposits of sand and soil over the top of that.
It’s only then 65 million years later that people have come across this.
It’s like the earth basically producing this wealth and then humans rushing from everywhere.
Thanks for watching, but it doesn’t end here.
We want you to join the conversation.
Go to the National Museum of Australia’s website ... that’s nma.gov.au ...
and let us know what you think are the defining moments in Australian history.
We’d love to hear your opinion.
Once again, thanks for watching. See you soon.