These are the vaults built to store the
gold dug out of the Victorian landscape during the gold rush, gold that
made a few rich but broke the backs of many others who dug for it.
This is a place that was purpose-built to store up treasure. Gold has always
been a treasure for humanity - since ancient times, but perhaps we should
focus on a different kind of treasure, join me as we travel back to the 1850s
gold rush days. Will we be able to resist gold fever? This is Bellarat Sovereign Hill
Gold Field, where we can still find gold today using a flat metal pan as gold
miners around the world have done for centuries. At first gold was used only by
sacred priests in religious ceremonies and then by royalty to show power and
prestige, then gold was used as money and turned into coins, Sovereign Hill gets
its name because the gold found here was melted down into sovereigns; gold coins
and thanks to coins the ownership and use of gold was no longer just for
royals, it was now in the hands of the common people who could touch it, feel it,
buy things with it and pay their debts with it. Gold coins became a treasure
that anyone could aspire to have. In this episode we will travel back to the 1850s
with the help of Sovereign Hill to learn just how gold fever turned Australia
upside down and how gold fever still taunts us today. We've always had a fascination with gold,
the power of gold has inspired, seduced and manipulated us for at least 6,000
years. The Egyptians were casting gold bars as money as early as 4000 BC, all
through history we have wanted gold to decorate religious objects, to decorate
important buildings and to decorate our bodies and to use as money. The demand
for gold has caused all kinds of social change and havoc throughout history as
people took enormous risks to find this beautiful metal. Today in the great gold
mines of South Africa the shafts reach down as far as 4000 meters and the
temperature reaches 54 degrees Celsius. We have massive open cut gold mines in
Australia and South Africa. In countries such as Mongolia, the Philippines,
Indonesia, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea people living in poverty on the fringes
of mining areas spend every day standing in mud with a pan or climb down into
unstable dark holes with a pick and homemade explosives, looking to find
flecks of gold that will help their families survive, is this Gold Fever
worth such sacrifice? Gold was discovered in Ballarat in
August 1851, it was found here in a place ironically called Poverty Point, within
days news of the find had spread to Melbourne and Geelong, within weeks eager
prospectors were making their way here from all corners of Australia, within six
months news had spread around the world and people rushed here from England,
Europe and America. Nobody wanted to miss a win - for 1852 was
the year when there was nothing but gold. Finding this gold was easy,
Panning simply involved washing dirt in a gold pan and as it tilted and swirled
loose dirt and gravel washed out leaving the heavier gold behind. Larger
quantities of dirt were rocked in a cradle to wash away clay and gravel -
trapping the golden layer of blanket. Over 600 tons of gold came from Ballarat
Gold Fields. Ballarat also became home to the second
largest gold nugget ever found; the massive 69 kilogram welcome nugget, when
this piece of gold was discovered no scales that were capable of weighing a
nugget of this size were available so it was broken into three pieces on an anvil,
the Nugget weighed about 72 kilos; at today's gold price it would be worth
about two and a half million dollars. When gold was discovered it seemed that
overnight the workers of Australia had gone AWOL; farms, building sites, ships,
police barracks, government offices, shearing sheds all were deserted, schools
closed and postal services were forced to work with a skeleton staff. News of
Victoria's supposedly infinite supply of gold was shared in newspapers and
letters in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw, Munich, Washington, Toronto and
Shanghai and people rushed to Victoria. In 1851 Victoria had a population of
77,000 people, by 1861 just ten years later the population of Victoria was
five hundred and forty thousand - an increase of over eight hundred percent
which was half the population of Australia. The gold fields became a melting pot of
humanity; tradesmen and artisans set up shops and established businesses to meet
the needs and demands of the miners; they were blacksmiths, candle makers, metal
workers, grocers and printers and they came from all over the world. Inspired by the lure of gold and the
promise of a new life in a new land thousands of fortune hunters from around
the world flooded into Victoria transforming the gold fields into some
of the most cosmopolitan places on earth. The population expanded as more people
arrived and settled and established homes and businesses, the streets and camps
built on gold grew into a prosperous bustling township soon to become a fine
provincial city. There was only one way that all of these thousands of people
from overseas could get to Victoria, the gold fields and beyond and that was by ship. The first year
after gold was discovered in Ballarat the number of ships arriving in Port
Phillip Bay more than doubled. 100 ships a day were sailing past Cape Otway
lighthouse. After sailing over 20,000 kilometers from Europe to Australia the
final obstacle for ship captains was the western entrance to Bass Strait, this narrow stretch of water between
Cape Otway and King Island is just 90 kilometres wide known; as the eye of the
needle it is considered the most dangerous stretch of water in the world
and became an infamous graveyard for many sailing ships, over 500 sailing
ships were wrecked along this coast. In fact over 80 ships were lost between
Cape Otway and Port Fairy alone, most of these ships
sank at night or in a howling storm, each of these ships faced the same treacherous
conditions along the shipwreck coast, the passengers and crew knew all about the
tragic shipwrecks but with no other option for travel and spurred on by the
lure of gold they continued their journey, placing their faith in the
captain and hoping that the weather would be mild so that they could make it
through the dangerous waters safely, when the weather was rough every person on
board would strain their eyes to see the light shining from the Cape Otway
lighthouse, the Lady Bay lighthouse in Warrnambool and other lighthouses dotted
along the shipwreck coast. For many the journey to Australia could take seven or
eight months and on the cheapest fare conditions were tough,
there were many epidemics of illness on the ships and those who survived the
journey arrived at the goldfields weak and unfit for the hard life in the camps,
fresh food was limited and clean water was in short supply, sewage was not
properly taken care of and so the unsanitary conditions meant that disease
was common, but no matter the cost people kept coming in droves - drawn by the
promise of gold. The gold found in Ballarat in the 1850s was exported to
Britain, it was enough gold to pay all Britain's foreign debts and help lay the
foundation of enormous British commercial expansion
in the latter half of the century. The development of Victoria as a state and
the vibrancy of Melbourne is intricately connected to the sheer enormity of gold
that was found in central Victoria. Melbourne continues to grow
exponentially for the next four decades and by 1880 it was the largest and
richest city in the British Empire after London, at its peak some two tons of gold
per week flowed into the Treasury building in Melbourne, between 1851 and
1861 Australia produced one-third of the world's gold, by the end of the 19th
century Australia was the largest producer of gold in the world. Here in the Victorian Parliament house
gold is used everywhere for decoration, in fact there's so much gold here that
it's valued at many millions of dollars. In a nearby passage there's a replica of
the Welcome Stranger gold nugget, today Melbourne is a busy city, voted the most
liveable in the world. No one talks of gold but it was the
global desire for gold and the power of gold fever
that shaped the city and also profoundly shaped Australia, the gold rush brought
roads, rail and the first telegraph, much of the rest of the country including
Western Australia and Queensland were mapped and settled in the name of gold
exploration and prospecting. The huge amount of wealth that flowed from
central Victoria and later southern Western Australia would pay for the
industrialization and modernization of the entire country, the desire for gold
still shapes our world today; a desire that promises so much but only delivers
riches to a few, let's go back to 1851 the birth of Australia's Gold Fever, the goldfields were a topsy-turvy place
where men could become rich overnight, wealth was being extracted from the
earth in great quantities, Ballarat was one of the richest gold fields the world
has known. If you walked on the world-famous Ballarat Gold Fields or
into the tented camps in 1854 you would hear many different accents of a
multi-faceted society; Italian, Irish, Dutch, Russian, English, German, Swiss,
French, American, Canadian and Chinese, they were fortune seekers, entertainers
and adventurers, the Gold Fields was a noisy hive of activity, thousands of dogs
were barking outside tents and mine shafts marking territory, thousands of
cradles rocked the gold out of clay on either side of the creek and diggers
popped in and out of holes like frantic moles, hundreds of flags flapped in the
wind on tents and stores. In the flats, on the hills, in the gullies, everywhere you
looked two or three flags were flying, flags of all nations but mostly the
Union Jack. At night there was the twinkle of a thousand campfires, with
talking and yelling at every camp, sometimes during the night many guns and
pistols would be fired to release the frustration of the day and then the
music started; accordions, concertinas, fiddles, flutes, clarinets, cornets, bugles,
all playing their own tune the effect was deafening. The early diggers of the 1850s were not
the professional miners of the 1860s a decade later, they were individual
speculators anxious about their family's living conditions eager to make their
fortune with gold and go home. Gold mining was back-breaking hard work with
no guarantee of a find, you could sink a shaft next to your neighbour, you could
both wallow in the dark and wet earth for five, six, nine months, bailing out the
constant seeping water and your neighbour might find the gold infused river bed
while your hole leads only to a bend in the underground river missing the gold
completely, he wins you lose. The space where someone was digging was called a
claim, to keep your claim a person had to work on it every day except on Sundays
if no one was working a claim someone else would come and take it, that
practice was called claim jumping, there was often violence on the gold fields
with thousands of people intent on making a fortune, all crammed together in
a small location, in rough accommodation with few comforts, tensions rose easily
but as long as there was gold people kept coming. As the alluvial gold on the surface ran
out, gold seekers were forced to look further underground, miners discovered
gold bearing water courses that had been buried at various depths by centuries of
silting or volcanic action. Deep mining was more difficult and dangerous, places
such as Bendigo and Ballarat saw great concentrations of miners who were
forming partnerships and syndicates to enable them to sink ever deeper shafts,
it was tough and dangerous, deep gold mining continues in many places in the
world today. We have always had a fascination with
gold, the power of gold has inspired, seduced and manipulated us for thousands
of years, the Egyptians were casting gold bars as money as early as 4000 BC, all
through history we have wanted gold to decorate religious objects, to decorate
important buildings, to decorate our bodies and to use as money. The demand
for gold has caused all kinds of social change and havoc throughout history as
people took enormous risks to find this beautiful metal, gold is so soft it can
be shaped with a cold hammer yet so strong that one troy ounce of gold can
be made into a wire that will stretch for 80 kilometers, which is almost the
distance between the gold fields here in Ballarat to the gold decorated Victorian
Parliament house. Human history is entwined with the desire for gold,
the Midas legend is about a king who desired gold so much that he asked that
everything he touch would turn to gold and then was devastated when he held his
precious daughter and she turned to gold, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai to
deliver the Ten Commandments to his people he found the Jews in a delirium
worshiping a golden calf, he was so enraged to see them bowing to an icon, an
idol like those worshipped by the hated Egyptians, that he smashed the Ten
Commandments that he had just brought down from Mount Sinai. King Solomon
enjoyed lavishing gold on his personal possessions; his shields were made of
gold, his ivory throne was overlaid with gold and he sipped his wine from golden
vessels, when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon she brought him around
three tons of gold. Solomon oversaw the construction of a
temple made of stone and cedar overlaid with gold, everything was covered with
gold; floors, walls, ceilings, it took more than
183,000 men seven years to construct, there probably hasn't been a building
built that could match its splendour. Solomon's Golden Temple was defaced; part
of it is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem today, but in AD 532 more than 12 metric
tons of gold was used to build the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople,
modern-day Istanbul, causing Emperor Justinian to exclaim "Solomon, I have
surpassed thee". Here today, we are down in the vaults
built to store the gold dug out of the Victorian landscape during the gold rush,
gold that made a few rich but broke the backs of many others who dug for it, this
is a place that was purpose-built to store up treasure. The Bible mentions
gold many times, we know details about Solomon's Temple from Old Testament
writings, but it also suggests that we should focus on a different kind of
treasure, here's what it says in Matthew chapter 6 verses 19 to 21: "Don't store up
treasure on earth, moths and rust can destroy them, and thieves can break in
and steal them. Instead, store up your treasure in heaven, where moths and rust
cannot destroy them, and thieves cannot break in and steal them. Your heart will
always be where your treasure is." We should treasure spiritual realities
far above any kind of earthly treasure, by spiritual realities
I mean immensely important things like forgiveness, fellowship with God, the
power of prayer, the development of character and moral excellence, the love
of God, the hope of heaven, honouring Christ in all you do, our lives should be
governed by our affection for these things made available to us by Jesus. Yes
we have to earn money and use money, we have to have food, shelter,
transportation and healthcare, we can have nice things and save money, but we
must remember that all of these things are so very temporary, so our heart
ought to be controlled by heavenly treasures, spiritual blessings, treasure
which cannot be touched by moth, rust or robber and will last forever. Where is
your treasure? Is it in earthly things, is it in money, possessions, the latest
gadget or is it in heaven, in the person of Jesus? If you'd like that heavenly
treasure, treasure that lasts forever why not ask for it right now as we pray?
Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for your love and goodness to us, thank you for
reminding us of the importance of getting our priorities right and
building up treasures in heaven, help us not to be consumed by the glamour and
glitter of the things of this world but rather focus on those things that will
last forever, we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. We're all interested in gold and
treasure, we want that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,
some of us wish for a life of glitz and glamour or maybe you want the real deal,
you want a better life, a life that brings happiness and fulfilment, a life
that's built on faith, faith in Jesus, I'd like to recommend the free gift we have
for all our viewers today, it's a book called: "Finding Treasure - A Beginner's
Guide" and it's pure gold. It covers topics such as God's love for
us, repentance, faith and acceptance and what to do with doubt.
I'm sure this book will bring you closer to Jesus, you'll discover real treasure.
Remember to ask for your FREE copy by name, there's no cost or obligation,
here's the information you need, phone or text us at 0436 333 555 or visit our website www.tij.tv to request today's free offer and
we'll send it to you totally free of charge and with no obligation. So don't
delay call or text 0436 333 555 in Australia or 020 422 2042 in New Zealand
or visit our website www.tij.tv to request today's offer. Write to us at PO Box 5101, Dora Creek,
New South Wales 2264 Australia or PO Box 76673 Manukau, Auckland 2241
New Zealand, don't delay phone or text 0436 333 555 in Australia
or 020 422 2042 in New Zealand or visit our website www.tij.tv to request
today's offer, call or text us now. If you've enjoyed today's journey, be
sure to join us again next week when we will share another of life's journeys
together and experience another new and thought-provoking perspective on the
peace, insight, understanding and hope that only the Bible can give us, The
Incredible Journey truly is television that changes lives. Until next week
remember the ultimate destination of life's journey: "Now I saw a new heaven
and a new earth and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, there shall
be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, there shall be no more pain, for the
former things have passed away."
