Explain Why Was The Australian Gold Rush A Tragedy For Overseas Immigration

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Why Was The Australian Gold Rush a Tragedy For Overseas Immigration?
The Australian Gold Rush was disastrous for people coming from different countries. The main focus of this essay is to argue that the Australian Gold Rush was a tragedy for immigrants. Oversea immigrants had to suffer intense racism and pay taxes that no else had to pay. Immigrants also had to dig in fields that have already been dug in.

The gold rush started in 1851 when gold was first struck in NSW. This was the first time gold was found in Australia and it started a frenzy all around the world to start looking for gold in Australia. It started when a man from California called Edward Hargraves came to Australia to look for gold. Edward and a man named Lister started …show more content…

The Australians got possessive of their digging sites and they began to insult the newcomers, the immigrants also had to dig in fields that have already been dug out by the Australian miners. The Australians first protested the idea of having the Chinese working on the gold fields because of racism and fear of new competition. The Australian diggers had a mateship which meant they had certain rules, but with the newcomers they didn’t know the rules and were often accused of doing something wrong they didn’t know was wrong. The Australians also thought that the Chinses will find more gold as they are known as untiring workers, so they were insulted and forced to live with other people from the same nationality for protection, the Immigrants were beaten up and insulted a lot and in some cases they were even murdered by the Australians. As if the racism was not enough the Chinese also had to pay a tax of 10 pounds when they arrived in Victoria that no other immigrants had to pay, so some landed at Robe S.A and walked to the Ballarat gold fields .All the Chinese immigrants forced the government to act, so they made laws that restricted that amount of Chinese workers in one area developing the idea of the White Australian Policy. The Chinese were also criticized of stashing the gold they found to take back to China when they should’ve invested it in Australia. The Chinese gold diggers were also treated as second class citizens on the gold fields, the Australians invented numerous sayings to convey their sense of superiority over the Chinese. A quote by an angry group of European and American miners met in Bendigo in 1854 and declared that a "general and unanimous rising should take place… for the purpose of driving the Chinese off the goldfield". Many were killed in these riots. But when the gold discoveries started to dwindle the Chinese left Australia to return to their homeland,

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