Edward Hammond Hargraves (7 October 1816 – 29 October 1891) was an Australian gold prospector who led an expedition in the Macquarie River region of New South Wales in 1851, and publicised the resulting finds, starting the New South Wales gold rush.
Early life
Edward Hammond Hargraves was born on 7 October 1816 in Gosport, Hampshire, England, the son of Elizabeth (née Whitcombe) and John Edward Hargraves. He was educated in Brighton and Lewes, but left school at the age of 14 to go to sea. He arrived in Sydney in 1832.
After his arrival in the colony of New South Wales, Hargraves worked on a property at Bathurst for a period and then went north to the Torres Strait, working in the bêche-de-mer and tortoiseshell industries. In 1834, he took up of land near Wollongong. He married Elizabeth Mackay in Sydney in 1836, and in 1839 they moved to East Gosford. Hargraves was an agent for the General Steam Navigation Company and also established the Fox Under The Hill Hotel. In 1843, he took up another property on the Manning River, leaving his wife behind to look after the hotel.
The Californian gold rush changed official attitudes. The rush to California left New South Wales with a shortage of workers and an economic depression. The new governor, Charles Augustus FitzRoy, felt that a discovery of gold could revive the colony's fortunes.
James Tom's brother William later said: "The reason why Mr Hargraves could not find gold in 1851 was this: He was too lazy to look for it in a proper manner; he always experimented on the higher instead of lower strata of the alluvial deposits he was taken to. [...] While in the Bathurst district, Hargraves never dug a hole a foot deep."