Thought I’d come in here as my family history has lots of stories about gold mining in Australia and in the USA.
My great grandfather on my mother’s side was a Cornish tin miner from Callington in Cornwall, who went to Australia to mine for gold when he was about 16 years old in the early 1850s and story is that he was involved in the Eureka Stockade incident. Afterwards he turned up in Ohio in the USA as a gold miner in 1870, returning to Cornwall in 1880. he then became a publican and ran The Bell at Launceston in Cornwall and The Imperial Inn in Ivybridge, Devon until his death in 1882.
Family story is that when he returned home to Cornwall he had a waistcoat with gold nuggets for buttons. Later he had the gold nuggets from his waistcoat made into tie pins and gave each to a member of his family. My parents always kept theirs on the mantlepiece, I remember seeing it as a teenager. From memory the gold nugget was about shirt button size, round, uneven, worn fairly smooth and mounted on a stainless steel pin about 2” long. Later my father gave it away to relatives who were visiting from the USA, because they were so taken and overwhelmed by it and the story.
Also my father went to Australia in the 1920s to work on a relative’s sheep farm. Summer season he worked as a sheep drover and in the winter building bridges. He spent 8 years there, returned home to Plymouth for a holiday and to see family, met my mother and never went back.
I have lots of photos of his time there, here’s one of him on his horse Barney. He loved to tell stories about Barney. Apparently after a long day Barney could find his own way home from about 20 or so miles with my father asleep in the saddle. His records and photos show he spent time in a place called Warracknabeal and Rainbow.
Rog.
