A driving, vigorous population : Gold rushes and the global

[Extract] In the wake of the first great rush to California, however, as Mark Twain himself later acknowledged, it was not so much that the goldseekers had vanished from the face of the earth - more that they had kept moving across it. Arriving at Ballarat in the British Colony of Victoria in 1895, Twain saw first-hand the incredible economic, political, and social legacies of the Australian gold rushes, which had commenced in 1851, and had triggered a second global scramble in pursuit of the precious yellow mineral. 'The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South Wales three months before' he observed, 'had already started emigrants towards Australia; they had been coming as a stream'. But with the discovery of Victoria's fabulous gold reserves, which were literally Californian in scale, 'they came as a flood'.