Australia has a Barkerville connection. In fact, it is intimately connected through people, names of places, and the modeling of Colonial laws. It is often noted that the first Governor of British Columbia, James Douglas, utilized the experiences that Australian colonial authorities used in order to model the laws that dealt with mining, as well as in creation of other laws in the development of those used in BC. In June of 1862, Bishop George Hill remarked that the boat on which he was traveling to the mainland of BC was filled with men from New Zealand and Australia. The fact is that the gold rushes of the 19th century saw people traveling from goldfield to goldfield - especially young men with a definite sense of adventure.
It was often the case that people with shared backgrounds traveled and worked together, or at least saught the same opportunites. For example, the story of two Irishmen - Andrew Kelly is linked with Michael Glynn simply because they both went to the Ballarat in Australia (Kelly in the 1850s and Glynn in 1854). Glynn's experience sees him traveling to Australia, then to New Zealand and then to California and then to the Cariboo in 1862. Kelly also followed a similar route at a similar time - one can not help but think that they knew each other and were responding to the lure of gold as each new goldfield developed.
While Glynn appears to have stayed with mining, Andrew Kelly is also noted for mining, but mostly for his entrepreneurial spirit - operating restaurants, stores and hotels in Barkerville. Kelly operated the Wake-Up-Jake Coffee Saloon at Barkerville for a period and helped mythologise the name as being derived after a narcoleptic patron who had to be woken up to finish a meal. However, the name was in common use throughout the goldfields of western North America for claims, silver ledges and in song, and, there was a claim with the same name established on Williams Creek, where Barkerville is located by 1862 - the year William Barker engraved his name on history with his fabulous finds.
We know a fair amount about Andrew Kelly, primarily because his decendants and relations have spread out thoughout BC. But, what of his time in Australia - ten years is a long time. I will be traveling to Melbourne, Australia for a conference this November and intend to spend time in the archives of the state of Victoria where the Ballarat is located. The conference is about the Chinese Diaspora which saw thousands from the Siyi county district of Guangdong Province travel to the various goldrushes to New Zealand, Australia, California and British Columbia - to name a few placed with shared histories. It is as remarkable that Irishmen with a similar place of origin would travel the same routes as Chinese people from Shunde or Kaiping. I intend to examine the links between people and places in order to get a better understanding of how the world worked at that time.
The Ballarat today features Sovereign Hill, a reproduced historic mining community that grew up around the gold finds in Victoria, Australia. Not only will I be looking at how they carry out their interpretation of history, I will be making some solid research links to people with shared interests. As a side note, in looking through our collections at Barkerville, I was surprised to find some ore samples from Kalgoorie (established in the 1890s), West Australia that Fred Tregillus, another Barkervillian, had been given - and this at least 60 years after the initial rushes to BC and Australia - the links keep getting deeper.
