Australia's Golden Heritage provides a pictorial and verbalisation of how the search for mineral wealth in the early Australian colonies became a quest, not only for personal wealth, but for the economic stability and growth of the fledgling States.Starting with the first mineral mines in South Australia where copper became the staple commodity for the colony, producing more than 10% of the world's copper, through to Tasmanian coal near Port Arthur, gold in New South Wales followed by Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.The romance of those years was captured by the poets, storytellers and painters. 'Banjo' Paterson, Henry Lawson, Donald Friend, Russell Drysdale, George Browning and S T Gill.It also highlights, with break-out stories, major events which occurred during these turbulent days helping to shape Australia as a nation: the European miners' attack on Chinese miners at Lambing Flat, NSW, in 1861, which contributed to the establishment of the infamous 'White Australia Policy'; the Eureka Stockade where miners fought government troops to stop the iniquitous mining licence; the rise and fall of the Mary Kathleen uranium mine new Mt Isa; the 1912 mining disaster at Mount Lyell, Tasmania, resulting in the death of 42 miners; the bank heist at Beaconsfield, Tasmania, in 1884 and the floods at the Briseis tin mine, Tasmania, which killed 14 people in 1929; the 1913 Battle of Broken Hill; the 1907 rescue of miner Modesto Varischetti at the Bonnievale mine near Coolgardie, WA, using deep sea mining equipment; and the famous - or infamous - gold rush under police supervision into the Kanowna Cemetery near Kalgoorlie in 1898.The stories flow from Tasmania's Plunket Point coal mine in 1834, South Australia's copper mining in 1841, through NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, the Northern Territory, and finally Western Australia.
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