Gold-Rush Banker: Falconer Larkworthy

The very words ‘Gold Rush’ conjure up mental pictures of devastated landscape, diggers’ tents, lawlessness and - if in Australia-of the Eureka stockade or Ned Kelly’s gang. From Wild West films we are used to the miner and his poke of gold-dust, the crooked assayer and the storekeeper, staking the prospector in return for a share of the spoils.

From my great-grandfather’s papers, however, a fascinating picture emerges of just how the financial side of those gold-rushes was organized by the banks and the government, so that robbery and extortion, if not attempts at trickery, became very rapidly the exception and not the rule in the Australian and New Zealand goldfields.

Falconer Larkworthy was born at Weymouth in 1833, but brought up by an aunt in Elgin after the death of his parents. His account of his schooling in Scotland certainly makes it clear that the discipline problems of modern comprehensives are scarcely yet on such a scale as, say, those of Elgin Academy in 1843: