Chinese on the Road to the Palmer.

Scarce colonial engraving showing the Chinese of to the  Palmer River gold fields.

Palmer River was one of Australia’s major gold rushes after William Hann and geologist Norman Taylor found gold in 1872. Hann named the river after Arthur Hunter Palmer the Premier of Queensland at that time. In 1873, access to the goldfields was established by Archibald Campbell MacMillan who led an expedition of 110 diggers, police and officials which blazed a trail from the port of Cooktown to the Palmer River. There were numerous confrontations between the Anglo-Australian diggers, Chinese miners and the Aborigines. From 1874 to 1877 more than 20,000 Chinese immigrants arrived at the river. The miners in the Palmer River included Chinese, mostly from the Guangdong Province in southern China. The Chinese miners would re-work the diggings of Europeans as they moved on to find richer diggings. In 1876, with the rush to the Hodgkinson River, Chinese miners occupied most of the Palmer Gold Field. As gold reserves were extracted, anti-Chinese sentiment grew. The Queensland government eventually responded to the influx with a poll tax of £10 according to the Chinese Immigration Regulation Act 1877 by which time most of the surface gold had long since been prospected.

From the original edition of the Australasian Sketcher.