A gold miner sitting outside his hut at the gold diggings in Gundagai. Photo: Charles Louis Gabriel.
With the price of gold soaring and expected to reach new record highs in 2026, we thought we’d take a look back to the brief but exciting gold rush at Gundagai in the 1860s.
By the late 1850s the alluvial goldfields around Adelong had given up most of what they had to offer and only the dedicated diggers remained, delving deeper and deeper underground.
There had been some early indication that Gundagai may have a nugget or two laying about and hope was confirmed in 1859 when gold was found in a creek on Kimo Station southwest of the town.
According to Tumut’s Wynyard Times, “it only justifies the universal opinion from the formation of the country and the abundant traces of the precious metal, that there will sooner or later be discovered a paying field, and Gundagai will then have its own diggings”.
Among the prospectors drawn to the region was an Italian man named Gaspard Billardi, who had been heading from Lambing Flat (Young) to the goldfields at Kiandra when he became stranded by the flooding Murrumbidgee River.
An experienced miner, Billardi liked the “nuggety” look of the terrain and settled in for a few weeks of digging to see what he could unearth in the area above the North Gundagai cemetery.
The Italian found enough traces of “coarse gold” to stake out a claim and, as more and more miners began to move in alongside, he anxiously awaited the arrival of the goldfields commissioner.
“A visit from the commissioner would be of great service, for the purpose of regulating the mining operations, and in particular to award the prospector, Mr Billardi, the ground to which he is entitled, as being the discoverer,” the Albury Banner and Wodonga Express reported in June.
“The ground which he claimed is already encroached on by one party, and the nugget was found in their claim.
“After Mr Billardi’s patient and praiseworthy perseverance in opening up a source of employment to many, it is most unfair that he should be deprived of any portion of the ground to which he has earned an honest and a legal right.”
Once the boundaries were fixed, Billardi hoisted up an Italian flag and continued adding small amounts of gold to his growing haul from the spot dubbed “Billardi’s Gully”.
“A rush has taken place, and a good number of claims are marked off and sinking is going off very energetically,” declared the Wynyard Times in May 1961.
“The prospector, an Italian man, has been working quietly and perseveringly on the spot for several weeks past, and seemed fully impressed that he would succeed in discovering a goldfield.”
Sure enough, the excitement reached fever pitch when a 1.8 kg nugget was found on Friday 2 August and Gundagai was officially declared a goldfield later that month.
Billardi’s success was largely confined to a slow and steady accumulation of “pennyweights” although one 300 g nugget generated some excitement.
The next turning point came in late 1861 when two Victorian miners found a quartz reef near the crown of Mt Parnassus above Billardi’s claim including two “handsome” nuggets weighing almost 2 kg each.
The local population swelled dramatically from around 600 to about 5000 within a year and the area around Spring Flat was a bustling hive of canvas tents and digging miners.
The rush petered out over the next few years, and by 1864 most of the miners had moved on. Occasionally, there would be news of modest finds in some of Billardi’s old claims and in 1895 one committed miner discovered a 600 g “solid lump of gold” while washing up for the evening at the foot of Mt Parnassus.
Recent geological surveys and rock chip sampling have confirmed that the area contains high-grade gold mineralization, and there are companies that continue with drilling and sampling programs to weigh up whether modern methods may unlock the treasure that remains in Billardi’s Gully.
Original Article published by Chris Roe on Region Riverina.
