Using Gold-Rush Migration History to Connect Cultural Heritage Industries in the UK and Australia

Project Summary:

Supported by a Benjamin Meaker Annual Award, Associate Professor Mountford will be hosted by the University of Bristol’s Professor Simon Potter. Potter and Mountford’s collaborative project will centre on developing a new history of nineteenth century gold rush migration. During the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of people left Britain and Ireland for Australia. Inspired by the discovery of enormous gold deposits in the distant Australian colonies, they set out on the longest global journey imaginable. 

Almost 175 years after the official discoveries of gold were reported in New South Wales and Victoria, this project will re-examine the history of gold-rush migration and address a significant challenge confronting historians and museum professionals today. Working closely with colleagues at Bristol’s SS Great Britain Museum and at Sovereign Hill (a museum dedicated to telling the story of the gold rushes in Ballarat, Australia) Potter and Mountford will consider the ways in which the history of gold rush migration can be re-thought and re-framed for contemporary academic and public audiences, including museum-going publics. 

This project builds on Potter and Mountford’s previous collaborations. Over the last decade they have (with Robert Fletcher) co-edited a special volume of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, subsequently republished as Connected Histories, Connected Worlds (Routledge, 2022). With Professor Fletcher, they have also worked together as part of an international network investigating ‘imperial mobilities’ and collaborated on a workshop on the ‘Official Mind at Fifty’ – bringing together historians and Civil Service professionals. 

This Meaker project will further these collaborations and support Potter and Mountford as they seek to set new research agendas in global and imperial history. The project team will host public lectures and research seminars in Bristol and Ballarat, and details of these will be publicised when they are available. 

Visitor Biography:

Benjamin Mountford is Director of the Centre for Regional Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (RHASS) and Associate Professor of History at Australian Catholic University. Ben’s research and teaching focuses on global history, British imperial history and Australian history. He is the author of the award-winning Britain, China & Colonial Australia (OUP, 2016) and has co-edited three books: Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World (Peter Lang, 2017), A Global History of Gold Rushes (University of California Press, 2018) and Connected Histories, Connected Worlds (Routledge, 2022). He was a co-editor of the journal History Australia (2022-24) and he is currently a research associate at Museums Victoria and the Sovereign Hill Museums Association, Ballarat. Before returning home to his native Australia, Ben was at Oxford, where he was a Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholar, a Beit Scholar in Commonwealth and Imperial History, a Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Global History and the first Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow in Modern British History. He has previously held research fellowships at La Trobe University and the Huntington Library in California. Ben is currently working on a history of how the nineteenth century gold rushes impacted Victorian Britain and is also part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project investigating the history of Australia’s transcontinental railways.