In 1849, hundreds of Australian men booked passage for San Francisco, hoping to make their fortune in the California goldfields. A mere two years later, thousands more Australian “diggers” flocked to the colony of Victoria in Australia itself, drawn by a gold strike that yielded one-third of the world’s gold output during the 1850s.

In California and Victoria, miners lived mostly in canvas tents and flimsy wood shanties and found gold initially in stream beds. In both territories, the huge migration virtually wiped out the aboriginal peoples. Similarly, both rushes attracted about 40,000 Chinese miners, an influx that, in the race-conscious, English-speaking world of the nineteenth century, prompted riots and legislation in both regions to restrict Asian migrants. Finally, only a few California “forty-niners” or Australian “diggers” made a fortune, perhaps 5 of every 100.

There were differences as well. Upon a gold strike in California, the prospectors would stake their claims and collectively protect those claims — a rough system of democratic self-rule. In Victoria, the British crown owned much of the land and gold commissioners and police administered the diggings, selling licenses to dig for 30 shillings a month (about $200 in present-day U.S. dollars). Distressed by license fees and corrupt local officials, 10,000 miners at Ballarat voted to create a Reform League, which demanded abolition of fees and universal male suffrage. When authorities ignored their demands, 500 miners seized a rich mine at Eureka. In the ensuing struggle, British troops killed 22 miners, ending the armed uprising.

Despite these differences — as well as a significant disparity in the proportion of women — California and Victoria were both transformed by the nearly simultaneous discovery of gold. Within a few decades a mining boom vastly increased their wealth and boasted their populations, as the following chart indicates: