From Australia's No.1 Gold Rush to Ghost Town: The Tragic Story of Hill End

[00:00:00]2:00 in the morning, the 19th of October, 1872.

[00:00:05]Deep inside a mountain called Hawkins Hill, in the central west of New South Wales, a blasting shot goes off in the Star of Hope Mine. The smoke hangs in the candle light, and as it clears, the night shift stopped dead. They are staring at a wall of solid gold. When they cut it free, it stands almost 5 ft tall and weighs 286 kg, the largest single mass of gold ever pulled from the Earth, anywhere on the planet, before or since. Above that mine sat a town they called the richest/4 mile in the world.

[00:00:44]8,000 people, 28 pubs, two newspapers.

[00:00:49]And here is the question that haunts this whole story.

[00:00:54]How does the richest quarter mile on earth become a ghost town in a single lifetime? This is where the gold went.

[00:01:02]Chapter one. The immigrant who chased the light.

[00:01:07]The man whose name is welded to that wall of gold did not find it. He was asleep most likely in a hotel he ran to pay the bills. And he was not even a very good miner. Remember that because it is the key to everything. Burnhard Otto Halterman was born in Hamburg in 1838.

[00:01:28]As a young man, he did what a lot of young German men did when faced with 3 years of compulsory military service. He ran. In 1858, he sailed for the other side of the world. 101 days at sea, seasick for most of them, arriving in Sydney in August with barely a coin to his name and almost no English. He took the jobs an immigrant with nothing takes.

[00:01:55]Waiter at the Hamburg Hotel, steward on a coastal schooner that ran up and down the coast. He was a big man, restless, ambitious, and going nowhere.

[00:02:08]And then he heard the word that had been pulling desperate men across oceans for years.

[00:02:14]Gold.

[00:02:16]Out west in the gold fields around Ba'athist, he met a Polish miner named Ludwig Hugo Buyers, a man everyone called Louie.

[00:02:27]The two of them threw in together. And from 1861, they worked a claim high on Hawkins Hill called the Star of Hope.

[00:02:37]The hill was named for an early digger, and the reef beneath it ran like a buried vein of treasure through the slate. But a vein you cannot reach is worth nothing. And for five long years, the Star of Hope gave Holman and buyers almost nothing at all. They sank their shaft. They chased the reef. They watched other men strike it lucky on neighboring claims while their own stayed stubborn and poor. This is the part the legend skips. Halterman was not a man who struck gold and got rich. He was a man who failed for half a decade at the one thing he had crossed the world to do. He nearly died when a blasting charge went off early in the cramped dark of the shaft. To keep the claim alive, he took over the license of the All Nations Hotel, pulling beers for luckier men, while his own fortune stayed locked in the rock beneath their feet.

[00:03:34]The two partners even married a pair of sisters Harriet and Mary EMTT on the very same day in Ba'athist in 1868, turning business partners into brothersin-law.

[00:03:47]He was not really a digger at all. He was something Australia did not yet have a word for. A promoter, a showman, a natural salesman who happened to be standing on a mountain of gold. and he was obsessed strangely with photography, with the brand new science of capturing light on glass plates. That obsession, not the gold, is the reason you are hearing his name today. Because Burnhard Halterman was about to become world famous for the largest mass of gold ever found, and he did not dig it up.

[00:04:25]Chapter 2. Bald Hills before it was the richest quarter mile in the world. It was nothing much to look at. A bald scrubby ridge above the Turon River that the settlers actually called bald hills.

[00:04:40]But long before any of that, this was Wajgerie country. The Wiraajgerie are one of the largest Aboriginal nations in the whole of New South Wales, the people of the Three Rivers, and they had lived across this country for thousands of years. The local clan camped around these hills for the reliable water and the kangaroo and the emu. And the word tambberora, the name of the bigger camp just up the road, comes from their language. And when the gold seekers came, they came over the top of a wound that was barely 20 years old because in the 1820s, this region had been the front line of the Ba'ist war. In August of 1824, the governor declared martial law across the Ba'athist district and in the months that followed, perhaps a quarter of the local Wajgerie were killed. The resistance leader, a man the settlers called Saturday, whose true name was Windradine, finally walked all the way to Paramata to make peace and died a few years later.

[00:05:46]The gold rush did not arrive on empty land. It arrived on taken land soaked in a violence the diggers mostly never bothered to learn about.

[00:05:56]Now let us clear something up because this channel does not deal in comfortable myths.

[00:06:03]Hill End was not Australia's first gold rush. That was a fear near Orange back in 1851.

[00:06:11]It was not the biggest either. The monster rushes were down in Victoria at Berat and Bendigo.

[00:06:19]What Hill End would become was something more specific and in its own way more astonishing. The richest single stretch of goldbearing reef the country had ever seen. The first diggers came in the early 1850s and worked the easy gold, the aluvial, the loose stuff you could wash out of a creek with a pan and a cradle.

[00:06:42]The nearby camp of Tambberora boomed first.

[00:06:46]By the winter of 1852, it was the most populous goldfield in the colony. But that easy gold was gone within a couple of years, panned out by the end of 1853, and the crowds drifted off to the next rush, the way they always did.

[00:07:04]The diggers who stayed started looking up at the hills and down into the rock.

[00:07:12]Because in 1858, someone traced a line of goldbearing quartz reef running right along the crest of Hawkins Hill. A Cornish miner known as Daddy Nichols began working that deep reef around 1860.

[00:07:27]The little settlement of Bald Hills was officially renamed Hill End in 1862.

[00:07:34]The real treasure was never in the creek beds.

[00:07:39]It was locked in the reef, hundreds of feet down, and getting it out would take money, machines, and a stomach for risk that would eventually swallow the whole town.

[00:07:52]Chapter 3. The richest quarter mile in the world.

[00:07:57]And so, in the early 1870s, Hill end simply exploded.

[00:08:03]The numbers tell the story better than any adjective. In 1870, the field produced 18,698 ounces of gold. The next year, 42,000.

[00:08:16]The year after that, 1872, more than 80,000 ounces in a single year.

[00:08:23]The gold was coming out of the ground faster than anyone could quite believe, and the town swelled to match it. At its peak in 1872, around 8,000 people lived in the town itself. And local historians estimate that across the whole goldfield, counting Tambberora and all the surrounding diggings, the population may have reached as high as 30,000. That is an estimate, not a census, so hold it loosely. But even the solid figure, 8,000 in the town, made Hillend the largest inland town in New South Wales, bigger than Ba'athist, bigger than anywhere out here. And what a town.

[00:09:06]Picture more than a kilometer of shops along the main drag.

[00:09:10]Five banks, two competing newspapers, a brewery, an oyster bar, a hospital, four churches, a public school full of children.

[00:09:22]By one count, the field carried more than 50 hotels with something like 28 of them packed into the town itself. Clark Street alone had 17 pubs. There was even a French hairdresser advertising himself as late of Paris, out here in the dust.

[00:09:40]and the Mullikes of central New South Wales.

[00:09:44]They called it, without blushing, the richest quarter mile in the world. And we know exactly what it looked like down to the shop fronts and the faces because of one man's obsession.

[00:09:58]In 1872, Bernhard Halterman commissioned a pair of photographers, an American named Bofoy Merlin and his young assistant Charles Bis to photograph the town. Not a postcard view, the whole thing. Merlin worked his way down the street, house by house, business by business, asking families to come out and stand proud in their doorways while he exposed his glass plates. Clark Street in its absolute pomp. the drapers and the boot makers and the publicans squinting into the sun, frozen forever on glass. Hold that image of the crowded street in your mind because we are going to come back to it and it will not look the same. A contemporary reporter from the Empire newspaper walked those streets in June of 1872 and noted almost with surprise that for all the golden grog, there was far less drunkenness than you would meet on any street in Sydney after 10 at night. This was not just a brawling mining camp. It was a real town, convinced it was the future, sitting on a fortune that seemed bottomless.

[00:11:07]And then at 2:00 in the morning, deep in the star of hope, they hit the wall of gold.

[00:11:15]Chapter 4, the wall of gold.

[00:11:19]We started this story in that moment. So let us go back and stand in it properly.

[00:11:25]The 19th of October 1872, the Star of Hope mine on Hawkins Hill. A blasting shot fired in the small hours.

[00:11:36]And when the smoke cleared, there it was, embedded in the slate and quartz of the reef. A slab of gold the size of a door. When they finally got it to the surface and weighed it, it came in at around 286 kg, stood about a meter and a half tall, and held roughly 93 kg of pure gold. To this day, it remains the largest single mass of gold ever discovered anywhere on the face of the earth. Now, here is where this channel has to do its job because the legend gets two things wrong. First, people call it the Halterman nugget. It was not a nugget. A nugget is a lump of more or less pure gold.

[00:12:22]This was a specimen, a great sheet of gold still locked into the rock of the reef, which is arguably even more remarkable.

[00:12:32]The largest pure nugget, the welcome stranger, had been found down in Victoria a few years earlier. In 1869, Hillen's claim is different and bigger.

[00:12:44]The largest single mass of gold. Full stop. Second, people imagine Halterman owned it. He did not. The Star of Hope was worked by a syndicate of eight men and Halman held a one sixth share and ran things above ground. He was the manager and the mouthpiece, not the sole owner.

[00:13:06]And the crulest detail of all, the man whose judgment actually found the gold was a syndicate member named Mark Hammond.

[00:13:16]Against instructions to keep sinking the shaft straight down, Hammond backed the advice of experienced miners and drove the tunnel sideways to the west straight into the Bonanza.

[00:13:29]And then before the great specimen was even pulled from the ground, Hammond sold his share.

[00:13:36]He made the call that uncovered the richest gold in the country, and he cashed out just before it paid. Imagine living the rest of your life with that.

[00:13:46]And spare a thought, too, for the eight men of the syndicate and the question that must have hung over every one of them afterwards.

[00:13:54]The Star of Hope was not some lone genius's lucky strike. It was a partnership, eight names on the agreement, each holding a slice of the richest gold in the country.

[00:14:06]Richard Kerr, Moses Bell, James Brown, the others alongside Halterman and Buyers.

[00:14:13]Most of them are forgotten now.

[00:14:16]History kept one name, the loudest one, the man with the camera and the talent for being remembered, and let the rest dissolve into the footnotes.

[00:14:27]That is its own kind of lesson about how a legend gets made. Holman begged the company to keep the specimen whole. He reportedly offered £1,000 over its value to save it as it was. They said no. It was too valuable as gold. So, they broke it up, crushed it, and smelted it down into ordinary bullion. The greatest single mass of gold the world had ever seen was melted into coins and bars and scattered to the wind, gone within months of being found. But Halterman had already done the thing that would outlast all of it before they destroyed it. He had the photographers record it and he had those glass plates of the town.

[00:15:11]He even commissioned a famous photograph of himself standing beside the towering specimen. Though here is one more honest detail. That image is actually a composite. Three photographs cleverly combined. The showman polishing his own legend even then. The gold was real. The trouble was most of the money was a lie.

[00:15:34]Chapter 5. The million pound lie. Here is where it gets genuinely insane.

[00:15:41]Because the gold in the ground was real and astonishing. But the money swirling around it, the money that built and then destroyed this town was mostly paper, mostly fraud, and mostly gone before anyone admitted it.

[00:15:56]When word of the Star of Hope specimen went out, it set off a frenzy.

[00:16:01]Not a digging frenzy, a share frenzy.

[00:16:05]By the end of 1872, there were more than 200 mining companies floated on the Hillend field. A handful were genuine.

[00:16:15]The rest were what the authorities themselves would soon call bubble companies. You floated a company. You talked up the claim. You sold shares to a public mad with gold fever and you pocketed the money. Whether the mine ever produced an ounce was almost beside the point. The trading was so frantic it helped drive the volume of business on the Young Sydney Stock Exchange with Hillend stocks dominating the share lists. And I want to give you the single number that defines this whole tragedy because it comes straight from the government's own man. In 1874, the Western Goldfields Commissioner sat down and looked at 13 of the principal claims along Hawkins Hill, and he reported that on those 13 claims, a sum of no less than 1 million had been spent simply buying and selling them.

[00:17:10]£1 million.

[00:17:13]And the total value of gold ever raised from those same claims, around £500,000.

[00:17:19]They put in a million and got out half.

[00:17:22]The other half a million did not vanish into the rock. It vanished, in the commissioner's own words, into the pockets of promoters, share jobs, and middlemen. The commissioner did not mince words. He wrote that the district had suffered more than any other from the formation of bubble companies, from extravagant expectations and reckless speculation, and from the gross frauds perpetrated by company promoters upon a too credulous public.

[00:17:51]Another official called it simply a mania.

[00:17:55]There were specific swindles, too.

[00:17:58]In September of 1873, the directors of one Hawkins Hill venture received a telegram announcing a fabulous gold strike deep in their mine.

[00:18:09]The share price was primed to rocket.

[00:18:12]Except the telegram was fake, a plant, and a second telegram exposed it before the scheme could pay off. There was a bubble outfit remembered as trust and try where by one account of £40,000 raised only £2,000 ever went into actual mining and the rest into the promoter's pockets.

[00:18:36]Now, in fairness, you will sometimes hear that hill mines were salted, seeded with gold to fool investors.

[00:18:45]There is no good evidence that happened here.

[00:18:48]The fraud was real, but it was the paper kind. Fake telegrams and bubble floats, not buckshot gold fired into the shafts.

[00:18:58]Let us keep it accurate because the truth is damning enough.

[00:19:04]While the speculators counted their paper fortunes in Sydney offices, the men who actually went underground were paying for this gold in a very different currency.

[00:19:15]Chapter six. The cost of gold.

[00:19:19]Because down in the shafts, there was nothing fake about the danger. The reefs at Hawkins Hill were chased deeper and deeper, eventually passed 200 m straight down into the dark and the heat and the bad air. And here is the part that should make you angry. There was no safety supervision at all.

[00:19:40]In 1872, a minor wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald, warning about the total absence of any official oversight of the deep sinking on Hawkins Hill and at Tambberura, warning that gold would be got at any sacrifice, with no attention paid to the safety of the shafts. He was right. The local paper recorded the consequences in the flat, terrible language of routine.

[00:20:06]One man killed while tamping a charge on the Turon.

[00:20:10]Another man named Griffiths killed by falling down the Newcastle company's shaft. And it was not just the miners.

[00:20:18]It was their children. The conditions in a boom town, the bad water, the disease, the malnutrition were so brutal that by some estimates roughly one in three children born at Hill End did not live to reach school age. One in three. If you walk the Tambberora Cemetery today, you can read that statistic in stone. In the heartbreaking number of tiny graves, some marked, many of them not. There is another group this town would rather forget. At the Tambberora end of the field, there was a substantial Chinese community with stores, market gardens, and a Jos house. Men who mostly worked the abandoned ground the Europeans had given up on. They were met with suspicion, discrimination, and violence.

[00:21:08]There was an anti-Chinese riot at Tambberora as early as 1858, part of a wave of racial violence across the goldfields that culminated in the notorious Lambing Flat riots of 1861, where around 2,000 European diggers attacked the Chinese camp and some 250 Chinese miners were gravely injured.

[00:21:30]Most lost everything they owned.

[00:21:33]The last of the oldtime Chinese residents of Tambberora, a market gardener remembered as New Chip, lived on there quietly until his death in 1937, by which time the hydraulic slooing had all but washed his old Chinatown away, and the land itself paid.

[00:21:54]The hills were torn open. The gullies slooed away. Mercury and later cyanide used to tease the gold from the crushed rock, poisoning the ground and the water.

[00:22:06]A place once described as a slight grassy hollow, golden gully was carved into a raw eroded canyon that you can still walk through today.

[00:22:17]Now, before we go on, let me kill one thing you might be expecting.

[00:22:23]There was no great revival of hill in the world wars. Gold mining was actually wound back during the Second World War, not ramped up as the men and the money went to the war effort. The only real wartime thread in this story comes much later. And it is a strange and beautiful one we will get to. For now, just know this. The reef was finite and the bill was about to come due.

[00:22:52]Chapter 7. when the reef ran out. Gold in a reef is not bottomless. That is the brutal simple fact at the heart of every gold town that ever died. The richest shoots at Hawkins Hill sat relatively close to the surface in the first 40 or 50 m.

[00:23:11]The miners tore through them in a few frantic years, and as the shafts went deeper, the ore got poorer and more expensive to win.

[00:23:22]The arithmetic that had made men rich began quietly to run backwards.

[00:23:29]The bubble companies that had promised endless dividends started calling on their shareholders for more money instead.

[00:23:37]Call after call with no gold to show for it. Shareholders got sick of paying.

[00:23:45]The capital that had flooded in began to drain away just as fast as it had arrived. and watch what the two partners do now because their two paths tell you everything about who profits from a boom and who pays for the bust.

[00:24:01]Burnhard Halterman left. He took his share of the fortune and his glass plates and he went to Sydney. He built himself a grand house on the Northshore with a soaring tower. And from the top of that tower, he and Bis made some of the largest photographic negatives in the world, including a vast panorama of Sydney Harour that won a bronze medal in Philadelphia in 1876 and was shown in Paris. He poured his energy into promoting New South Wales to the world, into immigration schemes, and even a patent medicine he called Halterman's life preserving drops. And in 1882, he got himself elected to parliament as the member for St. Leonard's. The penniles seasick immigrant had become a somebody.

[00:24:52]And here is a detail that tells you everything about the man.

[00:24:57]From that tower on the Northshore, Halterman and Bis exposed glass negatives so enormous they were at the time the largest in the world. single sheets of glass nearly a meter and a half across. He was not content to have struck the largest mass of gold on Earth.

[00:25:17]He had to make the largest photographs on Earth as well.

[00:25:22]Everything Holman touched he supersized because the point was never really the gold or the glass. The point was the spectacle.

[00:25:32]The point was to be seen.

[00:25:35]Louie buyers stayed.

[00:25:38]The man who had shared every one of those five failed years on the Star of Hope did not flee to the city. He put his roots down in Hillend. He became the mayor of the place. And from the late 1870s, he planted an avenue of European trees through the town. Trees that are still standing today, still throwing shade over a street that lost almost everything else.

[00:26:05]One partner cashed out and chased the bright lights of the city. The other stayed and planted trees he must have known he would never see grow tall.

[00:26:15]Neither choice was wrong.

[00:26:18]A man is allowed to take his luck and go. But only one of them was still there when the town needed someone to remember it. And there is something in that worth holding on to.

[00:26:32]The gold left first, then the money, then slowly, inevitably, the people.

[00:26:40]Chapter 8. The slow death.

[00:26:43]Here is how a town dies.

[00:26:46]Not in a day, in decades.

[00:26:49]One family at a time. The population numbers are the crulest weapon in this whole story. So, let me lay them out for you.

[00:26:59]At its peak in 1872, around 8,000 people in the town. By the turn of the century, under a thousand. By 1945, just 700 souls. And today, somewhere between 120 and 150 people live in what was once the largest inland town in New South Wales, from 8,000 to 130. Sit with that for a second. By 1900, a mudgy newspaper reported that the people of Hillend were hardly able to find the bare necessities of life. The grand boomtown had become a place of genuine hardship of people scratching a living from the leings of the rush.

[00:27:42]And in 1907 and 1908, the final indignity, the burough of Hillend, the official town with its own council and mayor, simply ceased to exist as its own entity.

[00:27:57]It could no longer sustain itself and it was swallowed up into the surrounding Turon Shire. The town did not just shrink. It was administratively erased from the map.

[00:28:09]Where did everyone go? They did what gold rush people always did. They chased the next strike.

[00:28:17]Many of them drifted off to Golong, the neighboring rush, a town that Merlin and Balis had also photographed in that same great campaign and a town that would one day put itself on the very first Australian $10 note alongside the poet Henry Lawson, who grew up on its diggings.

[00:28:38]The crowds that had made Hill End the richest quarter mile in the world melted away to other diggings, other dreams, other towns that would in their turn also fade.

[00:28:50]It is worth stopping on Golong for a moment because it is the perfect mirror of Hill's fate. Same era, same rush, photographed by the same two men in the same campaign and for a while just as frantic and crowded. And yet Golgong got the one thing Hillend never did. A kind of immortality. Its main street printed onto the money in millions of Australian wallets for nearly 30 years.

[00:29:18]Two gold towns side by side, both doomed to fade.

[00:29:24]One ended up on the $10 note. The other ended up as a warning. The line between being remembered and being forgotten is thinner and more random than any of us would like to admit.

[00:29:38]There were a few last gasps.

[00:29:41]A slooing company had another go at the ground in 1911.

[00:29:46]In the 1930s during the Great Depression, men came back to fossic the old gullies for whatever color they could find, glad of anything. and a company called Oromo tried largescale sloosing, an effort that finished off destroying what was left of the old Chinatown site. But none of it brought the town back. None of it ever could.

[00:30:08]You cannot refill a reef. By the time the trucks and much later the tourists started coming up the rough road from Baurst, there was almost nothing left to find. The richest quarter mile in the world had become a scatter of empty buildings on a windswept hill.

[00:30:25]And the strangest chapter of all was still to come.

[00:30:30]Chapter nine. The town that vanished.

[00:30:34]So let us go back to that street, Clark Street. The one Halterman's photographers captured in 1872. Thronged with people, lined with shops and banks and pubs, humming with the certainty that this place would last forever.

[00:30:50]Walk it a few decades later and it is a ghost of itself.

[00:30:55]Of the roughly 28 hotels that once roared in the town, only one, the Royal, kept pulling beers.

[00:31:04]The five banks gone.

[00:31:07]The two newspapers gone, presses and all.

[00:31:12]The kilometer of shops dwindled to a single general store.

[00:31:16]Building after building was pulled down for its timber, or simply left to sag and rot, and slowly disappear back into the bush. The grand town did not burn down in a single dramatic night. It just faded board by board, year by year, until the spaces between the surviving buildings grew wider than the buildings themselves.

[00:31:40]This is the quiet way most of Australia's lost places actually go.

[00:31:46]Not always under the wrecking ball of a wheel in the wrecker in Melbourne. Not always bulldozed at 4 in the morning by a developer racing a heritage order.

[00:31:55]Though this country has seen plenty of both. Sometimes a place just stops being needed. The people leave and the heritage value nobody thought to protect simply weathers away in the sun and the rain. Australia was famously slow to value this kind of history.

[00:32:14]The decades of demolition and neglect that stripped the character out of our cities did not spare the little places either. Hill end was protected by nothing but its own remoteness by being too far from anywhere for anyone to bother knocking it all down. And the man who had made the town immortal on glass did not live to see most of this decline. Bernhard Halterman died in Sydney on the 29th of April 1885.

[00:32:43]It was his 47th birthday. The showman, the immigrant who had chased the light across an ocean and caught it, was gone young. His great photographic plates packed away and before long all but forgotten. The man and the boom both burned bright and died early.

[00:33:04]By the middle of the 20th century, Hill End looked like a town the country had simply finished with. a few hundred stubborn residents, a pub, a store, the trees Louis buyers had planted, and the silence.

[00:33:20]It should have disappeared completely the way a thousand other gold towns did, leaving nothing but a name on a map and some dangerous holes in the ground. And then, in a garden shed in suburban Sydney, someone opened a wooden crate full of glass. Chapter 10.

[00:33:40]The shed in Chhatzwood.

[00:33:43]In 1951 in the Sydney suburb of Chhatzwood, a man named Kee Burke went looking for some old photographs and found a miracle. In a garden shed sat the surviving glass plate negatives from Holman's great project, around 3,500 of them. Traced through Holman's own family. through his daughter-in-law.

[00:34:06]They had sat in storage, forgotten for the better part of 70 years. And when they were brought out and carefully printed, an entire vanished world came back to life. Not a few blurry images, the most complete photographic record of an Australian gold rush town that exists anywhere on Earth. Clark Street in its prime. The shops, the miners, the families standing in their doorways.

[00:34:33]The wall of gold itself photographed before it was crushed. The town that had died was suddenly, impossibly alive again on glass.

[00:34:44]And there is a cruelty hidden in the timing. Bofoy Merlin, the photographer who started it all, who walked Clark Street capturing every doorway, never lived to see any of it matter. He died of pneumonia in 1873, the year after the Great Campaign. Still a young man, his assistant, Charles Bis, carried the work on, and it was Bis who would make those record-breaking giant negatives with Halterman. But the man whose eye first framed the doomed town, who pointed his lens at 8,000 people, who did not know they were living in the last good days, never knew that his glass plates would one day be the only proof those days had happened at all.

[00:35:32]That collection is now held by the State Library of New South Wales.

[00:35:37]And it is not just an Australian treasure.

[00:35:41]In 2013, it was added to the Australian Memory of the World Register. And in 2017, three of the giant glass plates were inscribed on the International UNESCO Memory of the World Register, ranking them among the most significant documentary objects on the entire planet.

[00:36:00]Think about that. The photographs that cost Holman a small fortune and that the world had completely forgotten in a shed turned out to be worth more in the end than the gold ever was. But the plates were only half of Hill's strange resurrection because 4 years earlier in 1947, two artists had driven up that rough road from Ba'athist. Their names were Russell Ddale and Donald Friend. And their friendship had been forged during the Second World War.

[00:36:35]That is the real wartime thread in this story.

[00:36:39]Not a mining boom, a friendship.

[00:36:43]They came looking for subjects in the old gold country, and they found hill and nearby Sofala, all peeling paint and leaning verandas, and that strange melancholy inland light.

[00:36:56]What they made there changed Australian art.

[00:37:00]Dedale's painting of Sofala won the win prize.

[00:37:05]His painting called the cricketers drawn from this haunted gold country has been described by the National Gallery as one of the most original and haunting images in all of Australian art. Friend bought a cottage in Clark Street and stayed and then the others came.

[00:37:23]Margaret Ollie, Gene Blet, Jeffrey Smart. Later, the giants of the next generation, John Olsen and Brett Whitley. A dead gold town became one of the most important artists colonies in the country and remains an artist's retreat to this day. The gold town was not saved by gold.

[00:37:46]It was saved by photographs and painters.

[00:37:50]Chapter 11.

[00:37:52]What the gold left behind.

[00:37:55]Stand on Clark Street today and the first thing that hits you is the quiet.

[00:38:00]Somewhere between 120 and 150 people live here now on a street that was built for thousands. The Royal Hotel still pulls a beer the way it has since 1872.

[00:38:14]Northeast store still stands, the most photographed building in town. And dotted along the empty road, the National Park Service, which has cared for the town as a historic site since 1967, has mounted the old Holman photographs on boards, right on the vacant lots where the buildings once stood.

[00:38:36]So you can hold up the thronged street of 1872 against the grass and the silence in front of you. The same view 150 years apart. Out past the town, the gullies are still raw and eroded. The old shafts still puncture the hills. And over at Tambberora, the small graves still sit in their rows. This is what the richest quarter mile in the world came to.

[00:39:04]Lesson one. The gold was real. The wealth was a lie.

[00:39:11]There really was gold here, more concentrated than almost anywhere on Earth. The wall of gold was no myth, but the prosperity built on top of it was for most people a confidence trick.

[00:39:25]Remember the number, £1 million spent on 13 claims, £500,000 of gold ever raised from them. The difference went into the pockets of promoters and share jobs and middlemen, while ordinary investors and ordinary diggers carried the loss.

[00:39:44]When you hear a boom described as a sure thing, when you hear that the money is endless and the only mistake is not getting in fast enough, think of Hawkins Hill.

[00:39:55]Think of the bubble companies and the fake telegrams and the outfit that spent £2,000 of 40,000 on actual mining. The gold was real and people still went broke because the people skimming the top were never really interested in the gold at all. They were interested in the fever.

[00:40:15]Lesson two, the resource always runs out. Every town built on one thing is living on borrowed time, and almost none of them believe it. Hill end never planned for the day the reef would run dry because in 1872, that day was unimaginable.

[00:40:35]But the reef did run dry. And there was no second act, no other industry, no reason for 8,000 people to stay. So they left. We have seen this exact story on this channel before at Mount Morgan in Queensland, whose mountain of gold and copper helped bankroll the founding of an oil giant, and which now sits quiet and scarred, its great pit silent.

[00:41:02]Hillend and Mount Morgan are the same warning told twice. A town that lives on one resource will sooner or later have to learn how to die. The only real question is whether anyone is left who cares enough to remember it. Whether someone plants trees and stays the way Lewis buyers did.

[00:41:23]Lesson three. What survives is never what they valued.

[00:41:28]Here is the part that should stay with you. In 1872, the most valuable thing in this town was the wall of gold, and they destroyed it. They crushed the largest mass of gold ever found and melted it into anonymous coins because the gold was the whole point.

[00:41:47]The photographs Halterman took were an afterthought, a promoter's gimmick worth almost nothing to almost anyone.

[00:41:55]And yet the gold is gone, spent and scattered a century and a half ago.

[00:42:02]Every coin of it untraceable.

[00:42:04]The photographs are UNESCO listed treasures, studied and loved around the world. The thing they valued vanished.

[00:42:13]The thing they overlooked endured.

[00:42:16]That is not an accident of Hill End.

[00:42:18]That is the pattern of almost everything we lose and everything we keep. We protect what makes money and we throw away what makes meaning. And then we spend the next century wishing we had done it the other way around.

[00:42:34]2:00 in the morning, the 19th of October, 1872.

[00:42:40]The smoke clears in the Star of Hope and the night shift stand staring at a wall of solid gold, certain they are looking at the future. That gold was crushed and melted and spent within the year. But the glass plate photographs that caught its image survived, forgotten in a garden shed to become one of the great treasures of the nation. The wall of gold is long gone. The empty street where it was found is still there, waiting in the silence on the richest quarter mile in the world for now.