Early living conditions

Old Mogo Town, Tourism theme park near Batemans Bay, south coast NSW

As gold rush villages were mostly built deep in valleys, they tended to get very cold during winter nights.

The miners hut was actually a display building that was burnt down when someone overenthusiastically stoked the fire one cold winters afternoon. This does serve to demonstrate the constant danger of fire in those days before running water and the great risk that bushfires have always posed in Australia. This is one of the reasons why no old gold rush villages still exist.

Tents and Bark Gunyahs were commonly used by the diggers as they had to always be ready to move on if the prospect they were working on dried up. Canvas would have been available, at a price, from the peddlers who carted most supplies into the goldfields.

Paddy O'heir's gunyah typifies the primitive conditions and hard life of the digger. When Paddy first arrived in Mogo to try his luck it was to an area untouched by white settlement and was a lawless, harsh environment. He would have known what it was like to feel cold and hunger. Before he finally found gold and could buy supplies from one of the trading wagons, he would have had to rely on billy tea and damper and whatever he could forage from the area.

When one considers the complications and stress of modern life, it is good to reflect on the simplicity of life in the 1850s. We tend to dwell on the harshness of life then. But when Paddy woke up in the morning it was to the sound of the bush and his first thought would have been of the riffle he had been working on the previous evening and how there would be a gret chance of a good find when he started again. He had taken a gamble coming to Australia and for once in his life, the odds would have been on his side.

Miners Tent

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Australian East Coast Tourism Website