Ophir is the name of a locality in

New South Wales ) , nickname = , image_map = New South Wales in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of New South Wales in AustraliaCoordinates: , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = Australia , established_title = Before federation , es ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

Cabonne Shire Cabonne Council is a local government area in the Central West region of New South Wales, Australia. The Shire is located adjacent to the Mitchell Highway and the Broken Hill railway line, partly surrounding the City of Orange. The administrati ...

History and discovery

Ophir is located near the

Macquarie River The Macquarie River - Wambuul is part of the Macquarie– Barwon catchment within the Murray–Darling basin, is one of the main inland rivers in New South Wales, Australia. The river rises in the central highlands of New South Wales near the ...

northeast of the city of

Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...

. Ophir is the place where

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...

was first discovered in

in 1851, leading to the

Australian gold rushes During the Australian gold rushes, starting in 1851, significant numbers of workers moved from elsewhere in Australia and overseas to where gold had been discovered. Gold had been found several times before, but the colonial government of Ne ...

. In popular literature it has been stated that William Tom Jr, John Lister and

Edward Hargraves Edward Hammond Hargraves (7 October 1816 – 29 October 1891) was a gold prospector who claimed to have found gold in Australia in 1851, starting an Australian gold rush. Early life Edward Hammond Hargraves was born on 7 October 1816 in Gosp ...

found payable gold in February 1851 at the Ophir gold diggings, located at the confluence of

Summer Hill Creek Summer is the hottest of the four temperate seasons, occurring after spring and before autumn. At or centred on the summer solstice, the earliest sunrise and latest sunset occurs, daylight hours are longest and dark hours are shortest, wit ...

and

Lewis Ponds Creek Lewis may refer to: Names * Lewis (given name), including a list of people with the given name * Lewis (surname), including a list of people with the surname Music * Lewis (musician), Canadian singer * "Lewis (Mistreated)", a song by Radiohead ...

. Hargraves was awarded £10,500 (worth $1,125,434 in 2004 values) by the NSW Government. Although Hargraves was honoured and rewarded, it may have been

William Tipple Smith William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...

, mineralogist, who first discovered gold at what would be later named Ophir, in 1848. On 27 February 1852 William Tipple Smith wrote to geologist Sir Roderick Murchison in England saying the spot now called Ophir was the very spot where he had found nugget gold in 1848. Smith's claims and correspondence are exhaustively studied in a 1986 book "A Fool's Gold?" by Lynette Ramsay Silver, in the foreword of which geology Professor David Branagan of Sydney University concurs and states "It is good to see him deservedly remembered in the pages of this book". William Tipple Smith was one of the owners of the

Fitzroy Iron Works The Fitzroy Iron Works at Mittagong, New South Wales, was the first commercial iron smelting works in Australia. It first operated in 1848. From 1848 to around 1910, various owners and lessees attempted to achieve profitable operation but ultim ...

at Mittagong and, during a visit in February 1849, Governor Charles Augustus Fitz Roy was presented with a steel knife "mounted with colonial gold". All that now remains of Ophir is very slight. All that remains of William Tipple Smith is one small gold sample and a previously unmarked grave (number 4929, section 4, Rookwood Cemetery) that was only recently provided with a headstone recognising him as the discoverer of the first payable gold in Australia.

References

Kathryn Wells (5 October 2007). "The Australian Gold Rush". Website. Government of Australia. Retrieved 21 October 2012. {{authority control Ghost towns in New South Wales Towns in New South Wales Towns in the Central West (New South Wales) Cabonne Council