The Biggest Ever Gold Mining Swindle In The Colonies

Robert Philps, later a Minister for Mines and a Queensland Premier, called it "the biggest ever mining swindle in the Colonies". He for one certainly knew, because Robert Ross himself sold Philps a swag of the Company shares in early 1888. This is the true story of multiple gold frauds by Robert Ross near Yeppoon Queensland, and a dubious Sydney Company involving many leading identities now well known in our history. Some made fortunes almost overnight and some ended up mortally wounded. The Supreme Court sessions featured most of the leading 'silks' in the Colony and even our later first Prime Minister Edmund Barton and all the sworn evidence and verdicts were meticulously recorded and then first sealed under Statute for 30 years.

It was hailed as the biggest gold discovery in the world this century, worth more than #15 billion, but it turned out to be the greatest mining scandal of all time. This is the astonishing account of the how Bre-X Minerals shot to fame after announcing the discovery of gold on Borneo.

Between 1849 and 1853 shares in nearly 120 public companies to exploit the booming goldfields of California and Australia were offered to the British public. The companies were collectively capitalised at over £15 million, but in the end only some £1.75 million was actually raised between 42 of them, with only one company surviving what the newspapers of the day described as a ‘gold bubble’. This book provides an overview of the entire bubble event, its antecedents and its outcomes. A number of researchers have investigated an earlier boom in the mid-1820s to reopen gold and silver mines in Latin America and several have studied individual company operations of that period. This is the first detailed investigation of the British gold bubble companies of the 1850s and their involvement in the almost simultaneous gold rushes on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Presents the story of how Latin American civilization emerged from the encounter of three great civilizations in the sixteenth century.