William Campbell

Who was William Campbell?

William Campbell was one of Australia's richest pastoralists, one of the first people to discover gold in Australia, and a conservative Victorian policitian.

Campbell was born in 1810 in Aberfoyle, Scotland. From 1834, Campbell managed a substantial collection of sheep farms in Inverness-shire and Argyll in the west of Scotland. Campbell migrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney, New South Wales in December 1838. He approached Governor George Gipps and the Macarthur family with letters of reference from the Colonial Office, and was soon given a job managing one of the Macarthurs' stations near Goulburn in New South Wales' Southern Tablelands.

In 1846, Campbell set out from the Macarthurs' stud farm at Camden, New South Wales, with 150 merinos, and overlanded to the Port Phillip District, searching for fresh pasture. After looking unsuccessfully for watered land in the uninhabited northern parts of the district, and being unable to obtain grazing licences elsewhere, Campbell settled near the town of Clunes, buying Tourall station, near the Clunes station owned by his brother-in-law Donald Cameron.

In early 1850, Campbell discovered gold while upon the Clunes station owned by Cameron; he showed the gold to Cameron, but they decided not to make the find public, for fear that a gold rush – the Victorian gold rush ultimately came the following year – would impact on their pastoral activities, and would diminish the pool of available labour in the colony.