Australian gold rushes a £1,000 reward as "the first actual producer of alluvial gold for the market". The following goldfields were discovered in New South Wales during July 1851: On 20 July 1851 gold was found near present-day Castlemaine, Victoria (Mt Alexander Goldfields) at Specimen Gully in today's Castlemaine suburb of Barkers Creek. The gold was first found by Christopher Thomas Peters, a shepherd and hut-keeper on the Barker's Creek, in the service of William Barker. When the gold was shown in the men's quarters Peters was ridiculed for finding fool's gold, and the gold was thrown away. Barker did not want his
Klondike Gold Rush Wild", a novel about a sled dog. His colleague, poet Robert W. Service, did not join the rush himself, although he made his home in Dawson City in 1908. Service created well-known poems about the gold rush, among them "Songs of a Sourdough", one of the bestselling books of poetry in the first decade of the 20th century, along with his novel, "The Trail of '98", which was written by hand on wallpaper in one of Dawson's log cabins. The Canadian historian Pierre Berton grew up in Dawson where his father had been a prospector, and wrote several historical books