Lessons from the life of Edward Hammond Hargraves – charlatan, impostor, and self-proclaimed discoverer of Australian gold.

If you were to google ‘Who discovered gold in Australia?’ you’d promptly get ‘Edward Hammond Hargraves’. He got the fame, fortune and adulation, but was he really the guy?

What about the two diggers he met on the Californian goldfields who told him where to look when he returned home?

What about the guys who led him to where they’d heard gold had been found before?

What about the pioneers whose discoveries had been documented years earlier?

This is both the story of an oversized layabout who received years of accolades and free lunches despite lumbering from one embarrassment to another, and of those who spent decades trying to expose him and seek their share of the glory.