Gold digger jewellery in colonial Australia

The crossed pick and shovel has been a heraldic symbol of mining since the middle ages, employed again in the iconography of the colonial Australian gold rushes. It emerged, without precedent, on gold jewels designed and made on the Victorian goldfields and colonial cities in the 1850s-60s and later. These are presented as literal claims to the pride of wealth made through manual labour, in one of the few contexts in which working class people could acquire wealth at the time. In this, the 'digger brooches' constitute a claim to social, and ultimately political, power in Australia.