Volume 23, No. 7, November 2017 437 Shattered Dreams: recollections of the Palmer Goldrush 1874-1875 * Gordon Grimwade † and Christine Grimwade §† First-hand accounts of life on the Palmer Goldfeld in its heady and hectic formative years are few and far between. For many years historians and ar- chaeologists working on and writing about the Palmer have had minimal pri- mary material at their fngertips. Letters from miners on the diggings were those gems that one hoped for, but rarely sourced. Apart from the plethora of newspaper reports and archival material, the most signifcant, published, frst person recollections of the later stages of the Palmer rush are those of JH (John Harrison) Binnie, My Life on a Tropic Goldfeld, self-published in 1944 and recounted over 60 years after the events. 1 John Binnie details life on the Palmer where his father, Andrew, ran hard rock crushing plants from 1875 until 1882. John, then six-years-old, his mother and siblings had joined their father in 1876. Contemporaneous recollections remain elusive. The transcription of George Wilcox’s 1874 diary, however, and its subsequent publication by the Cooktown Historical Society in 1997, flled a valuable niche for those fortunate enough to be aware of its publication. 2 In 2009, the fortuitous discovery in the Cheshire and Chester Archives, in the United Kingdom of a single, short letter written in 1876 by John Brown, added markedly to the known, extant, contemporaneous literature. 3 In 2015 a conversation (Grimwade/Petrich) brought to light seven letters about the Palmer Goldfeld, by itinerant miner, William Bartie (1831-c.1905). They were among 51 letters written to his wife, Mary, in Victoria, between September 1873 and October 1875, and held in the family archives for over 130 years. 4 * This article has been peer reviewed. † Gordon Grimwade is a north Queensland based historical archaeologist with several decades of experience in tropical regions, mining heritage and Asian settlement in northern Australia. He is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Flinders University, South Australia. Gordon writes for Dig Into History, a US based magazine for young readers, and is a member of its international editorial advisory board. § Christine Grimwade is a post-graduate history student at the University of New England and has undertaken military and genealogical research in North Queensland. QUEENSLAND HISTORY JOURNAL THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF QUEENSLAND