BALLARAT.
[FROM A CORRESPONDENT.] Two hours' railway travelling will take you from Melbourne to Geelong, over rich, flat, grassy plains, with scarcely a tree, nothing but ugly posts and rails to break their outline. In summer these plains must be parched and dreary beyond description, but it is May now, and the autumn rains made them green as an emerald, and pleasant for the eye to rest on. Geelong is scarcely worth stopping at, unless to speculate upon why it is not Melbourne and Melbourne it, as might have been the case,—so superior in many ways is its situation,—if its harbour bar had been cut through a few years sooner. During two more hours' railway you rise gradually, and emerge from a forest of ill grown, scrubby gums, upon a large, undulating, irregular amphitheatre, surrounded by small hills. Seventeen years ago the locality was scarcely ever visited except by blacks, for it was covered with brush and un- productive. Now it is Ballarat, the fourth city in all Australia. Strange, irregular, uncouth, human anthill it is, with its miscel- laneous cells above, and its galleries beneath the ground. You may walk two miles and more, from east to west or from north to south, without getting fairly out of the town. The Louses are of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, generally not contiguous, and the majority consisting of a ground-floor only. Most con- spicuous are the hotels, and the banks, glorying in stone fronts and plate glass,.as befits their dignity ; for are they not suckers at the fountain-head, drawing the golden stream which, joining other rills, waters the whole world of commerce ? Next door to one of these is perhaps a common log-hut, or a two-roomed cottage of corrugated iron, or a large shop stocked till its miscellaneous contents overflow through doors and windows, and are hung on hooks and pegs outside. Next to this, perhaps, and still in the heart of the town, may be an acre or two of ground covered with disgorged gravel and mud, in the midst of which, and at one end of a great mound twenty or thirty feet high, puffs and sobs a steam-engine, as it works the shaft and puddles the produce of the gold mine beneath. It is easy to gain admittance to a gold mine, at least, if the manager is satisfied that you are not a spy, and are not interested in the " claim " which lies nearest this one, and with which it probably is, or will be, as a matter of course, engaged in litigation as soon as the workings of either approach the boundary between them. Boundaries above ground are productive enough of disputes, but they are
nothing to boundaries under ground. The richest harvest reaped by the Victorian Bar is that of mining cases and mining appeals.
But there is not much to see in a mine. Down below I suppose it is not so very different from a coal mine (for the gold is far too minute in quantity to be visible), and not much cleaner. The operations at the surface consist simply in stirring and washing the mud and gravel with water in various ways till the gold settles at the bottom. But a good big panful of some two thousand pounds' worth of the clean yellow gold is a pretty thing to see for once.
But the strangest place in Ballarat is an unsightly piece of ground on the slope of a hill, many acres in extent, which has been turned over, heaped up, scooped out, drained, flooded, under- mined, perforated, shored up with timber, sifted, scarified, and otherwise tormented as Mother Earth never was tormented before.
It is the remains of the old surface diggings, almost (if not quite)
the first discovered, and the richest in all Australia, but long since worked out, and now deserted and dismal. It is a pity that no scribbling digger kept a journal during the first year or two after gold was found. Generally speaking, I believe the stories
which are told of those days are strictly true. The reality was so strange, so different from any other condition of circumstances conceivable in this century, the crowds suddenly collected were so miscellaneous, and at first so entirely emancipated from all rule, precedent, or prejudice, that there was enough that was original and ludicrous without having recourse to exaggeration and cari- cature. I believe it is a fact, and no fiction, that a successful digger had a gold collar made for his dog, that he, like his master, might put aside his working dress and be magnificent for the rest of his days. It is a fact that another rode through Balla- rat with his horse shod with gold. To keep a carriage and pair was the great ambition of a digger's wife. There was a woman near Colac who lived in a common log hut, with nothing but mud for floor, and a couple of stools and a bench or two for furni- ture. Outside the hut was the carriage, under a tarpaulin, and a pair of horses grazed near. For a year or more she was con- stantly to be seen on the road to Geelong. Her son drove, and she sat inside, in silks and satins gorgeously arrayed, a short pipe in her mouth, and the gin bottle reposing on the cushion by her side.
One day at Ballarat a man rushed up to the police magistrate, his face livid, and speechless with excitement, so that the magis- trate began to think be had just committed or witnessed a murder. At last he found words to express himself. He had come upon a nugget so big he could scarcely carry it, and dared not bring it in alone. Two or three of the police went back with him to help him, and he brought it in in triumph, followed by a procession of diggers. And indeed it was a nugget. It was about as big as a leg of mutton, and much the same shape, white lumps of quartz sticking to it like so much fat. It weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he was offered 5,000/. for it on the spot. He refused to sell it, and took it home to England, to exhibit it. But it proved to be a nugget of expensive habits, and at last was sold to pay for its keep and lodging, and the finder ended, as so many finders of great nuggets ended, in poverty and wretchedness, and even madness.
At Ararat, 56 miles beyond Ballarat, the gold-fields remain just as they were left by the diggers ; and the claims are more in working order and less broken in than at Ballarat. Ararat is now a thriving township, containing perhaps 2,000 inhabitants. Twelve years ago there were 65,000 people there, digging or deal- ing with diggers. When the " rush " began the stream of people and drays was continuous, the noses of each team of bullocks close to the dray in front of them, for the whole 56 miles, along a track on which, though the district is a thriving one, you will now hardly meet anything on wheels once in 10 miles. Centuries may pass without obliterating the traces of these dig- gings. There is a broad belt of ground, two or three miles long, pierced by thousands of shafts 30 or 40 feet apart, with mounds of white sand and gravel beside them. Most of the shafts are oval, four or five feet long, and about two or three wide. Little holes are cut alternately in the nearest pair of opposite sides, to act as steps for going up and down. Each shaft is neatly and cleanly cut, and as intact as if freshly made. All are deserted now ; only a few Chinamen remain, laboriously gathering up the crumbs that are left, and contriving to live and save money where an Englishman could not subsist.
There were comparatively few men, gentle or simple, in Victoria when gold was first found, who did not try their luck at digging for a greater or less time. Nevertheless, though so short a time has elapsed, it is hard to get a true conception of the state of things during the height of the gold fever. No two men had the same experience. One will tell you that nothing could be more quiet and peaceable and orderly than a concourse of men upon a newly found gold-field ; that property and life were safe, and every man so eagerly and excitedly absorbed in his work as scarcely to take his eyes off it while daylight lasted, and impatient of nothing except interruption. Another will say he never stirred after sunset without an open knife in his band, and will tell you (no doubt with truth) that hundreds, and even thousands, disappeared, whether murdered for their gold, drowned in a swollen creek, or lost and starved in the bush, no one knew, or cared to inquire ; for in all that crowd, who would miss a lonely and friendless man ? Not that the police, as far as their scanty numbers permitted, were otherwise than most efficient. In general, they were on the best of terms with the diggers ; and only in one serious instance the diggers at Ballarat, considering themselves aggrieved, made armed resistance to the authorities. They formed an entrenched camp and were not dispersed till as many as a hundred of their number had been killed or severely wounded. If money came fast, it had to be spent fast, too. Actual famine was with diffi- culty averted during the first winter. The country round was drained of supplies ; provisions went up to fabulous prices. The diggers could not eat their gold ; and it cost 100/. a ton to bring up flour from Melbourne ; for the road was a quagmire like that from Balaklava to Sebastopol, and ninety miles long, instead of seven. The carcases of the dead draught bullocks were alone sufficient to indicate the track to one, if not two of the senses.
But it is a mistake to suppose that gold-digging has been throughout a gambling occupation, offering a few prizes and many blanks, and pursued only by reckless men. The big nuggets soon came to an end, and on the other hand experience was gained, and digging became in the long run a tolerably certain and steady occupation, at which a strong man able to bear heat and cold, wet and fatigue, could in general make a pretty steady income, though not often a large one. Many have risen from comparative poverty to great wealth in Victoria, a few by owning sheep stations, many by steady devotion to business, some without any real exertion of body or mind, by the sheer accident of lucky speculations ; but I have never heard of a really wealthy man who became so by digging for gold. Yet some have gone on persistently year after year, in New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand, when one field was worked out travelling to another. For there was a strong fascination in the freedom and romance of the life. I have seen the pale face of an overworked waiter at a large hotel light up 'With enthusiasm as he spoke of it. He had left England and come to Australia ill of consumption, as a last chance to save his life. Idleness did not mend him, he said, so off he went with the rest to the diggings. The first day his limbs would hardly bear him, but each day he got a little stronger, till at the end of four years he had saved seven hundred pounds and his life. He had been in very different climates—in New South Wales, Victoria, and Otago—but, strange to say, heat, cold, and wet only helped to cure him, and he never even caught cold, he said, as long as he eschewed a house and was faithful to canvas. Alas ! in an unlucky hour he invested his savings in township land ; the place did not succeed, and in a few weeks his investment was not worth as many farthings as he had given pounds for it. And ii was too late to begin again.
It is over now, the wonderful Age of Gold, as well as the primi- tive pastoral age which preceded it. In place of diggers swarming like bees, dignified steam-engines draw the gold from the earth, not for those who toil with pick and spade, but chiefly for that crowd of mining brokers, and idle, disreputable speculators who crowd the pavement of the Ballarat "Cornet." Few make money by investing in mines. Of those who do, most have secret infor- mation; for there is much trickery mixed up with operations in mining shares, and hundreds have lost by them the savings of more prosperous times. Victoria is no longer the place for men with few possessions beyond youth and energy, and with an antipathy to a high stool in a merchant's office. Let not any bril- liant or laborious young Templar doubt but that Melbourne and Ballarat solicitors, like English ones, have sons and sons-in-law, and that there, as at Westminster, interest and connection are useful, if not essential, handmaids to brains and industry. Romance is at an end ; capital has reasserted its sway, and pride of purse is triumphant. It needs must be so ; and doubtless, on the whole, mankind gains. But it is difficult to love humanity in the abstract, and tastes and convictions will quarrel sometimes.—
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