Hence, though the Legislative Assembly passed the bill, the Upper House, whose members were mostly squatters, very promptly rejected it; and upon this there arose a struggle, the Ministry being determined to carry the bill, and the Council quite as resolute never to pass it. Acting on the advice of his Ministers, Sir John Young entreated the Upper House to give way; but it was deaf to all persuasions, and the Ministers determined to coerce it by adopting extreme measures. Its members had been nominated by a previous Governor for a period of five years, as a preliminary trial before the nominations for life; the term of their appointment was now drawing to a close, and Sir John Young, by waiting some little time, might easily have appointed a new Council of his own way of thinking. But the Ministers were impatient to have their measure passed, and, instead of waiting, they advised the Governor to nominate twenty-one new members of Council, who, being all supporters of the bill, would give them a majority in the Upper House; so that, on the very last night of its existence, it would be obliged to pass the measure and make it law. But when the opponents of the bill saw the trick which was being played upon them, they rose from their seats and resigned in a body. The President himself vacated his chair; and as no business could then be carried on, the Land Bill was delayed until the Council came to an end, and the Ministers thus found themselves outwitted. They were able, somewhat later, to effect their purpose; but this little episode in responsible government caused considerable stir at the time, and Sir John subsequently received a rebuke from the Colonial Secretary for his share in it.
2. Prince Alfred.—In 1868 Lord Belmore became Governor of New South Wales, and during his term of office all the colonies passed through a period of excitement on the occasion of a visit from the Queen’s second son, Prince Alfred. He was the first of the Royal Family who had ever visited Australia, and the people gave to him a hearty and enthusiastic reception. As he entered the cities flower-decked arches spanned the streets; crowds of people gathered by day to welcome him, and at night the houses and public buildings were brilliantly illuminated in his honour. But during the height of the festivities at Sydney a circumstance occurred which cast a gloom over the whole of Australia. The Prince had accepted an invitation to a picnic at Clontarf, and was walking quietly on the sands to view the various sports of the holiday-makers, when a young man named O’Farrell rushed forward and discharged a pistol at him. The ball entered his back, and he fell dangerously wounded. For a day or two his life trembled in the balance, and the colonists awaited the result with the greatest excitement, until it was made known that the crisis was past. No reason was alleged for the crime except a blind dislike to the Royal Family; and O’Farrell was subsequently tried and executed.
The Lithgow Zigzag, the Blue Mountains.
3. Railway Construction.—New South Wales has three main lines of railway with many branches. One starts from Sydney, and passes through Goulburn to Albury on its way to Melbourne; one goes north to Newcastle, then through the New England district, and so to Brisbane; and the third runs from Sydney over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, and away to Bourke, on the Darling River. Those rugged heights, which so long opposed the westward progress of the early colonists, have proved no insuperable barrier to the engineer; and the locomotive now slowly puffs up the steep inclines and drags its long line of heavily-laden trucks where Macquarie’s road, with so much trouble, was carried in 1815. The first difficulty which had to be encountered was at a long valley named Knapsack Gully. Here the rails had to be laid on a great viaduct, where the trains run above the tops of the tallest trees. The engineers had next to undertake the formidable task of conducting the line up a steep and rocky incline, seven hundred feet in height. This was effected by cutting a “zigzag” in the rock; the trains run first to the left, rising upon a slight incline; then, reversing, they go to the right, still mounting slightly upwards; then, again, to the left; and so on till the summit is reached. By these means the short distance is rendered long, but the abrupt steepness of the hill is reduced to a gentle inclination. The trains afterwards run along the top of the ridge, gradually rising, till, at the highest point, they are three thousand five hundred feet above the level of the Sydney station. The passengers look down from the mountain tops on the forest-clad valleys far below; they speed along vast embankments or dash through passages cut in the solid rock, whose sides tower above them to the height of an ordinary steeple. In some places long tunnels were bored, so that the trains now enter a hill at one side and emerge from the other.
One of these tunnels was thought to be unsafe; the immense mass of rock above it seemed likely to crush downwards upon the passage, and the engineers thought that their best course would be to remove the hill from above it. Three and a half tons of gunpowder were placed at intervals in the tunnel, and connected by wires with a galvanic battery placed a long distance off. The operation of firing the mine was made a public occasion, and Lady Belmore agreed to go up to the mountains and perform the ceremony of removing the hill. When all was ready, she touched the knob which brought the two ends of the wire together. A dull and rumbling sound was heard, the solid rock heaved slowly upward, and then settled back to its place, broken in a thousand pieces, and covered with rolling clouds of dust and smoke. All that the workmen had then to do was to carry away the immense pile of stone, and the course was clear for laying the rails.
When the line reached the other side of the Blue Mountains there were great difficulties in the descent, and here the engineers had to lay out zigzags of greater extent than the former. By these the trains now descend easily and safely from the tops of the mountains down into the Lithgow Valley far below.
