The same day we went to an evening party at Federal Government House. Melbourne is the seat of the Federal as well as of the State Government; and the balls or receptions at Government House bring together what in a less democratic country one would call the society of the state. Society in Melbourne is very cultivated and agreeable. It is more settled, more homogeneous, more cosmopolitan than elsewhere in Australia, so that here, if anywhere, one loses the sense of a new country, which is at the same time part of its charm. The women and girls in Melbourne are also prettier, and more prettily dressed than elsewhere, and it makes a cult of charming-looking, elderly, white-haired matrons, wearing the dignity of their years becomingly. Not that pretty women and girls are not to be found everywhere, but Melbourne has a colder, more bracing climate, and is more in touch with the outside world. Two facts that tell in complexions and clothes.
CHAPTER XI
BALLARAT
Nobody has seen Australia who has not seen a goldfield, and though with a certain reluctance, for the way was long and the trains unprovided with restaurant cars, we decided to visit one from Melbourne, whence, as one counts distance in Australia, they were easily accessible. The choice seemed to lie between Bendigo and Ballarat; they were equal as far as we were concerned, but there was something about the name of Bendigo that expressed a smug prosperity, while Ballarat suggested something of the unbridled spirit of adventure and undisciplined audacity of the pioneer. We elected in favour of Ballarat. We started very early in the morning, as you have to do in Australia if you want to get anywhere, feeling full of enterprise and prepared for any hardship. There had been a riot in Ballarat, they told us, quite a serious affair, with military intervention. The line to Ballarat runs at first through the flat country that we had already traversed, covered with the odd little yellow boulders, which a well-informed passenger now assured us were formed of lava. There had been a lava flow all over the plain in some former geological period, he said, and the lava had gradually broken up into these little yellow boulders. The line then crosses the Bacchus Marsh Valley; this neighbourhood is the centre of the milk and butter trade, and china clay is also found in the district. Farther on we passed through the beautiful Werribee Gorge, remarkable for having been “eroded through glacial conglomerate into the underlying Ordovician sediment,” a well-informed passenger hastened to explain to us. While we listened respectfully an immense bird appeared hovering, lonely, majestic, above the gorge. “Aquila audax,” cried the too well-informed passenger eagerly; the largest known eagle. “How do you spell “Hordax?” inquired a lady. This tacit reflection on his pronunciation so discomfited him that he retired to another carriage, and we proceeded on our way unenlightened.
No sooner were we within sight of Ballarat than all our hopes of adventure were dashed; instead of the mining town that we had expected with little rows of corrugated iron huts, and miners in wideawakes and shirt-sleeves, what we did see was a cloud of white dust driving along a road, and behind it a town like any other town, containing, as a guide-book informed us, a “Hospital, Orphan and Benevolent Asylums, Women’s Homes, Mechanics’ Institute, with Library, Fine Art Gallery, Banks, Commercial Houses, two Town Halls, three theatres, forty churches, School of Mines and Museum, Agricultural High School, State schools, six iron-founderies, a brewery, a flour and two woollen mills, boot and other factories...!”
We were fifty years too late. We had come to see Ballarat, and we were shown it by a kind and hospitable stranger to whose care we had been consigned for the purpose. There is a tremendous fund of local patriotism in Australia. Everybody is very proud of their own town, for the simple reason that they have seen it grow and helped to make it. They have a paternal or proprietary interest in it. In Ballarat they are most proud, and justly so, of their principal street, Sturt Street, called presumably after the pioneer who named that wonderful hanging scarlet and black flower “Sturt’s desert pea.” Ballarat lies on the side of a hill, and Sturt Street, very wide and planted with trees in the centre, slopes sharply away through and out of the city towards a green hill that rises abruptly, and is framed, as it were, by the street.
Ballarat, we found, was gradually relapsing into what it had originally been, an agricultural centre. It was in the year of Queen Victoria’s accession that six prospectors, seeking good pastures for their flocks, reached Mount Buninyong, and looking westward saw a rich expanse of well-watered country that was soon settled as sheep runs, with its centre at Buninyong. It was not till 1851 that gold was first discovered in New South Wales, and the Melbourne authorities, alarmed at the consequent exodus of population, offered a reward of two hundred guineas for the discovery of gold in the state of Victoria. In July a man accidentally discovered gold in felling a tree at Buninyong, and a further search revealed the presence of gold in immense quantities on the site of what is now Ballarat. In those early days, “The Roaring Fifties,” as they were called, diggers hastened to Ballarat from all parts of the world, including New South Wales itself, for gold in such quantities had never been seen before. The whole neighbourhood became a vast encampment of tents and huts, and the peaceful sheep-farmers were forced to migrate.
The Government sought to enforce order among the cosmopolitan riotous crew of diggers. Licences were issued for a fee permitting them to work within certain specified limits, and the violence used in enforcing this rule in 1854 produced a riot among the diggers, who opposed armed resistance to the police and Government soldiers at what was known as the “Eureka Stockade.” Order was restored after some bloodshed, but the ringleaders went unpunished, for public opinion was on the side of the diggers. The gold licences were withdrawn and the grant of parliamentary representation soon brought about more civilised conditions, or, in the words of the local guide, “Thus these early years of revelry and devilry have faded and dissolved into the far-famed golden city of the south, the garden city of Ballarat.”
That was sixty years ago. The greatest output of gold for any one year in Victoria occurred in 1856, and amounted to nearly £12,000,000 in value; for many years afterwards the mines yielded annually more than five millions sterling. It can be easily seen that the discovery of gold had a very great influence on the prosperity and development of the State and the disposition of its cities. Ballarat and Bendigo, for instance, are respectively the second and third cities in Victoria. As the extraordinarily rich surface alluvial deposits of gold were exhausted, mining was carried on at lower depths, involving greater expenditure of plant and machinery, and producing smaller profits. But in Ballarat, both east and west, there is a profitable field for further development. After having been well fortified with lunch, our host of the day took us off to see a gold mine.
We motored through the handsome main street of Ballarat, noting with surprise the number of very large and important drapers’ shops, with their impressive expanse of plate glass. They were all having what they called “clean up sales,” and we wondered how a population of about 42,000 could possibly support them, till our chauffeur, who was also the owner of the car, explained that Ballarat was the metropolis for the whole surrounding agricultural neighbourhood of the mines. On the way we passed through old Ballarat, the driver jumping a gutter with surprising skill. Old Ballarat is a wonderful, ramshackle-looking place, run up anyhow in the early days of the gold rush, when fortunes were made in other ways besides digging, and a “pannikin of rum” fetched an ounce of gold. It had the air of Earl’s Court after the season, when the exhibition is shut; the houses were of all shapes and sizes, and the arcades over the pavement were the only concession to convenience.