The Governor and his staff started with C. and Mr. Wallop for Brighton, where there was a grand review of the Victorian naval and military forces, ending in a sham fight, the enemy landing from nine vessels of war, and being repulsed by the militia on shore. It was terribly sultry and close, and they all came home late, very dusty, tired and hot, to go to a state banquet, given by the Mayor elect at the Town Hall that evening.
Tuesday, November 11th.—We made an expedition for the day to Ballarat to see the gold-mine belonging to the Band and Albion Company. Captain Dale, of H.M.S. Diamond, came with us, and we left Spencer Street Terminus at 11 a.m. Two hours in the train brought us to Geelong, where we stopped fifteen minutes for luncheon.
Geelong is prettily situated on Corio Bay, a continuation of Port Phillip. It has 23,000 inhabitants now, but once it hoped to rival Melbourne. The country we passed through was flat and uninteresting, though all under cultivation; but here you would rather require six acres for one sheep, instead of the six sheep to one acre of some parts of New Zealand.
Now we were able fully to realize the exceeding monotony of the blue gum, which we had previously heard so much about. Nature has fixed upon the gum or eucalyptus-tree as the tree appropriate to Australian soil, and wherever you look you see its straggling branches, and dull, ineffective, blue foliage, with light grey stems. They grow too luxuriantly, as in many places we saw fields that were being cleared of them by "barking" or cutting a ring on the trunk, some four feet above the ground, causing death through the non-communication of the sap. But it is a noticeable fact that much that is imported or grows in Australia, seems to flourish too freely. Take the cacti, the thistles, the sweetbriar, all of which are a plague to the farmer. Look at the "rabbit pest," which has ruined many owners of land, and which still remains the great problem of Australian agriculture. Each separate Government has spent thousands annually in trying to reduce the pest, but to no avail, as it appears the more they are destroyed the more they generate. They are now talking of building at an enormous cost a rabbit-proof wall all along the border of South Australia and New South Wales. Several station owners combined together, and spent in one year the sum of 20,000l. on the extirpation of rabbits, and on one run 1,000,000 were destroyed in a year, or over 27,000 per day.
Some of the houses in the villages we passed through were roofed with "shingles" or narrow strips of wood. They are cheap and easily obtained, but calculated only to last some five or six years.
We arrived at Ballarat at 3 p.m., and found Mr. Tyrell, the Superintendent of the Police, waiting at the station for us with his buggy. He drove us quickly out to the Band and Albion Mine.
We had to wait whilst the night "shift" at four o'clock went down the shaft, and we watched the windlass, which winds the cage up and down by machinery, and which in this case is made of wire rope of one single piece, in place of the manilla rope usually used in mines. I had to dress up in an old petticoat and loose jacket, with waterproof boots; and looked like an old bathing woman when ready to go down the shaft. The mine manager was there, and he and I and C. got into the cage. Three planks of wood, with an iron bar in the centre, to which was attached a hook for the rope, suspended us over the shaft. There was room for two on either side, and we had to stand quite still and straight. Down we shot into pitch darkness, through the narrow hole just large enough for the platform which grated against the sides, so exact was the fit, and often jerked with the uneven winding of the pulley. Down we went into the bowels of the earth, 1005 feet below the surface.
The most curious sensation of descending the shaft is that in the darkness, though you cannot see, you feel that the walls are being passed upwards and not downwards. We flew by the doors of many galleries, going down to the tenth and the last finished shaft. They are sinking yet another now, and were getting rid of the water by sending a tank of fifty gallons to the surface, suspended beneath the cage in each of its upward journeys.
We found ourselves in a cavern at the bottom, lighted by one candle, where the trucks with the quartz were standing ready to be hauled to the surface. At this moment the tank by accident overturned and emptied its contents with an alarming rush at our feet. By the light of our candles we groped along the narrow galleries, three feet wide by five feet seven inches broad laid with a track for the waggons. The slush and mud were ankle deep, and, at a particularly bad place, the old manager, without saying anything, quietly lifted me into a trolly, and ran me along to the end of the gallery. Here there were two miners at work, pickaxing the quartz, and one had just cut a hole for the powder to blast away a large piece of quartz rock, and was about to insert the fuze, which burns two or three minutes before the explosion to allow of the men having time to escape. We marked the dark line in the quartz, within which lies hidden the precious metal, and the roof overhead shone and glistened with bright sparks of gold. In an upper gallery there was an archway formed by a valuable vein, still unworked. Some time ago a "fault" was found in some earth extending for twenty feet. The Company can go on working their claim for some distance further on one side and almost interminably on the other, always supposing that the ore still continues. The miners work in shifts of eight hours each, receiving two pounds a week without rations, and they warm their "billy," or tin can of tea, which they bring down with them, over a candle.
The relief of coming up to the open air again from the damp, muggy atmosphere was great. The cheerful light of day seemed a return to life from a living death. One feels curiously nervous of accidents in a mine, though there can be no more danger there than in a railway tunnel. We heartily pitied all those poor men who spend their lives in the underground pit.