The city has its drawbacks. There is dust in the summer, which the water-carts seek in vain to control; and there is mud in winter, which no raving against the Corporation appears to affect; and the less said on the drainage question the better. Again, as to weather, there are people who protest against the suddenness of the change when the wind in January chops round from north to south, and after panting in the morning you begin to think of a fire at night. But the three hundred delightful days of the year, when existence is a pleasure, are to be remembered, and not the odd sixty-five when ills have to be endured. A favourable impression is usually made upon visitors by the city with its charm of suburbs, its wealth and reserves, its crowds of well-dressed people, always busy about either their pleasure or their business, always obliging, the poorest showing no signs of poverty, nor yet the lowest of the influence of drink. And if a visitor had ideas of his own he would withhold any adverse dictum until he was away, and would not seek to wound the feelings of his hospitable hosts. With them, at any rate, it is a cardinal principle of faith that their much-loved home is entitled to the proud appellation of the 'Queen City of the South.'
An 'unearned increment,' such as would satisfy the most glowing dreams of the most ardent speculator, has occurred in the capital. One instance may be given. One of the few original half-acre blocks now in possession undisturbed—not cut up—of the family of the original purchaser is situated in a good part of Collins Street. The colonist whose executors are now holding the property gave £20 for it in 1837. To-day the sixty-six feet frontage to Collins Street is worth £1,150 per foot; the Flinders Lane frontage is worth £350 per foot. A little ciphering brings out a sum total of £99,000 as the present value of the original £20 investment. And for decades the income derived from the block has been counted by many thousands per annum. The £20 has by this time earned at least £200,000 in all. In many country places a £5 lot will bring £500 when a decade has passed. But then the place may not become a centre, and your 'unearned increment' will be no more substantial than the evening cloud. There is a reverse to this shield, as to all others.
Bird's-eye View of Sandhurst.
From Melbourne it is easy to journey to the two great gold-fields of Victoria—Ballarat and Sandhurst. The latter is due north, and is reached by a double-track railway, built in the early days at a cost of £40,000 per mile. Single-track railways, costing £4,000 per mile, are now the order of the day. Sandhurst is the Bendigo of old days. It has had many ups and downs; has been deserted, and has been ruined; but the result is the fine city of to-day, with its broad, tree-lined streets, its splendid buildings, and high degree of commercial activity. As a recent writer puts it: 'What vicissitudes has not the place undergone! From enormous wealth to the verge of bankruptcy, from the pinnacle of prosperity to the direst adversity; from financial soundness to commercial rottenness; and yet, with that wonderful elasticity and buoyancy which characterises our gold-fields, the falling ball has rebounded, the sunken cork has again come to the surface, and Sandhurst, after all her reverses, is perhaps now richer and on a safer basis than ever—a city whose wide, well-watered streets are perfect avenues of trees, bordered by handsome buildings and well-stocked shops, brilliantly lighted by gas; whose hotel accommodation is proverbially good, whose civic affairs are admirably regulated, whose citizens are busy, hospitable, and prosperous.' There is no mistake about the character of the town. Miles and miles of country before you enter it have been excavated and upturned by the alluvial digger. And there are few more desolate sights to be met with than a worked-out and deserted diggings, for often Nature refuses to lend her assistance, and does not hide the violated tract with trees or verdure. Ugly gravel heaps, staring mounds of 'pipe-clay,' deposits of sludge, a surface filled with holes, broken windlasses, the wrecks of whims, all combine to make a hideous picture as they stand revealed in the pitiless sunshine. Alluvial digging of the shallow type is a curse to the unhappy country operated upon. But alluvial mining has long had its little day, and ceased to be in and about Sandhurst, and the town lives now by deep quartz mining. You come upon the 'poppet-heads' and the batteries everywhere, even in the beautiful reserve which is the centre of the city. Sandhurst contains 30,000 inhabitants, 8,000 of whom are miners, while the value of the mining machinery and plant is three-quarters of a million sterling.
Old Bendigo had busy scenes, but never did it witness such excitement as when a share mania broke out in 1871. Then it was that the richness of the so-called 'saddle reefs' was demonstrated. The old-established companies were paying well, and the Extended Hustlers exhibited one cake of 2,564 ozs. as the result of a crushing of 260 tons. This was just the spark wanted to set the market aflame. From being unduly neglected, Sandhurst was unduly exalted; new companies were projected in every direction where a line of reefs could be imagined; existing 'claims' were subdivided, and in a few months £500,000 was invested in Sandhurst mines. Of course there was a reaction; but though the speculators lost money to sharpers, there really were auriferous reefs in Sandhurst to be honestly worked, and no town seems more likely to hold its own in Victoria than the great quartz city. Foundries and potteries are springing up in its midst, or rather have sprung up; vineyards and orchards are found to be successes in its neighbourhood, and the visitor is grateful for the tree planting in the broad streets, appreciates the water supply, is duly dazed if he enters a battery chamber, and is delighted when 1,500 feet below the surface he is allowed to break off some fragment of glittering quartz.
Ballarat lies 100 miles to the north-east of Melbourne, or at least it is that distance by rail, viâ Geelong, but a direct line will soon reduce it to a distance of seventy miles. An upland plateau, with a fringe of hills all around, some of these now denuded of their timber, and glittering white, cold, and bare in the sun, the earth pitted with holes and gullies, scarified as if by some gigantic rooster, 'mullock'-heaps, 'poppet-heads,' and engine-stacks everywhere. This is one's first impression of Ballarat. Gold-fields are very much like each other all over the world. 'Substitute pines for eucalypti,' says Mr. Julian Thomas, 'and I could imagine this to be California. But when one first drives from the station and sees the magnificent width of Sturt Street, with the avenue of trees planted along the centre, the public buildings, banks, and churches—you are possessed with astonishment that this is a mining town. Ballarat is indeed a great inland capital. The difference between this and Sandhurst is that at the latter the mines obtrude themselves everywhere. One cannot go half a block but one has mullock-heaps and poppet-heads in view. There is a mine in every back-yard. At Sandhurst it is gold—nothing but gold! Small nuggets are occasionally, so say the truthful inhabitants, picked up by sharp-visioned pedestrians in the public streets. There is gold or evidences of it all around, even in the very bricks of the houses in which we live, for the old men tell that the first brick building ever erected in Sandhurst was pulled down and crushed, yielding three ounces to the ton! In Ballarat it is all different. Walk up Sturt Street, or along Lydiard Street, and one sees nothing but substantial buildings and avenues of trees. The mines are in the suburbs, and do not deface the town, as at Sandhurst. After an experience of the plains the city is a perfect Arcadia. Embowered in trees, the homes of the people are surrounded with gardens. There is verdure and vegetation in every street. One mentally associates an amount of roughness and coarseness with a mining town. Here it is quite other than so. There is everything to bring light and culture and sweetness home to the people. Sandhurst is superior in one respect—that its public gardens are right in the centre of the town, running by the side of old Bendigo Creek; but there is nothing in the colonies to surpass Wendouree Lake, the walks around it, and the adjacent reserves and Botanical Gardens. An easy walk from the town, and you embark on one of the fleet of elegant little steamers—perfect yachts—furnished with luxurious cushions and rugs as protection from the spray. Here everything is calm and peaceful. There is no dust, no noise, no smells. Sailing boats and rowing boats are plentiful; in little punts fishermen are bobbing for perch. This is a lung which gives health and happiness to the inhabitants of Ballarat. And when, after crossing the lake, you land under the shade of English oak trees, and the air is perfumed with the scent of new-mown hay, you feel that in no other mining community in the world have the people such privileges as here. The Botanical Gardens are always beautiful, and are a model to other establishments of the same kind in much larger communities.'
It was here, early in August 1851, that alluvial gold was discovered at a bend in the Yarrowee Creek, renamed Golden Point, where the toil of some of the earlier diggings yielded from twenty to fifty pounds weight of gold per day. In some spots, indeed, the gold lay almost on the surface, amidst the roots of the bush grass, to be turned up by the wheels of the passing bullock-drays, or picked out by hand after heavy showers. At first it was thought that the auriferous deposit did not extend beyond the commencement of the pipe-clay stratum, and most of the diggers moved further afield as soon as they had turned over the bare skin, so to speak, of the ground; but one digger, more persistent than the rest, dug beyond the clay, and was richly rewarded by finding that here lay the true home of the precious metal, here were the 'pockets' so dear to the heart of the true digger. The deserted 'claims' were quickly reoccupied, fresh thousands of diggers poured to the locality, and in a couple of months Ballarat was more vigorous than ever.
Then for a time it was thought that the golden riches lay solely in the alluvial stratum; but more modern research led to the discovery of a number of quartz reefs, from which large quantities of gold have been taken. Amongst the leading mines at present being worked are the celebrated 'Block Hill,' the 'Band and Albion,' 'Redan,' 'Washington,' 'Koh-I-Noor,' 'Band of Hope,' 'Victoria United,' 'Llanberis,' 'Smith's Freehold,' 'Williams' Freehold,' together with scores of others, employing upwards of three hundred steam engines, with an aggregate of about ten thousand horse-power, besides numerous machines worked by horses. The total value of the plant and machinery in use is nearly a million sterling, and the number of miners engaged in active operations is returned as nine thousand, of whom nearly one-seventh are Chinese. The total number of quartz reefs proved to be auriferous is between 350 and 400, while the extent of auriferous ground worked upon in the district is 187 square miles.