The treasure of Doctor Ker, exhibited first at Bathurst and then at Sydney, soon drove everybody wild. The very newspapers which had first maligned the discovery, now sounded the trumpet in praise of this wonderful piece of good fortune. “The news,” says the Morning Herald of Sydney, “will astonish Australia, will astonish England, Ireland, and Scotland, will astonish California, and will astonish the whole world. On the arrival of the packet in England, when every newspaper throughout the United Kingdom shall have repeated the news of the discovery as the wonder of our age, the sensation will be profound, and will exceed anything hitherto talked of, or thought of; from the queen on the throne to the peasant in the fields, there will be but one united exclamation of surprise and astonishment; from the palace to the cottage, from the drawing-room to the stable, from the schoolboy to the philosopher and the statesman, there will be one universal talk of this mass of gold, and of the country whence it came; from all the ports in Great Britain and Ireland, ships will be freighted with passengers and goods—population and wealth will rush to Australia like a torrent. Port Jackson will be the best filled and the most flourishing harbour in the world, and Sydney will take its rank amongst the most opulent cities. New South Wales will be looked upon in England as the queen of her colonies.”
Waiting the impression to be produced in the mother country by the news of the “golden land,” to use again the expression of the Morning Herald, the population of Sydney flocked to the diggings; the numbers who left were about 400 a day. Sailors deserted their ships in the harbours. Government, on account of the dearness of provisions, doubled the salaries of their officials. In every direction there was a general hunt in quest of new “placers;” and the districts South and West of Sydney were explored by miners to the extent of 200 miles. Auriferous deposits were discovered in the counties of St. Vincent, Argyle, Dampier, Wallace, and Wellesley, as well as in the basins of Murrumbedgee Shoalhaven, the River Hume, the River Peel, and the Snow River. At the extreme north of New South Wales, in the district of Moreton Bay, the diggings are in full work at the several branches of the River Condamine. Nearer to the capital, in New England, gold has been found in abundance in the basin of the River Macdonald. 200 miles south of Sydney, at Braidwood, one miner realized £30 sterling in five weeks; another £42 sterling in fifteen days; and a party of three £200 sterling in one week. Nothing was more common than a produce of two ounces per man per day; and not unfrequently it reached as much as one pound. Women also set to work. One widow and her two daughters are said to have collected an average of two ounces a-day.
The district of Turon did not lose its repute. Such was the attraction for gold hunting, that a labourer at Meroo would not undertake to work for hire at a lower rate than £3 a-week, in addition to his food. Up to October, 1851, the Government had given out 8,637 licenses; 10,000 miners were at work in the province of Sydney, and £215,866 sterling, (about 5,500,000 francs) had already been shipped to England.
In December, the yield of the “placers” averaged £40,000 sterling per week, a sum equivalent, after deducting the stoppages during extreme drought and rain, to £2,000,000 sterling per annum.
These results, however brilliant they appeared, were soon eclipsed by the accounts from the province of Victoria. Gold was first discovered at Ballarat, where it was found at some considerable depth from the surface; then at Mount Alexander, where it was dug up merely by the pickaxe, almost on the ground; at Caliban, fifteen miles further, at Albany, on the Murray, and on the east coast at Gipp’s Land.
It is asserted that the chain of hills which separates the province of Victoria from Sydney, and which are known by the name of the Snowy Mountains, is one vast mine of gold. Every day announces some new discovery, and that of yesterday is almost always surpassed by that of to-day. The mines of Mount Alexander are in extent about ten miles, and the earth is said to be full of gold; they find the precious metal in a gravelly clay, and in the interstices of a slatey formation. It is sufficient to dig six inches of soil; and already, in the month of December, 1851, there were 15,000 miners at work, and the deposits appeared inexhaustible.
Here occurred the most extraordinary events. Amongst ordinary cases, seven workmen were cited, who amassed 500 ounces of gold in three weeks, which at £3 sterling per ounce, the then current value of gold in the colony, was about [110]260 francs per day each; at another time, two miners, in the same space of time, collected 400 ounces, or [111]735 francs per day each. One carman, who had never even removed the earth, made up a bag of £1,500 sterling in five weeks. A convict, but just freed, made £150 sterling in sixteen days. A workman, who had never exercised any trade but that of shoeing horses, was somewhat less fortunate, but brought home £100 sterling, clear, after paying all expenses, and working five weeks. A boy of fourteen, in less time, collected £400 sterling; and another of the same age, £120 sterling; but the ambition of the workmen knew no bounds; there was scarcely a man who set to work digging a hole who did not expect to come home at night with £40 or £50. These expectations were kept up by some most wonderful instances of fortune, the recital of which, repeated from group to group, amongst the diggers, soon became matters of history. One spot of a few feet square produced [112]45,000 fr.; four sailors, after six weeks’ work, loaded their cart with a case containing two hundred pounds of gold, about [113]260,000 francs; four other workmen, after two months’ labour, divided [114]1,000,000 francs. One workman was spoken of who gathered twenty-five pounds in two or three weeks, and another was known to have amassed eleven pounds in forty-eight hours; another, in less than one hour, made up a package weighing thirty pounds, worth at least [115]38,000 francs. It was said that the miners would no longer pick up gold-dust, it was not worth while; anything smaller than a pin’s head was thrown aside as too insignificant for notice. There must have been fine gleanings from these fastidious reapers.
In the “placers” of Mount Ophir, and of the Turon, where the profits and the workings were on a more moderate scale, there was less difficulty in preserving order and good behaviour. Captain Erskine, of the Royal Navy, who was there about the end of July, 1851, reports most favourably in this respect. The miners received him with the most perfect civility; order and good feeling was the general rule. Captain Erskine only saw one man drunk on the placers. The sale of spirituous liquors was forbidden, and the Sundays religiously observed. There even appeared some traces of regular industry. The neighbouring “placers” of Port Philip presented a perfectly different scene. There, mining appeared to be considered as a complete lottery. The coolest heads soon grew as wild as the steadiest—passions and extravagance broke loose in all directions. The consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors was enormous; gambling tables, quarrels, and prize fighting, desecrated the Sundays. One man was quoted who placed a £5 note between two pieces of bread and butter, and ate it as a sandwich. Another rolled up two £5 Bank notes, and swallowed them as a pill. A third went into a pastry cook’s shop to eat a cake, threw down a Bank note, and refused to take up the change. The miners appeared to have no idea of the value of money; they bore their losses with the most perfect philosophy. One man, who had had a draft of [116]3760 francs stolen from him, and on enquiring at the bank, finding it had been already cashed, exclaimed, “Bah! there is no want of money now.”
A “placer” in the colony of Victoria presented the appearance of an immense encampment, with thousands of tents of all sizes, colours, and shapes; the bivouac during the night was illuminated with fires in all directions, and noisy with the discharge of guns and pistols; every miner was armed to the teeth, and could only trust to himself for the protection of his booty and his life; every one kept himself on the qui vive, and took even the precaution of daily discharging and reloading his firearms every evening at sunset. Government offered a weekly transport to Melbourne at a charge of 1 per cent.; but as, notwithstanding so exorbitant a charge, this transport was without any guarantee against robbery, the miners formed themselves into parties, when tired with making their fortunes, and escorted their own treasures. The bandits from Van Dieman’s Land came down like birds of prey, and fell upon the miners, and in such numbers and with such fury, that when a murder was committed the local police were not unfrequently afraid to go amongst them to seize the murderer. The authorities of Melbourne were unable to give effectual aid under such circumstances; for their own city police, with the exception of six, had all gone off to the diggings. A cry of despair and indignation was universally raised. “The imbecility of our Government,” says the Argus, “has compelled us to take the police into our own hands, and to make lynch law the rule of action.” The Morning Herald says, “The Government must act with energy, and without loss of time, or we shall become a second California, with mutiny and lynch law established, and crime in its naked deformity.” The Governor, Sir G. Fitzroy, responded to this appeal by sending home for more troops, and by recruiting his police by discharged soldiers. Will it be sufficient for the preservation of this community, scarcely yet formed, from the threatened danger of disorganization, to send a vessel of war to the station of Port Jackson, and to Port Philip, and to reinforce the garrisons of Australia, as Sir John Packington proposes, with some 400 or 500 soldiers?
Fortunately, such a state of disorder is not likely to become chronic; when public authority, which ought to suppress it, is declared incompetent, society, alarmed for its own existence, steps in and at all hazard gets rid of turbulent characters. What is to be as much feared, especially in a community of such recent formation, is the attraction to a spirit of gambling, from fortunes thus suddenly acquired. Men, fascinated by such a magnet, abandon all productive and useful employment. Neither their ordinary vocations or their known duties will retain them in their ordinary habits; no rates of pay can follow the progressive chances of the miner with his pickaxe; the trade of gold-seeking supplants every other occupation; a whole people are bowed down to the earth, and absorbed in a work which brutalizes them, and they abandon to others all the cares of and attention to the cultivation of the soil.