"According to Australian history, gold was discovered at Lewis Pond Creek, in New South Wales, in February, 1851, by Edward Hargreaves; and at Clunes, sixteen miles from Ballarat, Victoria, in July of the same year, by a miner named Esmond. Both Hargreaves and Esmond were rewarded by the Government for their discoveries; they had been gold-miners in California, and were led to search where they did through the similarity of the ground. There is a report that gold was really found by a shepherd near Clunes at least two years before the discovery by Esmond; and there is another report that gold was found in 1814 by convicts who were building a road over the Blue Mountains, but the Government kept the discovery secret.
"No gold-mining region in the world ever gave up so much of the precious metal in the same time as did Ballarat in the early days. Claims eight feet square and the same in depth yielded from fifty thousand to sixty thousand dollars each; at the Prince Regent mine men made eighty thousand dollars each in a few months' time; at one claim a tubful of earth washed out nearly ten thousand dollars; one nugget, the 'Welcome,' was sold for fifty-two thousand five hundred dollars; and a claim that had been abandoned on the supposition that it was worked out, gave to the fortunate two men who then took possession no less than forty thousand dollars in less than two weeks. I could fill a volume with stories such as these and then shouldn't be at the end. The total yield of the Australian gold-mines up to the present time is said to be very nearly one billion seven hundred million dollars.
THE RUSH TO BALLARAT.
"Just before gold was discovered in Victoria the colony had seventy-seven thousand inhabitants; in a single year eighty thousand were added to the population, and three years after the gold discovery there were two hundred and thirty-six thousand inhabitants there. The number has increased ever since with more or less steadiness, and now exceeds a million. In 1854 there were fifty-one females to every one hundred males; now the proportions are eighty-eight to one hundred."
"We went from Ballarat to Sandhurst, another mining city," said Fred in his journal. "It was formerly known as Bendigo, and in old times was the scene of a rush much like that to Ballarat. It has had about the same history as Ballarat, having been wonderfully rich in alluvial diggings, then almost deserted, and finally doing a fine business in quartz mining. In one respect, to-day, it differs from Ballarat; at the latter place the mines are in the suburbs, while here they are right in the city. There is a mine in nearly every backyard; gold is sometimes—so they say—picked up in the street, and is even in the bricks of the houses. The first brick house built in Sandhurst was pulled down and crushed, and the crushing yielded three ounces of gold to the ton; at any rate, that's what they tell us, and they're very earnest about it too.
