Australian Heroes and Adventurers

by William T. Pyke

The Victorian population at this time was only 77,000, of which 30,000 were concentrated in the two principal towns. Nearly all these people became mad for gold. The whole of the colony was stirred to its inmost depths, and underwent a total revolution in all its social relations.

Almost the first manifestation of the change was shown in the sudden appearance of an immense motley throng upon the roads that converged to the gold-fields. Thousands of men of every walk in life—rich and poor, old and young, sturdy and weak—were enticed from the comforts and delights of the domestic hearth, and from the conveniences and amusements of town life, by the allurements of the glittering prizes which Dame Fortune was lavishly dealing out to the pioneer prospectors, and which seemed to dangle before the expectant eyes of everyone. What a strange and entertaining sight the thickly-thronged roads must have presented to the observant student of human nature! Many a tramp hopefully toiling along with swag on back; bands of mechanics with lumbering drays and bony nags to assist in transporting the heavy necessaries; parties with light hand-carts and wheel-barrows energetically pushing and pulling their primitive vehicles; shopmen in spring carts; doctors and lawyers in first-class gigs and buggies. The whole of these, from beggar to barrister, from pickpocket to parson, were to be seen hieing along dusty roads and journeying through hitherto untrodden forest, all impelled by the one covetous desire to the one end—the gold-fields, where, perchance, they might reap a golden harvest without the laborious years of working and the wearisomeness of waiting, which are the usual checks to success in other pursuits.

The Rush to the Diggings.

Ere these fortune-hunters reached the Eldorado of their wishes, many obstacles had to be overcome. The roughness of the road, the yielding nature of the bush tracks, and general unevenness of the ground, occasioned many a poor horse to knock under and leave his master or masters in a sorry plight. Their fellow-wayfarers seeing such a predicament would sometimes lend a helping hand; and it was not uncommon to see thirty or forty men dragging a dray up some of the steep hills by means of ropes, or carrying on their backs portions of a heavy load.

A number of the travellers were free and independent. These, carrying all their property with them, usually made a day's journey of about twenty miles; then, after an al-fresco meal, they lay down in the open-air, with their blankets wrapped like martial cloaks around them, and were lulled to sleep by the breezy murmurs of the wild bush. Others, ignorant of the obstacles they had to encounter, rushed away from town insufficiently supplied with provisions, and the few public-houses on the way became quickly packed to confusion by these half-famished wanderers, demanding food and drink.

Many of the first arrivals on the fields soon found out that the life of a digger was not all honey, and, after a few bitter experiences, either went back to their old employments in the town, or adapted themselves to the requirements of the new order of things by supplying the diggers' camp with provisions—an occupation which was generally quite as lucrative as that of the average digger. Meanwhile, the fame of the Victorian gold-fields had circulated throughout the adjacent colonies. Very soon the tide of emigration was turned from the Turon mines, and flowed in the direction of Ballarat and its vicinity. It poured into the auriferous creeks in the shape of an immense living mass, every unit big with expectation, and bent on ferreting out and appropriating some fragment of the golden lodestone.

The bush surrounding the diggings was quickly thinned of its timber—its red gum, stringy bark, and box trees serving as good fuel for the culinary fire of the digger. Even the tallest and most massive giants of the forest were not spared, and soon the scene was completely shorn of its pristine sylvan beauty. Verdant hillocks and grassy mounds, which in primeval days had been the peaceful browsing and grazing grounds of the kangaroo and its species, and the happy hunting grounds of their scarcely human enemy, the aboriginal black, were speedily changed into yellow-coloured upheavals, which from a distance presented to the interested spectator the lively appearance of great ant-hills warming with busy workers, who now dropped into pits cut in the slopes, and anon reappeared bearing heavy loads, with which they impetuously rushed to the turbid waters of the nearest gully.

On the diggings everyone was subjected to the sway of the golden metal, and the effect of the spell on the different temperaments was as interesting as they were varied. In some of the diggers the sympathetic springs of life's action seemed to be completely clogged; the demon of avarice held complete dominion, and rendered these men forgetful of the commonest offices of humanity. But over others the spell was not so potent, or its sordid effect so marked—an occasional pausing or ceasing from work in order to exchange civilities, or to do a friendly action, betokening that a desire for the amenities of life was not entirely obliterated even among the rough hairy diggers in their most cupiditative pursuit.

A year later the fame of the enormous yield of the Victorian gold-fields had astonished the whole world, and quickly attracted numerous ship-loads of emigrants from every centre of civilisation. This great influx set in about September 1852, and doubled the population before the end of the year. During 1852 and 1853 Victoria became the most populous of the colonies by the arrival of nearly 200,000 persons, the arrivals in Hobson's Bay averaging about 1800 weekly.