The news reached town, I think, on 21st September. A week later a small knot of us merchants, who had offices on the east side of the Market-square—including our next door neighbours, Messrs. Watson and Wight—were discussing what was to come of it all; for while part of our employees were off to visit the diggings on leave, the rest threatened to follow—leave or no leave. The situation had a certain convenience in the fact that almost all business was for the time at an end, excepting that of buying up spades and shovels, pitchers and pannikins, and anything to answer for a cradle.
Instead of rising with the gold, houses and lands in Melbourne actually fell, and considerably too, in the first confusion, when multitudes were selling off or letting at anything they could get, in order to be off to the diggings. There came, however, a rapid recovery a few months after. My friend Mr. Henry Miller, sitting next me in the Legislature, told me one day that two owners of cottages, to whom he had lent 80 pounds each, upon their respective security, had begged him six months ago to take over the said property in payment, and let them be off at once to the common goal of the day; that he had charitably done so, and that he had just resold these houses for 1,000 pounds each.
When the tide began its upward turn, a Mr. O'Farrell, a quiet unpretending house agent and rent collector (one of whose sons afterwards came to so bad an end), made promptly a large fortune by buying up leases or fee-simples, and in an incredibly short time re-disposing of them at a great advance.
EARLY BALLARAT.
"All that glisters is not gold."
—Merchant of Venice.
Let me begin upon early Ballarat by stating, what many may now have forgotten, namely, that the original and native name was Balaarat, or Ballaarat, which was the pronunciation then, and for some years after. But our English way is to put the emphasis on the first part of a polysyllabic word. I have long remarked this practice, comparing it with that of races of inferior, or more or less barbarous condition, who, as in countless other examples in Australia, and still more strikingly in New Zealand, and generally, I think, over the world, lay the emphasis on or towards the end of the word. What does it mean? I arrived at my solution. The emphatic ending best preserves the whole word. The barbarous, with few ideas, give surpassing importance to words; while the civilized, under the crowd of ideas, disregard words except as mere vehicles, and traverse them easiest by the early emphasis, to say nothing of dropping the after part entirely when troublesomely long. The Turanian, or lowest class of language, as Professor Max Muller tells us, preserves its root-words for ever, tacking one to another, but never losing the full sound of each; while all sorts of word "jerry mandering" liberties go on in the highest class. I ventured to propound my theory to my linguistic friend, Mr. Hyde Clarke; but he found so many divergencies in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and what not, that I was driven to a partial reconstruction. It was the busy as well as civilized race that scamped the words. The Greeks and Romans—that portion of them that made society or the public opinion, and that consequently governed the language—abhorred the vulgar hurry of business life, and thus gave their words a better chance of unmutilated life. I have not yet been driven out of this final theory.
With hardly anything else to do, it was as hardly possible to resist a visit, with nearly everybody else, to Ballarat. So I appeared there on the 3rd October, and, as senior member for Melbourne in the colony's first Parliament, and first President of the recently established Chamber of Commerce, I was, of course, "a man in authority." So, mounting a gum-tree stump, as the only available chair or pulpit, I harangued the diggers, first upon the grand fortunes that had overtaken the colony, and next upon their sadly wasteful ways with the little stream that ran through the Ballarat valley. I fear I did not much impress my hearers on the latter point, for everyone did what was most for his immediate needs, whether or not he thus sacrificed his neighbour below him. Next I was conducted to Gold Point, which was just developing its quality in the "blue clay," which had been struck at no great depth below the surface. I was let down into a big hole, the early parent of shaft-sinking, given a spade, and directed to apply it to a place where a digger's quick eye had detected one speck of gold. There was probably, he said, a string of gold behind it. And so it proved, for out of about a pound weight of matrix which I removed on the corner of the spade, I picked out 7 shillings and 6 pence worth of gold.
Then I retired from the crowd and the incessant noise of cradles, and ascending from the valley to the high level plain, I came upon a small lake, whose waters glittered peacefully in the warm sunshine of a bright spring day. A tiny streamlet was still running from the lake, and trickling down the small semi-precipice towards the main rivulet, now sadly muddy, which I had just left. So near was this edge to the lake that I increased the stream by deepening its bed with my foot; but I repented of this waste, and restored the block, because the approaching summer must be thought for, and this natural reservoir was by no means deep. I waded into the pleasantly and invitingly cool water, but had promptly to retreat from swarms of leeches which attacked my feet. The scene was striking. Although the hum of busy humanity arose from beneath, not an object was visible on the higher level, as I glanced around to the far west and north, excepting the country's indigenous features. There was not a human being, not even a sheep in sight. Around this spot has since arisen the city of Ballarat, with fifty thousand people, with streets, buildings, institutions, business (including an extra busy Stock Exchange), equal to those of, at least, twice its population at Home; while the lovely lake of that time has long been fringed with residences and gardens, and its waters been the scene of the regattas and other diversions of the leisure of the prosperous citizens.
As I rode back on my horse to town—for Cobb and Co. had not yet established their leather-hung stage drags, for which, in the impossibility of others upon the unmade roads, we had reason to be thankful—I mused over all I had seen, and long ere reaching home had concluded that 10,000 pounds a day was being taken out of Ballarat. Sundays excepted, that meant a product at the rate of over three millions a year, into which, as one of its export items, the young colony was already "precipitated" from a total export product of only a trifle above a million the year before. No one was prepared to credit such a statement. Indeed, unbelief on the point was prevalent until well on into 1852, when Bendigo had been added to Ballarat, and when Melbourne was seen to be full of gold, which the newly-instituted "gold broker" was already practised, with critical eye as to quality, in weighing out by the hundred or the thousand ounces, and which diggers by hundreds were carrying away in their pockets, in most cases entirely unrecorded, to Tasmania, Sydney, and Adelaide. There was hardly any Customs record at the first, and only a very partial one for a while after, until the diggers ceased thus to carry off the gold, upon finding that the rival brokers gave them fair and full value. The yield of 1852 was estimated at no less than fifteen millions.
How the diggers, utterly inexperienced as they mostly then were, came so suddenly upon such surpassingly rich drifts has never been, to my mind at least, satisfactorily explained, unless the case be summarily affiliated to those possibilities of throwing "sixes" in dozen successions, and such like. In no one year, since 1852, have the Victorian goldfields, although comparatively the most productive, yielded even a near approach to fifteen millions.