"All cheering Plenty, with his flowing horn,
Led yellow Autumn, wreathed with nodding corn."
--Burns.
After the first few years of disturbing land speculation, and a too
general extravagance of living, we settled down into a frugal folk, of
moderate but steady prosperity, which lasted up to the general
unsettlement of everything by the gold. The general moderation, and the
cheap and plenty time that characterized it, culminated in 1844, when
bread was 4 pence the 4-pound loaf, rich fresh butter 3 pence a pound,
and beef and mutton 1 penny. A good managing lady, with whom I lodged in
that year, told me one day at dinner that a savoury dish we were
enjoying was a bullock's head, got for nothing from her butcher, and
with which she hoped to keep the house for yet two more days. Shortly
before this, when my friend Fennell and I housed together at the west
end of the town, we sent one day to the neighbouring slaughtering-place,
where the custom was to sell by retail to the public the legs of mutton
at 5 pence each, as they had comparatively so little of tallow for
boiling down. We duly got one, cooked it, and found it very good.
No doubt it was in very great measure because money was scarce and dear
that nearly everything was thus cheap. I recollect the sale by auction
at that time of a vacant half-acre allotment in central Collins-street,
next to that on which Mr. George James, wine merchant, had very early
erected his surpassing brick office and dwelling. After some slight
competition, the allotment, put up, I think, at the upset price of 300
pounds, was bought by Mr. Edmund Westby for 344 pounds. The amount is
impressed upon me, because I wondered at the time that anyone should
thus throw away so much good money. But my friend Westby reckoned the
future more accurately than I did, for within nine years after, this
price was hardly the 500th part of the value. To cap the whole tale, the
lot was, I think, in the hands of Government from having been abandoned
by the original buyer, who had forfeited his deposit rather than
complete his supposed bad bargain.
According to my recollection, the first of our sober community to set up
a carriage and pair was Mr. Henry Moor, above alluded to. Even His
Honour the Superintendent had no such luxury at that time. I remember
looking upon that vehicle with a sense of awe, possibly not without envy
at what was to most of us the entirely unattainable. I speak of the real
Hyde Park Corner article, and not the old "shandrydan" with which some
remote squatter might at times have galloped into town, poising himself
with practised and needed adroitness on nature's bush track, behind a
pair or more of the hundreds of nags on his run. I must except also
those said anomalous early years, for I recollect sallying forth in 1841
from my little lodging in Lonsdale-street, opposite the old gaol, then
being erected, to see Mr. John Hunter Patterson, a spirited colonist of
the earliest times, drive his splendid four-in-hand through the
trackless bush into town from the direction of the Moonee Ponds.