"Gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold."
--Hood.
I am drawing near the end of what may be fairly considered as "Early
Melbourne and Victoria." Indeed, I might be challenged in going beyond
the memorable 1851, a year which ushers such momentous new features into
the colony. But considerably more than a generation has since passed;
and, writing as I do for those who occupy to-day the old scene, I may
plead as my excuse their own view of the subject; for already they
regard the time I have come to as the real beginning of early Victoria,
while the dim distances preceding are to them a kind of age before the
deluge, which ordinary memories fail to fathom. In keeping to personal
recollections I cannot, at the worst, be very protracted, for I quitted
public life in 1853, and regretfully, under the calls of business, the
colony itself four years later. I must confine myself to some few
recollections of the former brief but busy period--1851-3--of which, in
its multifarious rush of political and general business, I might say in
the well-known words of the Roman poet, which have survived my classic
rust "quorum pars magna fui," provided I were allowed to greatly abate,
or rather perhaps, in becoming modesty, altogether to delete, the third
factor of Virgil's sentence.
The goldfields came upon us with almost the suddenness of the changes of
dreamland. We had had a slight graduation by the news, in the May
preceding, from the sister colony, of a shepherd on Dr. Kerr's station,
near Bathurst, having come upon a round hundredweight of nearly pure
gold. This luck, I presume, was mainly the result of the habit most of
us had begun to acquire of keeping our eyes upon the ground beneath us,
in consequence of Hargreaves, on his return from California about this
time, having predicted gold, and subsequently fulfilled his prophecy by
washing out some of the precious metal in the Bathurst vicinities.
Passing over trifling intermediate finds of gold, as at Anderson's Creek
in August, Ballarat came suddenly upon us.
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.