captain was a lady of unbounded bravery and great strength—­a model pioneeress, with a talent for governing the opposite sex.* When at home on her station she did the work of a man and a woman too.  She was the one in a thousand so seldom found.  She not only did the cooking and housework, but she also rode after stock, drove a team, killed fat beasts, chopped wood, stripped bark, and fenced.  She did not hanker after woman’s rights, nor rail against the male sex.  She was not cultured, nor scientific, nor artistic, nor aesthetic.  She despised all the ologies.  All great men respected her, and if the little ones were insolent she boxed their ears and twisted their necks.  She conquered all the blackfellows around her land with her own right arm.  At first she had been kind to them, but they soon became troublesome, wanted too much flour, sugar, and beef, and refused to go away when she ordered them to do so.  Without another word she took down her stockwhip, went to the stable, and saddled her horse.  Then she rounded up the blackfellows like a mob of cattle and started them.  If they tried to break away, or to hide themselves among the scrub, or behind tussocks, she cut pieces out of their hides with her whip.  Then she headed them for the Ninety-mile Beach, and landed them in the Pacific without the loss of a man.  In that way she settled the native difficulty.  The Neills, with a bullock team, the Buckleys and Moores, with horse teams, followed the track of the leading lady.  The station-owners stayed at home and watched their fat stock, which soon became valuable, and was no longer boiled.

[Footnote] Mrs. Buntine; died 1896.

On December 31st, 1851, there were in Tasmania twenty thousand and sixty-nine convicts.  Six months afterwards more than ten thousand had left the island, and in three years forty-five thousand eight hundred and eighty-four persons, principally men, had left for the diggings.  It was evident that Sir Wm. Denison would soon have nobody to govern but old women and children, a circumstance derogatory to his dignity, so he wrote to England for more convicts and immigrants, and he pathetically exclaimed, “To whom but convicts could colonists look to cultivate their lands, to tend their flocks, to reap their harvests?” In the month of May, 1853, Sir William wrote that “the discovery of gold had turned him topsy-turvy altogether,” and he rejoiced that no gold had been discovered in his island.  Then the Legislature perversely offered a reward of five thousand pounds to any man who would discover a gold field in Tasmania, but, as a high-toned historian observes, “for many years they were so fortunate as not to find it.”