EARLY VICTORIA, FROM 1851.

“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.