A VOYAGE TO THE AUSTRALIAN STATION.

(Continued from p. 199, Vol. 1v.)

Ballarat and the Gold Diggings.

I HAD but a vague and general idea that Ballarat was a town of canvas tents-inhabited by a population of diggers governed by Judge Lynch; I was sure there would be nothing like an hotel, and the best accommodation would be found in a booth like the Crown and Anchor' of Greenwich Fair.

Such was the Ballarat I expected to find. My readers may like to know what the actual Ballarat was.

We left Melbourne at 11.30, and reached Ballarat at 3.30. This gives a speed of 25 miles an hour, and as no accident has yet happened on any of the 200 miles of Victoria Railway, the government deserve honourable mention for their management. No tunnel or embankment and only one short viaduct is required, as the country is almost a dead level. For 20 miles we saw no tree, and I was reminded of the familiar dreariness of the prospect that once spread before me as I travelled by the Great Eastern, from station to station through the Eastern Counties flats. For the rest of the way the country is a little more diversified, and there are plenty of gum trees with a fair undergrowth of grass.

About 3 P.M. we passed through a track of gravel land furrowed with trenches and pools half full of water, and with mounds and embankments along their edges; this was something of the scenery I expected in the diggings. I began to look out for Ballarat. The station is finer than the average of English ones, with the usual mob of loafers on the platform. There is, however, an unmistakeable Yankee twang about everybody and everything in the colony which seems strongest at Ballarat, and strikes you even on the platform.

My idea that Ballarat could show no better hotel accommodation than a canvas tent was rather shaken when I found the 'George Hotel' could make up 80 or 90 beds, and had a large bar, a sitting room, a billiard room, &c., besides a dining room, where we found tables laid for 30.

VOL. V.

I

One more surprise awaited us in our bedrooms, which were provided with toilet apparatus complete, razors excepted. We prefer to provide these things for ourselves in England; but the colonials seemed to approve of the arrangement, as the hair brush already stood in need of a wash, and the tooth brush was dyed pink with the dentifrice of the last guest. The cold bath does not seem to flourish as in England; "bath-room" always figures in large letters on the bills and cards of the hotels: but my experience is that it is an apartment out of repair, or just painted, or unavailable for some reason or another-probably the inhabitants are prejudiced against it on account of the untimely death of a popular Melbourne alderman, caused by an unwise use of a cold bath: a thing so contrary to his usual habits, that he never recovered the shock.

Curious to see what Ballarat was like, we sallied out next day on a voyage of discovery, and found that like all towns in Victoria, the streets ran east, west, north and south. A few doors down the street we passed a group of five banks, all built of a dark blue stone that abounds here. Each building rose to the height of three stories, and in each the words Gold Office" glittered on the blinds of one or two windows. As may be expected, 1 know no town in England that could surpass Ballarat in the character of its banks.

About 100 vards further down the street stands the Mechanics' Institute, which we entered. Proceeding down the passage to the reading room, we passed on one side a small lecture room, capable of holding 300 or 400 people; on the other, two rooms for evening classes, which, I was sorry to hear, did not answer well. The reading room, however, was well filled with attentive readers; upstairs is a really fine lecture room, in which, when platform and area are filled, 1000 people can find room.

There are few places of public amusement at Ballarat. A French colony seems to start with a theatre; whilst an English one begins with a warehouse, and follows it up with a church, trusting to the law of supply and demand to provide theatres and other recreations. At least in Ballarat this expectation has proved a vain hope. I did not visit the theatre or dancing room, but a friend informed me that he was once the sole occupant of the boxes, and had considerable difficulty in hearing the actors on account of the din in the pit; whilst in the dancing saloons, full dress consisted of shirt sleeves, and trousers tied up at the knee.

Leaving the Mechanics' Institute, we pass the intersection

of the two main streets: here is the pedestal on which a monument to the explorer, Wills, is to stand; here also does stand the Ballarat Shop. The front of that shop must be 100 feet at least, and seems to offer for sale everything a man can want for house furnishing or body clothing.

We pass many streets branching off to the right and left, noticing that all of them begin with much show, but fall quickly into the decay of wooden houses and sheds. This convinces us that we are in the "main artery" of traffic, so we follow it on. After walking some distance we came to a place where the ground began to sink a little, and the size of the houses a great deal. Stone houses became the exception instead of the rule, and even the wooden ones dwindled in size, until the front was barely large enough to frame door and office window, on which was written, in seven cases out of ten, the words" share broker,"" land-agent," "attorney," &c. This is the most Americanized part of the town; the streets also are a little more irregular, and as you walk under the piazza that is built from each house, little can be seen but the glaring white paint on the opposite house fronts; whilst along the front of the piazza is fixed a huge board with the tenant's name and business in the largest letters of deepest black.

We passed several churches; in some the iron building that first served for a church is converted into a school, and by its comparison with the present larger stone church, which is not without architectural pretensions, gives an idea of the rapid increase of the parish in numbers and wealth.

In these parish schools, which receive government aid, religious differences are ignored; indeed I believe all religious instruction is prohibited. Every one knows how the government has endeavoured to introduce this system into the National schools at home. A strong proof of the impossibility of ignoring the religious difficulty in treating the subject of education is afforded by these schools, for they are as sectarian as in England. For instance, if a school is attached to a Wesleyan chapel, it is filled with Wesleyan children; if to a Roman Catholic chapel, with Papists, &c.

I have previously praised the broad streets of Melbourne, the result of making the roads that pass between the huts of the first settlers of the same magnificent breadth that is so striking in Burke street, or Elizabeth street. The final result is satisfactory: but the intermediate stage of small buildings and small traffic passing through the enormously wide roads of this part of Ballarat is very dreary. The very small houses

on the opposite side of the way seem almost thrown into perspective by the breadth of the street, and to walk across the road seems like crossing a desert. However we contrived to get as far as the Hospital and Benevolent Asylum: the former is a two-storied building, with ten large windows in the front of each story, built in 1856; it is a sign of the surprising growth in wealth of the community, as gold was not discovered until 1851, and Ballarat was by no means the first gold field. As might be expected in a mining district, we found that a large proportion of the cases were casualties from explosions, and other mining accidents. The Benevolent Asylum (our workhouse) is a pretentious building with many pinnacles and oriel windows. It contains 203 inmates: 103 are deserted children; most of the rest are bedridden; considering the length of time this colony has been in existence, I was surprised to find that with hardly an exception these last are from the old country.

As yet the poor of the colony are relieved by voluntary contributions: we should suppose the colony rich enough to do this easily, but it is here generally admitted that paupers are becoming so numerous that voluntary efforts must be supplemented, if not altogether superseded, by government aid.

These buildings formed the limit of my walk; I could now form a more correct idea of Ballarat. Brought into existence originally by the rush for gold, it has outlasted that excitement, and settled down into the great inland mart of the colony-though even now gold mining, gold selling, &c., are the occupations of thousands.

The importance of the agricultural interest may be gathered from the 1864 prize list of the annual show of the Ballarat Agricultural Society, founded in 1858. There are three classes of horses, comprising twenty-eight sections; there are twenty sections in the cattle class, fifteen in the sheep, thirty-one in implements, and thirteen in machinery. To each section two prizes are allotted, and in three cases silver cups of the value of £10 or £15. In the early days of the colony gold was obtained, as is well known, by washing the sand and mud deposited in the beds of rivers whose streams had gradually worn down and carried away the gold dust formed in the quartz. It is generally known that this kind of work was soon exhausted, and explorers naturally tnrned their attention to getting gold direct from the quartz itself. This is still a principal way of obtaining it; the other plan is on the whole more remunerative and requires rather

less capital. For its discovery the colony is indebted to a common sense application of the simple principles of geology. Ballarat is built in a wide valley between two ranges of hills: one of these is quartz, and in the streams proceeding from it quantities of gold were found: the other range is composed of basaltic rock, and for sometime was not supposed to contain gold. To one explorer however it occurred that in former geological ages this unproductive range must have been quartz also; that the sands of the streams running from this range into the sea, must have been impregnated in like manner with gold dust, and that the waters must have washed away nuggets of gold from the quartz; that the beds of these streams with their golden treasures must still exist under the flood of basalt, which had poured over the range and choked up the streams-so that, if the basalt was pierced through, the streams would be reached and the washings from the beds prove to be rich. At 400 feet below the surface, these results were verified; a rich bed was hit upon, and large quantities of gold obtained. Most of the companies at Ballarat obtain gold in this way; their works are called alluvial.

Only one spot, called Black Hill, is mined for quartz crushing, Sandhurst being the great centre for this kind of mining.

Our first visit was paid to the Black Hill works.

After a few words with the manager, we walked up the hill side to the tunnel which leads to the excavations. Standing at its entrance we had a capital view of Ballarat: it seemed to extend over a length of nearly two miles, having a breadth never exceeding a quarter of a mile. I was informed that two or three high circular brick towers, conspicuous in different parts of the town, are watch stations for observing the first signs of a fire and giving notice to the fire-engines. As near as I could guess, we walked about seven or eight hundred yards before reaching the scene of operations. Starting from the level we were on, the miners had worked upwards, until to save props, they had broken out to the light, and we found ourselves on the floor of a large pit or excavation some two or three hundred yards square, and averaging a depth of thirty from the surface. A large extent had evidently been worked out and presented nothing but heaps of profitless mullock, much resembling white chalk. Following a train line leading towards a part of the pit sunk deeper than the rest, we came upon a party of miners at work. The white clay which formed the hill, seemed here broken by firmer and darker bands of earth, whilst a