334 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



to limit the areas affected. Experience, too, has taught the farmer 

 how by judicious foresight he can protect both his homestead and 

 his crops from such dangers. The recuperative power of Nature is 

 great, and when, a year later, thousands of gold-seekers were toiling 

 through the Black Forest on their way to the diggings, this vast 

 area of charred trunks had already put forth a fresh display of 

 leafage, and had almost succeeded in covering the traces of its 

 fearsome contribution to the horrors of Black Thursday. 



With the assumption of self-government in July, 1851 tentative, 

 it is true, and only the inauguration of the machinery by which a 

 working Constitution was to be created the romantic era of the 

 colony's existence came to a close. Thereafter its story is largely 

 a record of conventional politics, of prosaic competition for place 

 and power, and the arena in which many social, politico-economic 

 and philosophical experiments have been made and abandoned. 

 Within its comparatively limited territory there was no longer 

 scope for the adventurous explorer, for the unfolding of fresh pano- 

 ramas of Nature's beauties, such as enraptured Sir Thomas Mitchell. 

 No further opportunity for the wild free life that could command 

 the use of undefined areas for a peppercorn rental, and find delight 

 in penetrating the secrets of a mysterious land, with a flora and a 

 fauna all its own. The haunting dread of the lurking savage which 

 had quickened the pulse in many a midnight vigil took the more 

 prosaic form of a report to the nearest police station. The man 

 who had risked everything to lord it over his solitary domain was 

 soon to find himself jostled by a crowd of envious competitors, who 

 thought they could put his acres to a more profitable use. As one 

 of the early pioneers expressed himself in a letter to Mr. Latrobe in 

 1853 : 



" It has often been a source of regret to me that all the charms 

 attending the traversing of a new country must give way to the 

 march of civilisation ; the camp on the grassy sward is now super- 

 seded by the noisy road-side inn ; the quart pot of tea by the bottle 

 of ale. All the quiet serenity of an Australian bush, as we have 

 known it, has yielded to the demands of population ; and this, 

 though a necessary change, is not the less to be regretted. I look 

 back to those days as to some joyous scene of school-boy holiday." 



