i3?o AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



handsome city, with its stately town hall, its numerous churches, its well-paved and 

 tree-planted and gas-lighted streets, its schools, markets, theatres, free library and public 

 gardens, and its municipal government administering a revenue of upwards of twenty 

 thousand pounds sterling per annum. To minister to the wants of its population, 

 necessitated the cultivation of the surrounding district, and thus each mining centre 

 lt 'tame the nucleus of an agricultural and horticultural settlement ; and the cultivation 

 of grain, and fodder crops, the breeding and fattening of cattle, the grazing of sheep, 

 the growth of fruit and vegetables, and the planting of the vine for wine-making 

 purposes, afforded employment to many hundreds of persons. Manufacturing industries 

 i^rew up, part passu, with the development of the subterranean veins and drifts of gold. 

 Mining machinery required to be provided, replaced and repaired : flour-mills were estab- 

 lished ; tan-yards, brick-kilns, tile-factories, breweries, malt-houses, iron-foundries, woollen- 

 mills, soap and candle works, boot and shoe manufactories, and a variety of other 

 industrial enterprises were embarked in ; and within thirty years of the period at which 

 the first ounce of gold was dug from the soil of some valley, which had previously 

 been a virgin solitude, a populous and prosperous city had sprung into existence on its 

 site, with nothing to differentiate it from cities of a like magnitude in Northern Europe 

 but the newness of its buildings, the absence of any indications of poverty among its 

 inhabitants, the brightness of its atmosphere, and the general air of activity, energy and 

 vivacity characterizing the great bulk of its population. 



Gold-mining in the colonies was, for many years, a very hap-hazard and unscientific 

 proceeding. The news of a discovery usually referred to alluvial gold, and quartz-reefing 

 was a much later development. Lacking capital, the discoverers of gold in quartz had no 

 other resource but to let their treasure lie undeveloped until the necessary means were 

 forthcoming to procure a reefing-plant, crushing machines, and the other requirements of 

 the expensive and often very tedious process of reef-working. It was not until the 

 mining centre had seen its day as an alluvial "diggings'" that the era of quartz-mining 

 came in ; townships that had once been the riotous scenes of a tumultuous life of 

 excesses on the one hand and toil on the other, where brilliant fortunes had been made 

 and spent, and a seething population had gathered like insects about some teeming ant- 

 bed, relapsed into wildernesses when the surface-workings no longer paid. The days of 

 great finds dwindled down into the dull time when the district was all but deserted, 

 and the few stragglers and Chinese who remained gleaned the scattered ears of the 

 golden harvest, and eked out a precarious living, at little more than labourer's wages, 

 on ground that had once yielded fabulous fortunes. A mining district passing through 

 this stage of its experience presented a dreary spectacle. Here and there among the 

 small areas of cultivation would be seen the bleak spaces that had been turned over 

 by the miner's pick, patches of yellow clay, grass-grown shafts of various depths, deserted 

 huts of dilapidated bark and slabs, and a general air of desolation and decay. The life 

 had passed out of the place, leaving it a shell of its former self, haunted by stories of 

 the wild and picturesque past. Tumble-down rookeries the remains of the drinking 

 shanties of a time when alcohol flowed like water, and every lucky " find " was celebrated 

 by a carousal in which the curious champagne of the period formed a necessary feature 

 have, in some cases, been turned into dwellings ; a few shop-keepers have re-opened 



