Golden Australia 143 



when the publican, who possessed some political 

 influence, arranged that the Minister of Mines 

 should visit the fields. On the arrival of that 

 dignitary, who came in all innocence, the men 

 held a meeting, and declared an exemption for 

 three days, in order that the event might be 

 celebrated in a fitting manner. It need hardly 

 be said that the exemption was indefinitely pro- 

 longed, and that nothing more was heard of the 

 strike. The device of the beer strike, however, 

 has since then been adopted with success in more 

 than one remote Australian township, where hu- 

 manity is dry and liquor over-expensive. 



Between these newly made mining camps of the 

 day before yesterday and the fifty-year-old golden 

 cities of the Eastern states, the contrast is as strik- 

 ing as anything afforded by Australia, the land 

 of contrasts. And yet there is only the history 

 of a generation between them. The sons of the 

 men who made the garden cities of the Bast are 

 helping to make Kalgoorlie to-day. In time, 

 they too will cover the scarred earth with a mantle 

 of green, will mend the unsightly wounds, and 

 smooth away the traces of the ugliness they 

 caused in their fierce greed for gold. They will 

 make a pleasant city where life will be well 

 ordered, and where they may rest after their ad- 

 ventures, and enjoy the fruits of their labours. 

 But the adventurous spirit that moved them to 

 leave the sober streets and waving trees of Bal- 

 larat, as it moved their fathers to turn their backs 



