66 



KIDD'S OWN JOURNAL. 



and choke themselves with the fumes of 

 smoke. But we will proceed : — 



We have had very heavy rains lately ; several 

 people have been drowned on their way to and from 

 the diggings, in attempting to swim the creeks, as 

 the government does not think of platting any 

 bridges where they are required; indeed, the peo- 

 ple are beginning to murmur against the abomina- 

 ble way in which our government is at present 

 carried on. The people can, and very soon will, 

 govern themselves, if the authorities are not very 

 soon altered, or change their mode of action — if 

 6uch a word as ' action ' may be used for their utter 

 imbecility. You cannot walk the streets of the 

 &ty after dark, without being armed. I never go 

 out at night without hacing an open knife in my 

 hand. 



This, too, is a pleasant state of affairs. 

 How very soundly a person must sleep in 

 such a " happy land !" 



Robberies are committed also in the open day 

 with impunity, whilst the Legislative Council is 

 debating whether they shall give policemen 7s. 6d. 

 or 7s. 9d. per day, when no man will work under 

 10s. at even road-scraping. I cannot have lost 

 less than between £300 or £400 by the mis-man- 

 agement of the post-office, letters being misdaid, 

 mis-sent, and lost altogether, day after day. We 

 want a Vigilance Committee here as in California, 

 and I would be one of the first to join it. It saved 

 California, and we shall have no safety until it is 

 adopted here. There are marriage parties driving 

 about every day, as I described in my last. I was 

 at the Botanical-gardens last Sunday ; and there 

 were diggers' wives promenading, most splendidly 

 dressed in silks, satins, velvets, feathers, and jewel- 

 lery ivlio had been servants in situations a week 

 before. 



These frauds by the post-office people are, 

 we know, very common. " Help yourself 

 seems quite the order of the day. It must be 

 good fun to see the loutish servants, bowed 

 down beneath the weight of their finery. 

 Silks, satins, velvets, feathers, and jewellery 

 must " set off" their vulgar persons nicely ! 



September 2. — There are about one thousand 

 five hundred people arriving here every week ; 

 this number will soon be two thousand. Hitherto, 

 we have only had them from the surrounding colo- 

 nies ; the stream is now commencing in earnest 

 from England, the mother country, as she is called, 

 but she is a mother that does not know how to 

 govern her children. Everybody now is doing 

 well, that the weather will permit to do anything. 

 In nearly every shop, such as a tailor's, there is a 

 bill up with ' Thirty good hands wanted.' Car- 

 penters are advertised as being wanted, wages £1 

 per day. Dressmakers and milliners in propor- 

 tion ; and more than they can do. Pastrycooks 

 are making small fortunes from mere wedding- 

 cakes, one about six or eight inches diameter cost- 

 ing £4 or £5. If it is £4, the digger throws down 

 a £5-note, and takes a handful of gingerbread- 

 nuts as change. Melbourne is literally crowded 

 with ' new chums,' who are at their wits'-end where 

 to lay their heads. They stand with open mouths 

 at the windows of the gold-brokers' shops, admir- 



ing the golden show ; the window is generally set 

 out with three or four glass vases filled with gold, 

 large pieces of the same metal being placed sepa- 

 rate when weighing above lib. or so. The rest 

 of the window is generally filled up with rolls of 

 bank-notes, and piles of sovereigns. All this re- 

 flected by a looking-glass, forms a very attractive 

 sight to newly arrived gold seekers. Some of these 

 windows must contain from £9,000 to £10,000. 



A tempting Bight this, for the dapper 

 young clerks on landing. They must surely 

 u dream" of gold the first night 1 But now 

 for the gold-brokers. Are they honest? 

 We shall see : — 



The gold-broker has a happy facility in convert- 

 ing into an office any space large enough to con- 

 tain himself and a pair of scales. The passage or 

 private entrance of a shop is frequently made into 

 an ' office' by having a green-baize partition at 

 the back of the broker, who pays £5 per week for 

 the accommodation. Some of these 'take in' 

 diggers to a great extent. One of their tricks is 

 as follows • — A digger goes into one of these offices 

 with his bag of dust and nuggets, which the bro- 

 ker requests him to empty on a large sheet of 

 whity-brown or other large paper. He then be- 

 gins a vigorous ' rousing' with his fingers, and a 

 magnet to extract the iron-stone from among it ; 

 and, a good deal of blowing and shaking having 

 been gone through in a careless off-hand manner, 

 he empties the lot into the scale. ' Seven and 

 four is eight, eight and three is eleven, eleven and 

 four is fourteen ; fourteen ounces, four penny- 

 weights and a half, at £3.7s an ounce, £43 ; there's 

 a check, Sir.' Now, all this shaking, &c, is to 

 make a portion of gold pass through two nicks 

 each, in two sheets of paper. When he takes it 

 to put the gold into the scale, he shifts the two 

 sheets, so that the nicks are no longer over each 

 other. Consequently they cannot be seen, even 

 if the seller has any suspicion. Sometimes, after 

 shaking and blowing the gold in the above man- 

 ner, he offers 2s per ounce less than the digger 

 can get anywhere else, who of course declines sell- 

 ing, and goes away with an ounce or so less than 

 he came with. Some never buy an ounce, but 

 have a pound or two to sell at the end of the week. 

 Some scales have the beam divided unequally, so 

 that it takes a quarter of an ounce to turn the 

 scale. If one half of the beam is the 16th of an 

 inch longer than the other, it will take this. The 

 way to beat them at this work is, to reverse the 

 gold and weights from one scale to the other. The 

 known weight of gold that has been sent from 

 here up to this date is sixty-four tons ; but this 

 does not include that which parties take away of 

 their own. The number of persons that arrived 

 in Melbourne last week was 4,283; who left it, 

 390 ; leaving an addition to our population in one 

 week of 3,803. 



So much for Melbourne, and its civilisation. 

 No employment is there, of any kind, for the 

 mind; no thought required beyond the pre- 

 sent moment. Eating, drinking, sleeping, 

 and gold digging, are here reckoned the 

 summum bonum of human happiness. Let 

 us hear what another writer says of Adelaide, 



