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Updated: May 13, 2025
The men returning were drinking, gambling and "treating" those who were bound for the gold-fields. It was a degrading sight, and Mary Seacole wished that she had not left Jamaica. There was nowhere for her to sleep, wash or change her travel-stained clothes, for every room in her brother's house was engaged by the homeward-bound gold-diggers.
Mulhaus in his lecture at the picnic in the grass-covered crater of Mirngish, there is nothing to suggest that the author had any personal acquaintance with mining in the colonies. The experience that was so fresh and abundant in his mind is put aside in favour of a set of facts and pictures not even incidentally connected with life on the gold-fields.
But being without conscience or scruples, and determined to get rich at no matter what cost, deriving from gambling and speculation what they might have earned by patient and steady work, they engaged in all sorts of impossible adventures. One day they were rich, the next day poor, like most of the questionable individuals who had hurried to the gold-fields in search of fortune.
Even so early as November, 1851, he began to anticipate trouble from the preemptive clauses of the Crown Lands Leasing Act of 1847, by which the squatters had a right to purchase land in the neighborhood of the gold-fields.
Offences against the act were to be decided upon by the magistrates; but the accused might demand a court of at least two members, and there was to be an appeal to General Sessions. These measures were partly successful in restoring order, but it was obvious that the gold-fields contained men who were averse to a peaceable settlement.
He talked so confidently, so scientifically, and, as far as my knowledge went, so veraciously, not only of the principal Australian gold-fields, but of the different notable claims, that curiosity broke through ceremony, and I asked him how long he had been out. Just three weeks, he told me. His name, he added, with an inimitable bow, was Franz von Swammerbrunck, very much at my service.
"But we don't dine till eight," said the lady, "so it will just suit for your supper." "Do come," said Emma Gray, "we shall be quite alone, and shall have a great spinning of yarns over Uncle William and the gold-fields." "Well, I don't mind if I do," said the Captain, "but before supper I must go to the docks for my kit and settle my lodgings."
Just as I had found the English colonists to conduct their arguments in a circle and constantly to bring forward the same old statements, so I found these Boers repeating the same assertions over and over again: that the Lord was on their side; that they must prevail in the end; that they could not trust us; that we had played them false; that we were really after their gold-fields; "if there had been no gold in South Africa there would have been no war."
Chena is at the virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river port and town of these gold-fields.
They found themselves on an open plateau, with nothing to intercept the view. Toward the north the quiet waters of Lake Omco, all alive with aquatic birds, and beyond this lay the vast plains of the Murray. To the south were the wide spreading plains of Gippsland, with its abundant gold-fields and tall forests.
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