MOUNT ALEXANDER AND BENDIGO.
"Our fortune lies upon this jump."
--Antony and Cleopatra.
The following year, about the same pleasant spring season, I made out a
second goldfields visit, in company with my late friend, Mr. W.M. Bell,
senior partner of the early firm of Bells and Buchanan. This time I went
further inland, and in the more northerly direction of Mount Alexander
and Bendigo, as considerable regions around were then loosely called,
and which are now represented respectively by the large municipalities
of Castlemaine and Sandhurst. Vast changes had taken place in the colony
since my Ballarat visit. There had been, in the first place, arrivals in
multitudes, first from the surrounding colonies, and then from Home,
and, in a lesser influx, from the Cape, America, and parts of Europe.
The tide of such threatening dimensions from China was later on. The
roads, such as they were, were crowded with passengers; and with
traffic, chiefly in flour, to the starving diggers, the carriage of
which to Bendigo ran up to 100 pounds a ton. Indeed, such was the cost
of carriage that some of us estimated that a single year's total would
equal the cost of making a railway. Of course the railway, draining the
labour market, could only itself have been at proportionate cost.
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