resolution was negatived by more than three to one. A petition from the residents of the Port Phillip District, praying for separation, was, in the same year, sent to England; and on the 11th February, 1846, a favourable answer was received in Melbourne, and the occasion was marked by a public banquet to Dr. Lang. Events now moved rapidly. On the 5th August, 1850, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania were granted representative institutions by Imperial Statute; and when, on the 11th November news arrived in Melbourne of the granting of separation from New South Wales, the rejoicing thereat continued for five days. On the 1st July, 1851, Victoria was proclaimed a separate colony. On the 16th of the month Mr. La Trobe was appointed LieutenantGovernor, Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy, of New South Wales, being named about the same time as Governor-General of Australia; and on the 11th November the first Victorian Legislature-of which two-thirds were elected members-met at Melbourne. In 1850, the year preceding separation, the year also prior to that in which gold was discovered, and only forty-eight years since its discovery by Lieutenant Murray, Port Phillip had a revenue of £230,000, its exports amounted to £760,000, and its population was over 76,000.

The beginning of the year 1851 brought ruin and desolation to many a home, and in the gruesome designation of "Black Thursday" there has been preserved the bitter memory of the 6th of February, when the hot blasts from the north swept with fury over the earth, carrying with them flame and death. We are told by an eye-witness that the conflagration was terrible in its completeness; men, women, and children, sheep and cattle, birds and snakes, fled commingled before the fire in one common panic. For hundreds of miles the country was wrapped in flames; the most fertile districts were swept clean, flocks and herds were abandoned, and the entire population rushed in terrified hordes for their lives. The ashes from the forests on fire at Macedon, 46 miles distant, littered the streets of Melbourne.

Four months afterwards it was announced in the Port Phillip Gazette that gold had been discovered in the Henty Ranges. On the 9th June, 1851, the Gold Discovery Committee was formed in Melbourne; on the following day Mr. William Campbell, a settler on the Loddon, found some specks of the precious metal in quartz upon the station of Mr. Donald Cameron, at Clunes. Then the excitement spread and grew. On the 5th July a discovery of gold was reported at Anderson's Creek; on the 8th August gold was found at Buninyong; on the 8th September, at Ballarat; and on the 10th December at Bendigo. The simultaneousness and magnitude of these discoveries were perfectly startling. The simplest appliances and the labour of only a few hours appeared quite sufficient, to the overwrought imagination of the early gold-hunters, to secure a fabulous fortune, transcending the visions of romance. All classes and all distinctions were levelled, the thirst for gold seizing upon the entire community. The shops were empty, the streets deserted, the doors of the counting-houses

barred, the plough left rusting in the furrow, sheep and cattle wandered untended, while the port of Melbourne was filled with unmanned vessels, dropping to pieces for lack of attention or repair. But in the valleys, and all along the creek courses of Clunes, Buninyong, and the Loddon River, and in many other auriferous places around, thousands of men swarmed, and the roads from the port to the fields were crowded with the eager gold-seekers. Trade soon, however, began to revive, and brisk business was done by the gold-buyers and lodging-housekeepers in the city; by the carriers, who found freightage at £80 per ton from Melbourne to Bendigo to pay as well as gold-digging on the fields; by saloon proprietors and the shanty and dancing-hall keepers, who became the veritable "first robbers" of fortunate diggers. The public service was, however, reduced to abject inefficiency; the police decamped, like their superiors, in search of fortune; and even domestic servants, male and female, joined in the general stampede. The Governor was reduced to a condition of absolute powerlessness, and ruled in Melbourne with hardly any to obey his behests-like a monarch without a realm. Society was, in truth, utterly disorganised, and it was not long before the position became even more embarrassing. The news reached China, America, Europe, besides the neighbouring colonies, and at the port of debarkation up sprang "Canvas Town," formed by the myriad tents of the new arrivals. From South Australia and Van Diemen's Land, without reckoning the other colonies, something like 11,000 people poured into Melbourne, bound for the fields, in the latter half of the year 1851. Moreover, the supply of gold appeared inexhaustible. Before the end of the month of December in the year of its discovery (1851), upwards of 10 tons of the metal had been obtained from the Victorian fields; and it is interesting to note here that nearly one-third of the world's annual production of gold is raised in the Australasian Colonies. Of these Victoria, down to 1897, retained the first position; while the colony's total yield since the first discovery up to the end of the year 1901 was 65,136,000 oz., valued at about 260 millions sterling.

The arrivals from Europe in the early days included, not only what has been picturesquely described by an Australian writer as the "brain and brawn of the Old World," but also many that could have been easily spared, viz, fugitives from justice, adventurers from California and the South Pacific, escaped convicts and disguised bushrangers, sharpers and professional gamblers from every city on the "Continent" or in the "States," and hordes of Asiatics from Canton and the Straits Settlements, there being not less than 25,000 Chinese whom the gold fever allured to the various fields. Week after week, and month after month, vessels sailed into Hobson's Bay, landing passengers and discharging cargoes in the most primitive fashion, for their crews deserted as soon as the ships dropped anchor or came to their moorings. The nobly-born and the gently-nurtured, professional men and navvies, artisans, farm-labourers, deserting soldiers and runaway sailors, "forty

niners" from the fields of California, political refugees from France and Germany and Russia-representatives, in short, of every civilised and almost every uncivilised people beneath the sun-poured, in neverending stream, into Port Phillip, en route for the gold-fields. Upwards of 15.000 immigrants arrived by sea during the latter half of 1851, 94,000 during the year following, and in 1853-4-5, nearly a quarter of a million. The gold yield from the Victorian fields reached its maximum only two years after its discovery, when the return of production during twelve months represented a value of £12,600,000. The value of the gold raised from 1852 to 1860 inclusive was upwards of £95,000,000; while the population of the colony in the latter year was little over half a million. The palmy days of gold-hunting represented a period of about a decade, and most of the great prizes were won in the early days of the history of the industry. The first large nugget (weighing 1,620 oz.) was found in Canadian Gully, Ballarat, in February, 1853. Another, found on Bakery Hill, in the same district, in June, 1858, weighed 2,217 oz. Men mining at Golden Point, Ballarat, each made from £300 to £400 sterling per day. The Governor, who visited this part of the field in 1851, says that he saw 8 lb. weight of gold washed from two dishes of dirt. He heard also of a party which had raised, at an early hour of the day, gold weighing 16 lb.; and the same party had succeeded in obtaining 31 lb. in weight before nightfall. But though the prizes were great, the failures were many; and numbers of the disappointed and disillusioned were glad to return to their former callings, or turn their hands to the employments that the conditions of the diggers' life called into being. Wages rose phenomenally, and carpenters and blacksmiths found constant work, and fierce competition among employers for their labour, at £1 and £1 5s. a day. Cartage from the seaport was excessive, amounting in the case of some fields to as much as £100 sterling per ton; and it is said that a publican, who controlled no less than 120 drinking shanties, disbursed as much as £1,500 a week in the conveyance of goods from Melbourne, for seven consecutive months, in the year 1853.

A noteworthy incident of the period was the robbery of the ship "Nelson," lying in Hobson's Bay, by a gang of desperadoes (probably escaped convicts from across the straits), who boarded the vessel and carried off gold-dust, valued at some £24,000 or £25,000 sterling. The criminal element in the community found exercise for their talents also in sticking-up" and robbing the gold escorts on their way to the capital, sometimes killing the armed officials who formed the guard, though such bushranging exploits were much more common in the early gold-fever days of the neighbouring Colony of New South Wales.

Governor La Trobe was succeeded by Sir Charles Hotham, R.N., who arrived in Melbourne in the month of June, 1854. This official has been described as one who attempted to govern a free colony as he would the quarter-deck, and who, though possessed of many fine qualities, was totally lacking in the great essential of tact. He came

to Victoria in a time of administrative trouble and embarrassment. The separation of the Port Phillip district from the Colony of New South Wales had been attended by the creation of a Legislative Council, composed of ten nominee and twenty elected members. Among the latter there were, however, no representatives of the great bulk of the people who had been attracted to the gold-fields. One of the first acts of the Council was the imposition of a license-fee of £1 10s. per month-which had for a time been raised to £3-exacted from every person searching for gold, the license not being transferable, and available only within a half-a-mile of the police head-quarters whence it had been issued. Moreover, whenever it was demanded from a digger by a police officer, the license had instantly to be produced; and this proved an excessively galling condition. Diggerhunting by the young cadets in the Government service was frequently indulged in with unnecessary harshness, and the spectacle of some fifty or sixty handcuffed together was no uncommon thing. Everyone engaged in searching for gold who had neglected to procure or to renew, or who had lost or mislaid his license, was a subject for legal treatment; and the action of the authorities occasioned tremendous heart-burning. This culminated in an agitation for the suppression of the licensefee, which began at Bendigo, in 1853, and quickly spread to the other gold-fields. The Government met this manifestation of popular indignation, in 1854, by the issue of an order directing the police to devote two whole days a week to the hunting down of unlicensed diggers; and then the smouldering embers of rebellion broke into flame.

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A digger named Scobie had been killed in a scuffle at an hotel in Ballarat kept by a man named Bentley, and the man's comrades believed the latter to be concerned in what they considered to be murder. The Police Magistrate, before whom Bentley was brought, acquitted him, and indignation meetings were immediately held. one of these the hotel which had figured in the trouble was burnt to the ground, its owner only escaping by flight on horseback. For this act of incendiarism three men were arrested, not one of whom, it was alleged, was concerned in the affair; and a public meeting was held, at which resolutions were carried demanding their immediate release, affirming at the same time the right of the people to the exercise of political power. However, the three prisoners were taken to Melbourne, and each was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment. Again did the diggers demand their release, and again were they refused. Their attitude, however, was ominous, and two detachments of infantry were sent up to Ballarat from Melbourne. They arrived on the 29th of November, 1854, and were attacked by the diggers, who followed them to their bivouac. This brought about a sortie by the police, who drove the assailants of the military back. Two days afterwards there followed another digger-hunt, and the soldiers were called from quarters to support the constabulary. The diggers resisted

and organised themselves for an armed defence, electing the late Hon. Peter Lalor as their leader, and entrenching themselves behind a stockade in Eureka-street-since known as the Eureka Stockade. On the 3rd December the soldiers and police, consisting of 276 men, and including cavalry, advanced on the entrenchment to attack the recalcitrant diggers. The insurgents made a gallant defence, but, after several volleys had been fired on both sides, the Stockade was carried at the point of the bayonet, and the diggers were dispersed. During the engagement, which lasted about a quarter-of-an-hour, Captain Wise, of the 40th Regiment, was mortally wounded; about thirty of the diggers were killed, and 125 were taken prisoners; while of the soldiers, four were killed, and many were wounded. All the tents within the Stockade were burnt down; the district was placed under martial law, and the prisoners were conveyed to Melbourne. On the 1st April, 1855, they were arraigned on a charge of high treason in the Supreme Court, though three of the leaders in the outbreak-Messrs. Lalor, Vern, and Black-succeeded in evading capture. Public sympathy with the insurgents ran, however, so high, that no jury could be empannelled to convict them. Their defence was voluntarily undertaken by several leading barristers, and their acquittal was secured. An amnesty was then proclaimed ; and the causes which led to the outbreak were removed. A commission of inquiry subsequently recommended the introduction of constitutional government on a representative system, based on a liberal franchise. On the 23rd November, 1855, the new Constitution, which had been prepared by the existing Legislature, and had received the sanction of the Imperial Parliament, was proclaimed. It established Responsible Government, with popular representation and two Chambers, both elective; and when the first Cabinet, with Mr. Haines as Premier, took office, the district of Ballarat was represented in Parliament by Messrs. Lalor and Humffray, both of whom were concerned in the armed resistance to authority at the storming of the Eureka Stockade. The former became, in course of time, and remained for years, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly.

The colonists proved themselves worthy of the trust reposed in them. by the Home Government; though for one man at least the anxieties of the position were not outweighed by its compensations. The mental worry and distress attending the administration of the colony, proved too much for Sir Charles Hotham, and he succumbed to a severe illness at the close of the year 1855, the administration of the Government devolving upon Major-General Macarthur until the arrival of the Lext Governor.

Sir Henry Barkly, who had been appointed to succeed Sir Charles Hotham, did not arrive in the Colony until the 23rd December, 1856. Some few months after he assumed office, his wife, who had become very popular, died of injuries received in a carriage accident, the peculiarly sad circumstances surrounding the unfortunate event exciting the deepest sympathy from all classes of the community.

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