Here Were Gathered Together Men From Coolgardie And Murchison, Attracted
By The Tales Of Wealth Brought By The First Prospectors Of The New Rush.
Some Of Them Had Been Longer Away From Civilisation Than We Had, And Many
Arguments Were Held As To The Correct Date.
Of course I knew, because I
kept a diary; but the Queen's Birthday was celebrated by us on the wrong
day after all, for I had given April thirty-one days!
We heard that
hundreds had started for the rush, but this camp represented all who had
persevered, the rest being scared at the distance.
This reads funnily now when Mount Margaret is as civilised as Coolgardie
was then, and is connected by telegraph, and possibly will be soon
boasting of a railway. The blacks had been very troublesome, "sticking up"
swagmen, robbing camps, spearing horses, and the like. It is popularly
supposed that every case of violence on the part of the natives, may be
traced to the brutal white man's interference in their family
arrangements. No doubt it does happen that by coming between man and wife
a white man stirs up the tribe, and violence results, but in the majority
of cases that I know of, the poor black-fellow has recklessly speared,
wounding and killing, prospectors' horses, because he wanted food or
amusement. A man does not travel his packhorses into the bush for the
philanthropic purpose of feeding the aboriginals, and naturally resents
his losses and prevents their recurrence in a practical way.
As a matter of fact, the black population was so small, that even had
every individual of it been shot, the total would not have reached by a
long way the indiscriminate slaughter that was supposed to go on in the
bush. The people who used to hold their hands up in horror - righteous
horror had the tales been true - at the awful cruelties perpetrated by the
prospectors, based their opinions on the foolish "gassing" of a certain
style of man who thinks to make himself a hero by recounting dark deeds
of blood, wholly imaginary. I remember reading a letter to a friend from
his mother, in which she begged him to take no part in the "nigger hunting
excursions" that she had heard went on in Western Australia. Poor lady!
she need not have disturbed herself, for such things never existed, nor
had her boy ever seen a black-fellow, except round the slaughter-yards of
Coolgardie!
No luck attended our search in the Mount Margaret district, and we shared
the opinion of everybody there that it was a "duffer," and after events
had proved what that opinion was worth. Travelling and prospecting as we
went, we at last succeeded in finding a reef which we thought was worth
having.
May 30th. We made camp amongst some auriferous hills in what is now known
as the Niagara District, and within a few miles of a spot where,
subsequently, a rich find of gold was made.
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