I understood very little of those matters
at the time: the shoe had not pinched my toe yet.
Every one returned to his work; some perhaps not very peacefully, on account
of a nobbler or two over the usual allowance.
Chapter V.
Risum Teneatis Amici.
I recollect towards this time I followed the mob to Magpie Gully. It was
a digger's life. Hard work by day, blazing fire in the evening, and sound
sleep by night at the music of drunken quarrels all around, far and near.
I had marked my claim in accordance with the run of the ranges, and safe
as the Bank of England I bottomed on gold. No search for licence ever
took place. What's the matter? Oh, the diggers of Bendigo, by sheer
moral force, in the shape of some ten thousand in a mob, had inspired
with better sense the red-tape there and somewhere else, so I took out
my licence at the reasonable rate of two pounds for three months,
my contribution for the support of gold-lace. So far so good. I had no fault
to find with our governor Joseph Latrobe, Esquire; nor do I believe
that the diggers cared about anything else from him. Was it then his being
an esquire that brought his administration into contempt? The fact is,
a clap of "The Thunder" from Printing House-square boomed on the tympanum
of my ear. We diggers got the gracious title of "vagabonds," and our massa
"Joe," for his pains to keep friends with us, was put down "an incapable;"
all for the honour of British rule, of course.
"Wanted a Governor," was now no longer a dummy in 'The Argus'; but, unhappily,
no application was made to the people of Victoria.
Give a dog a bad name - and the old proverb holds good even at the antipodes.
My trampings are now transcribed from my diary.
With the hot winds whirled in the Vandemonian rush to the Ballaarat Flat.
My hole was next to the one which was jumped by the Eureka mob, and where
one man was murdered in the row. At sixty-five feet we got on a blasted log
of a gum-tree that had been mouldering there under a curse, since the times
of Noah! The whole flat turned out an imperial shicer. (You do not sink
deep enough, Signore Editor.) Slabs that had cost us some eight pounds
a hundred would not fetch, afterwards, one pound. We left them to sweat
freely in the hole; and all the mob got on the fuddle. My mate and myself
thought we had been long enough together, and got asunder for a change.
I was soon on the tramp again.
