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Victoria and Tasmania; Being a Portion of 'australia and New Zealand'.
Victoria and Tasmania Being a Portion of 'australia and New Zealand' Author:Anthony Trollope General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1874 Original Publisher: Chapman and Hall Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you ca... more »n select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV. BALLAARAT. Ballarat, the gold-field city, -- or Ballaarat as the conscientious orthographists of the district insist on spelling it, -- deserves a separate chapter to itself. Not that the two towns of that name, -- Ballaarat and Ballaarat East, -- with their vicinities comprise now -- A. d. 1873 -- the most productive gold-fields of Australia, as they are beaten by those of Sandhurst; but that the place has been more noticeable than any other in the history of Australian gold, and more productive, taking its history back to the time when gold was first discovered there in 1851. That was the great year of the discovery of Australian gold. I am not going into the deeply discussed question of the merits of this or that discoverer, -- as to which jealousy is still rife both in New South Wales and Victoria. Taking the belief which I now find to be the most common in the colonies, I may say that Sir Roderick Murchison and Count Strzelecki both foretold the finding of Australian gold, basing their opinion on the geographical condition of the country; that Hargreaves, acting with others, first struck gold at Ophir in New South Wales; and that gold was first discovered, in Victoria, at Clunes, some few miles from the present city of Ballaarat. I will not venture to say who was the first discoverer, but a miner named Esmond was rewarded for the discovery. In New South Wales gold was declared to be found in April, 1851, and at Clunes in July, 1851, so that the interval between the two colonies was very small. But, in regard to the discovery at Clunes, I think i...« less