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Land, Labor and Gold; Or, Two Years in Victoria: With Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen's Land
Land Labor and Gold Or Two Years in Victoria With Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen's Land Author:William Howitt General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1855 Original Publisher: Ticknor and Fields Subjects: Gold miners Gold mines and mining Victoria 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 bo... more »ok you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: LETTER XXV. Tomming out White Hill Stuff -- Amazing Clearing made by the Diggers in one Year -- Total Disregard of Life by the Officials -- Pits in the Highways Eighty Feet Deep -- Fearful State of the Melbourne Road at Bendigo -- Author gets it repaired, and what comes of it -- Experiences of a Coroner -- Corpse thrown by Officials into Catholic Chapel -- Drownings of Drunken Men -- Liabilities of a Dinner-party -- The System of Government on the Diggings a Mistake -- Practical Bailiffs better than unpractical Commissioners -- Cost of this Gold-lace Commission -- Government lets a whole Station for 101. a Year, and hires out of it a Single Paddock at 5001. a Year -- Oats Is. per lb., Hay 120?. a Ton, for Commissioners' Horses -- Expenditure on Permanent Buildings at the Diggings. Bendigo, October 80,1653. During the period included in my last two letters, a new phase of these diggings was showing itself, and growing into a prominent feature. There had been for some time a number of people digging the surface from some of the slopes about these White Hills; for this to six inches, and in some cases to a foot deep, showed considerable quantities of gold in it. Huge piles of this reddish earth, chiefly a mixture of small quartz and burnt slate, had been carted down to the creek; and men were busy washing it through toms, races being cut from the creek, and streams of water conveyed through the toms. One party had been collecting their pile all the last summer, amounting to some thousands of tons; and this win...« less