Australia Felix | Page 6

off as soon as they reached the diggings. There, a man
must, for safety's sake, be alone, when he stooped to pick up his fortune.
But at first sight of the strange, wild scene that met his eyes he hastily
changed his mind. And so the two of them had stuck together; and he
had never had cause to regret it. For all his lily-white hands and finical
speech Young Bill had worked like a nigger, standing by his mate
through the latter's disasters; had worked till the ladyish hands were
horny with warts and corns, and this, though he was doubled up with
dysentery in the hot season, and racked by winter cramps. But the life
had proved too hard for him, all the same. During the previous summer
he had begun to drink--steadily, with the dogged persistence that was in
him--and since then his work had gone downhill. His sudden death had
only been a hastening-on of the inevitable. Staggering home to the tent
after nightfall he would have been sure, sooner or later, to fall into a
dry shicer and break his neck, or into a wet one and be drowned.
On the surface of the Gravel Pit his fate was already forgotten. The
rude activity of a gold-diggings in full swing had closed over the
incident, swallowed it up.
Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawn
veil of blueness, which ought to have been transparent, stretched what,
from a short way off, resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch of green
offered rest to the eye; not a tree, hardly a stunted bush had been left
standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basin itself, or on the
several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides. Even the most
prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out on the Flat like a
gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense timber, feverishly
disembowelled, and was now become a bald protuberance strewn with
gravel and clay. The whole scene had that strange, repellent ugliness
that goes with breaking up and throwing into disorder what has been
sanctified as final, and belongs, in particular, to the wanton disturbing
of earth's gracious, green-spread crust. In the pre-golden era this wide
valley, lying open to sun and wind, had been a lovely grassland, ringed
by a circlet of wooded hills; beyond these, by a belt of virgin forest. A

limpid river and more than one creek had meandered across its face;
water was to be found there even in the driest summer. She-oaks and
peppermint had given shade to the flocks of the early settlers; wattles
had bloomed their brief delirious yellow passion against the grey-green
foliage of the gums. Now, all that was left of the original "pleasant
resting-place" and its pristine beauty were the ancient volcanic cones of
Warrenheip and Buninyong. These, too far off to supply wood for
firing or slabbing, still stood green and timbered, and looked down
upon the havoc that had been made of the fair, pastoral lands.
Seen nearer at hand, the dun-coloured desert resolved itself into
uncountable pimpling clay and mud-heaps, of divers shade and varying
sizes: some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others were
taller than the tallest man. There were also hundreds of rain-soaked,
mud-bespattered tents, sheds and awnings; wind-sails, which fell,
funnel-like, from a kind of gallows into the shafts they ventilated; flags
fluttering on high posts in front of stores. The many human figures that
went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from the ground they
trod. They were coated with earth, clay-clad in ochre and gamboge.
Their faces were daubed with clauber; it matted great beards, and
entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where, here and
there, a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness, it was so besmeared
with yellow that it might have been expected to turn green. The gauze
neck-veils that hung from the brims of wide-awakes or cabbage-trees
were become stiff little lattices of caked clay.
There was water everywhere. From the spurs and gullies round about,
the autumn rains had poured freely down on the Flat; river and creeks
had been over their banks; and such narrow ground-space as remained
between the thick-sown tents, the myriads of holes that abutted one on
another, jealous of every inch of space, had become a trough of mud.
Water meandered over this mud, or carved its soft way in channels; it
lay about in puddles, thick and dark as coffee-grounds; it filled
abandoned shallow holes to the brim.
From this scene rose a blurred hum of sound; rose and as it were
remained stationary above it--like a smoke-cloud, which no wind

comes to drive away. Gradually,