Page:Charleston • Irwin Faris • (1941).pdf/232



To-day it is but a name, a mark upon the map to indicate where once the town was; a waste of bramble, gorse, and tailings, affording few signs of previous occupation, and none of past prosperity and romance—like Nineveh, a desolation. A tourist highway has replaced the Buller Road and Camp Street; and motor cars and motor lorries have taken the place of the four-in-hands and covered waggons of earlier days. The drivers of these cars, like the coachies of old, tell strange tales to passengers; which although true, sound unbelievable and are disbelieved. They point to a bramble patch where, they declare, once stood a large hotel; to a larger patch and tell that it once bore a block of business premises; that in another gorse-clump stood a busy bank dealing in thousands of ounces of gold each week; point to the outline of some hardly distinguishable water-course from which they state came gold in bucketsful; to a brown flat where once thousands of miners toiled. Small wonder that such facts are received with doubting smiles; even those who knew the old place stone by stone find difficulty in locating once familiar resorts, even when able to penetrate the tangled growth that hides most of them from view.

Only one tangible proof of past history remains, the old European Hotel, which has defied the years and circumstances, and stands a lonely reminder of what was, and whose landlord, Mr. J. H. Powell, possesses quite a museum of relics, and delights in regaling passing sightseers with oral pictures of times that were.

The great batteries have long since ceased work, are silent for ever; their machinery but scrap; their giant water-wheels fallen and in decay; their miles upon miles of water-races dry and crumbling. Of the free and easy-going life of old Charleston much could be written, and of its people much more. Suffice it to say that they were such as we, their descendants, are; but may be a sturdier and more self-reliant race than we of this easier and more favoured age; a people