Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/509

Rh were rewarded by the Government for their discoveries; they had been gold-miners in California, and were led to search where they did through the similarity of the ground. There is a report that gold was really found by a shepherd near Clunes at least two years before the discovery by Esmond; and there is another report that gold was found in 1814 by convicts who were building a road over the Blue Mountains, but the Government kept the discovery secret.

"No gold-mining region in the world ever gave up so much of the precious metal in the same time as did Ballarat in the early days. Claims eight feet square and the same in depth yielded from fifty thousand to sixty thousand dollars each; at the Prince Regent mine men made eighty thousand dollars each in a few months' time; at one claim a tubful of earth washed out nearly ten thousand dollars; one nugget, the 'Welcome,' was sold for fifty-two thousand five hundred dollars; and a claim that had been abandoned on the supposition that it was worked out, gave to the fortunate two men who then took possession no less than forty thousand dollars in less than two weeks. I could fill a volume with stories such as these and then shouldn't be at the end. The total yield of the Australian gold-mines up to the present time is said to be very nearly one billion seven hundred million dollars.

"Just before gold was discovered in Victoria the colony had seventy-seven thousand inhabitants; in a single year eighty thousand were added to the population, and three years after the gold discovery there