Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/359

 The journey to Bathurst was easily performed by mail-coach or on horseback. Arrived at Bathurst, the explorer found himself in the midst of a rich pastoral and agricultural district, in which every fertile valley had a small colony of settlers, ready to supply flour, meat, milk, and butter, at reasonable charges.

The gold-diggers, instead of settling in a wilderness infested by grizzly bears and savage Indians, like California, found themselves in a district where a market was only needed to call into cultivation thousands of acres of capital land—at Frederick's Valley, a gold placer of extraordinary richness, belonging to Mr. Wentworth; at Summerhill Farms, at King's Plains, Pretty Plains, Emu Swamp, and the Cornish Settlement, where the crops in the severest droughts never failed.

The Summerhill diggings, which are now nearly exhausted, and the style of life which prevails throughout the interior of Australia, are well depicted in the following sketch by a correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald:—

"Monday, June 2.—In the morning the ice was thick upon the water in the dishes outside, and the ground covered with hoar frost, as it always is here in fine weather at this season; hot days and frosty nights.

"To an unscientific eye the gold country (Bathurst district) consists of a mass, not of ranges, but apparently of points of ranges, thrown together without any regular arrangement, but dovetailing into one another like the teeth of two saws placed close together, face to face; these teeth again being cut into smaller pieces by narrow precipitous gullies, many of them nearly as deep as the main creek itself. Small creeks twist and twine down these narrow gullies, which have a sudden bend every half-dozen yards, into the Summerhill or main creek, which twists and twines like the others, but on a larger scale. The banks of the gullies are precipitous on both sides, but in the main creek there are alternate bluffs and low points, the teeth of the saw sloping gently down, diminishing in height as they do in width, till they come to a point overhung on the opposite side by a high bluff or precipice, which forms the inside of the nick of the opposite saw; and, as we stood upon the edge of the cliff, we looked down nearly two hundred feet over and along each side of the opposite point, dotted with tents and gunyas of bark or branches, each with its fire in front, sending the blue smoke up into the clear frosty morning air; some under the noble swamp oaks at the water's edge, others behind and under the box and gum trees which towered one above another till the rising branch was merged in the