AN OLD VICTORIAN NOTORIETY.

Evening Star, Issue 4131, 24 May 1876, Page 4

AN OLD VICTORIAN NOTORIETY.

There are low old Victorian diggers who cannot tell stories of the days when David Armstrong was Superintendent of Police on the goldfields. “Atticus ” thus writes of him in the Melbourne ‘ Leader —ln the old regitne of irresponsible government the man in the Colony most cordially detested was Armstrong. The laws for (he government of the digging populattte, Wp ciWrWsiVe in pfcijicljft, tdwold mbife obnoxi'dtiß

by the tyrannical and arbitrary manner in which he carried them out. He harried the diggers from a feeling of pure sport. He rounded up the unlicensed ones in „ mobs, and chained them in batches to logs in the Government camps. On old Bendigo, in ’52,1 have seen in one day a dozen shanties fired by his order, for the offence of having more than the regulation of spirit found in them. To him more than to any one man, may we ascribe the exasperation of feeling that led to the outbreak at Ballarat, and to the reaction against this rule may we ascribe the goldfields commission of T4, and subsequent legislation that caused diggers to be recognised as ordinary hitman beings. For the sake of old friends on the diggings, who may not read the daily papers, I should like to chronicle the fact that ex-superintendent justice of the peace David Armstrong is at the present moment serving a sentence of fourteen days’ imprisonment for stealing a brass ring from a fellow lodger in an hotel. He escaped for all he did to the diggers in the old time, gets locked up for stealing a brass ring !