A HISTORY OF BALLARAT.

Grey River Argus, Volume IX, Issue 723, 6 September 1870, Page 4

A HISTORY OF BALLARAT.

A Mr Win. Bramwell Withers has written and published a history of Ballarat, from the first pastoral settlement to the present time. As it contains matter which must interest the majority of our readers, we publish the following review of it from the Melbourne Argus : — What need to write romances when the history of what has been passing around us during the last 20 or 30 years is fuller of romantic incident than a story from the Arabian Nights ? Even the transformation scenes of a Christmas pantomime are less surprising than those of which many of us have been the eye-witnesses in Victoria. Looking back upon the changes which have occurred within the memory of colonists who are still young, is like sitting in a theatre and watching the unfolding of a moving panorama, composed of striking and skilfully-contrasted pictures. All is novelty, variety, and mutability. What is this bit of sunny landscape that first meets the eye? A sylvan solitude, with nothing but the hum of insects and the chirp of birds to disturb the voluptuous stillness of the summer air — nothing but the languid flow of a little stream fed from the" neighbouring hills, and the silent procession of a cohort of snow-white clouds across the steel-bright sky, to suggest the idea of motion. Presently this sequestered valley is invaded by flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, which browse upon the succulent grasses fringing the stream, but scarcely mitigate the oppressive sense of solitude engendered in the' mind of the stranger who has penetrated this pastoral fastness. The scene gradually dissolves, and all its sylvan features disappear. An encampment was sprung up with the magical celerity of the Veiled Prophet's, and thousands of people gathered from all parts of the earth, thick as midges on an' autnmal evening, and active as masonwa c p? in the last paroxysm of their short and busy lives, are burrowing in the earth, and extorting from it more treasure than was hidden in Aladdin's cave. What are the fables of poets compared . with the dazzling realities disclosed by the pick and shovel of the digger ? Gold ?. .It is everywhere ; on the surface and under the surface ; clinging to the roots of thegrass, and nestling in crannies of the rock, in fine,.<J«st, in coarse pebbles, in." pockets" rich enough to purchase a king's ransom, and in great masses that must be weighed, like coal, by the hundredweight. It seems to have been scattered broadcast, as though the valley had been the favorite haunt of Danae, and Jupiter had rained down gold upon it in reckless profusion. In the fascinating pursuit of the universal talisman, there is a levelling of all ranks, an abolition of all distinctions, a reduction to one common flux of all the elements of society. Whatever may have been written aforetime with respect to the fickleness of fortune and the caprice 3of chance is : more than verified now. Between sunrise and sunset men have attained to opulence at a single bound. Christopher Sly and the Mock Duke in the "Honeymoon," never played such fantastic tricks as are: perpetrated by the nouveaux. ricftesin'therfirst flush of their .prosperity. Outside the Riie.Qninisahifoixin the days of John Law'; or .of 'Change Alley wheu the South Sea Bubble was being blown ; or of Wall street, New York, when the gold fever was at its. height, nothing has been seen approaching these startling vicissitudes of fortune. They were the wonder and the staple of conversation of one-half of Europe. The rumour of them "launched a thousand ships," as the beautiful face of the wife of Menelaus is said to have done, broke up hundreds of households, and drew tens of thousands of eager adventurers across the sea; so that an obscure province of a remote dependency of Great Britain grew to be the leading colouy of the Australian group, with a celerity rivalling the growth of Jonah's gourd. Then comes another dissolving view. The pursuits of industry are forsaken for those of civU warfare. Men goaded to rebellion by misrule, aro arming, drilling, and entrenching themselves behind a hastily-corfsfeucted fortification for ;tlje purpose of resisting the authority of" the Government. Horse and foot are marching in hot haste to attack the insurgents ; the stockade is assaulted and carried by a coup de main, not without bloodshed on either side ; the insurgents are ,put to flight ; some of their leaders are ' eventually' captured, tried upon a charge of high treason, and acquitted ; and these painful transactions culminate in the abolition of the arbitrary and unpopular regime, under which bitter discontent had flamed up into open rebellion. These things have passed away, and with them the encampment in which they were enacted. A railway passes not very far from the spot upon which the standard of revolt was raised ; one of the leading spirits, of the insurrection occupies a seat in Parliament, and a handsome city, more populous than three of the oldest cathedral cities in England, covers the ground which was twenty years ago a picturesque sheepwalk ; and hundreds of feet below the surface miners are exploring the beds of ancient rivers through all their sinuous course, and extracting tons of gold from their auriferous sands. This -"s theHheme of Mr Withers' book, and with such a theme it is almost of necessity as interesting as a clever work of fiction would be. Patient and industrious in the collection of his materials, systematic in their arrangement, and fortunate in his ability to secure documentary illustrations of the affair at the Eureka Stockade, Mr Withers has produced a work of which the utility will be I more apparent half a century or a century ' hence than it is ' at present. With con-

siderable forethought, he has applied to various persons who have been acquainted with Ballarat from the earliest period of its history," to supply him with their recollections, and with whatever information respecting its rise and growth it might be in their power to bestow. And the value of much of the information thus received it would be difficult to exaggerate. Fancy thedelight with which some Macaulay of the 21st or 22nd century would alight upon a passage like this, and the picturesque uses to which he would apply it:— "l ofter passed (saj^s Mr Hastie), the site on which Ballarat is built, when visiting Mr Waldie, and there could not be a prettier spot imagined. It was the very picture of repose. There was, in general, plenty of grass and water, and often I have seen the cattle in considerable numbers lyingin quiet enjoyment after being satisfied with the pasture. There was a beautiful clump of wattles where Lydiard street now stands. . . . Mr Waldie/had at that time a shepherd's hut about where the Deac l Horse Gully is on the Creswick road, and one day when I was calling on the hut-keeper, he said the solitude was so painful he could not endure it, for he saw no one from the time the shepherds went out iv the morning till they returned at night. " So, too, with regard .to the painful events of December, 1854— events which now appear almost as remote as the massacre of Peterloo. Mr Withers has gathered together and preserved the statements and narratives of several persons who were actively engaged in, or were attentive spectators of, the diggers'^ rebellion. Among these, the acount given of the affair by Carboni Raffaello, better known as " Great Works," and who was afterwards a prominent figure among the Transteverini sympathisers with Garibaldi in Rome, where he also published a tragedy — is one of the most characteristic and amusing. Raffaello was one cf the sigrers of the " Declaration of Independence," and had been educated in the revolutionary school of Italy. He was a warm-hearted, hot-headed, right-meaning, but often wrong-judging eccentric, with a good deal of shrewdness combined with & good deal of simplicity in his composition. He was one of the most honest and sincere of the insurgents, and took up arms against the Government from a firm conviction that there was no other method of redressing the wrongs from which he and his associates suffered.