INTERCOLONIAL NEWS

Grey River Argus, Volume XI, Issue 920, 8 July 1871, Page 2

INTERCOLONIAL NEWS

A young man named Timothy Crough, working for Mr Gordon, a contractor of Ararat, lost his life by a fall from his horse, which took place recently. The last crushing of the City of Hobart Claim, Black Boy, averaged loz sdwt. The other claims are promising, but operations are retarded for want of water. The Baltnain (N.S.W.) Regatta Committee intend giving a £100 prize for another inter-colonial gig race, on the 9th of November next. The rats coming over from Queenslih I to South Australia are becoming a ser'.o n nuisance in the far north. Afc mio house 600 of the vermin were killed in one night. The 1 Melbourne Cemetery has received another adornment, now that the n;w mortuary chapel in the Roman Catholic portion of the ground has been completed. A parcel of about .£9O worth of gold has been received in Sydney from the recently-found diggins at Puebo, New Caledonia. The Government have imposed an export duty of 2s 6d an ounce mi gold. A favorable opportunity has not yet been obtained for testing the precise value of Puebo gold. The mining population would appear to be small. The foundation of a local custom that may endure long enough to be an " old custom" is thus alluded to by the Ballarat Courier: — " Mr Bath, according to annual custom, on Monday re-asserted his occupancy of the thoroughfare known as Bathstreet, by haying a rope drawn across from one side of the street to the other. The usual attendant was present to claim a tollage of 6d from every vehicle which passed through." " The news from the Stockyard Creek gold fields," says the Qvpps Land Mercury, "is very encouraging. Several extensive finds of gold have taken place during the past week. The population is increasing, and buildings are going up in every direction. Several tradesmen have gone from this district with a view to the establishing of businesses at the new diggings. A baker from Sale and a baker from Stratford may be included in the number." Bendigo has quite supplanted Ballarat as a mining centre, and fortunes will for the future be made and lost in Pall Mall, instead of the Corner at Ballarat. Hitherto there has been a rising market for nearly every description of stock, and nearly every speculator has made money. Perhaps the most astonishing instauce of success is the sale by Mr Koch of his claim and machinery on the Garden Gully line of reefs for £75,000 cash. A few months ago it might have been purchased for a few hundred pounds. A young man named James Holman Odgers, twenty years old, and an apprentice on board the ship Star of Peace, lying at the Williamstown Railway Pier, was accidentally drowned on Sunday Bright. The young fellow and several of the crew had been on shore at Williamstown during the evening, and were returning to *L the vessel about ten n'clock, under the | influence of liquor. Odgers was in the S) act of passing along the gangway leading s I from the west side of the pier to the a ' vessel, when he fell into the water, and c sand. He was not seen to rise again. O TJia-jnam StvrlnftV-SlQfAjvjiom in-**--'— *■» " scribed by the Sydney Mornvng Herald : . — "As our readers are aware, there has g been an alteration in the design of the „ sovereign coined at the Sydney branch of i the Royal Mint, by which it is assimie lated to the English coin of the same t kind. A specimen of this altered coin f has been brought under our notice, and a its alloy being copper, there is a marked difference between the color of that and - the coin of the older date. On the re- - verse, instead of the garland and the word 8 'Australia,' we have now the English * coat of arms, and in the joining stems of jT the wreath, surrounding it a very small letter S, which signifies that it ha 3 been ' coined in Sydney." 3 There is a probability of gold being ? found in Western Australia, in the northIs east of Champion Bay. Mr H. Y. L. b Brown, the Government Geologist, paid a the' district a visit about two months ago. - It is about from 100 to 200 miles from ■ Champion Bay, across the dividing range & which separates the waters flowing into " the Murchison from water flowing due 1 east into an apparently large river similar L to the Greenborough. Mr Brown met with rocks almost identical with the goldbearing rocks of Victoria, but he had to return before a careful search could be mail. When the last mail left he had gone out a second time. Traces of gold > have been discovered in the casing of reefs near Peterwangy, where auriferous indications were observed about a year ago. I The Tarnagulla correspondent of the . Bunnolly Express, says: — "One of the [ richest crushings which has been had in ' Tarnagulla for some years was completed ; on Friday, at the South Poverty Consols I Company's machine. The stone was got out of a claim known as Halliger's claim, in Ironbark Gully, being the Greek's Hill and Ironbark line of reef, 33 loads giving 3520z Bdwt 6gr smelted gold, which was sold to the Union Bank, the Bank advancing LI4OO, subject to assay. The party are deserving of their good fortune, as they have been working the ground for some five months with but very poor success, having scarcely made a living out of it. They have worked out the whole of the block. There is, however, no doubt but more gold will be found in the claim, as it has been one of the best of the many good claims on this line of reef. Mr Olsen, owner of the adjoining claim crushed a lot of 19 loads, yielding 14oz. There waa also a small lot of 16 loads from Ironbark Hill crushed, which gave 12oz ldwt." The one great subject of interest in Queensland is railway . extension. A strong-effort has been made to obtain the sanction of Parliament to the completion of the Southern and Western Railway, by bringing it down to Brisbane, the capital, and to the extension of the northern line to the Expedition Range ; but the Government and their supporters have defeated the effort by a majority of one. The Opposition members intimated that they would obstruct all other legislation until the railway question was dealt with; whereupon the Government carried a motion which adjourned the Legislative Assembly to the 7th November next. A public banquet has been given by the Brisbane people to the Opposition members j aud the agitation for further railways is kept up at the principal towns t interested in the matter, A memorial •

has been presented to the Acting-Gover-nor praying him to prorogue Parliament with the view of calling it together in a month's time. The human remains found on the Barcoo River, and supposed to be the bones of some of Leiehardt's ill-fated party, have been pronounced by medical men to be the bones of aboriginals. The whole of the exhibits from this colony for the International Exhibition have been lost in the Queen of the Thames. "A very distinct earthquake shock," says the Beaufort Chronicle, " was felt by residents in every part of the Beaufort district about four o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 14th inst. In the township a number of families were awakened from their slumbers by a rumbling sound, and an unmistakeable vibration of the? earth, and was sufficient in several places to causes a rattling amongst the kitchen crockery, and a perceptible trembling of bedsteads. The shock lasted from 25 to 30 seconds, and its direction is generally described as from west to east. Numbers of people were so much alarmed by this unwelcome addition to their colonial experiences that they summarily dressed, and waited for daylight with considerable anxiety. At Waterloo, most of the inhabitants felt the shock and heard the peculiar noise, some of them describing the sound as resembling that of a heavilyladen waggon, with muffled wheels, being drawn sharply over a metalled road " It is said that woman's love endureth long. That of the Geelong Littles must have outrun the ordinary span, for husband and wife were separated for 20 years, when the heart of the former yearned to behold the chosen of his youth, and the latter, hearing that her first love was now a wine merchant in prosperous circumstances at the antipodes, deemed* it her wifely duty to sell off her little farm in Ireland and come out to Australia to share the joys and sorrows of her long absent spouse. Alas ! sentiment vanished when Mrs Little arrived and found that the wine merchant's business was carried on in a very retail way, in a little village cabin, a few miles from Geelong, that Little had a wooden leg, was addicted to swearing, and had generally on hand a smaller stock of joys than sorrows. Better it would have been for this loving couple had they mourned each other dead, for since Mrs Little's arrival the wine merchant has been bound over to separately maintain his wife, and Mrs Little on her part is left to lament the folly of breaking up a comfortable Irish home for the prospect of sharing the fortune of the head of a wealthy mercantile firm in Australia. It would be interesting to know how much of wordly interest entered into the calculations of this loving pair, the one in offering, the other in accepting a renewal after twenty years' absence of the sweets and bitters of married life.