My word, we were stunned, and no mistake about it. There was nothing to see but a rocky river and a flat, deep down between hills like we’d seen scores and scores of times all our lives and thought nothing of, and here they were digging gold out in all directions, just like potatoes, as Maddie Barnes said. Some of the lumps we saw—nuggets they called ‘em—was near as big as new potatoes, without a word of a lie in it. I couldn’t hardly believe it; but I saw them passing the little washleather bags of gold dust and lumps of dirty yellow gravel, but heavier, from one to the other just as if they were nothing—nearly £4 an ounce they said it was all worth, or a trifle under. It licked me to think it had been hid away all the time, and not even the blacks found it out. I believe our blacks are the stupidiest, laziest beggars in the whole world. That old man who lived and died in the Hollow, though—he must have known about it; and the queerlooking thing with the rockers we saw near his hut, that was the first cradle ever made in Australia.

The big man of the goldfield seemed to be the Commissioner. We saw him come riding down the street with a couple of troopers after his heels, looking as if all the place, and the gold, too, belonged to him. He had to settle all the rows and disputes that came up over the gold, and the boundaries of the claims, as they called the twenty-foot paddocks they all washed in, and a nice time he must have had of it! However, he was pretty smart and quick about it. The diggers used to crowd round and kick up a bit of a row sometimes when two lots of men were fighting for the same claim and gold coming up close by; but what he said was law, and no mistake. When he gave it out they had to take it and be content. Then he used to ride away and not trouble his head any more about it; and after a bit of barneying it all seemed to come right. Men liked to be talked to straight, and no shilly-shally.

What I didn’t like so much was the hunting about of the poor devils that had not got what they called a licence—a printed thing giving ‘em leave for to dig gold on the Crown lands. This used to cost a pound or thirty shillings a month—I forget rightly which—and, of course, some of the chaps hadn’t the money to get it with—spent what they had, been unlueky, or run away from somewhere, and come up as bare of everything to get it out of the ground.