If we were digging up gold like potatoes we weren’t the only ones. No, not by a lot. There never was a richer patch of alluvial, I believe, in any of the fields, and the quantity that was sent down in one year was a caution.Wasn’t the cash scattered about then? Talk of money, it was like the dirt under your feet—in one way, certainly—as the dirt was more often than not full of gold.

We could see things getting worse on the field after a bit. We didn’t set up to be any great shakes ourselves, Jim and I; but we didn’t want the field to be overrun by a set of scoundrels that were the very scum of the earth, let alone the other colonies. We were afraid they’d go in for some big foolish row, and we should get dragged in for it. That was exactly what we didn’t want.

With the overflowing of the gold, as it were, came such a town and such a people to fill it, as no part of Australia had ever seen before. When it got known by newspapers, and letters from the miners themselves to their friends at home, what an enormous yield of gold was being dug out of the ground in such a simple fashion, all the world seemed to be moving over. At that time nobody could tell a lie hardly about the tremendous quantity that was being got and sent away every week. This was easy to know, because the escort returns were printed in all the newspapers every week; so everybody could see for themselves what pounds and hundredweights and tons—yes, tons of gold—were being got by men who very often, as like as not, hadn’t to dig about twenty or thirty feet for it, and had never handled a pick or a shovel in their lives before they came to the Turon.