Australia must have seemed a desolate and forbidding land to the many thousands of people who arrived in Sydney and Melbourne after news of the discovery of gold reached Europe, America and the East in the early 1850s. The cities, particularly Melbourne which was to become the starting place for a many prospective diggers, were small, dirty and ill-equipped to cope with the sudden arrival of masses of immigrants. When they set off into the bush to make their way to the goldfields they found the country strange and inhospitable.
Antoine Fauchery, the French photographer who became a successful digger and as a bonus made a vivid photographic record encountered on his way to Ballarat in 1852. Soon after leaving the verdant vine-covered hills of Geelong
... all traces of cultivation vanish. You plunge for sixty miles - what am I talking about? for ever! into woods, woods entirely without coppices . . . a sterile tract of land that produces neither flower nor fruit, and is covered......
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Approximate Word Count: 353
Approximate Pages: 2 (260 words per double-spaced page) |