This classification is taken from Kerr's Port Phillip Directory for 1842; but though some of them are rated as landowners or merchants, they were all neck deep in other speculations, mostly of a risky character.
Such were the so-styled "Twelve Apostles" of Port Phillip to whom Rucker made an assignment of his property, nominally assessed as worth £40,000, and by a curiously peculiar arrangement, the "Holy Brotherhood" were rendered jointly and individually liable to the Union Bank of Australasia, not for the sum claimed, but for £10,000 each, or £120,000. Though these "Saints" comprised what might be termed a smart, wide-awake lot, one of them was so superlatively cute that, by a rapid and pleasant stroke of business, he showed himself the superior of his fellows, and actually succeeded in outwitting the Bank. After all the legal preliminaries were arranged, and the ominous parchments cut and dry, ready for the signatories, a certain hour of a certain day was appointed to put the finishing touches of pen and ink to the deed, which was lying like a State prisoner in the Bank parlour. The sharp practitioner referred to had his weather-eye open wider than the Bank Manager's, and, setting his solicitor to work, an ante-nuptial settlement of all his property was prepared in favour of an attractive spinster, whose services were retained as governess in a family residing at Heidelberg, and thither on the evening before the doomsday he hied, led off the consenting lady in triumph to the Hymeneal altar, and duplicated the prior settlement by another, ratified through the joint agency of a minister, a book, and a ring. He was present, however, at his post, in compliance with the Bank appointment, and no one there, save himself, had the slightest notion that there was a veritable "man of straw" amongst them. By this adroit move, one of the ten thousand pounder assets was finally disposed of. But it could be well spared, for when the time for action arrived, Mr. Thomas Elder Boyd, who succeeded Mr. William Highett in the Union Bank management, made short work with the Army of (Rucker's) Salvation, for he put on the screw most mercilessly, rushed station and various other kinds of property into a market where there was little demand for any sort of commodity, and at these forced sales everything was sold without reserve. "A tremendous sacrifice" was effected, and though the "Apostles" had to pay the piper, others danced to the joyous tune of some £50,000 ultimately netted by the purchasers, who, I have been informed upon reliable authority, were believed to have acted in complicity, if not with the Bank, certainly with its Manager. Three things are certain, viz., that the original £10,000 liability was paid, that certain persons pocketed handsome profits out of the purchases, and that the "Apostles" were so far cornered as to be compelled either to fly for refuge to the Insolvent Court, or compromise with their creditors. Even the hero of the ante-nuptial coup did not weather the storm, for he too went under water through other commercial causes. It was not to be expected that such a bouleversement could have run its course without the intervention of the Law Courts, and the consequence was a network of suits in Equity, Nisi Prius, and Insolvency, whose intricacies nearly exhausted the ingenuity and patience of Bench, Bar, and Jurors, a detail of which would fill a tolerably-sized volume. Sufficient to state that the "Apostles" withdrew from the struggle like a dozen squeezed oranges, yet with a recuperative power in the pips, which enabled them to resume the battle of life, and fight it so lustily that, except three or four of them, who either died soon after or left the country, they worked themselves into good positions in life; some in easy and some in affluent circumstances. Of the Twelve, ten are sojourning in that bourne from which there is no return, and only two remained amongst us until a recent period. One of these twins, and the chief of the tribe (Mr. Rucker), passed out of the world in 1882. "The Last of the Mohicans," the ultimus Romanorum, the solitary Apostle now remaining on earth, is Mr. J. B. Were[1] an old colonist, dating from 1839, who has seen much of the ups and downs of Victoria; and, from various points of view, has been accounted both a good and bad fellow, using the adjectives in a general and inoffensive sense, as the goodness outweighed the badness in his organization. Largely engaged in the early commercial and other speculations, he had so shrewd an eye to business that certain sharp customers who were unable to "do" him were wont to indulge in a little spiteful merriment, by recasting his name and declaring that, though conventionally J. B., it should in reality be Jonathan "Be-Ware."
- ↑ Mr. Were died in 1885, since the above was written.—Ed.
