The Stampede from Melbourne.
The Gold Fever was now regularly scattering the seeds of the epidemic far and wide. Every station was denuded of its helping handle, and sheep and bullocks were left to mind themselves. The few country townships were deserted, and Kyneton, the most important, was left without as much as a drink of water, for the few water-carriers there had sold their carts and horses and ran away. To make matters worse the baker's loaf became a nonentity, and the townspeople were glad to fall back upon devouring the primitive " damper." On the 8th October Lieut.-Governor Latrobe set forth for the diggings, leaving Melbourne in a state of chaos behind him. The fever raged in highway and by-way; intense excitement ruled everywhere, and nothing was talked about but gold, and the universal question asked by everybody of every other body was, " When are you off to the diggings ?" Almost every one was either gone, going, or preparing to go—rich and poor, high and low, gentle and simple. Labourers struck work, clerks deserted their desks, and "counter-jumpers" jumped away, all dreaming of nothing but the road to fortune, and the fortune that only awaited the picking up at the end of the journey. In two or three days hundreds had left, and those who remained were busily engaged in getting ready for the tramp. Every possible device was resorted to in the way of providing for the step about to be taken. Those who were not in funds and had anything vendible got rid of it, and every species of saleable commodity was converted into cash, for the purchase of supplies. Cradles, picks, shovels, and hammers were bought; drays, drags, and carts put in readiness, and it was seriously apprehended that if this state of things was, in any degree, intensified, both Melbourne and Geelong would be drained of all their male population, and garrisoned only by women and girls. Even the police had gone into the scare, and so many of them flung away their batons as to create a general uneasiness through a fear of the difficulty of procuring substitutes for the protection of life and property. Intimation was given to the Licensed Victuallers, that such of them as left the town, would be accounted as absentees, and their licenses forfeited for public-house desertion. There was even a run on the banks by persons desirous of withdrawing deposits, and one forenoon the Union Bank was blockaded in such a manner as to render it necessary to call in the police to preserve order amongst the angry infatuated crowd. The clearing out of Government clerks and every other class of salary or wage earners was growing general. Mechanics, servants, labourers, etc., left with or without notice; and any who applied for leave and did not get it, very unceremoniously took "PVench leave." There was hardly a carter to be found in town, and horses and drays were, by some mysteriously rapid process, melted into "tin," to supply the travelling expenses. Sailors deserted their ships, striplings ten or eleven years old, with tin pannikins and bits of hoop iron, some of them barefooted and many in rags, darted off like so many wild animals, not knowing what they were doing unless they were on the road to the diggings ; and in order to keep a few police and prison warders at their posts, their pay had to be raised to 6s. and 7s. per day respectively. But to one class (and the least deserving) of the community, an acceptable holiday had come; and they were "in clover," viz.:—• the prisoners sentenced to hard labour, for they had nothing to do, as stone-breaking had to be abandoned, for the supply of stone had run out, and there were neither quarrymen nor draymen available. In the midst of all this turmoil, Mr. E. P. Sturt, the energetic Superintendent of Police, took it into his head, inopportunely, to get married, and during the honey-mooning, Mr. N. A. Fenwick was appointed his locum tenens, a change certainly not for the better. Then came a dearth and dearness of food in town, where provisions went up 25 and water 100 per cent, for nearly all the men were away, and the women took their turn at the pumps and became water suppliers. Richmond was so thoroughly deserted that a newspaper declares, that on one day only one old fellow was to be seen hobbling about, and with a phiz so shrouded in anxiety as to induce a belief that he had been left behind as the sole care-taker-general of all the women and children. As to Melbourne, its streets were as deserted as Collins Street on a Saturday afternoon is now, but at every second shop door heaps of cradles were to be seen for sale, so much so, that a humourist of the period pronounced the town to resemble a huge lying-in settlement, minus the babies.
