Moorabool to about midway to the Lal Lal Creek. Mr. Bacchus still resides in the same locality, his present station being known as Perewur, or Peerewurr, a native name, meaning waterfall and opossums. It was originally held by Messrs. Fairbairn and Gardner. Buninyong was a village, or township, long before Ballarat had any existence as a settlement. The first huts were built at Buninyong in the year 1841, by sawyers, splitters, and others, Mr. George Innes being then called the "King of the Splitters." George Gab, George Coleman, and others, were the pioneers in the Buninyong settlement. Gab had a wife who used to ride Amazonian fashion on a fine horse called Petrel, and both husband and wife were energetic people. Gab opened a house of accommodation for travellers on the spot where Jamison's hotel was afterwards built. The first store in the neighborhood was opened at the Round Water Holes, near Bonshaw, by Messrs. D. S. Campbell and Woolley, of Melbourne, who almost immediately afterwards removed to a site next Gab's, at Buninyong, whose place they took for a kitchen. Gab then removed and built another hut opposite to the present police-court, and he opened his new hut also as a hotel. A blacksmith named M‘Lachlan, with a partner, opened a smithy opposite to Campbell and Wooley's store. This was the nucleus of the principal inland town then in the colony. In the year 1844 Dr. Power settled there, and built a hut behind what was afterwards the Buninyong hotel. He was the first medical man in the locality, and for years the settlers had no other doctor nearer than Geelong. The young township became a favorite place with bullock teamsters, who were glad to build huts there where they could leave their wives and children in some degree safe from aboriginal or other marauders. In the year 1847, the Rev. Thomas Hastie, the first clergyman in the district, came to Buninyong. His house, and the church in which he performed service, were built entirely by the residents in Buninyong, both pecuniary gifts and manual labor being contributed. Then, as afterwards, the Messrs. Learmonth were among the foremost movers in the promotion of the mental and moral, as well as material welfare of the people about them. Mr. Hastie, in a letter to us, says:—
Before I came in 1847, the Messrs. Learmonth had made several efforts
