to procure the settlement of a clergyman at Buninyong, but had failed, partly from want of support, but chiefly from their inability to procure one likely to be suitable. Overtures had been made to Mr. Beazely, a Congregational minister then in Tasmania, and afterwards in New South Wales, but he declined them. The Messrs. Learmonth were willing to take a minister from any denomination, and the circumstance that a Presbyterian clergyman was settled here arose from the fact that no other was available. Until after the gold discovery there was no minister in the interior, that is out of Melbourne, Geelong, Belfast, and Portland, but Mr. Hamilton of Mortlake, Mr. Gow of Campbellfield, and myself. For many years my diocese, as it may be called, extended from Batesford, on the Barwon, to Glenlogie, in the Pyrenees, and included all the country for miles on either side, my duties taking me, from home more than half my time. Before I came the Messrs. Learmonth had contemplated the establishment of a cheap boarding-school for the children of shepherds and others in the bush, but for prudential reasons they deferred the matter till the settlement of a minister offered the means of supervision. Immediately after I came the project was carried out, and subscriptions were received from most of the settlers in the Western district. The school was opened in 1848 by Mr. Bed well, £10 a year being charged for board and education.
The gold discovery carried away the teachers, raised the prices of everything, and Mr. Hastie had to see to the school and its 60 boarders himself; but through all the difficulties the school was maintained with varying fortunes, until at length it became the Common-school near the Presbyterian Manse, with an average attendance of some 180 children.
What is now the boroughs of Ballarat, Ballarat East, and Sebastopol, was then a pleasantly picturesque pastoral country. Mount and range, and table land, gullies and creeks and grassy slopes, here black and dense forest, there only sprinkled with trees, and yonder showing clear reaches of grass, made up the general landscape. A pastoral quiet reigned everywhere. Over the whole expanse there was nothing of civilisation but a few pastoral settlers and their retinue—the occasional flock of nibbling sheep, or groups of cattle browsing in the broad herbage. There were three permanent waterholes in those days where the squatters used to find water for their flocks in the driest times of summer. One was at the junction of the Gong Gong and the Yarrowee, or Blakeney's Creek, as it was then
