“We miss the brilliant foliage, the verdant fields and the beautiful gardens we have left behind. The herbage during the time I have been here has been completely parched up, and the gardens have most of them so run to waste through the scarcity of labour, that hardly a cabbage or a lettuce is to be had. I priced them yesterday, and am not joking when I tell you cabbages were 2/9 each; lettuces 6d. to 9d.; onions 13d. per pound, by the ton, but selling in the shops at 2/- per pound; nuts, 3/- per lb.; flour, which was £47 per ton, has gone down this week to £16. Bread, which we paid 2/6 the 4lb loaf for on landing, we are now giving 1/6 for. House rent, however, flogs everything else. The average rent for a wooden hut is £3 to £5 a week. There is not more than a quarter of the number of houses building in Melbourne that there was in Hastings when I left. The arrivals kept pouring in, and for the most part bring their tents, and pitch them at ‘Canvas Town’, about a quarter of a mile from the city, on a hill. Here they ‘gipsy’ to their heart’s content, and many a fair form, accustomed at home to the negligé of the drawing room and the winning grace of the white satin slipper, clusters round a fire of wood, and repose in all but primitive simplicity, with nought but a shred of hemp or calico between the wind and their nobility. The number of tents is not so great as formerly, many of them having been drafted off to the diggings, but I think there are still from a thousand to fourteen hundred. It is calculated that the population within the last twelve months has risen from 1.000 to 22,000”. . . Referring to the diggings Mr. Robinson says – “My own knowledge, derived from the gold diggers themselves, leads me to believe that more is made of this gold-digging question than properly belongs to it. The occasional find of a good lump dazzles and attracts the multitude, who dig on, hoping some day to come across the same luck themselves. Minute enquiries among those I came out with in October give me the result that out of about 150 engaged at the Ovens and Ballarat diggings, only one party have netted more than their current expenses. . . Parties unfitted by previous occupation, to use the shovel, and the pick, become disgusted when they arrive at the diggings, to find as plebian an occupation as would be at home in the cutting a railway or sinking a well. Only just outside the window where I am writing is a young fellow, well-educated, master of a profession highly connected, &c., who has tried the diggings three times and failed. He has returned to town and is now laying down a pavement in the street at 10s a day. This will be thought high wages by those at home, but a man at home can buy more of the creature comforts of this life for 3/6, and be in a far happier condition, because everything here is in the rough, and whatever he may pay he cannot purchase that which is to be found at home. The social and domestic interchanges of feeling and affection which are met with at home, are here but faintly reflected, while the vices and evil passions, both of man and woman are more intensified. . .Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Mr Robinson believed that as Time works wonders, there was, probably, a brilliant future for Melbourne.
