Australia And The Depression

Australia must have seemed a desolate and forbidding land to the many thousands of people who arrived in Sydney and Melbourne after news of the discovery of gold reached Europe, America and the East in the early 1850s. The cities, particularly Melbourne which was to become the starting place for a many prospective diggers, were small, dirty and ill-equipped to cope with the sudden arrival of masses of immigrants. When they set off into the bush to make their way to the goldfields they found the country strange and inhospitable.

Antoine Fauchery, the French photographer who became a successful digger and as a bonus made a vivid photographic record encountered on his way to Ballarat in 1852. Soon after leaving the verdant vine-covered hills of Geelong

... all traces of cultivation vanish. You plunge for sixty miles - what am I talking about? for ever! into woods, woods entirely without coppices . . . a sterile tract of land that produces neither flower nor fruit, and is covered only with dead wood or with a coarse sort of couth-grass on which you cannot even sit. So don't expect to see a stag bound away at a turn in the road, a hare jump up from its form, a partridge or a pheasant rise from under your feet, for none of these tasty bits of game could make do with the poor fare that the Australian soil offers. Amid these vast solitudes you only encounter the kangaroo, the mediocre taste of whose ribs bears sufficient witness to the animal's sobriety. The kangaroo-rat, a small kangaroo the size of a rabbit, the possum, half kangaroo, half wild-cat and the flying squirrel share the tree-trunks where they shelter during the day and from which they come out at night to make the echoes ring with their plaintive cries. these animals 'with inoffensive habits and execrable flesh, seem to belong to a common family they all have a ouch under their belly, a travelling bag provided no doubt by providence so that at the first opportunity

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