Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution by Peter Fitzsimons Read Free Book Online

settlers, Henry Anderson and William Cross Yuille, just 19 years old, drove their flocks forward into that particular grassy valley to settle. The kangaroos didn’t really bother bounding away, so placid was this invasion, while the emus barely blinked.
    In short order, William Yuille began to cut down many of the scattered wattle and gum trees and build his home by the banks of a stream he called Yarrowee Creek. All around were many other creeks, gullies, patches of forest and grassy slopes. ‘A pastoral quiet reigned everywhere.’
    Yuille decided to call his run Ballaarat, after the Wathaurong people’s notion of balla arat – a great place to lean on your elbow. And within that run there was no more beautiful or picturesque resting place than a particular waterhole surrounded by wattles at the juncture of the Yarrowee and Gong Gong creeks, at the foot of a curiously elongated, dome-like hill, where the grass around always remained green, no matter how deep the drought, how long the summer, how rare the rains.
    No sooner had these pioneers opened up the land than hundreds, then thousands, then millions of sheep and thousands of cattle began to flow into the central highlands’ felicitous rolling grass country. It was the very area that the explorer Major Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell had first seen in 1836 when, upon reaching the junction of the Murray and Loddon rivers, he became so enchanted by the area and its pastoral possibilities that he called it Australia Felix.
    True, this was all Crown land, with all that lay upon it and beneath it belonging to His Majesty William IV, but the 1836 legislation passed by His Majesty’s representative in Australia, the New South Wales Government, had already determined what they could do. So long as the squatters did not settle within three miles of each other – in practice giving each squatter about 6000 acres – and paid an annually renewed lease of £10 per annum to the government, they were allowed to ‘squat’ upon that land and have grazing rights. If there were any disputes, it was for the Commissioner of Crown lands – the official in formal charge of all of His Majesty’s sovereign territory – to regulate it.
     
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    By 1839 the Port Phillip settlement and its surrounding regions were thriving to the point that, with no fewer than 5000 settlers, the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, felt that it needed a full-time administrator, and this person proved to be a Londoner by the name of Charles Joseph La Trobe. An imposing man at six feet tall, he arrived on the last day of September that year, with his Swiss wife, their two-year-old daughter, Agnes, two servants and a prefabricated cottage that had first been put together in England before being dismantled, transported 10,000-odd miles and then reconstructed in Melbourne. Settling into that small, two-room cottage on a corner of the Government Paddock – an estate he soon renamed Jolimont – he was not long in getting to work. As one whose father had been a peripatetic missionary (Charles himself had considered entering the Church), and who, as an adult, had travelled through both North and South America as a tutor to the troubled young Swiss-based Frenchman Count Albert de Pourtales, Charles La Trobe was nothing if not used to adapting to different climes, and he did well from the first in this benign pastoral outpost of the British Empire.
    And yet, just as La Trobe accommodated his growing family by adding rooms onto his cottage – with a kitchen, library and servants’ quarters constructed by local builders, even as they built stables out the back – so too had he taken over a colony whose settlers were already spilling into adjoining regions.
    From the beginning, however, he was eager for this colony to be a place where far more than mere wealth was accumulated, as he noted in his first speech in Melbourne:
    ‘It is not by individual aggrandisement, by the possession of