amount of valuable property, which they were under the necessity of disposing of. Others had perhaps only one or two superfluities that they were positively compelled to turn into money to buy bread.
“There were every variety of characters engaged in this singular traffic. The handsome and distinguished looking scion of some good family, anxious to dispose of the best portions of his valuable outfit, bought at Silver’s, and which his fond mother or sister had taken so much pains about. The care-worn broken-down gentleman or tradesman, or his wife, endeavouring to dispose of a silver teapot or a gold snuff-box, or some other carefully hoarded up family relic, which only actual want would have compelled any of them to part with. The stalwart farmer’s son from Cumberland, or some other inward county, offering a gun or a watch, which he found useless in a country like Australia in the golden era. Some with a book, or umbrella, or a pair of boots. In a word there were every class of seller, with every kind of article to dispose of.
“The traffic in ‘Rag Fair’ became at last so considerable as to interfere with the interests of the legitimate storekeepers, and a memorial on the subject having been forwarded to the city council, that body thought it necessary to suppress it; and an order went forth to take into custody all persons guilty of offering goods for sale on the forbidden ground where ‘Rag Fair’ was held. The pretext was that it had become appropriated to the sale of stolen goods, and that persons made it a regular place of traffic, getting themselves up for the occasion as poor immigrants and catching up any unwary purchaser who might visit the scene. The contrast was very striking between the immigrant thus disposing of a few necessaries and superfluities, in order to purchase a small outfit for the diggings, and the half-fledged immigrant who had made a successful trip to Bendigo or Forest Creek, and had revisited Melbourne to dissipate a portion of the treasure he had secured. The hotels presented a singular and to a mind of any refinement, a disgusting scene. The bars, parlors, and public rooms were crowded with people in all the various stages of drunkenness—some were drowsy, some foolish, some violent, some excited, some idiotic, some positively mad. Such assemblages of the worshippers at the shrine of Bacchus could hardly have been jumbled together in any other part of the world; and the freaks of some lucky diggers were so erratic that the stranger to such scenes would hardly believe that they occurred. The great and unaccountable propensity of such as had been very successful in obtaining treasure to fly to dissipation, and to squander their wealth in extravagant profusion, astonished men of reflection; cases have been known where these men have taken up rolls of bank notes in their drunken fury and eaten or destroyed them.
