A Romance of Canvas Town And Other Stories

DWELLERS in Melbourne during 1851 and the immediately succeeding
years of the golden age in Australia will remember Canvas Town. Good
cause, doubtless, have certain prosperous citizens to recall the
strange suburb of Melbourne across the river, in which they, with
hundreds of strangers and pilgrims, were fain to abide, pending
suitable lodgings or employment. It arose mushroom-like from the bare
trampled clay, a town of tents and calico, at no great distance from
Prince's-bridge, shouldering the road which then led to the
fashionable suburb of South Yarra.

Its raison d'être was briefly this. When tidings of the wondrous
yields of Ballarat and Forest Creek--of gold dust and ingots, so
profuse, so easily won--reached Europe, fleets of vessels bearing
armies of adventurers set sail for Eldorado. When the flotilla
anchored in Hobson's Bay, disembarking in crowds, the young and the
old, the rich and the poor, the delicately nurtured with the rudely
reared, there was simply no place to put them, nowhere for them to go.

For in Melbourne, houses and cottages, huts and hotels were alike
full, more than full, with legitimate occupants. The verandahs and
even the back yards were utilized as dormitories. A list of the
extraordinary makeshifts for bedrooms then in common use would read
like a chapter from the Hunting of the Snark or kindred literature.
Only with this difference, that the nonsense would all be true,--
terribly true.

What, then, was to be done? Filled with auriferous fancies and
fables, it was yet impossible for all of these inexperienced,
untraveled innocents to march at once for the diggings. Many had
imagined that they could 'step over,' on arrival, to the golden
fields, and commence the colonial industry of nugget gathering without
loss of time.

To fathers of families--some of near kin to Mr. Micawber--to raw
lads, to the feeble, the sick, the penniless--there were many of these
last--it may easily be imagined how terrible was the first experience
of the strange, inhospitable, and apparently savage land in which they
found themselves.

Landed at Sandridge or on the wharves of Melbourne, in the midst of
rude, jostling crowds, what misery must many of them have undergone! I
fear me that the complacent colonists, thriving and experienced, fully
aware of the fact that all property, whether of stock, land, stations,
or houses, had become enormously enhanced in value, must have seemed
to the forlorn emigrants hard and unfeeling. There was a savour of
selfishness, surely, about the way in which the herd of helpless
strangers--gentle and simple, good, bad, or indifferent--was permitted
to go its own road, to sink or swim, with but little aid or counsel
from their countrymen in Victoria.

The deadly wharf-struggle over, it became a vital question with the
houseless horde where to go and how to shelter themselves. There,
indeed, was the rub! Melbourne, as before stated, was crammed full.
They could not camp in the streets. They were unprepared for the bush.
They knew not which way to turn. Whether, in some semi-official way,
directed to locate themselves upon the site, long famous and
memorable, or, whether as being within reach of the Yarra, of the
town, and apparently unoccupied, and unowned, the bright idea of
"pegging out" struck some smart pilgrim, and the rest followed suit,
cannot be known. But almost in a night Canvas Town arose, and became a
localized, tangible fact.

About that time there lived in the pastoral region of Victoria,
occasionally visiting Melbourne like his brethren, when a decent
excuse offered, a squatter named Evan Cameron. This young person had
lately brought a draft of fat cattle from his station near the mouth
of the Glenelg. The season being that of winter, the weather bad, and
his assistant strictly unreliable, he had been sorely tried and
endured hardship. But, as he had sold the drove at an unprecedentedly
high price, and was even now enjoying a well-earned holiday, the
memory of his privations was becoming faint and obscure.