Читать книгу Old Convict Times to Gold Digging Days - William Derricourt - Страница 3

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The following narrative, which has come into the possession of the proprietors of the Evening News, will, though a record of actual experience, be found to contain episodes that have never been surpassed in any novel. It shows the career of one who, arriving in this part of the world as a convict, gradually, and not without some temporary slips backward, worked his way to a position of competence and respectability, finally arriving at a point sufficiently assured for him to be able to reveal his past without fear of anyone making it a reproach to him. His record incidentally shows, set forth as nearly as possible in his own words, a state of society that has now passed away almost as completely as the dark ages. Touching England one reads in our hero's recollections of the Midlands almost as savage as when John Wesley preached through them—a region of bull-baiting, dog-fighting, and sports even more barbarous still. Journeying with the writer to the southern half of the globe, there is revealed in sober matter of fact the horrors of Van Dieman's Land as vividly as the late Marcus Clarke dealt with them in fiction. Turning to the continent the details of "Robbery under Arms" find confirmation in reminiscences of such celebrated bushrangers as Gardiner and the Clarkes; and there is, too, a picture of diggers, lucky and unlucky, their triumphs, and their disappointments and reverses, which has not yet been equalled in popular literature. The wild days of the fifties are traced from the breaking out of the Turon goldfield to the finding of the 200 ounce nugget at New Chum Hill, and thence right down to the present times of half-exhausted fields and veterans, who could once come down to Sydney on sprees of almost fabulous proportions, working for wages on the scenes of their former glories. Taking up these pages one can again see the gold escort start in the days when gold escorting was a service of real danger; one can hear the ever fresh tale of the masked desperado waiting for the old lumbering coach at the lonely turn of the road; and above all it can be seen that even the "old hands" had much in them of good sturdy stuff, and were often more the victims of circumstances and of harsh laws than possessed by any inherent wickedness. In presenting the narrative an attempt has been made to preserve a plan by which the various phases in the life of a man of the old times will be kept distinct, and in intelligible sequence. Now to our story: The history of William Derricourt, or Day, once of Darliston, England, now of Sofala, New South Wales.