at a certain point in the progress towards refinement.”—
Macaulay.


Australia’s history is so short, and her progress has been so
wonderfully rapid, that, seeing things as they are to-day, it is
hard to believe that among us still are men who can remember
the days when convicts in irons tramped the streets of
Sydney, and it was unsafe to go to and from Sydney and Parramatta
without an armed escort; who were partakers of the
roaring days of the diggings when miners lit their pipes with
five-pound notes and shod their horses with gold; who have
exchanged shots with Gilbert and Morgan, and have watched
the lumbering police of the old days scouring the country to
earn the thousand pounds reward on the head of Ben Hall.
So far as materials for ballads go, the first sixty or seventy
years of our history are equal to about three hundred years
of the life of an old and settled nation. The population of
the country comprised a most curious medley. Among the
early settlers were some of the most refined and educated,
and some of the most ignorant, people on the face of the earth.
Among the assisted immigrants and currency lads of the
earlier days education was not a strong point; and such
newspapers as there were could not be obtained by one-half
of the population, and could not be read by a very large
percentage of the other half. It is no wonder, then, that the
making of ballads flourished in Australia just as it did in
England, Scotland, and Ireland in the days before printing
was in common use. And it was not only in the abundance
of matter that the circumstances of the infant Colony were