As I had not then been appointed
registrar, he had to travel sixty miles further before he could
comply with the necessary legal formalities. Then the rush began.
Old diggers came from all parts of Victoria, New South Wales,
Queensland, and New Zealand; also men who had never dug before, and
many who did not intend to dig--pickpockets, horse thieves, and
jumpers. The prospectors' claim proved the richest, and the jumpers
and the lawyers paid particular attention to it. The trail of the
old serpent is over everything. The desire of the jumpers was to
obtain possession of the rich claim, or of some part of it; and the
lawyers longed for costs, and they got them. The prospectors paid,
and it was a long time before they could extricate their claim from
the clutches of the law. They found the goldfield, and they also
soon found an unprofitable crop of lawsuits growing on it. They were
called upon to show cause before the warden and the Court of Mines
why they should not be deprived of the fruit of their labours. The
fact of their having discovered gold, and of having pegged out and
registered their claim, could not be denied; but then it was argued
by counsel most learned in mining law that they had done something
which they should have omitted to do, or had omitted to do something
else which they should have done, frail human beings as they were,
and therefore their claim should be declared to belong to some
Ballarat jumper.
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