About This Book
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'etre 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 utilised 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."
