CHAPTER X
TRANSITION : THE AGE OP GOLD
The - The epochs into which we have divided Australian history
transition are nQt con t ra sted in all their characteristics : there is no from the ' second to single universal break, nor does one decisive moment sever
epoch" ^ m g nt from day, or ' cut the glory from the grey '; but the
dividing line is jagged, parts of one epoch overlap the last
or project into the next, and between the second and third
epochs there was a period or rather phase of transition, and
men passed from the middle to the new world across a bridge
which began near the ending of one world and ended near
the beginning of another world, which belonged to both
worlds or neither, and whose material was of unwrought
gold.
■was effected In 1840, Lord J. Russell ordered Sir G. Gipps not to b coveries of reserve mines when selling land, because ' the small amount gold. of profit derived from mines throughout the British Colonial Empire ' was a 1 reason why such reservations would be as unnecessary as inconvenient'. 1 Gipps complied with this command by reserving nothing but gold and silver. For while Lord John wrote the eastern sky was beginning to show the first faint symptoms of a golden dawn. McBrien (1823), 2 Strzelecki (1839), 3 Rev. W. B. Clarke (1841), Blakefield (1844), Smith (1848), and others, picked up gold-quartz
1 May 31, 1840, in Acc. and Pap. (1840), xxxiii. p. 395.
2 E. F. Pittman, Mineral Resources of A T ew South Wales (1901), Frontispiece.
3 Strzelecki, Supplement to Physical Description of New South Wales, &c. (1856).