The great day, the great race was over. The Australian family had enjoyed their modest triumph in seeing the good horse from a sister colony win the blue ribbon of the great cross-country contest, coming in victorious over hedge and ditch, brook and rail, with the best blood of England eight lengths behind. That was an honour which could never be taken away from them. In years to come any of them would be able to say, ‘I saw Moifaa sweep over the four miles and a half of a stiff course (as English people reckon) with as much ease as if it had been a hurdle race. And until we see an imported horse from England win a steeplechase at Flemington, we shall be entitled to hold that the horses bred south of the line possess unequalled speed, stoutness, and jumping ability.’
From the far ocean-surrounded islands of the south land, where still linger the traces of the moa, and the apteryx perplexes the tourist, to the torrid levels of the West Australian fields, where the miner’s harvest is weighed and reckoned in ounces of fine gold, the love of athletic sports, which the British emigrants carried with them, has caused their representative champions to be respected from India to the Pole.
After this equine battle of Waterloo it was, of course, natural for the victorious Austro-Britons to fall back upon their base in London—the Hotel Cecil, where they and the Allied Forces might arrange for future operations during the spring and summer campaigns.
The Bannerets were not, as may be imagined, without acquaintances, and, indeed, friends of long standing in high places. Cadets of noble houses had visited Australia in the early ’fifties (1852 to 1856), when the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo, Eaglehawk and Maryborough, were at their marvellous height of productiveness; where, also, the purchase of a few shares overnight might result in a fortune before breakfast for the investor. Besides such glimpses into Aladdin’s cave, there was the entirely new spectacle of goldfields, where the precious metal might be seen in the matrix, and the operations for its extraction by chance workers of every degree of age, nationality, or occupation witnessed. It was a fascinating and novel experience to watch the process in shallow ground, hardly less primitive than the ordinary digging of potatoes: to mark the runaway sailors, farm hands, shepherds, or stock-riders, joking the while, as they occasionally threw up a ten- or twenty-ounce ‘nugget’ of almost pure gold, worth £4 per ounce, or a lump of the gold-studded quartz, to the tourist bystander peering down the edge of the shaft, with the touching confidence that it would be punctiliously returned, after being wondered at, and perhaps weighed, by the obliged stranger. Such things sound improbable, but are, nevertheless, strictly, rigidly true, as can be avouched by any miner of the period. The neighbouring squatters, in a general way men of birth and breeding, had been pleased to welcome these agreeable strangers to their homes, where, the daughters of the land being often handsome and attractive, the stranger guest had no particular objection to prolonging his stay when his hosts and other neighbouring magnates were so anxious to secure his society.