Daphne Saisal Aussie Gold Rush

JOE JOE!

I woke up in a daze. I had momentarily forgotten our deal with John and was confused as to why I was in a strange house with Sally sleeping on the other side of the room. After I remembered the events of last night I got out of my sleeping bag and quietly went to check on Betty so as to not wake Sally or John up.

I got to Betty and she was all good. I had moved her feed to the stable in the corner last night so that I can easily locate it. I thought to myself for a moment how this morning wasn't too different than the mornings at the salon. Then I started thinking about Teresa and started getting homesick. How was she? How was the salon going? Is she doing extra work because I'm not there? Does she miss me?? These were all questions I asked myself as I walked back to the house.

Sally was up, she cantered over to me and asked how betty was doing.

"Pretty great" I said "She doesn't seem to like all the quick changes though"

"Oh the poor donkey, I bet she's very confused as to why you keep moving. At least she has a roof over her head now in the stable," she said.

"Yeah, luckily for her I'm not going to be moving her again for at least until my bags are full of gold."

"That reminds me! We need to buy a miners license now."

"WHAT!" I shouted "How much is it and where would I buy it?"

"We pay for it at the local town hall. It's thirty shillings a month"

"That's so expensive! It'll drain me of what money I have left for food"

"Well then. We should go pay for ours and get some gold. Also don't even think about panning or mining without a miners license, I heard the coppers around here are real strict and don't mind giving you a beating if they see you without one."

And with that we went off to the town hall to get our Miners licenses. After an hour long walk we arrived and the line wasn't even that long as it was still early! I guess we just found out about the licenses before everyone else. We had some small talk while we waited for the small line to shrink and once we got to the front of the line we paid our 30 shillings each and got our licenses. We then panned for gold the next day but weren't lucky enough to get much. We only got around enough for a quart of milk.

We started walking back to john's house and talked about other panning sites and maybe mining tomorrow. We heard that there was a good mining place a couple kilometers east and decided that we would go there and see if we could get some nice chunks of gold. We got to John's house and he greeted us at the door, we greeted him back and then went to our room to put our stuff away. I then asked John if we could use his bath as we wanted to clean up and he said yes, we just have to bring and use our own soap. I cleaned up then fed Betty. After that I went to my bed and wrote a letter to Teresa.

Dear Teresa.

I've just finished my first week in the goldfields, I've met some new people who's names are Sally and John. Sally is a fellow miner who is really nice and John is a farmer who's allowing us to live in a room inside of his house for two shillings a month. He's really nice to be allowing us to stay with him and I'm really grateful as it's much easier to sleep in a house then in a tent.

Hope you're doing well at the salon.

Sincerely Daphne.

Then I went to bed.

I woke up the next day and re read my letter while waiting for Sally to wake up. Once she woke up we grabbed our miners licenses and went to the mining spot. Once we got there we noticed that there were more police there than there were at the gold panning area that we panned at. We then went off to find an area to mine and after a while we found one. We grabbed our pickaxes and started mining and after a while we got around 5 gold nuggets collectively and we were very happy with ourselves. As we started getting a blanket to have a break on we heard someone shout.

"JOE JOE!" They shouted.

We looked over to see what was happening and saw a policeman walking up to a miner. He asked to see his miners license and when the miner said it was in his tent back at camp the policeman started beating him with a heavy looking baton. By the time he was done the miner was on the ground sobbing bruised and bleeding and it looked like he had a couple broken bones. He asked if anyone else left there license in there tents and everyone said no. He walked away looking satisfied with himself and we heard someone muttering.

"Traps. I hate the lot of them, they're too brutal."

We then decided to call it a day then and go back home. We talked about the events of today to John for a while and then we did jobs for him to pass time before going to bed.