#1. Importance of the Year 1851.#--The year 1851 was in many ways an eventful one to Australia. In that year the colonies received from the Imperial Parliament the amended Constitutions they had so long expected. Tasmania, South Australia, Port Phillip, and Western Australia were now no longer under the absolute control of Governors sent out by the colonial authorities in England; they could henceforth boast the dignity of being self-governed communities, for, in 1851, they were invested with political powers which had previously been possessed by New South Wales alone. They now had the privilege of electing two-thirds of the members of a Legislative Council which not only had the power of making laws each for its own colony, but also of framing any new constitution for itself according to its own taste and requirements. Each colony kept its Legislative Council for only a year or two until it could discuss and establish a regular system of parliamentary government with two Houses and a Cabinet of responsible Ministers. Again, it was on the 1st of July in the same year that Port Phillip gained its independence; from that date onward its prosperous career must be related under its new title--Victoria. But the event which made the year 1851 especially memorable in the annals of Australia was the discovery, near Bathurst, of the first of those rich goldfields which, for so long a time, changed the prospects of the colonies. For several years after the date of this occurrence the history of Australia is little more than the story of the feverish search for gold, with its hopes, its labour, its turmoil, and its madness; its scenes of exultation and splendid triumph, and its still more frequent scenes of bitter and gloomy disappointment. #2. Early Rumours of Gold.#--For many years there had been rumours that the Blue Mountains were auriferous. It was said that gold had been seen by convicts in the days of Macquarie, and, indeed, still earlier; but to the stories of prisoners, who claimed rewards for alleged discoveries, the authorities in Sydney always listened with extreme suspicion, more especially as no pretended discoverer could ever find more than his first small specimens.