[Editor: This is a chapter from The Eureka Stockade by Raffaello Carboni. A glossary has been provided to explain various words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to modern readers.]
C.
Wanted — stuff, anyhow, for the last chapter.
If The Age, always foremost in the cause of the digger, never mind his language or colour; if The Argus would drop the appending “a foreigner” to my name, and extend even unto me the old motto “fair-play;” if The Herald would set up the pedestal for me whom it has erected as a “Monument of Gratitude;” I say, if the gentlemen Editors of the Melbourne Press, on the score of my being an old Collaborateur of the European Press, would for once give a pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether, to drag out of the Toorak small-beer jug, the correspondence on the above matter between
1. Sir Charles Hotham, K.C.B.
2. W. C. Haines, C.S.
3. W. Foster Stawell, A.G.
4. Mr. STURT, Police Magistrate.
5. W. H. Archer, A.R.G.
6. Captain M‘Mahon.
7. Police-Inspector H. Foster.
8. Another whom I detest to name, and
9. Signor Carboni Raffaello, M.L.C. of Ballaarat,
it would astonish the natives, teach what emigration is, and I believe the colony at large would be benefited by it.
There are scores of cases similar to mine, and more important by far, because widows and orphans are concerned in them. Sunt tempora nostra!
Master Punch, do join the chorus; spirited little dear! won’t you give a lift to Great-works? Spare not, young chip, or else, the jackasses in the Australian bush will breed as numerous as the locusts in the African desert.
It is not FEAR that makes me shake at chapters XCII and XCIII. Good reader, to the last line of this book, my quill shall stick to my word as given in the first chapter. Hence, for the present, this is the LAST. Put by carefully the pipe, we may want it again: meanwhile, FAREWELL.
Printed by J. P. Atkinson & Co., 79 Queen-street, Melbourne
Source:
Raffaello Carboni. The Eureka Stockade: The Consequence of Some Pirates Wanting on Quarter-Deck a Rebellion, Public Library of South Australia, Adelaide, 1962 [facsimile of the 1855 edition], page 126
Editor’s notes:
collaborateur = (French) collaborator (in this context, a person who works with someone else; as distinct from its later usage for someone who collaborates with an enemy)
Punch = Punch magazine
*sunt tempora nostra = (Latin) “are our times” (*rough translation) [Carboni uses the phrase “sunt tempora nostra” in chapters I (1), LXXXIX (89), XCVIII (98), and C (100)]
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