ABSTRACT
It was cold and tempestuous, swept by 'hail-storms and hurricanes, with a burning sun next day-barren and almost inaccessible ... owing to bogs and swamps'. Horne went on to describe Blue Mountain, sixty miles north-west of Melbourne, as 'the Siberia of all the goldfields'. Spending £6o which had just arrived from the Royal Literary Fund on a 'bog-and-bush horse' and surveying instruments, he had set off for Blue Mountain at the end of June 1863 with a mixture of relief and despair, a mood not lightened when he saw his home. A dismal hut made of planks and logs and measuring a bare fifteen by ten, it made Mother McGuirk's a palace by comparison. The settlement itself of tents and huts was as rough as any he had encountered: the most degraded, it was said by the Melbourne papers, of any in the colony. In the next few months Home would see many a colourful lawless character who would long remain in his memory - Gentle Annie, a miner's wife who declaring herself wronged drew a cleaver on the crowd in the butcher's shop; Mountain Mag, convicted on her eighth charge of drunkenness in a few months; and 'Homeric' fighting miners who sank to their waists in mud in the main street. In its primitive vigour Blue Mountain reached heroic heights.
