sketcher and gold-digger, wrote and illustrated an account of a journey to the goldfields (ML). His leather-bound volume, watermarked 1851, is titled 'Wombat wallaby—Reminiscences of a trip overland to Melbourne and the goldfields’ and may have been intended for publication. The narrative tells of Tester’s journey between 'Kerkabaroo’ on the Wakefield River, South Australia, and Bendigo in Victoria. He had first heard of the gold-rushes while working as a splitter; a month later he was 'struck by the gold fever’ and set out for the diggings on foot. At Dry Creek he teamed up with a doctor friend and the two decided to travel overland on horseback. Their subsequent adventures through 800 miles of bush included encounters with Aborigines and a formidable array of wildlife, from black snakes to blowflies—'the most disgusting insects in the colony’. The intrepid pair also met up with assorted bullock-drivers and gold-diggers, both affable and villainous.
In an extended narrative of 343 pages, there are only eight illustrations, the last unfinished. These are quite competent works in watercolour and ink, several colourfully captioned with the colloquial dialogue which is so much a feature of the work. The first, 'Mornin Mate! Have yer seen any mob this way?’, portrays Tester on first receiving news of the gold-rush from a Bungaree Station stockman. Another depicts the travellers’ encounter with Aborigines, there is a portrait of a young Aboriginal woman, and a sketch of the travellers’ humble accommodation at the Loddon River. There are no drawings of the goldfields. By the time they reached Bendigo Tester and his friend found that the heyday of the rush had passed, the water supply was failing, provisions were overpriced and everywhere they were greeted with 'filth, starvation and wretchedness’. They camped briefly at Bullock Creek but when a dead horse farther up river polluted the water supply they auctioned their horses and tent for gold and returned to Melbourne in their bare feet, hanging their boots from their necks so as to be able to make a respectable appearance when they reached the metropolis. The volume ends with the pair embarking as steerage passengers for Adelaide, richer only in experience.
The only further clue to Tester’s identity is a mourning card inserted in the front of the book to the memory of Hephzibah Tester who died on 13 April 1901 at the age of seventy-five.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
