Excerpt from China, Australia: And the Pacific Islands, in the Years 1853 56 My narrative commences about the latter end of the year 1852, a period when Australian attraction had arrived at its climax, when the auri sacra fames not only beckoned the hardy miners to this inexhaustible El Dorado, but when crowds of all nations - artists and artizans, lawyers and labourers, and even poets and philosophers - were flocking to the land of promise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.