Ballarat, May 20th, 1854.

After all the accounts which I had seen of the Ballarat Diggings, I had no idea of what sort of place it really was. On approaching it, instead of traversing, as usual, long gullies filled with great heaps of gravel, and quantities of tents, I found myself standing on a green bank near the Commissioner's camp, and before me lying a deep basin, which had evidently been some time a great lake. This basin, the main field of the diggings, is some mile and half wide or so each way. In the bottom of it rises up a chain of low, rounded hills, something like the White Hills of Bendigo, and these hills and the slopes all round this great basin were dug up, and presented the usual chaos of clay and gravel-heaps.

On the right hand lay, as usual, a Golden Point, and before me, more centrally, a Red Hill. A creek, now strong and rapid from the rains, traversed the bottom of the basin in the foreground, coming from the left, and running across a little below the camp. On the left the hills rose higher than on the right, and well wooded; and up and over the top of the nearest and loftiest of these hills had been diggings. This hill was called the Black Hill, for no reason that I could discover, but that it was green, and the gravel turned up whitish-yellow.