On 10 August 1852, a twenty-three-year-old man, Charles Henry Lines, finally set sail for Melbourne in the Ballarat. Thinking that the Ballarat would sail on Friday 6 August, Lines had travelled down from his home in London, to Gravesend, only to find that the ship would in fact arrive the following morning, on Saturday 7 August. To pass the time, Lines met with friends at Gravesend and, as the ship had not arrived yet, spent the night on shore. The atmosphere was one of feverish buoyancy: Lines described the night as ‘spreeish and expensive, as might be expected of young fellows bidding adieu to the pleasures of City life’. The next day, the Ballarat arrived, and Lines took a boat out with his friends to her, ‘where a new World, complete in itself, met our view and claimed us as its citizens’. Waking up on Sunday morning, he breakfasted on board the ship, received some friends in his cabin and then went ashore to take tea with them. A fire had been lit in the neighbourhood; a chill that he had caught the previous night on board the ship tempted him to spend the night on shore. The following morning, on Monday 9 August, he woke up, had breakfast and went on board the Ballarat, where to his utmost surprise, he found his mother waiting for him. ‘I received a most unexpected visit from my poor dear Mother,’ he wrote, ‘who, as unexpectedly, gave me a Sov[ereign].’ Lines's mother's surprise visit and her equally surprise gift of a sovereign are marked by a quiet poignancy. Both she and her son knew that they would never see each other again in their lives. Against this sense of loss, the sovereign can be read as a symbolic gesture of hope that Lines realises his search for gold.

Lines's ship is a ‘world’ before the ‘new’ world, and by acquiescing to be a citizen of it, Lines renegotiates his own relationship to Britain. Yet, although he is ready to embrace this ‘new’ world, he cannot leave the ‘old’ one behind. Only ten days after sailing, he writes: