Word Of The Day #5

• a worthless thing or person, especially a swindler

• MINING:  an unproductive claim or mine.

….With the hot winds whirled in the Vandemonian rush to the Ballaarat Flat. My hole was next to the one which was jumped by the Eureka mob, and where one man was murdered in the row. At sixty-five feet we got on a blasted log of a gum-tree that had been mouldering there under a curse, since the times of Noah! The whole flat turned out an imperial shicer.

….Towards the latter end of October and the beginning of November we had such a set of scoundrels camped among us, in the shape of troopers and traps, that I had better shut up this chapter at once, or else whirl the whole manuscript bang down a shicer.

from Raffaello Carboni’s eye witness account of The Eureka Stockade, 1854