Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
The following Letters were most of them written in Australia in 1867, and were published in the _Spectator_ in the course of that and the following year. Some are reprinted without alteration, others have been added to and altered, and others are new.
The following Letters were most of them written in Australia in 1867, and were published in the _Spectator_ in the course of that and the following year. Some are reprinted with...
2. Part 2It was a relief when one day, south of Trinidad, the air grew suddenly cooler, the flying-fish disappeared, and the first Cape-pigeon, and the first albatross, then Cape-geese,...
3. Part 3The great and ever-present charm of Melbourne consists in the exceptionally vigorous and active appearance of its population. This is due simply to the fact that the great bulk...
4. Part 4It is a pleasant life to have a station up the country (but not too far up), at least for a man not over gregarious in his habits and tastes, and whose mind is not set on those...
5. Part 5If the case of Sands had been a solitary and exceptional one, it would not have called for remark. But his course of conduct seems to have been singular chiefly in having been f...
6. Part 6Free labour, as is always the case, suffered from contact with forced labour. The convict taught the free labourer many bad lessons, and one of them was how to do the least poss...
7. Part 7The Press of course suffers from the paucity of readers and from the absence of a sufficiency of topics to discuss. Every day one if not two leaders appear, often necessarily ab...
8. Part 8And after all, at the worst, is it to come to this—that a shrewd, strong, hard-working man, with plenty of land of his own, cannot live unless markets and prices are favourable?...
9. Part 9In New South Wales a considerable proportion of the population is of convict descent. It is impossible to say _what_ proportion, for the line of separation is no longer strictly...
10. Part 10Not twenty years ago an Irishman who for a seditious libel had become acquainted with the inside of a gaol, and through a technical legal mistake had narrowly escaped a second c...
11. Part 11Sir Charles Hotham, when Governor of Victoria, foreseeing what would happen, when some modifications of the Constitution were sent home for ratification, wrote a despatch pointi...
12. Part 12One more glimpse of the new Southern world we have before striking straight across the Indian Ocean to the old Oriental one. At sunset about five days after leaving Melbourne th...
13. Part 13Truly a P. & O. steamer is a wonderful institution, worthy to take a high place among the unquestionable successes of the last thirty years. Once, in Tasmania, in a remote littl...
14. Part 14And when the news came that the Duke had been shot at and wounded on their own shores, every one in a strange way seemed to take it to heart, to be struck with shame and dismay,...