Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria

MP3 Audio CD. Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria

AN INTRODUCTORY MEDLEY.

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short."--Othello.


I had long looked forward to one more visit to Victoria, perhaps the
last I should expect to make, and the opportunity of the opening of the
great Centenary Exhibition at Melbourne on 1st August of this year was
too good to be lost. Accordingly, having been able to arrange business
matters for so long a holiday, I took passage, with my wife and
daughter, by the good steamship "Coptic" of the "Shaw, Savill New
Zealand Line," as it is curtly put. She was to land us at Hobart about
27th July, in good time, we hoped, to get across by the Launceston boat
for the Exhibition opening, and she bids fair, at this moment, to keep
her engagement. We would have taken the directer route, with its greater
number and variety of objects, via Suez and Colombo, but we feared the
sun-blaze of the ill-omened Red Sea in summer. We purpose, however, to
return that way towards the coming winter.

More than thirty-one years have elapsed since I left Melbourne, after a
residence there of seventeen years, broken, however, by two intermediate
visits "Home." I think with wondering enjoyment of what I am to see in
the colony and its capital after such an interval. Previously, when I
returned after only a year or two's absence, I was wont to mark with
astonishment all that had been done in that comparatively brief time. I
am thankful to Mr. Froude, whose delightful work, "Oceana," I could read
to all full enjoyment during the leisure and quiet of the voyage, for
somewhat preparing me for what I have to see, for I must infer from his
graphic accounts, especially of interior progress--while already three
more years ha