The Sun.
London, England, 1858-09-23 00:00:00

A WIZARD'S VIEWS OF AUSTRALIA.

LETTER FROM PROFESSOR ANDERSON..
Melbourne, Australia, July 10, 1858.
Dear Sir,—Books about Australia have been
issued from the press in plenty ; and letters from
emigrants, diggers, squatters, farmers, traders,
literary men, operatives, soldiers, sailors, loafers,
anybodies and nobodies, have appeared in English
papers so frequently, that it would almost be pre-
sumed, on a first consideration, nothing more re-
mained to be said about the country, and that no
new ground remained to be broken. A wizard, how-
ever, is generally supposed to be a being of another
class to those usually met with every day, and as
such, would be likely to be a different sort of corre-
spondent to the run of correspondents in general.
Hence, I venture to send you a little news about the
other side of the earth : in the first place, because, as
a wizard, my points of view will probably be unlike
those of correspondents who have already commu-
nicated with you ; and, in the second place, because
it is quite out of the question for any one to have
told all that can be told of this great country. How
are you to do it ? Before this letter reaches you
there will be more changes in Melbourne than would
happen in Aberdeen during 20 years ; and the
Australia of yesterday as different from the Aus-
tralia of to-day as Balgownie 'Brig differs from
Princes Bridge over the Yarra Yarra. The informa-
tion that' I send you inthis is reliable, because it has
been all gathered on the spot, and carefully noted
for transmission home ;and, as some of it may be
valuable from its affording a true account of the
colony of Victoria so far as regards its prosperity,
the price of labour, and the character of the people,
you will not object, I hope, to give it a place in
your columns.
I must premise, however, that what I have to
say chiefly relates to Melbourne ; for that is nearly
all of the colony that I have seen at present. I
left England, as. I believe you are aware, on the
11th of last March in the ship Monsoon. I sailed
from Liverpool, and arrived in Hobson's Bay, Vic-
toria, on June 10. A voyage to Australia had been
pictured to me before starting as one of the most
pleasant it was possible to make. I regret that I
did not find it to be so, though I have no doubt that
my disappointment in great part originated from
sailing in a chartered vessel. It was imperative
that I should leave England at the date I did, so
that I had no alternative : the vessel advertised
was the one I had to go by, and I went. So far as
the ship-herself was concerned, or the seafaring
qualifications of the captain, there was no cause of
complaint. No better sailor nor any more trust-
worthy ship, do I wish for when next I go to sea,
than was our skipper and the vessel he commanded.
But the lesson I learned was this—that it will be well
for my northern friends who are intending to emi-
grate to remember it—never sail in a chartered ship.
If you do; you will make the following discoveries :
First, that the charterers care-very little about the
comforts of the vessel they charter ; secondly, that
the owners of the vessel look after the ship,
but have nothing to do with you ; thirdly, that the
servants, being the servants of the owners, and not
the servants of the charterers, look after the in-
terests of their masters, or perhaps their own in-
terest in preference, caring very little about that of
the hirers of the ship ; and, fourthly, that, between
the two stools—charterers and owners—you are
very like to fall to the ground, and, paying first-
class fare, find that you have third-class accommo-
dation only. All the usual incidents and accidents
of an Australian trip, of course, befel us as we
sought across the seas for the Continent of the
South. We met ships in the. Channel, were sea-
sick in the Bay of Biscay, saw porpoises in
plenty sighted Madeira in the distance, sweltered
on the line, were half-frozen in lat.- 45 deg. S., en-
countered a hurricane and saw our ship with all
her canvas furled, and her masts bending ready to
break, about a fortnight's sail from our destination ;
caught albatrosses, saw sharks, smelt icebergs in
the distance, and beheld no sign of human life, ex-
cept that which was to be seen in our own ship,
from lat. zero to long. 143 deg. E. If we had had
all the good things which were promised to us at
the outset, we might have been better pleased ; and
if we had not encountered two pretty respectable
storms on the way, everybody, perhaps, would have
assented to what I believe is a very popular belief at
home—namely, that an Australian voyage is as
smooth as was that of the barge of Cleopatra, de-
scribed by Enobarbus, instead of being sometimes,
as it was with us, more like the' voyage of Ferdi-
nand and his friends when they found Miranda on _
the Enchanted Isle. As a matter of course, the-
fact of the Wizard being on board was accepted by
some as sufficient explanation of the cause of every
gust of wind and every roll of the sea. The first
morning that I appeared on deck I was recognised
by a score or two on board who had witnessed my
performances in some one part or other of the
three kingdoms ; and many of them appeared to
have grave doubts as to whether they had done
rightly in sailing in a, ship which carried the
Wizard of the orth. However, before we had
left behind us many of the 16,000 miles which se-
parated us from the shores of our destination, all
fear on this score was fully removed. My Scottish
friends rallied around me and chatted, with plea-
sant recollections, of the
Heather that empurpled blooms
On the hills of Caledon,
as they paced the deck with me at night ; and my
Irish acquaintances accepted my invitation to drink
to the success of old Ireland on St. Patrick's Day,
with all the enthusiasm which characterises Irish-
men, meet them where you may. My English
friends had seen me either at the Strand; Adelphi,
Lyceum, or Covent-garden Theatres ; and having
at length caught me shut up with them for three
months on board a ship, felicitated themselves on
their lucky chance of being able to learn how the
great gun-trick was effected, how I contrived to
pass half a dozen watches through a man's head,
and in what way I commanded the spirits who
deliver their oracles through . the . medium of my
rapping table. lam afraid that the information
they received from me will not make any one of
them a conjuror.
Ninety-one days after leaving England, I stepped
on the soil of - Australia. I had reft myself from
lands where fortune had smiled upon me from my
boyhood, and had to seek my fortune on land_
which I had never trodden, under a sky which I
had never seen. Strange and puzzling was it,
therefore, to me, as I rode on the car from Sand-
ridge to Melbourne, to pass faces that were as fami-
liar to me as if I had seen them but yesterday, and
to recognise five or six good men whom I last met
when fplayed at the County-rooms in Union-street,
Aberdeen. This,s the first thing that strikes you
on arriving at the other end of the globe—that it
is almost the same as being at home. Your long
three months' voyage appears, in the course of 24
hours after landing, to be nothing more than a
dream to you, and you walk out the next morning,
not to stare and wonder, but to shake hands and
say, -4‘ How d'ye do r just as you would have dong
the next morning after leaving England, if the ship
lad put back and you had never gone to sea at all.
Not but what you may be altogether disappointed
with Melbourne ; for, if you have heard of it as a
dingy, dirty, ill-built town, with rough, rude in-
habitants, very little pretensions to civilisation,
and peopled with diggers, walking about in red
skirts, with. revolvers in their waistband, pickaxes
on their shoulders, and 'a huge _nugget of gold in
each hand, you will find, upon arrival, that your
information has been as erroneous as it could well
be. What Melbourne is, is simply a large well laid-
out city, covering many square miles of ground,
built on two hills, which rise lo the west and east
of the city proper. - But to describe it, suppose we
go back to the bay, or still further back, as far as
Port-Philip Beads. Entering- them you have one
or two facts to remember. First, that 100 years
ago, no vessel, so far as history records, had applied
for admission at that unknown gateway of the
south—that no hardy adventurer from the shores
of Britain had asked of the rocky janitors permis-
sion to enter the well-guarded precincts. Secondly,
you have to bear in mind that 30 years ago, he who
lived undisputed master of all that lay within those
gates was the black man who claimed to be the
aboriginal—that on the land within the great
dinorius had lived, died, and become extinct, the
kangaroo lept, the opossum sprang from bough to
bough, the tall grass waved, the gum-tree flourished
in undisturbed possession of the primeval forest, and
the Yarra-Yarra flowed onwards to the sea, un-
marked on any map, and without a place in any
geography.- Now, when you arrive at the Heads,
your coming is telegraphed up to Melbourne imme-
diately by the electric telegraph, and before you
land the arrival of the ship in which you sail is
notified in the morning's newspapers, and is a sub-
ject of interest to 100,000 inhabitants, in most part
natives of those British Isles which lie so many
thousand miles away. 'Well, you pass through the
Heads and enter Hobson's Bay. A magnificent one
you find it to be. Melbourne is thirty miles
from you, and the bay opens up around you
like a sea. To your right, placed among some
umbrageous scenery, is a large, white, hand-
some looking building, which you soon learn to be
the residence of the Government Medical Inspector,
and away to your left, the water of the bay flows
up to the town of Geelong, the port of Ballarat.
There are three channels through the bay. Your
pilot takes you along one that is well buoyed, and
as you sail' on you descry -Williamstown in the dis-
tance to your right, and pretty, St Kati to the
left. You drop anchor in Port-Philip Bay, and
around you are as many ships as you would see in
Leith harbour, and most of. them of much greater
tonnage than you would sge there. A boat takes
yeti on shore at `Siitidbridge, dtid a railway convqs
yo up to Melbourne. It costs you at the present