The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-04-18 00:00:00

LIFE IN MELBOURNE.

Tne following is a copy of a private letter, addressed to.
a Norfolk clergyman by his sou :--
" Melbourne is built on the slope of a hill, laid out in
Yankee fashion—streets wide, and at right angles to each
other ; none of the little twisting lanes that you see in all
the great European cities. Many, in fact, most of the'
houses are of stone, or brick, and built in a very hand-
some and solid manner, and but few of the run-up wooden
structures that you so often see in large American towns..
I speak, of course, of the principal streets • in the out—
skirts of the town there are the most extraordinary look-
ing, half-wood, half-canvass contrivances, you can possibly-
imagine, abounding in the half-horse, halt'-alli=gator genus
of homo, that are fresh from the digg,ins, with lots of
nuggets in their belts, and hair about their faces. The
streets are crowded with drags of all kinds, carrying
merchandise, omnibusses, and old-fashioned four-horsed
coaches, rejoicing itt names of bygone days in England—
such as ' The Times,' Tally-ho, &c.; carts with horses
driven tandem-wise,.and, in short, all sorts and kinds of
conveyances. You may imagine the bustle of the place,
when I tell you that it reminds me of the busiest part of
Liverpool in the busiest time. The horses and oxen are
splendid beasts, and as fine as you ever saw in England,
and I strongly suspect that, in sending emigrants here
from the old country, you have shipped the finest men
you could find, and kept the lean kine at home ; for a
finer and more robulit looking set of fellows I have never
seen than the draymen, porters, masons, carpenters, &c..
that one sees about the place. The wages here would
frighten the old Protectionist party;' a common hand
gets 12s. to 14s. a-day ; a mason, 255., and other crafts in
proportion ; so you may imagine that for a labouring man
it is a small, or rather a largish kind of paradise. Board.
and lodging, however, are frightfully dear, and the rents
that are paid for houses are something quite incredible. I
was to-day in a gentleman's office who rents two rooms on
the first floor in one of the principal streets—one room
about 16 feet by 10, the other about a third larger; for
these two rooms he pays £l,OOO a-year, and is considered
to have got a very cheap bargain ; in fact, meney is
spoken of as mere dirt. Men speak of £lO,OOO as you
would speak of ten shillings, and the sudden rises in
fortune from the lowest depths of poverty to actual
wealth before your eyes are astounding. A gentleman
who came with me in the steamer, and who has friends
and relations in business, told me this morning that a
young fellow he had formerly known, who had left Eng—
land without a sou ten years ago, and who had been pre-
viously employed in some shop or other as an assistant,
had recently let some land for £3,500 a-year, and held
some more that he had been offered £30,000 for. In fact,
if I had been told in England what I know to be true
here, I never should have believed half ; but one must
come here, and then the reality of the statements is not to
be questioned, as there the persons are. The conversation
' at the dinner table, and in the various rooms of the hotels,
reminds me much of America, as nothing is discussed
that has not some relation or other to making money,
and if you substitute the word pounds' for dollars,'
you might imagine yourself in a public room in New
Orleans during the very busiest time of cotton specula-
tion. On dit, that more gold is being found than ever,
and, if I might judge from what I have seen of the conduct
of divers diggers I have seen about the streets, they must
have been singularly successful lately. These gentlemen
Patronize the most expensive articles that they can find,
and the way I saw a digger's 'lady' dressed up yesterday
would (as far as richness of material and gold chains) cast
into the darkest shade the most expensively got up belle
at Almack's or the Champs Elysees. This morning I saw
several fellows with beards of huge length, and moustache
and whiskers to match, dressed in corduroy `smalls,' huge
boots, and a sort of blue blouse, with a belt round it,
standing at the door of' a public-house tossing nuggets in
their hands, some of which must have weighed several
pounds, as carelessly as you see boys in England tossing
stones and catching them, going to school. I spoke to one
or two of them, and they were as civil as possible, said
they were better off than they were in England, which I
believed myself, and also said, which I did not believe, that
they intended ' some day' to put money in the savings'.
bank. There are, however, many of the diggers who save
their gold, but this other especial party will not leave their
noblers' (which is Australian for brandy and water) till
their pockets are at low ebb, and they have only enough to
carry them back to Ballarat or Mount Alexander. How-
ever, if people did not drink, what would become of the
publicans ? which is a serious consideration, as here, and at
Adelaide, every other house is devoted to the retailing of
' spirituous liquors, which are 'drunk, as are also the cus-
tomers generally, on the premises. Storage is excessively
high ! 2s. 6d. per week per ton is the general rate, mid the
same sum as entrance money. Land is worth in the main
street £lOO a-foot frontage, and is bought at that price and
turnedtoaccouut, as stores andsmall shops. One small place
you really could not swing a cat in, about eight feet square,
is paying a rent of £lO a-week, and the occupant told me
that he was quite satisfied, so I presume he realized,' as
the Yankees say. The shop was dedicated to the divinity
who presides over tobacco—not bad tobacco, such as you
see labouring men in England smoke, but the genuine
article in cakes from old Virginny," looking as strong
and black as a copious infusion of molasses could make it,
and which, in order to be fashionable, ought to be smoked
out of a very short clay pipe, the shorter and • blacker the
better. The great drawback to the place is the dust,
which blows in clouds, just the same as it does occasionally
in Egypt ; but here, what with busses, carts, &e., and a
strong wind to aid and abet, it gives the place the appear-
ance of being in a thick fog, and is extremely annoying,
as the dust is of as very subtle nature, penetrating every-
thing. The trade of washerwoman—now lam on dust—
is an extremely lucrative one ; 12s. a-dozen articles, small
and great, is the charge ; but at the hotel 'where I am
staying, which is an `aristocratic' one, the charge per
dozen is only Bs., because, as the housemaid informed me,
`Gents is cleaner here, and wears more shirts.'
" All this will give you some idea of the good town of
Melbourne. Notwithstanding the enormous wages of
masons, &c. they are hard at work in every part of the
town in building shops, &c., and what they build seems
to be of a very solid nature, stone being the chief material
used. They say that all these buildings are worth their
weight in gold to their enterprising builders and owners ;
indeed, if gold should last, Melbourne will be one of the
principal towns of the world before long ; it has every-
thing in its energetic, enterprising merchants and thriving
shopkeepers, in its population, of ablebodied, money-get-
ting, and money-spending population, to insure success—
magnificent land for cattle, corn, &c.—as back country,
and, supposing gold were to fail, they say that there are
mines of other metals which would be almost, perhaps
better, being money certain, for the trade of the colony.
" Hobson's Bay is crowded with shipping, and, looking
from the town at it, it looks like the whole range of the
London docks, as seen from the river ; such a collection of
shipping together I have never seen at one coup d'aril.
The great difficulty is to get the goods up to Melbourne
' from the bay, as the river only admits of small schooners,
' &c. This is a heavy Item of expense, as goods have to be
shipped in lighters, and conveyed ninemiles to their ware-
' houses, although Hobson's Bay is only two miles from the
town, the river widening like a labyrinth. A cut
_across
the neck of land which divides the bay and. V' the

thing talked of but is only talked of at present, as 4 „hip
canal for that distance would be a rather expensive under-
taking, as you may imagine from what I have toldyon about
the price of labour. There are a great number of Americans
in the place, who are spoken of by all as being the most
enterprising set of fellows ; they have already established
an American line of coaches to the bay and American
bar-rooms ; and American advertisements (the Yankees
are great advertisers) are as plentiful as bears in some
valley the name of which I have forgotten."