Page:Early History of the Colony of Victoria by Francis Peter Labilliere.djvu/14

xii Colony had shared the same fate. This led me to ask permission to inspect the Colonial Office papers in the Record Office, which was courteously granted; and I set to work upon a regular search through several hundred volumes of despatches and letters of the New South Wales Correspondence—from the foundation of the Colony in 1788, to the colonization of the Port Phillip District—and also through most of the Tasmanian Correspondence to the same period. From these papers, which contain a vast amount of information respecting the early history of Australia, I have been able to bring to light numerous documents which have hitherto remained as if mere ordinary official records.

Among these are all the papers and correspondence relating to the settlements attempted to be founded by Colonel Collins at Port Phillip in 1803-4, and by Captains Wright and Wetherall at Western Port in 1826-27. None of these papers seem ever to have been printed; and I know of no published account of either of those attempts to colonize the territory of Victoria. Whenever mentioned, they are barely noticed by writers who have treated of the early settlement of the Colony.

Some documents, also, now brought to light, seem to set at rest the controversy whether Hume and Hovell, on arriving at the coast, both believed that they were at Port Phillip Bay or at Western Port, and also whether the party of Batman or of Fawkner first selected the site of Melbourne.

I have been disappointed in not discovering two important documents—for which I have sought wherever there seemed a chance of finding them in this country, and have