Page:The Coming Colony Mennell 1892.djvu/130

 XIX.

devote the present chapter to a paper recently written on Western Australia by Mr. Henry Gyles Turner, the widely esteemed general manager of the Commercial Bank of Aus­tralia. It has been kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. A. Patchett Martin. In some respects it involves a repetition of facts which I myself have already stated in another form, but in a work like the present, confirmatory testimony is more desirable than continuous narrative or single authorship.

In other directions besides those referred to, I have avoided touching, in the body of the work, on topics which Mr. Turner is vastly more capable of treating than I can pretend to be. Mr. Turner writes:—

"The present Governor of Western Australia, Sir William Robinson, is fond of calling the colony over whose destinies he is the first constitutional ruler, the Cinderella of the Australias.

"That she is poor, that she has long been neglected, and that she is now about to assert her claims to consideration, are facts generally recognised in the eastern colonies; but it is only within the last few years that any appreciable interest has been taken in her or her belongings. To thousands of people in England, Australia means New South Wales, and anything outside Sydney or Melbourne is hardly deemed worthy of consideration. But how few persons in the British Isles realise the fact that, eliminating the Russian Empire, and lopping off