Page:The Irish in Australia.djvu/48

 Fitzgibbon's salutary regulations and precautions. He has earned the lasting gratitude of future generations of Melbourne citizens by his watchful care and zealous guardianship of the public parks and gardens.

Melbourne is fortunately well supplied with these essential breathing-places. Within easy accessible distance from all parts of the city are the Royal Park, the Carlton Gardens, the Fitzroy Gardens, the Flagstaff Gardens, the Treasury Gardens, and the Botanical Gardens. But interested parties, selfishly inclined and forgetful of the needs of the future, are continually bringing pressure to bear on the government of the day with a view to having portions of the popular reserves submitted to sale in allotments. Against this numerous class of hungry land sharks, Mr. Fitzgibbon has waged an unceasing war, not always with success, but still he can point to more than one beautiful reserve that would have been either spoiled, disfigured or alienated, perhaps lost to the people for all time, but for his opportune interference, vigorous protests and strenuous exertions. In that capacity, as protector of the public parks, Mr. Fitzgibbon deserves to be long and gratefully remembered.

Melbourne has not escaped the gross misrepresentations and unfounded assertions of professional book makers, men who rush across the seas from the old world, put up at some leading hotel, remain for a few weeks in luxurious ease, accept everything they are told as gospel truth, and, having thus collected a miscellaneous budget of cheap and worthless information, rush back to London and publish what they are pleased to call, with sublime audacity, their "impressions of the colonies," save the mark! The mischief done by these parasitic excrescences of a book-loving