Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/12

 George Gipps, by giving a chapter of political poems from a Sydney newspaper, the " Atlas," which will bear comparison with English compositions of the same kind from the days of the "Anti-Jacobin" to the days of "Punch."

The Descriptive section has been rendered more complete by the addition of a tabular view of the counties, towns, mountains, and rivers of New South Wales and Victoria, extracted, by permission, from Sir Thomas Mitchell's "Manual of Australasian Geography," and by accounts of journeys to and from the various gold-fields, which I have in great part abridged from the able reports made by special correspondents of the Sydney papers.

As I have throughout the following pages expressed my opinions on colonial questions and colonial statesmen with a freedom which my friends may call bold and my opponents audacious, I may perhaps, without incurring the charge of egotism, state what have been my opportunities for acquiring correct information on colonial subjects.

In 1844 my brother, with whom I had previously kept up a close correspondence, returned from Australia, where he had passed six years, engaged in pastoral pursuits. He arrived in England in the midst of the furious contest, described in Chapter XI. of this book, between Governor Gipps and the squatters. In the cause of the squatters he enlisted me; and when the Pastoral Question came to be discussed in Parliament, we contributed several letters—criticising the pastoral regulations which the government proposed to adopt, to which some of the leading London journals gave a prominent place.

Up to that time I had been a disciple of the Wakefield system of colonisation Land Monopoly. It was, however, only necessary to investigate with a practical man the practical effects of this untenable system in order to become irresistibly convinced of its fallacy. In 1847-8 I wrote for my brother, who was a close observer but no writer, a thin duodecimo, "A Voice from the Far Interior of Australia, by a Bushman."

In 1848 we sent forth the first edition of "The Australian Hand-Book." Shortly after its publication I had the pleasure to read an extract, quoted from the volume, in "Blackwood's Magazine," by the then anonymous author of "The Caxtons," who was pleased to describe the "Hand-Book" as "admirable for wisdom and compactness."

From attacking Wakefield's colonial land monopoly in print, I ventured, on every fitting opportunity, to attack it in public at meetings held to promote colonisation. At a meeting in 1848,