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 THE ANTIPODES ISLANDS.—(FROM A SKETCH BY J. A. JACKSON, ESQ.)

CHAPTER XVIII.

VICTORIA, OR PORT PHILLIP.

N the year 1834 Victoria, or Port Phillip, was a desert, barely known to Europeans except by the reports of wandering shore parties of whalers and sealers. In the year 1852 nearly two hundred thousand inhabitants, six millions of fine-woolled sheep, a city furnished with many of the luxuries if not the comforts of civilised life, two thriving ports crowded with ships, steam-boats, and coasters, farms, gardens, and vineyards, attested the colonising vigour of the English race, the advantages of its soil and climate, and, not least, of administrative and legislative neglect; for Port Phillip attained all its solid prosperity without the aid of colonising companies or acts of Parliament, or governors or regiments, or any of the complicated machinery with which sham colonies are bolstered up, and real colonies are so often encumbered.