CHAPTER VIII.

THE NORTHERN DISTRICTS, AND THE OVERLAND ROUTE FROM SYDNEY TO MELBOURNE.

BESIDES the regular monthly communication by the Shamrock steamboat, and the frequent trips of several fast-sailing vessels that trade to and fro between Sydney and Melbourne, there is now an overland mail between the two Colonial Capitals twice a-week. I have made the journey three times overland by the mail— twice from Melbourne to Sydney, in the years 1843 and 1845, and once from Sydney to Melbourne, in the month of January 1846; and as it may not be uninteresting to the reader to learn something of the general character of the intervening country, even within the limits of the old convict-colony of New South Wales Proper, I shall take the liberty to book him at Sydney for the whole distance, and carry him as rapidly as possible to Gundagai, on the Murrumbidgee River, where we shall again get within the proper limits of Phillipsland, and take it more easily.

The overland mail for Melbourne leaves Sydney at five P.M. every Tuesday and Friday, and reaches its destination between seven and eight o'clock in the morning of the same days in the following week; but as it travels right on to Yass, an inland town about 200 miles from Sydney, and as I wished to perform that part of the journey by easier stages in daylight, in order to rest on the Lord's-day, and celebrate divine service to the Scotsmen and other Presbyterians in the vicinity of Yass, I left Sydney two days before the Friday's mail to Melbourne, by the daily mail to Goul

burn; being assured at the coach-office in Sydney that I should reach Yass, by a continuation of that mail, on Saturday evening. We started, therefore, from Sydney at five P.M. on Wednesday, the 14th of January 1846; my agreement being to be taken up by the Port Phillip mail of the Friday following at Yass.

For the first five miles the Great Southern Road from Sydney is the same as the Great Western Road across the Blue Mountains, and the frequent and handsome villas on either side of it proclaim the vicinity of a large and flourishing commercial city. For the next fifteen miles to Liverpool, the road lies through a thick forest of uninteresting trees, chiefly iron-bark, which the intrinsic value of the land, after it is cleared, will scarcely compensate for the trouble and expense of felling and burning off; except, perhaps, for the erection of a public-house on the way-side, with a large garden attached to it, and a paddock for bullocks. At all events, such houses are frequent along the road.

The town of Liverpool, which is twenty miles from Sydney, was founded and named—rather absurdly I think-by Governor Macquarie. It is a dull, lifeless, stagnant sort of place, as different as possible from the great bustling commercial city, whose name it so ambitiously bears. One is never disappointed in these Australian Colonies, on arriving at such a town as Parramatta, or Wollongong, or Jamberoo, or Berrima, or Gundagai, or any other town with an aboriginal name; for as in all likelihood there is no other place of the same name on the face of the globe, there is no other town that one can have a right to compare it with. But when one goes to "Liverpool,” or “ Windsor,” or "Richmond," forsooth! and finds it a small insignificant village, he cannot help saying to himself

O what a falling off is there !

and the place actually looks much worse than it really is, simply from its unfortunate name.

I confess I never had my classical ideas and associations so rudely broken in upon, as when, in travel

ling by the steamboat up the beautiful Hudson River, from New York to the city of Troy, the boat stopped successively at two paltry American towns, which I was told were called Rome and Athens! I did not feel at all disappointed with Troy; for besides that we know much less of the original, the American edition of the city of Priam was a really respectable and thriving city of 20,000 inhabitants-well planned, well built, and eminently prosperous as a place of trade, as may be supposed from the fact of its being at the time not more than thirty years old. But I felt absolutely offended at the sort of classical sacrilege which Jonathan had perpetrated upon the memory of the great cities of Rome and Athens, by giving their venerable names to his two insignificant villages on the Hudson. I actually thought it had been done for the express purpose of lowering antiquity and the classics in the estimation of the young American, and teaching him to say, somewhat contemptuously—

Urbem quam dicunt Romam, Meliboce, putavi

Huic nostrae similem.

"I guess, Mister, the city folks call Rome ain't half like this of our'n,"

without adding Stultus ego-"fool that I am," ,"-as the poet does.

Besides, there is often a positive inconvenience in this system of Colonial nomenclature. For example, a letter containing a bank-note was put into the post; office at Sydney, addressed to somebody at Liverpool s but as the letter did not specify where Liverpool wao situated, it was thrown, in the hurry of business, intn the mail for England, where, after having arrived ie due time, and been refused by every person of the nam it bore in the great city of Liverpool, it was opened at the General Post Office in London, and found to be intended for some person in Liverpool in New South Wales, whom it reached at last after having first made the circuit of the globe.

Insignificant, however, as it is, my earliest recollections of New South Wales are indissolubly connected

with this locality. On my first arrival in that colony in the year 1823, a brother of mine was in charge of the Commissariat at Liverpool, which was then a considerable depôt both for convicts and troops. He occupied a brick verandah cottage in the town, with a little plat of garden-ground, and a white gate in front; his whole establishment consisting of a convict manservant. The next cottage, exactly like it, was occupied by the officer in charge of the detachment at Liverpool-Mr. M'Nab, of the 3d Regiment or Buffs, whose establishment consisted of his orderly, one of the soldiers of the regiment. Mr. M'Nab used to dine occasionally with my brother, and on one of my visits to perform divine service in the town, I was invited, along with my brother, to dine with Mr. M'Nab, who was a genuine warm-hearted Scotch Highlander. His orderly, however, had but recently arrived in the colony, and was not initiated at the time into the mystery of colonial cookery; and, accordingly, when the piece of excellent colonial ration-beef which he had roasted for our dinner was uncovered on the table, it was found to be all alive! There is a large fly in the colony which, in summer, is sure to alight upon fresh meat, especially when roasted, if not carefully covered, and to deposit instantaneously a numerous offspring of live maggots upon its surface. This was one of those accidents which are not uncommon in colonial life, even in the best-regulated establishments, and it only served to afford us a little amusement at the expense of the poor orderly, who easily supplied us with a substitute for the roast beef in "a cold collation."

Mr. M'Nab was only an ensign at the time, although I believe the oldest in the British army. He had belonged originally to the Scotch Brigade, a corps which was raised in the beginning of last century, during the wars of the great Marlborough, but which had always refused to take a particular number as one of the regiments of the British army. Towards the close of the last war, however, when all such corps were obliged to take a number, the Scotch Brigade, although one of

the oldest Regiments in the service, had to take one of the highest numbers; and when the army was reduced, after the general peace, it was consequently one of the first to be disbanded. Mr. M'Nab, however, had shortly before got into the service again, from half-pay; but he was then still only an ensign. As one of the officers of the old Scotch Brigade, he still retained, as a cherished recollection of his former corps, part of its old silver plate which the officers had divided among themselves when it was finally broken up.

All these recollections crowded into my memory as the mail drove rapidly past the two brick verandah cottages, with their little gardens and white gates in front, in the dull town of Liverpool. The reader may perhaps wish to know what has become of the four occupants by whom they were tenanted at the period I speak of the two masters and the two men. My brother, therefore, died of an inflammatory fever about two years thereafter, during my own absence in England. Mr. M. Nab went to India with his regiment, where he attained the rank of Captain: he then returned to England, sold out, and, having a taste for agricultural pursuits, took a farm near Callendar in Scotland-his native place-where he died a few years ago, much respected. The orderly, I have reason to believe, fell a victim to the climate in India, where the Regiment was nearly annihilated; and my brother's convict servant, having obtained his freedom on the expiration of his period of transportation, has for many years past been one of the most respectable of the class of emancipists in New South Wales-the father of a reputable family, and enjoying the reputation of considerable wealth. Apropos-the reader may perhaps think these first stages of the Overland Route, and the colonial recollections which they have called up, somewhat tedious; and perhaps they are so: but as I am at this moment recording these particulars on shipboard, in the cold bleak month of December, and after a fortnight of incessant and violent gales of northeasterly wind, right in our teeth, off the entrance of