OUR ANTIPODES:

OR, RESIDENCE AND RAMBLES IN

THE AUSTRALASIAN COLONIES.

With a Glimpse of the Gold Fields.

BY LIEUT.-COL. GODFREY CHARLES MUNDY,

AUTHOR OF PEN AND PENCIL SKETCHES IN INDIA."

RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.

PREFACE..

Australia is the greatest accession to substantial power ever made by England. It is the gift of a continent unstained by war, usurpation, or the sufferings of a people.'-Blackwood's Magazine.

"The land of The South that lies under our feet,

Deficient in mouths, overburden'd with meat!'-Punch.

To publish a Book without a Preface, is like thrusting one's acquaintance, without the ceremony of introduction, upon some distinguished and formidable stranger. A few observations may be therefore, in submitting these Volumes to the Public.

necessary, Their contents, then, are taken from diaries extending over a period of more than five years,-five years of Residence' in the city of Sydney, with various 'Rambles,' on duty or during leisure, into the interior of New South Wales, as well as to the adjacent Colonies of New Zealand, Van Diemen's Land, and Victoria;-the latest of these excursions having for its object the newly-discovered Gold Field of the Bathurst district.

The visit to New Zealand, its military posts and battle-fields having . been accomplished 'on particular service,' a slight outline of the late Anglo-Maori war has, almost insensibly, linked itself with the personal narrative.

The Author would have the Public bear in mind that, during the whole of his sojourn in Australia, he was their paid and of course hard-working servant. They will be pleased to contemplate him as part and parcel of his office-desk, plodding through returns and reports, records and regulations, warrants and articles of war; exchanging an occasional dry word with his clerks perched on their long-legged stools, and enjoying only fugitive glimpses, over the rim of his spectacles, of more external and unprofessional affairs.

But although the reduction of his notes, to what he would fain believe a readable form, constituted the recreation of his leisure

hours, not the business of his days, he would beg to advance that no trouble nor care was on his part spared that he had time to devote to this object.

The Work is intended to be a light work; the Writer nevertheless would hope that the opportunities he enjoyed of seeing more of these remote and interesting offshoots of his native land than has fallen to the lot of many Englishmen, may have enabled him to supply some share of information likely to be useful as well as amusing, and to furnish, in a familiar shape, a just conception, as far as it goes, of a portion of the world destined to become every year more important to the British Empire.

Such further motives as may have actuated the Writer he would leave to be developed in the course of the Work, rather than swell a Preface by dilating upon them.

If he addresses himself to his task with any advantages, they rest probably in the fact, that he is wholly unconnected with, and independent of the Colonies and communities he strives to delineate ; and that he has neither pique, partiality, nor prejudice to indulge, in thus recording the impressions he imbibed amongst them.

G. C. M.

LONDON, March 31st, 1852.

OUR ANTIPODES.

CHAPTER I.

A MAN must be leading in Europe a very sad, solitary, or unsatisfactory existence, who can, without many a pang of regret, many a sigh of painful separation, gird up his loins, shoulder his wallet, and clutch his staff, for a pilgrimage to Australia. Whether the sentence to be transported beyond the seas emanate in due course of law from a big-wig on the Bench, or in due course of service from a big-wig in the Colonial Office, the Horse Guards, or the Admiralty, he must be a hardened offender or an even-souled optimist who can hear it without

Life is but a span; and of that brief term few are the days which by a great majority of men, especially by Englishmen, and emphatically by younger sons and brothers, are destined to be spent in the home of their infancy, or even in the land of their birth. But however engrossing may be their pursuits in foreign climes-however vivid the excitement, cruel the misfortunes, or stirring the events wherein this portion of their life is passed-the memory of home will be intimately interwoven with all. Like a sunny streamlet flowing side by side with the traveller's path, it will cheer his eye and sing in his ear as he plods along his weary way. In health or sickness, wealth or ruin, joy or grief, victory or defeat, it is from home he looks for sympathy; it is at home that he hopes sooner or later to display his laurels and enjoy his gains, or, should fortune have frowned upon his lot, to lay down his burthen of sorrows and reverses. The schoolboy blubbers openly, or manfully swallows his bitter feelings, as the chaise or train bears him off for a few weeks only, from home and holidays to Latin and Greek. The fair and happy bride, while the four greys are pawing before the home no longer hers, throws herself all tears-into her mother's arms, though well aware that almost ere the honeymoon has waned she will embrace her once more. In such cases parting is but sweet sorrow. There is little saccharine, believe me, in the affair, when the Antipodes is the point of destination! The immense distance and the amount of time necessary to accomplish it, the tardiness of correspondence with home, the gradual alienation too surely springing from protracted absence, and the foreknowledge that this absence can only terminate by the repeti tion of the same tremendous voyage, such are some of the drawbacks confronting him who meditates expatriation.

There are indeed two cases in which the shock of expulsion may fall with mitigated rigour the one where the individual, having both merited and expected the gallows, finds himself expelled his country for his country's good, instead of passing through the hands of the hangman; the other, when a step of promotion and an honourable appointment accompany the fiat of expulsion.

Give me credit, kind Reader, for belonging to the latter class of exiles.*

On the afternoon of the 3rd March, 1846, I arrived at Gravesend with a brother who had volunteered to see me on board, and took rooms for the night at the Falcon Hotel, from the *The Author had been appointed Deputy Adjutant-General in the Australian Colonies.

The following anecdote was related at a regimental mess in Sydney by a gentleman holding a high official appointment in the Colony under the Crown.

Returning home on leave of absence about the year 1847, he got into conversation with an Irish cabman, who, recollecting his person, demanded respectfully where his honour had been this long time.' 'In New South Wales,' was the reply. Botany Bay, is it?' pursued the driver. Exactly,' said the gentleman.

After a short pause, Paddy's curiosity overcoming his politeness, he whispered, Might I make bould to ask, Sir, what took you there?'-Oh! I went at the Queen's expense,' answered the other, humouring his interrogator's evident suspicions.

Here Paddy's politeness recovered itself, although his suspicions were confirmed. Ah! said he, there's many a good man gone out that same way.'

B