90 Sutton, Notes on the Sandringham Flora. [vou'xxi> 



With regard to the surroundings of "the Hill," 1 am able to 

 say from personal recollection that the Coast Tea-tree existed 

 at the back of the targets on the rifle-butts, and elsewhere, 

 vestiges of it remaining until quite lately behind the fishermen's 

 huts at Port Melbourne. It is probable it was discontinuous 

 all along the bay front. My own school-boy rambles enable me 

 to say also that there were shifting sand-dunes, almost devoid 

 of any plant life, extending for some hundreds of yards back 

 from the water at one point at least. This was just south of the 

 battery, about and beyond the corrugated iron building which 

 housed the nearly-time-expired prisoners then at work on the 

 military road. The Butts, where now is Middle Park, I can 

 distinctly remember as being very swampy in parts and only 

 sparsely covered with lowly plants. Concerning the locality 

 beyond the Sandridge Lagoon, where landing was effected by 

 the earliest comers to Melbourne, the following excerpt from the 

 manuscript of Josephine Antoinette Macdonald, of Wellington, 

 N.Z., is of some interest. This I am permitted to include here 

 by the courtesy of Mr. Greig, hon. secretary of the Historical 

 Society of Victoria, the possessor of the document. Mrs. Mac- 

 donald was a daughter of the late Wilbraham Frederich Evelyn 

 Liardet, after whom the beach at Port Melbourne was first 

 named, and arrived in the colony with her father in 1838, when 

 about 8 years of age. This lady writes :—" .... Liardet's 

 Beach .... was at this time a beautiful, clean, white sandy 

 beach, covered thickly with a great variety of lovely both small 

 and large shells, and quite close down to where the tide came 

 up there was a skirting of what we called the tea-tree. Above 

 that again, all along the beach, grew the wild cactus" (surely 

 the Angled Pigface) '• tliat produced a rich-looking flower of a 

 dark mauve, with a yellow centre, and an insipid kind of fruit, 

 lull of small seeds, about the size of a large gooseberry ; there 

 were thousands of other pretty wild-flowers of all colours right 

 on as far as we could walk, up to a lagoon which I think had 

 become filled up before I left Victoria. It was just on this spot 

 where the only thing to show that man had ever trod before 

 met our surprised young eyes ; it was a post with a small cask- 

 nailed to it, and which we were told was placed there by Mr. 

 Batman. Beyond all these lovely flowers was the forest and 

 the silver wattle, which we in New Zealand prize very much ; then 

 the he-oak and the she-oak— both trees apart from each other 

 look the same, but when you see them growing together you see 

 that instead of leaves they have needles like pine trees, and the 

 needles of one tree droop down, while the needles of the other 

 stand up ; then the wild cherry, which is another peculiar tree, 

 for the stone grows outside at the end of the cherry instead of 

 inside the fruit. There were also lots of blue gums, or eucalypts, 



