BY J. MOORE-ROblNSON, F.R.G.S. 163 



NEWSPAPERS. The vault contains bound volumes of 

 Tasmanian Newspapers. The earliest of these are the 

 Colonial Times of 1826 to 1856, the Hobart Town Courier of 

 1827 to 1859, the Australasian of 1824, The Tasmanian of 

 1826, The Cormvall Chronicle of 1835 to 1880, Bent's News 

 of 1834 and 1837-38. The Volumes of these Newspapers are 

 numbered and catalogued, but otherwise the information they 

 contain is only available after arduous and exhausting 

 search, "Page upon page, and line upon line." 



HOBART TOWN GAZETTES. The Government has 

 also a complete set of these from No. I., Vol. I., June 1st, 

 1816, to the present date. This set is a veritable mine of 

 information, which, like that of the old newspapers, is not 

 readily available. If these Volumes and the Newspapers 

 were indexed in regard to news items, even up to the year 

 1850, some surprising facts would be brought to light. It is 

 a work that I hope to see done. 



THE BONWICK TRANSCRIPTS. No list would ba 

 complete without reference to the result of Mr. James 

 Bonwick's work, undertaken at the request of the Tasmanian 

 Government, and completed in 1892. Mr. Bonwick copied 

 papers, some in the official custody of the Imperial Govern- 

 ment, and others preserved in the British Museum. These 

 include valuable documents relating to the discovery and 

 settlement of Tasmania and New South Wales. Among them 

 is to be found a copy of Tasman's Journal in Dutch (British 

 Museum) and a copy of Woides' translation of it. The latter 

 contains three several points quite new to History. I am 

 hopeful of seeing it in print in the near future, as it is too 

 good to be lost. The transcripts were largely used by the 

 late James Backhouse Walker in preparing that series of 

 monographs read before the Royal Society, and published 

 in a Memorial volume called Early Tasmania, which entitled 

 their author to be counted among the chief of Tasmania's 

 historical writers. Much of the matter contained in these 

 Transcripts is being published in that valuable Common- 

 wealth enterprise, The Historical Records of Australia^ 

 under the able editorship of Dr. Frederick Watson, referred 

 to above. 



PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS. It is, I suppose, hardly 

 necessary to state that the vault contains a complete set 

 of Parliamentary Papers since Responsible Government in 

 1856, and the enactments of the earlier Legislative Council 

 from 1887. 



