3S AUSTRALIAN PICTURES. 



Governor King, of New South Wales, dispatched the Lady Nelson, under 

 Lieutenant Murray, to explore and report. The account given was most 

 favourable of the extent of the bay, the security of its anchorages, and the 

 beauty and apparent fertility of its shores. The result was that it was decided 

 to establish a convict settlement on the shores of the gulf, and in 1803 Colonel 

 Collins and a party of prisoners, with their guards, landed at the site of the 

 now fashionable seaside resort, which has been called Sorrento at the instance 

 of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the first landowners there. To the lover 

 of beauty the scene, gazing from Sorrento down Capel Sound, is fair ; the 

 blue sea ripples at your feet ; the high hills around Dromana, draped with the 

 rich ultramarine blue not to be found outside of Australia, form a charming 

 background on which one "ean^ gaze and gaze again. But the prose of the 

 situation for Governor Collins was that he was landed on a well-nigh waterless 

 sand- spit, the most sterile portion of the district, the resort to-day of the 

 admirers of loveliness, but shunned even to-day by the practical settler. The 

 citizen in his Sorrento villa is lulled by the roar of the league-long surf which 

 ever breaks on the rocky ocean beach, scarcely a mile away. But circumstances 

 alter human views, and the historian of the expedition reports that the 

 monotonous booming of the breakers irritated and depressed both soldiers and 

 convicts, and made a miserable company still more wretched. A search was 

 made for water that was not brackish, but the right places were missed, and 

 at last, happily for all concerned, the settlement was abandoned in favour 

 of the Hobart colony. Governor Collins rejoiced to get away from the 

 spot, the soldiers rejoiced, and the convicts also, and posterity will never 

 leave off rejoicing that Victoria was left to be a ' free colony ' from its 

 inception. 



The bad name given to the Port Phillip district clung to it for nearly a 

 generation. The great central desert was supposed to extend to the sea-coast 

 in this direction ; but gradually the real district was discovered by ' overlanders ' 

 from New South Wales, and at last, in 1824, Hovell and Hume crossed the 

 Murray river, skirted the Australian Alps, and struck the shores of Port 

 Phillip between Geelong and Melbourne. Later on the Messrs. Henty, 

 crossing from Tasmania, established a whaling-station in Portland Bay, and 

 began cultivation also. So the new land was more and more talked about 

 in the existing settlements, just as the new country in North-western Australia 

 is being talked of in Sydney and Melbourne to-day. Tasmania sent the first 

 batch of colonists, an association, with Mr. John Batman at its head, being 

 formed to take up land there. In one sense Batman did take up land on 

 an enormous scale. He landed in May, 1835. He says in a despatch to the 

 Governor of Tasmania : ' After some time and full explanation, I found eight 

 chiefs amongst them who possessed the whole of the territory near Port 

 Phillip. Three brothers, all of the same name, were the principal chiefs, 

 and two of them, men six feet high, very good-looking ; the other not so tall, 



