CHAPTER V. 

 THE POUNDING OF MELBOURNE. 



PRIDE of lineage is supposed to be one of the concomitants of a 

 high form of civilisation. The man who can show that his ances- 

 tors " came over with the Conqueror," even though they shared in 

 the rapacity of that truculent Norman, looks down on the neigh- 

 bour who cannot trace his pedigree farther back than the accession 

 of the House of Brunswick. Even in .democratic America the 

 impossibility of an hereditary title is compensated for when pro- 

 minent citizens can prove that the roots of their family tree were 

 transplanted in the Mayflower, and it is notorious in Pennsylvania 

 that the descendants of the treaty-making William Penn are the 

 most exclusive of an extremely exclusive sect. At the Antipodes 

 the form which this idiosyncrasy took on was a consuming desire 

 to be regarded, not so much as the descendants of illustrious ances- 

 tors, but as the founders of a new dominion which was destined 

 with unexampled rapidity to occupy a foremost place in the history 

 of the world's progress. 



The prosperous and generally self-satisfied community that 

 from the City of Melbourne wields a leading influence over the 

 destinies of the Southern Hemisphere takes now but a languid 

 interest in the relative merits of the score of adventurers who, in 

 1835, wrangled and squabbled over their imaginary rights to an 

 exclusive possession of the banks of the Yarra. Yet it will be 

 within the memory of some old colonists how, after the lull in the 

 excitement which followed on the gold discoveries, the rival claims 

 of Batman and Fawkner to be considered the founder of the colony 

 rent society politically and socially, and kept the organs of the press 

 in a permanently controversial attitude. Batman, who for a time 

 was a notable figure in the infant settlement, died before he was 



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