MR. LATROBE AS SUPERINTENDENT 263 



surroundings in 1843 it was a very imposing building, and it was 

 destined to be the theatre of some very important trials ; but forty 

 years later, when it was deserted for the present palatial Law 

 Courts, it had been long inadequate to the requirements of the 

 department. In estimating Judge Willis, some excuse for irritabil- 

 ity may be found in the cramped, ill- ventilated and badly appointed 

 chamber in which he had to pass so much of his daily life. 



However gratifying it may have been to the people of Mel- 

 bourne to acquire the privilege of trying their own criminals and 

 settling their legal differences locally, it was, after all, only a phase 

 of bureaucratic administration. Two events of far greater import- 

 ance followed close upon its heels, giving for the first time in 

 Australia a voice to the people in the control of their own affairs. 

 The first faint flicker of representative government, municipal and 

 national, came with the establishment of the Melbourne Corpora- 

 tion in 1842, and the Constitution Act of the same year, officially 

 proclaimed by the Governor of New South Wales on the 5th 

 of January, 1843. 



The first-named event had become a matter of urgent necessity, 

 for the rapidity with which the town had been peopled, and the 

 entire absence of any sanitary arrangements or regular water 

 supply, had corrupted the pure air, as well as the sylvan surround- 

 ings which so charmed John Batman. Dysentery, and what was 

 then called colonial fever, probably identical with typhoid, were 

 very serious scourges during the summer of 1841-42. There was 

 as yet no hospital, and the registration of deaths was possibly not 

 very exact, but the records show that the mortality from these 

 preventable diseases reached as high as twenty in a week, and the 

 aspect of the burial ground at the north end of Queen Street be- 

 came painfully familiar to nearly all the people of Melbourne. The 

 Port Phillip Patriot, like many journals of more recent issue, 

 waxed wroth with the Government under this calamity, and took 

 it to task for not doing something to alleviate it. The exceptional 

 heat of the summer was not under the control of the Superinten- 

 dent, but the paper insisted that the Government was to blame for 

 not clearing away " the dense wood that lay between the town and 

 the bay, so as to give the people the healthy influence of the sea 



