THE NEW COLONY 313 



alone the town should have been in the first instance, were induced 

 to take this Government bait, and to form an insignificant village 

 at about a mile distant from the proper town." 



The answer to this sneer at Sir George Gipps is that the sale 

 took place fifteen months before Lord John Eussell's "judicious 

 policy " was embodied in a despatch to the colony, and the prices 

 realised, quoted from official sources, disprove the rest of the con- 

 tention. 



The initial sale in Geelong took place some eight months before 

 Mr. Latrobe's arrival, but it was not till 1840 that there were any 

 indications of progress about the place. The exorbitant ideas of 

 the Sydney speculators blocked occupation, and the result was the 

 springing up of scattered dwellings outside the surveyed boundary 

 of the town, and the creation of irregular suburbs, the dwellers in 

 which, at first, actually exceeded the town residents. Gradually, 

 however, the Government submitted more land to auction, and the 

 speculators were thus forced to accept lower prices, so that at the 

 census of 1841 Geelong claimed to have eighty-one houses and a 

 population of 454. It had also by that time its newspaper, the 

 Geelong Advertiser, the oldest continuing Victorian journal, which 

 was a business venture of the indefatigable John Pascoe Fawkner. 



Thenceforward the progress of the town and the district was 

 steady, and it continued to grow in population and trade until, in 

 October, 1849, with some 8,000 inhabitants, it was incorporated by 

 an Act of the Sydney Council, and Dr. Thomson, who had been 

 with it from its birth, became its first mayor. With the develop- 

 ment of the goldfields in 1851, the situation of the town as a half- 

 way house on the best route to Ballaarat, gave an enormous 

 impetus to its growth, and it nearly doubled its population in two 

 years. 



There was reserved, however, for a small township in the 

 extreme western limits of the colony, 225 miles from Melbourne, 

 the distinction of establishing a record for the price of town allot- 

 ments, cut out of the surrounding forest. Portland Bay was known 

 to the earliest settlers as the locality where the Henty family had 

 made their unauthorised descent upon the coast, before South 

 Australia was colonised or the lands around Port Phillip occupied. 



