47 6 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



upon the State for their maintenance, for during a period in which the population of 

 the colony has increased by three hundred thousand, the number of these wards of 

 the Government has declined from nearly two thousand four hundred to less than two 

 thousand, and the cost of supporting them from forty-six thousand seven hundred to 

 about thirty-seven thousand three hundred pounds sterling. 



In the centre of the Royal Park an area of fifty acres has been granted to the 

 Zoological and Acclimatization Society, and here the Council of that body, with an 

 annual income which rarely exceeds four thousand pounds sterling, has succeeded in 

 collecting from all parts of the world specimens of its most representative fauna. The 

 larger cages are occupied by lions, tigers, wolves, leopards, bears and living examples of 

 the mammalia generally. Elephants and camels are led about the grounds for the 

 conveyance of childish passengers ; hundreds of birds, of every variety of plumage, from 

 the brilliant hues of the tropics to the sober grays and browns of northern latitudes, 

 are suitably housed in the midst of picturesque surroundings ; and the Gardens have been 

 planted with shrubs and flowers so as to augment their attractiveness. A mia-mia, 

 constructed of sheets of bark, and furnished with the nets and weapons of the aborigines 

 of Victoria, connects the present with the past by faithfully reproducing one of the 

 native habitations which not more than fifty years ago were reared upon this very spot, 

 when the site of Melbourne was occupied by grassy glacles and groves of venerable trees. 



On the east side the Royal Park is skirted by a suburb of recent growth, entitled 

 Parkville, composed of pretty villas and handsome terraces, some of which face the 

 Sydney Road one of the broadest of the approaches to the city, and planted with avenues 

 of elm and pine. On the other side of a reserve that has received the name of Prince's 

 Park is situated the Melbourne Cemetery. This has been used as a burial-ground 

 since the year 1853, and during the interval it has received the mortal remains of one 

 hundred and twenty-five thousand persons, thus but a limited area of its hundred and 

 one acres is now available for future interments. Each of the leading religious denomina- 

 tions has its own separate province in this silent realm, which is made as beautiful by 

 trees and shrubs and flowers as nature and art can render it. One of the most conspi- 

 cuous monuments in the Cemetery is that erected to the memory of Sir Charles Hotham, 

 which consists of a lofty pillar of polished red granite, with a richly carved capital sur- 

 mounted by a cross. Another, covering the grave of Lady Darkly, resembles a Gothic 

 chapel ; and a third, consisting of a huge monolith of rough-hewn granite resting on a 

 massive plinth, marks the final resting-place of the bones of Burke and Wills, the 

 explorers : " Comrades in a great achievement companions in death and associates in 

 renown " so reads the epitaph. 



The suburb of Carlton has already enveloped the Cemetery on three sides, and the 

 time is fast approaching when, from the inability to find room for any more graves, 

 this, like its predecessor, will have to be closed. It has been resolved, therefore, to select 

 a site for a much larger necropolis at such a distance from Melbourne as will place it 

 beyond the reach of metropolitan extension, at any rate for some centuries to come ; 

 and a tract of land, close to the railway, comprising some hundreds of acres in an 

 elevated position and with a sanely soil, has been marked out for this purpose near Frank- 

 ston, on the eastern shore of the Bay. 



