RYE AND EASTBOURNE 119 



was he not ? A hundred years in the history of 

 the Old Mother Country means a lot. What has 

 the nineteenth century meant to Young Australia 

 in its advancing ? The gulf between the days in 

 which Charles Joseph La Trobe was Lieutenant- 

 Governor — I presume this was the La Trobe 

 known as Governor La Trobe, after whom the 

 street in Melbourne was named — and the present 

 year is almost impossible to realise in its vastness. 

 One may safely reckon that when the to-be 

 Governor went out there was no Victoria so 

 catalogued as an independent colony ; Separation 

 Day had not arrived ; far the larger part of the 

 great continent by now brought into profitable 

 use was terra incognita ; sailing ships took nearly 

 two-thirds of a year to get out from the Old 

 Country, and, if they arrived in the days of the 

 gold rush, might lie and rot for want of hands to 

 work them back. Australia had been made the 

 rendezvous for the scum of the world because of 

 the diggings ; at the gold fields — all alluvial 

 workings (mining in the rock was not dreamed 

 of, and machinery consisted of a cradle and bowl) 

 — lucky ones made money in lumps ; the mining 

 army as a body earned rather less than labourers' 

 wages ; said army was somewhat more rigorously 

 bullied by jumped-up police officers than convicts ; 

 regular industry was at a discount, and Governors, 

 also Lieutenant-Governors, had to fight very 

 hard to get their colonies recognised as worthy of 

 respect and entitled to fair consideration by the 

 home authorities. 



Bearing in mind how events have shaped 

 themselves down under, it sets one thinking to 

 fall across in an out-of-the-way rustic English 

 hamlet the tomb of a character notable in 



