VIII. NORMAN SELFE. 



Macquarie being thus frustrated in his efforts to make Sydney 

 a model city, and blamed for his lavish expenditure, did not give 

 up his ideas all at once ; for he afterwards built without one penny 

 of cost to the Crown, the great hospitals in Macquarie-street, the 

 public section of which did duty for over eighty years, and has 

 only recently disappeared. Opinions of course differ as to Mac- 

 quarie's methods, Lord Liverpool censured him for them, but it 

 is certain that the Imperial Government would never have found 

 the £30,000 which he raised and expended on the Macquarie-street 

 buildings. As a matter of history the Governor contracted with 

 Messrs. Darcy Went worth, G. Blaxcell, and A. Riley, in 1810, 

 that they should have the right of buying fifteen thousand gallons 

 of rum free of duty, as a return for erecting these structures. This 

 work occupied five years, and although the central hospital has 

 gone, the other sections are still in existence as part of Parliament 

 House, and the Mint facade. 



The Water Supply of Sydney. — Early historians speak of the 

 fairy dells which graced the valley of the Tank Stream in the 

 course of its short run ; and they tell us of its great natural 

 beauty, with wild flowers and ferns, and its banks fringed with 

 heavy timber. There are few of us who are not sufficiently 

 acquainted with similar gems of Australian undergrowth, as to be 

 able to form a mental picture of this watercourse as it presented 

 itself to the arrivals by the First Fleet. Governor Phillip ordered 

 that no trees should be cut down within fifty feet of the water 

 run of this stream. At the present day the General Post Office 

 and other conspicuous buildings extend right over its valley from 

 bank to bank, and there is nothing whatever above ground to 

 even indicate its site. Our first Governor also took steps to secure 

 the water from pollution, in 1791 he had an intercepting ditch 

 dug on each side to keep out the surface drainage, and a fence 

 erected for the protection of the beautiful shrubs within the area. 



When Phillip left the colony on December 10th, 1792, and the 

 Civil Government was changed to a Military Oligarchy under 

 Captains Grose and Patterson, all Phillip's precautions seem to 



