Volltext Seite (XML)
84 diately lowered the value of land throughout the island, nearly fifty per cent, from the general desire it induced to he off to the Eldorado. Every settler’s son who had a spark of life in him, besought his father for his portion of goods,—I mean of sheep and cattle—that he was fairly entitled to, and hied himself off with them to Port Phillip.” The writer of these records remembers well many years ago the fair sisters of Tasmania rehearsing their grievances about the “ nasty Port Phillip,” that took all the marriagable young men aw r ay, and left them, the lovely flowers, to waste their sweetness in the desert air ;—desert indeed of human sympathies. FLOCKS AND FLOCK-MASTERS. The couragous men who first dashed into the forests of Port Phillip, or stood exposed, alone, in its vast plains and solitudes, deserve our applause. It is a very different thing now coming out hence, and taking up our quarters in a comfortable Melbourne Hotel, or dropping down upon a rural retreat with its orchards in full growth, to that early time, when the gun was ever in the hand of the stockman, when fifty miles lay between one and his neighbour, and when supplies were with such difficulty obtained, and retained. There were two landing places for flocks in the Bay,—Gellihrand’s Point, now Williams Town, and Point Henry, on the Geelong side. One old shepherd told us that the air of these places was not filled with rosy odours, the shore being strewn with dead carcases. The poor pent-up animals, exhausted from confinement in the vessel, and want of water, would rush readily into the sea to drink, drop, and die in heaps. The association’s 500 sheep arrived in the barque Norval, Capt. Coltish, at Point Gellihrand, Oct. 26th, 1835. The general rate of freightage once averaged five shillings a head. A roaring trade followed. It was sheep versus flour cargo. A Sydney paper alluded to our dilemma : “ The settlers,” it observes, “ complain.of the diffi culty of getting supplies from Launceston, as the owners of vessels from that place to Port Phillip, find the transport of live stock more pro fitable than goods.” Another trip of the Norval w r as not so propitious. Mr. Ferguson, as Capt. Swanston’s agent, was arranging for a station to receive 1000 sheep per Norval, in February 1836, chartered to land at Point Gellihrand as before. The owner, Mr. Read, of Laun ceston, is said to have had a valuable cargo of wattle bark awaiting
