AN HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF NEW SOUTH WALES, FROM THE FOUNDING OF THE COLONY IN 1788 BY JOHN DUNMORE LANG, D.D., A.M. SENIOR MINISTER OF THE SCOTS CHURCH, SYDNEY, AND RECENTLY HONORARY MEMBER OF THE AFRICAN INSTITUTE OF FRANCE, OF THE LITERARY INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OLINDA, IN THE BRAZILS. THE HISTORY OF THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ENTIRELY NEW. London: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, LOW, & SEARLE, CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET. 1875. [All rights reserved.] THE three former editions of this work were published in the years 1834, 1837, and 1852, respectively; but, from the wonderful development of the Colony of New South Wales during the last twenty or twenty-five years, and the manifold and important changes that have taken place in that period in its general condition and prospects, only a small portion, comparatively, of the original work has been embodied in the present edition; while the history of the Colony which it gives for the last quarter of a century is entirely new. Almost the whole of the following work was written at sea, on the author's repeated voyages from Sydney to London; the materials having been previously collected for the purpose on these occasions in the Colony. For having, unfortunately, had to spend a large portion of his life at sea, the author has found it expedient and necessary, independently altogether of other and higher objects, to carve out beforehand sufficient literary labour for each successive voyage, to redeem that portion of his life from the mere blank which it might otherwise present, as well as to escape the listlessness and languor into which any person without an absorbing employment is, in such circumstances, likely to fall. A work written in circumstances such as these must necessarily have many imperfections. Repetitions of the same facts and circumstances, and sometimes even of the same ideas, are not only apt to occur, but to be afterwards overlooked till it is too late to make the necessary corrections: dull expletives also are apt to intrude themselves, especially if the wind happens to be foul, or the weather unfavourable; and the balancing of periods is scarcely to be thought of. Having firmly resolved, on the completion of his academical curriculum of eight years at the University of Glasgow, for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, that he would not wait for any dead man's shoes in his native land, but would go forth beyond seas to some transmarine field of labour, in which no minister of the Church he belonged to had ever laboured before, the author went forth accordingly, as a minister of religion, to Australia, of his own choice and at his own charges, upwards of fifty years since; and having formed a strong attachment to his adopted country from the first, he was early identified with efforts of various kinds for its welfare and advancement. In process of time, as the colony was gradually expanding, and the powers of evil under the superlatively bad government to which it was long subjected were more and more strongly developed, he became involved in a whole series of struggles for its intellectual, social, moral, and political advancement, of which the reader will find sufficient indications in the following volumes. In the meantime, as the rest of the family of which the author was a member had followed his example in going forth to Australia shortly thereafter, and had acquired much valuable property in the country, which in the order of nature had all fallen to the author, he was enabled to maintain these struggles for a long series of years, and thereby not only to secure many important and permanent benefits for his fellow-colonists, but perhaps also to leave footprints on the sands of time in Australia, that, in all likelihood, will never be effaced.' As it is now evident that during the last eighty years and upwards Great Britain has been, perhaps unconsciously and undesignedly, laying the foundations of one of the mightiest empires of the future in Australia, the history of the origin and progress of the British settlements in that country will henceforth necessarily be an object of interest and importance not only to the colonists of Australia, but to the whole civilized world. Of these settlements, however, the only one that can ever pretend to have a history of the slightest interest or importance to the European reader, is New South Wales; of which, indeed, all the others-Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland-including even Western Australia or Swan River on the one hand, and New Zealand on the other, have merely been the progressive expansions. To pretend, therefore, to compare the wonderful progress of some of these settlements with the comparatively slow progress of New South Wales in the infancy of that settlement, as has frequently been done by ill-informed and prejudiced writers, both in the mother country and in the Colonies, is pre-eminently absurd. For example, when the Colonies of South Aus 1 At a public meeting in Sydney, in the year 1870, the Hon. Sir Terence Aubrey Murray, President of the Legislative Council, or Upper House of Parliament, in the chair, the Hon. S. D. Gordon, a member of that House, stated to the meeting that, "if Dr. Lang had retained the property which he had disposed of from time to time for the furtherance of objects which he conceived of value and importance to the country, it would then have been worth not less than a hundred thousand pounds." The author would certainly not have made such a statement himself; but as it was made publicly, where the facts it referred to were all well known, he has no hesitation in saying that it was perfectly correct. |