Melbourne's Centenary

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21296, 16 October 1934, Page 10

Melbourne's Centenary

The ordinary man can be excused for feeling a little impatient about centenaries, whether they cities, great men, or notable events. For it must be confessed that the practice of disinterring celebrities and recapitulating events for no better reason than that there has been a lapse of 100 years has been tediously overdone. There are times, however, when a centenary comes neatly and opportunely at the end of a clearly-defined historical period and provides a useful vantage point from which to ponder upon the past and take stock of the future. The Melbourne and Victoria Centenary, the celebration of which began yesterday, is one such. Both politically and economically the century between 1834 and 1934 marks a definite period in the development of the colony of Victoria, of the Pacific Dominions, and of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The settlement which the Hentys founded at Portland Bay in 1834 was, after all, the nucleus of an empire as well as of a colony. To the great mass of the British public and to most British statesmen, colonial expansion seemed in the early years of the 19th century a troublesome and unprofitable venture. Yet in those years was founded by a few visionaries like the Wakefields and by a few practical adventurers like the Hentys the Empire that was to stir so profoundly the imagination of later generations of Englishmen. Moreover, the Empire which began in the eighteen thirties ends the first stage of its political development in the nineteen thirties with the acquisition by the Dominions, through the Statute of Westminster, of complete and unrestricted powers of self-government. It is to the credit of those who arranged the Melbourne Centenary celebrations that they have seen the broad Imperial significance of the events they are commemorating and have invested the celebrations with an Imperial as well as a local character. What is now assembling in Melbourne is a sort of informal Imperial Conference.