THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN IN AUSTRALIA.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1579, 4 March 1887, Page 3

THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN IN AUSTRALIA.

We make the rapidest of rushes to Williamstown. The country through which we pass can scarcely be called inviting. It is devoid of trees; it is intolerably dusty, and generally arid, and, especially, it lacks water. No brimming rivers, no purling streams, no babbling rills going on, like Lord Tennyson's brook, for ever; not bo much as a duck-pond or a mill-race. For all this the prospect on either side throughout this eight miles' journey is marvellous. Huge factories, sawmills, steam bakeries, and flour mills; rope-walks, wool and hide warehouses seem to succeed one another mile after mile; then there will come a break—an expanse of apparently waste land—and thence ftart up street after street of villa residences, brickbuilt or galvania-ed-tinned iron-built, interspersed with wooden shanties. In justice to the verandahed villa residences it must be admitted that, as a rule, they do their best to look pretty. Unfortunately they do not often succeed in the attempt. The surrounding verandahs just redeem the houses from sheer hideousness; otherwise the houses partake of the general tasteleßsness and meanness which characterise domestic architecture at the Antipodes. The great Australian cities abound in splendid public buildings. The postoffice is usually a palace; tbe jail commanding, and Government House lofty if not ®§thetic. The shops are as handsome as any to be seen in the United States or in the Old Wcrld; the banks and insurance offices are really sumptuous piles, although their facades seem occasionally to comprise as many as nine orders of architecture ; but the private dwellings are with rare exceptions paltry in construction and ugly in aspect. It is as though yery few wealthy Australians contemplated

the probability of their Inus )S being inhabited by their children's children, or, indeed, for an entire lifetime by themselves. Sooner or later, I cannot help fancying the Wool Kings, the Kidney-Fat Princes, the Every thingShop Aristocrats mean to go " home," as they affectionately call England; buy the leases of five storeyed mansions in Cromwell Gardens or Palace Gate; engage those powdered footmen and professed cooks whose services they are unable to procure in Australia; and stand for Parliament in the Conservative interest.— G. A. Sala, in Tiasley's Magazine.