AUSTRALIAN LETTER.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7540, 22 January 1896, Page 4

AUSTRALIAN LETTER.

\'." (Otago Daily Times Correspondent.) ■ : . . .' IMELBotnwrß, Jan. 8. ■■,*;". . KOJTKJAL -DULNESS. • ' Jasfc at present politics are no burden to { the mind in Victoria. Parliament is to ■ ■■.sit again after the holidays— a very un- " usual thing. Generally it ends business ;.; by Christmas, sitting from J une. It does ;■''-■. nob distress itself —meets three day 3 a week ■• ' (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) at ';. 4.30, and winds up for the night at 11, : .in time to catch the last trams and trains ■ : ":- '" ;i for the suburbs. In Sydney, where the .'•< trams are Government property, special oars are always detained for members, no .-'. matter at what time they finish — even 4 ,■or 5 in the morning. If there were later trains here members would sit later, but no one , has had the nerve to propose : speoial trains. Three days a week from ''-•• 4.30 to 10.30 is not extremely arduous work. There is no sitting at the beginning and end of the week, to allow the ;' ' hnabands and fathers from the country ■" the opportunity of a visit home. A Vlc- '.-"■ torian legislator at L 240 a year has there- • fore| what is known as a "fat billet." Parliament) House is a pleasant club — , ' ..free billiards, comfortable rooms, a choice of companions, and the rest. This session ■ has; already lasted six months. If members sat five days, a week instead of three ' and 10 hours a day instead of six, all the ' . work could be done in three months. Since the tariff debate closed no one ■has taken. any interest in the doings of ':= Parliament. A New Zealand visitor remarked it to me a few days ago as one of the thingn that had struck him as singular that politics are the last subject you hear mentioned in conversation ; indeed, he said, he believed very few people knew ' the names of Ministers. The contrast to . New Zealand is extreme in this respect. GOING BACKWARDS. . Victoria is losing her population to Western Australia at such a rate that people are beginning to take serious alarm 1 about it. Last Saturday- two steamers ; took away 600 steerage passengers. I . '.- . daresay this last three months 300 depar-" turea have been the weekly average, and 1 they are the young, strong, robust mem- 1 bers of the community ; but it is a notice- ; . able fact that from New South Wales the -emigration is going' on in only a very limited degree. The reason is not at once ■ - ' . apparent. But Sydney is in a much more .'. ; healthy , state than Melbourne, and her new tariff will keep it so. Here in Victoria the farmer is at laat expecting to reap some benefit from Protection. He has no wheat to export after the miserable harvest, and the Age preaches daily to him how the protective duty on wheat will keep the market up. This kind of jubilation is of a piece with the wretchedly short-sighted arguments of the Protection- ■. isfc. ' The entire community is to suffer . ' that the farmer may get Is 9d a bushel , ■ more for his grain. And so it is all round. " Bread, clothes, boots — all the necessaries ■ of life — are kept up to the dearest possible point by 50 per cent, duties. And yet : we are surprised that the working man - flees the country. "quacks." When a man like "Professor " Richard can make royal progress through the colo- , ■ nies as an " electric healer," there is no difficulty in understanding that in big cities like Melbourne and Sydney quacks of all kinds and degrees flourish like the green bay tree. In Sydney a Parliamentary Commission took evidence a couple or three years ago which was simply astounding in its exposure of the credulity of the trusting public and the unabashed villainy of the trusted "professor." A cancer | c professor" is under arrest in Melbourne " jusfr now. ■ He is a common-looking, '.. Ignorant individual who calls himself .. "Professor" Davis. He cannot speak half a dozen words of the Queen's English without his speech betraying him to be a ". : man entirely without education. Yet he boasts of "pulling cancers out by the ; toots," and will show you some in.a bottle, roots afld all. Mrs Currie. from the country town of Rushworth, came to Melbourne and took the best medical advice. She had a cancerous growth in ■ the abdomen, and was told she was incurable. Some kind friend recommended the " professor," who airily asserted his i ability to have the cancer out by the roots In no time. He doctored her with some kind of ointment which the doctors, now the woman is dead, say ate right through the abdominal wall and set np peritonitis —■a disease of which, no doubt, the " professor " never heard. If he is convicted he deserves more punishment than he is likely to get. The most despicable , form of fattening on the public is certainly medical quackery. Up in Carlton there Is one notable individual, who sets up as an expert in women's diseases. His ignorance of the English language is appalling ; 1 yet his rooms are full of suffering women all day lopg. His boast is that, " unlike the Collins street doctors," he never operates— wherein ha shows his wisdom— and be doses his patients with such nauseous, if probably harmless, stuffs that they worship him. OID TIMES. >'-- "Ts the Australian horse doterioraring V is one of the questions which has been discussed in the papers in the holiday season. Two notable "horsey" men have , been interviewed in Mr J. O. Campbell, of Kirk's Bazair (now an M.L.0.. by the way), and George Watson, " the prince of starters." Both hold that the horse of the old days was ever so much better than the horße of the present — an opinion they very likely hold about the men. Mr Campbell thinks five-furlong flutters on racecourses and the abolition of trotting .traces are recponsible for the evil. Bosides, all the good country is kept for sheep and cattle, and "starve a horae and you'll have a scrubber." In the old clays ne says the endurance of horses was wonderful. "I remember in 1860 I rode my home from Kirk's Bazaar to Lonewood— 9s miles— in twelve hours, . starting afc 6.30 a.m., and arriving at Longwood soon after 5 in the afternoon. Next "morning h8 would do his 60 miles before 2 o'clock ; and I rode 12st 81b then. . My horse was by »n Arab siro o^ of a ■mare bred by Mr Macnrthur, of Camden, N.8.W., and was bred by Mr Paul de Oastalln, of Lilydale, and when I first saw him he wbs the loadinc horso in a Hawthorn omnibus. The late Mr G. Glnsscoofc rode the name horse 100 miles Jn 12 hours in New Zealand. If you once put that horse into n three-foot canter he -- ■ -would go on and never stop till you pulled „ him up. He wns a beautiful lady's hack, V and in New Zealand he did his mile in : 3min 9sec, carrying 13st, when I trotted , : him aoainsb the late Mr G. Glasscock's <'} dare I)osey on the Silverstream course, ; Danedin. . A grey horse ho wns, standing 16 2, and in Southland, Now Zealand, ", he won a trotting race, and in ten days afterwards, ran .first in a hurdle race, a: ajthough ' he. was not a fast enlloper, ...but ha ,'waf- one of thp best jumpers T /""'■' remember," Snmo of the " ancients " J •■:■'. jikp Sydney' 3nme» nrnl Ocorae Dowse '"j mny retiif>mhfir. Mr CrtmpbeJl'fl trotting f; match. Mr George Watson thinks that >" horses have deteriorated, because — "The ' - country has been starved. It has been ,''. l eaten, down by sheep and cattle. In the :: ; old days there was grass up to a horse's o;. .knees, and I don't think the Reasons were \ anything like aa bad as they have been of ;;";'>• late years. Look at this season, for in•"•;^stance.;.'"AH the young stock are as poor ?!: ;as they.. can, be. ' .Again, the country is ij'--'''ieipbb.edfdf'«ll;its good horses. As soon as fe^pod'.loplring four-year-old is found he 's, i;is, snapped up for the 'Indian market, and i ; ;V j:|he'.cmony. loses him. ' Then the railways V-jjand; improved means . of communication jp^enerally/.Jjav'e ,dori,e : away with the imwhich existed for a bigger 00te#Qi$f(gj)eai-:-, Thirty years ago,' when I^M:-l?B!*|iiij(iß^i»ntea''to'".jj6»ne'«p to town 'mjm^&6^&-;<y ■)■-.■■.• S?i^«^^feeEfefe"s : ''«-<'i-'.:;v.-/:.-:.-;!^- ."..-"■.-■ ■-!

he had to ride, and he must have a horse that would carry him sometimes two or three hundred miles. Nowadays when a man wants to visib Melbourne he steps into the train." HISTORY OF " LAKRIKIN." Professor Morris has lectured on " Australasian English." He wants to settle the derivation of "larrikin," "shout," "kangaroo," "sheoak," and such words. An authoritative statement about "larrikin" is made by Mr VV. H. Whelan in the Argus :— " Being clerk of tho City Court, I know that the word originated in the very Irish and amusing way in which tho then well-known Sergeant Dalton pronounced the word ' larking ' in respect to the conduct of ' Tommy, the Nut,' a rowdy of the period, and others of both sexes in Stephen (now Exhibition) street. Your representative at the C.mrt, the witty and clever • Billy ' O'Hea, who, alas ! died too early, took advantage of the appropriate sound of the word to apply it to rowdyism in general, and next time Dalton repeated the phrase changed the word from verb to noun, where it still remains, anything to the contrary notwithstanding. I speak of what I do know, for O'Hea drew my attention to the matter at the time, and, if I mistake not, a reference to your files would show that it was first in the Argus the word appeared in print."