PREFACE
BEFORE giving to the publishers these notes of my journeyings during the early part of this year in Australia and New Zealand, the greater part of which appeared, during the months of March and April, in the hospitable columns of the Manchester Courier I have taken some trouble in revising and correcting them, to the best of my ability, from the latest available official returns. I am therefore indebted for many of my facts, and for most of my figures, to a class of documents available to all, but probably, in this country, perused by few—the publications of the several Colonial Governments. But, in putting together, as it were, the leaves of my notebook, I have not intended to write either a work of reference or a volume of travels; and my book makes as little claim to literary merit as to statistical completeness. To deal with the agriculture, as yet only in its early stages, of Bunbury and the Mallee, of Gippsland and the Darling Downs, of Colac and Tasmania, would require all the knowledge of another Arthur Young; while who should treat fully, as well as intelligibly to the general, of the mining industries of Ballarat and New Zealand, Mount Morgan, "the Towers," Broken Hill, Mount Lyall, Kalgoorlie, and Chillagoe, must have the silver tongue of a mining expert, as well as the treasures of his wisdom. The provincial peculiarities of "Tassies" and cornstalks, gum-suckers, crow-eaters, sand-gropers, and "wait-a-whiles," might furnish many jests to your globe-trotting philosopher, or to a witty reporter. But as
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