The Superintendent's Office,
In the first instance, transacted its rather limited business in a cottage in Little Flinders Street, one of the two apartments of which was used as a sub-Treasury. In February, 1841, these quarters were vacated for a somewhat more commodious brick tenement at the north-eastern corner of William and Little Collins Streets. The Superintendent soon after gave up this place altogether to the Treasury, and moved around to the untenanted house of Batman, on Batman's Hill, and there made himself as comfortable as circumstances would permit. He was little more than a senior clerk, tied up with red tape, with hardly more to do than to receive and answer correspondence from head-quarters, and report progress. In course of time he was entrusted with discretion to a considerable extent, and some of his despatches may be ranked with the ablest State papers in the office of the Colonial Secretary. He used to be facetiously styled "the Twenty pounds Governor," because in the beginning it was said that his financial discretion was limited to that amount. Further he dare not go without a special authority.
The establishment was thus provided for on the Estimates of the time:— His Honor the Superintendent, £800 per annum; Clerk (Private Secretary), £155 per annum; Assistant Clerk, £109 10s. per annum; Forage for horses to His Honor, &c., £139 10s. Total, £1204.
The Treasury having also moved to a skillion in the rear, probably the Batman kitchen, sufficient savings were pared out of the etceteras of the forage item to pay for a Messenger. In January, 1846, the Superintendent transferred himself and his official belongings to a newly erected building in William Street formerly well-known as the Government Offices, in the centre of the square now covered by the new Law Courts. The business did not increase very much for some years, though His Honor's salary nearly doubled, and that of his Private Secretary was largely augmented. This is how it stood in 1847: His Honor, C. J. Latrobe, Esq., £1500 per annum; Secretary and Chief Clerk, E. L. Lee, Esq., £240 per annum; Second Clerk, Mr. Alexander Holmes, £140 per annum; Third Clerk, Mr. Charles Holmer, £120 per annum; Messenger, Thos. M'Carthy, £50 per annum. In 1848 the Private Secretary disappeared under circumstances of a mysterious character never satisfactorily elucidated. Having obtained a three months' furlough, on the 15th December he left Brighton on a boating expedition. As the day was unpromising, some friends cautioned him against doing so; but he started in a small boat, with a black boy as his only companion. The boat was provisioned for two months, and Mr. Lee let it be understood that he intended visiting an island in Bass's Strait, where the parents of his sable protégé lived. Nothing further was heard for about a month, when an aborigine arrived in Melbourne with intelligence, that he had some weeks previously seen a boat upset in a squall off Point Nepean. The crew, a black and a white man, tried to save themselves by swimming ashore, in which the black succeeded, but the other was drowned. The blackfellow wandered about the country for some time, until falling in with some of the Western Port aborigines, he was killed by them. This story might not have been believed but for the simultaneous finding of a boat beached on a Mr. Thompson's station in Western Port. Captain Dana the commandant of the native police, started off at once with some troopers to hunt up further particulars, and succeeded in finding the boat, which was identified as Lee's. Though for nine years the Superintendent's Secretary, this was the first leave Lee had had. There were some who discredited the fact of Lee's alleged drowning, assigning sinister motives for his departure, and sensational paragraphs about him appeared in the newspapers. But Lee was never after seen in Melbourne, nor, I believe, heard of from that day to this. He was soon forgotten and his vacant desk filled by Edward Bell, whoretained the office until after the separation of Port Phillip from New South Wales, an event which raised the status of the department from a simple Supermtendency to that of a Lieutenant-Governorship.
The Treasury.
In 1839, Mr. Webb, in addition to his duties as Sub-collector of Customs, was charged with the control of a branch of the Colonial Treasury, which was opened at Melbourne on The 7th July; and in April, 1840, Captain Lonsdale resigned the police magistracy and was appointed Sub-Treasurer. The
