The now great wood-blocked causeway at the intersection of Collins and Elizabeth Streets was during the early years a queer thoroughfare. The four half-acre corner allotments were purchased respectively for ^ 3 2 , £,o, ^ 4 2 , and ,£50, no doubt the full value at the time.
The most remarkable corner in Elizabeth Street is its north-east junction with Little Collins Street. The half-acre was bought for £28, and the corner was devoted to mercantile purposes by Campbell and Woolley, importers. The store was about half up on the arrival of Father Geoghegan, the first Roman Catholic priest, in July, 1838, and he obtained permission to solemnize therein the first mass offered in the colony.
About the General Post Office corner, a "cock-and-bull" story occasionally crops up to the effect that the place belongs to a pauper cripple, who acquired it legally in the days of yore, but the intervention of some legal or illegal hitch ousted him from his rights. There is little doubt of such a supposition being groundless. At the period of the early land sales the place was such that no sane man would put a shilling in it, and as no one even thought of then purchasing it, the block appears on the old charts of Melbourne, shaded off as a red blank, the indication of the unbought portions of the township. It was a species of bog, and, according to tradition, during the winter of 1837, a bullock team, including a drunken driver, got swamped there one evening after sundown whilst en route for Flemington, and no traces of them were ever brought to the surface. This latter is, no doubt, a stretch of the imagination.
The half-acre whereon is now the Theatre Royal was knocked down for £95. It was used as a timber yard until the Fates decreed it to form the principal Metropolitan home of the drama. From Swanston Street northward was for a length of time reckoned at little value, for not only trading, but even habitable purposes. It was an extensive upland of forest country, rent by water-worn gorges, and deemed valuable only for its supposed stone-quarrying resources. One of the most pleasurable pedestrian excursions that could be indulged in, was an afternoon stroll away over the ground now occupied by the Court House and Gaol Reserve, and away by the Cemetery towards Brunswick, so called by Mr. W. F. A. Rucker.
The first building erected in East Collins Street was the Scots' School, in 1838, primarily used also as a Kirk. Lower down, on the south side, where The Argus now forges and launches its typographical thunderbolts, was the first Baptist place of worship, a capacious tent, wherein the first service was held. Of this half-acre freehold Mr. Thomas Napier became the owner, and his heirs are still the ground lessors. H e lent the land temporarily to the Baptists, and subsequently had a building put up there, an apartment of which was dignified as Napier's Large Room, the scene of some early religious services and society meetings. When William Kerr started the Melbourne Argus in 1846, the place was converted into a newspaper office; and when this journal died and the present Argus sprung like a Phœnix from its ashes, the premises and the newspaper clove together, enlarging every year, and growing so attached to each other that it would be difficult to calculate upon the particular period (if ever) when they will dissolve partnership.
Crossing obliquely from The Argus, we come to a place which, before a stone of a Town Hall was laid there, figured as a locality of some note. The bole of a large gum tree remained there a few feet over the ground for years. This was the first stump utilized for orating purposes. From a platform attached to the stump, during the Anti-transportation campaign, the Tribunes of the period discharged their philippics against the threatened pestiferous invasion. Directly opposite was the half-acre known almost from time immemorial as Germain Nicholson's Corner, purchased for £45.
Old Melbourne could boast of (so-called) "Terraces," some particulars of which are worth rescuing from oblivion. The first erected in Stephen Street commenced at the corner of Little Bourke Street, and known as "Cleveland Terrace," but was afterwards known as "Porter's Cottages," after their owner, Mr. George Porter. If the memoirs of "Porter's Cottages" could be written, many a quaint and thrilling tale of Melbourne life would they unfold. The premises were in 1881 turned into a Hippodrome, under lease to a company of which an enterprising medico was the principal.
Latrobe Parade, a nomenclative compliment to the Provincial Superintendent, and still known as such, is a lane extending from Collins Street East to Little Flinders Street, between Stephen and
