PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Since the 1st September, 1852, an edition of 5,000 copies of "The Three Colonies of Australia" has been exhausted. In this Second Edition I have made material alterations and additions. The work is now divided into two parts—the first Historical, the second Descriptive. I have in preparation, as a sequel, another volume of less bulk, which will be a Practical Hand-Book to the South Sea Colonies, including Australia, Van Diemen's Land, and New Zealand.
The Historical section contains, in twenty chapters of 240 pages, a sketch of the discovery and foundation of the Three Colonies, and the principal political and social events in their respective careers, between the landing of the first fleet in Port Jackson and the opening of the gold mines at Mount Alexander. In the preparation of the first seven chapters (83 pages), I had, in addition to the oral information of old colonists and valuable MSS., the assistance of the works of Collins, Wentworth, &c. The remaining thirteen chapters, which include the administrations of Governors Bourke, Gipps, and Fitzroy, in New South Wales—the Land Question—Emigration—Transportation—the Constitutional Contests of the first Australian Representative Council, and the whole History of the Colonisation of South Australia, are in the strictest sense of the term original. The materials were diffused through the votes and proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, English Blue Books, files of colonial newspapers, and other sources still more obscure and difficult of access. Whatever, therefore, be the demerits of this part of my work, it is the History of the Leading Political and Social Events of a period never before chronicled by any writer on Australia—a period to which Australian colonists look back with as much interest as we do in England to the struggles for the Reform Bill or for the repeal of the Corn Laws. In this Second Edition I have rewritten and condensed the pages devoted to the all-important Land Question, and devoted an additional forty pages to the Administration of Governor Fitzroy and the Colonial Policy of Earl Grey; and I have endeavoured to throw new light on the government of Sir
