PREFATORY NOTE BY THE EDITOR.
To get a clear idea of the space of time in which the great English colonies have grown up in Australasia, as well as to mark the period to which the following historical records refer, an illustration, at once simple and striking, may be given in a few words.
At a little village a few miles from Hobart Town there still walks about a hale hearty man, who was born at Port Phillip Heads on the 25th November 1803. His parents had landed there with the rest of the intended colony about six weeks before.
On the following Christmas Day, under the gum trees overlooking what is now called "Sorrento," after the chaplain's sermon to the assembled civil and military officers, the settlers and the convicts,[1] Lieutenant-Governor Collins handed the little son of the sergeant of marines to the Rev. Mr. Knopwood, and stood godfather to William James "Hobart" Thorne, the first-born of the settlement. In another month godfather and godson, officers, emigrants, and outlaws had got on board their ships again, had hove up their anchors and sailed away for Tasmania, where Hobart Thorne and Hobart Town grew up together.
Lieutenant-Governor Collins was born in 1756. At the age of nineteen he was with his father's regiment at "Bunker's Hill," in the American Revolutionary War, and at thirty-two he went out, in 1788, as Judge-Advocate with Governor Phillip in the "First Fleet," and so helped to found Sydney.
When we reflect that at that time there was not a white man resident on any part of the vast island-continent of Australia, or in New Zealand, Tasmania, or any of the islands washed by Australasian seas, we may form some idea of what has been done in the span of these two lives.
The journals of the early discoverers and explorers, which led to Collins being sent out by the British Government to establish a penal colony at Port Phillip, together with the records of the settlement itself,
- ↑ The First Sermon Preached in Port Phillip, on the 13th November 1803, by the Revd. Mr. Knopwood, has been printed in the Melbourne "Church of England Messenger," 14th February 1878.
