"
EMMA. "Poor Mr. Meredith! What a frightful murder!"
MRS. WILTON. "The Australians thought nothing of it, for they glory
in the most atrocious deeds. I fear it will be long before they will
be civilized. But let us look at their country, of which, in some
respects, but little can be said; for it is not remarkable for its
fertility, and in many parts exceedingly barren. But few animals
range there, and in the south-west the natives subsist during the
winter chiefly on opossums, kangaroos, and bandicoots, in the summer
upon roots, with occasionally a few fish."
DORA. "Port Adelaide appears to be a neat town. Its harbor is a deep
creek or inlet of the sea, running out of Gulf St. Vincent: it
contains two spacious wharfs, alongside of which, vessels from Great
Britain, Singapore, Manilla, China, Mauritius, Sydney, Hobart Town,
and New Zealand, are continually discharging their cargoes."
MRS. WILTON. "There are many lakes in Australia, but none of them
very large. Lake Alexandria is the largest, but it is very shallow;
and Lake St. George, the second in size, which, in 1828, was a sheet
of water 17 miles long by 7 broad, was said by an old native female
to have been a forest within her memory, and in 1836 it was dried up
to a grassy plain."
EMMA. "Does not Van Diemen's Land belong to New Holland, mamma?"
MRS. WILTON. "Yes, my dear; and the part nearest to it is New South
Wales, from which it is separated by Bass's Straits, which are 100
miles broad, and contain a great many small islands.
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