LETTER XVI

Summary

Melbourne, April 27. 1853.

I see immense changes here in the few months that we have been away. Canvass Town, as they call it, a large camp on the other side of the Yarra, where people who cannot get lodgings, or who cannot afford to pay exorbitant prices for them, pitch their tents, has sprung up while we have been up the country, and contains, I suppose, some thousands of people. There are also in the same locality whole rows of wooden houses, erected for the same purpose, the temporary shelter of the immigrants, who yet keep pouring in. On Emerald Hill, a slight elevation in the swampy flat between Melbourne and Liardets' Beach, where was a camp of emigrants, there is now a whole town of wooden houses sprung up like mushrooms: inns, shops, and cottages. On all other sides of the town there is the same amazing increase of population. The Government, the most pedling Government in the world, totally inadequate to, or totally unmindful of, the unexampled crisis which has arisen, is still doling out one small scrap of land after anǝther in the suburbs for building upon. They will not throw a good quantity into the market, so that people could get little farms and enclosures, for that would reduce the price; but they only sell little bits at such intervals of time as ensures a monstrous price for it; for people must have houses of some sort and somewhere.