Let Us
Follow Him Through The Difficulties That Bewilder The Stranger In
Melbourne During The First Few Days Of His Arrival.
The commencement of his dilemmas will be that of getting his luggage
from the ship; and so quickly do the demands for pounds and shillings
fall upon him, that he is ready to wish he had pitched half his "traps"
over-board.
However, we will suppose him at length safely landed on the
wharf at Melbourne, with all his boxes beside him. He inquires
for a store, and learns that there are plenty close at hand; and then
forgetting that he is in the colonies, he looks round for a porter and
truck, and looks in vain. After waiting as patiently as he can for
about a couple of hours, he manages to hire an empty cart and driver;
the latter lifts the boxes into the conveyance (expecting, of course,
his employer to lend a hand), smacks his whip, and turns down street
after street till he reaches a tall, grim-looking budding, in front of
which he stops, with a "That ere's a store," and a demand for a
sovereign, more or less. This settled, he coolly requests the emigrant
to assist him in unloading, and leaves him to get his boxes carried
inside as best he can. Perhaps some of the storekeeper's men come to
the rescue, and with their help the luggage is conveyed into the
store-room (which is often sixty or eighty feet in length), where the
owner receives a memorandum of their arrival. Boxes or parcels may
remain there in perfect safety for months, so long as a
shilling a week is paid for each.
Our emigrant, having left his property in security, now turns to seek a
lodging for himself; and the extreme difficulty of procuring house
accommodation, with its natural consequences, an extraordinary rate of
rent, startles and amazes him. He searches the city in vain, and
betakes himself to the suburbs, where he procures a small,
half-furnished room, in a wooden house for thirty shillings a week. The
scarcity of houses in proportion to the population, is one of the
greatest drawbacks to the colony; but we could not expect it to be
otherwise when we remember that in one year Victoria received an
addition of nearly 80,000 inhabitants. The masculine portion of these
emigrants, with few exceptions, started off at once to the diggings;
hence the deficiency in the labour market is only partially filled up
by the few who remained behind, and by the fewer still who forsake the
gold-fields; whilst the abundance of money, and the deficiency of good
workmen, have raised the expenses of building far above the
point at which it would be a profitable investment for capital.
Meantime, the want is only partially supplied by the wooden cottages
which are daily springing up around the boundaries of the city; but
this is insufficient to meet the increasing want of shelter, and on the
southern bank of the Yarra there are four or five thousand people
living in tents.
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