"Marvellous" Melbourne

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 91, 30 January 1892, Page 4

"Marvellous" Melbourne

. .■ > * News from Melbourne is rather ghastly reading just now. What with suicides, bank swindlers, company swin,dlers, failures, and 'the bursting tij) of bogus banking concerns, "Marvellous. Melbourne " appears, to be in a very- unhappy condition. In the worst of. our own troubles we never approached such a financial abyss, nor waded in anything like such depths of moral degradation as the newspapers <lisclose the existence of in that city. A few years— nay, a few months- — ago \ anyone who should have ventured to predict such catastrophes would have been mercilessly ridiculed. The silver boom and the land boom fairly set the Melbournites dancing mad. They seemed to think, and I believe did think, that the inflation would last for ever. But everybody cannot gain riches, for somebody must- lose them. Poor little New Zealand and her troubles were sneered at in those days, or at best spoken of in a deprecating, patronising tone by the 'Age' and { Argus. ' But New Zealand has now pretty well tided over her difficulties — faction fights omitted ; and now the same papers are only too glad to hold ' our colony up as a model for imitation, and buckler against British depreciation, of Australasia. Melbourne correspondents point apparently with a feeling of satisfaction, to a difference between depression in New Zealand and disaster in Victoria ; which is that our. depression extended to the country districts, and that their own troubles are confined to -the .city, our recovery is due, not to wise legislation, nor evea to the ".sacrifices" we are somewhat' unduly preditejd with having made, but rather to the "fact that our main reliance is on the produce of the soil ;. and good harvests have freed the farmers, or will ultimately free them, from the shackles of mortgage engagements. Land in "Victoria will never again attain the fabulous prices to which it was forced by all sorts of trickery. All the arts of all the brokers, auctioneers, and land bankers that swarm, as thick as flies and as obnoxious, in the Victorian capital, can never again restore the gilded age of sham prosperty. Melbourne has been drunk, and is now suffering from the 'Ut's, " and must, I fear, still suffer more. — Dunedin Star.