A VICTORIAN'S OPINION OF THE EMPIRE CITY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1931, 3 May 1880, Page 2

A VICTORIAN'S OPINION OF THE EMPIRE CITY.

A former resident in Eailarat, in a letter to a friend, gives the following extraordinary description of Wellington city:— "Of all the backward, dirty holes I have been in, this beats them all. I know of no road in Victoria, excepting one close to Mount Warrenheip, in as bad a condition as the principal street in Wellington. The mud is two inches thick, and to hare to cross the street on foot requires a large amount of moral courage to nerve one for the task. The publio conveyances are about the best things in the placed as they are nearly all either carriages cr broughams, but you never can get one if you want it before 10 a.m. or after 8 p.m., and oven between these hours you may have to walk nearly a mile to one of the •star-ds.' A tramway carriage runs every twenty minutes during the day up to 6 p.m., in which you can ride a distance of four miles for threepence. The best musical people in the city are two old Ballarat men, Messrs M. King and Caddy, the former a nephew of Mr T. King, and the other related to Mr Cadden, at one time market inspector in Ballarat. The only vocalist worth mentioning is Mrs George Cotterill (Miss Carandini). There is very little to blow about in the place, but it would not do to say so to the inhabitants, as they look upon Wellington as being vastly superior to any other place south of the line, although there is but one decent building in the whole city, and that is Jacob Joseph's warehouse. There is not a square or garden in the whole place, and no probability of there ever being one, since no room can be found for it, Wellington being built at the foot of a ridge of hills in the shape of a horseshoe. Occasionally they reclaim a few yards of the shore from the sea. It is, without doubt, 200 yours behind the age, and has the most useless good-for-nothing City Council I ever knew of. They do nothing, but want to do everything ; they mu3t have sole control over everything ; they are the committee of the Hospital and Benevolent Asylum, Ac, and also Harbor Board Commissioners, and yet ' they are nothing in reality."