Local Intelligence.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VI, Issue 431, 20 December 1856, Page 7

Local Intelligence.

Z STEAM POSTAL COMMUNICATION WITH AUSTRALIA. At the meeting of the merchants of Lyttelton, which wo noticed in our paper of December 3rd, the following Memorial to His Excellency the Governor was adopted, and has since been circulated for general signature. The sudden arrival of the Zingari made it necessary that the document should be recalled from the plains before it had received all the names

which might have been attached to it, but it is, even so, very extensively signed. It was despatched to the North by the Zingari on her return. To His Excellency Colonel Thomas Gore Browne, Commander of the most hon. order of the Bath, Governor and Commander-in-chief in and over her Majesty's Colony of New Zealand, and vice Admiral of the same, &c, &c. The humble Memorial of the undersigned Merchants, Traders, and Residents in the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand, Humbly sheweth, —That your Memorialists respectfully desire to lay before your Excellency tho injustice done to Canterbury, by the arrangement made by your Excellency's Government as to the delivery of the Mails at Auckland for the whole of New Zealand, under the Steam Postal Service. Your memorialists submit, in the first place, that by the above mentioned arrangement their mails are made to undergo a most circuitous route to Canterbury; and, secondly, from the very short stay the steamer is to make in Auck--1 and, that it will be quite impossible for your memorialists or the residents in any other oi the Southern Ports to reply to their letters by the same steamer, on her return trip to Melbourne. Your memorialists would most respectfully have been disposed to submit to your Excellency, that Wellington, from its more central position, would have afforded Canterbury and all the other southern settlements more facility in communication, were it not that Auckland would thus have been deprived of a direct conveyance of her mails. Your memorialists would under the peculiar circumstances of the case, therefore, venture to suggest, for the purpose of affording to all the New Zealand Settlements some participation in the advantages intended to be granted to all the Australasian and New Zealand Colonies by the new Steam Postal service, that the branch service with New Zealand should consist of two steamers instead of one, as proposed.; the one to run to Auckland, Taranaki, and Nelson ; the other to Otago, Lyttelton,and Wellington; the latter taking her departure for Melbourne from Wellington. Y rour memorialists, in conclusion, humbly but earnestly pray your Excellency that, if the petition of your memorialists cannot be granted, the mails for Canterbury may r be sent to Sydney as at present, to be thence forwarded 'by the first opportunity, instead of being subjected to the lengthy and uncertain route via Auckland. And your memorialists, as in duty bound, will ever pray, Sec, &c.