AUSTRALIAN ITEMS.

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 120, 14 December 1858, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN ITEMS.

(from latest papers.) Melbourne was lately visited with a thunderstorm which continued for about an hour, rendering Swanston-street impassable. So great was the force of the current in Elizabeth-street that it carried away iron bridges, paving stones, timber, &c. In the case of Mackay v. Griffiths, tried lately at the Supreme Court of Victoria, the claim of the plaintiff for moneys due for transactions with the defendant in Tasmania tor goods sold and delivered in 1828 and 1829 was substantiated, the jury awarding interest upon an amount over a period of twenty-eight years. An impudent and barefaced robbery was perpetrated on some young ladies, belonging to Wangaratta, Victoria, who were indulging in the luxury of bathing in King River. The thief had the unblushing effrontery to walk off with their clothes. A diabolical attempt, to throw the train off the rail was perpetrated lately on the St. Kilda Railway, Melbourne, by placing a sleeper, propped up with stones, across the rail. The train, however, arrived in safety. The Sydney Herald says that a public mid-day prayer meeting was held in the York-street Wesieyan Methodist Church. It was numerously attended by persons of various denominations, and the public exercises were not confined to the members of the Wesieyan communion. It was the first of a series to be continued weekly on Wednesdays, from one to two o'clock. The object is to seek a general revival of religion in the city, and though these meetings originated in a meeting of officers of the Wesieyan Church, they are not intended to be denominational in their character. The promoters hope other churches will follow their example, and that there will be a general concert of prayer in all the Churches of Christ. Service pipes are now laid on at Ballaarat township to supply them with water from the adjacent swamp. An accident of a distressing character occurred at Mr. Kingsland's crushing mills, Bendigo. A young lad, named Christopher Roffe, who was employed to drive the horse, is supposed to have fallen asleep, and as the wheels revolved, one of them oruslied liis head to a jelly. Four miners at Avoca, Victoria, have cut a race fourteen miles long. The Bendigo Mercury states that about 9000 tons of quartz are crushed monthly at Sandhurst, Victoria. The Melbourne Ar(/us't\\us describes an execution in that city:—Both criminals were foreigners: Samuel Gibbs, who murdered Ills wife, was a native of Philadelphia, and George Thompson, who murdered a man named Hugh Anderson, was a negro, a native of St. Domingo:—"The preliminaries having been completed, the convicts, trembling in every muscle, were led to the scaffold ; they were both assisted up the ladder. 'On the drop Thompson was perfectly passive, but Gibbs struggled hard. Me first, tried to get off the trap-door and take refuge upon the permanent boarding. In doing this'he i'elt the rail behind him, and grasped it firmly with his pinioned hands, at the same time crying out,' Mercy ! mercy ; I'm an innocent man; good people protect me. Oh God! oh God!" In the midst of these cries, and as the voice of the clergyman was heard reading the funeral service, the'wife-slayer's hands were disengaged from the rail, he was pushed forward on the drop—it swung from beneath the feet of both criminals. Thompson was at once a dead man ; not so with Gibbs. The impetus of his forward motion on the drop became combined with his downward motion, and instead of descending perpendicularly, the rope was brought with violence against the lower edge of the beam, which is angular, and then it broke short off, and the wretch was precipitated to the floor below. He was immediately' taken up, nearly insensible, and carried again to the scaffold. As he got there he began to revive, so far as to be able to scream as well as the tightened rope ronnd his neck would permit. The rope was quickly knotted, the officers saying to each other, ' Q,uiek, quick, stand out of the way.' The assassin once more swung from the gibbet. He was then two or three minutes in dying. At the inquest that followed, the fact of the rope having broke was given in evidence, and also that it was the kind of rope that is always used for such purposes, and was in this, as in every other instance, subjected to careful examination before being used. A new paper has been started in Sydney, called The Evening Mail, the price of which is 2d. Its politics are liberal. It is stated by the Launceston Examiner that the constituents of Mr. T. J. Gregson, the " rowdy" member of the Assembly, lately expelled, have called on him to resign. The Hobart Town Mercury states that the nine tons of Fingal quartz have been crushed at Clunes, and only yielded eight pennyweights. The third session of the Parliament of Tasmania was closed on the sth November. Its great merit was its brevity, since it was only opened on the 7th September. A lad of thirteen years of age was sentenced by Judge William's.to be whipped twice in Ballaarat gaol, for stealing auriferous earth. All the gaol officers and European prisoners refused the task, but it was at length undertaken by a Chinese inmate. This is the first instance of corporal punishment at Ballaarat. The Rev. Philip Homan, resident at Ararat, Victoria, has incurred much odium by refusing to read the burial service over the remains of an unbaptised child. In the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, Mr. Service lately , advocated the propriety of vesting the appointment of the magistracy.in the judges of the Supreme Court, so as to place them beyond political influence. Gold of fine color, and in large nuggets, has been found at Boggy Creek, Gipps Land. Another vigorous effort has been made to complete within one year the Roman Catholic Cathedral being erected at Bathurst, N.S.W. Twelve gentlemen have agreed to advance .£3OOO for three years without interest, which, with the sums in hand, is calculated to be sufficient to complete the edifice. Mr. M'Carthy, a gold buyer, was stuck up on the road between Richardson's Point, on the Meroo, and Maitland Bar, N.S.W., the other day, and robbed of £468 in gold and money, by a man who presented a pistol to Mr. M'C.'s head, and made him give up his saddle bags. The robber was on fool, and the robbed on horseback. The Mudgce Newspaper, N.S.W., spins the following yarn :—A man named Tattershill, when shepheiding last week, killed, as he thought, an opossum, and having taken off the skin and pegged it out to dry, threw the body on the ground for the dogs to eat when they came round ; he then went away for a few minutes, but on returning, was surprised to see the 'possum, minus skin, running up a tree, into a hole in which he escaped. ! A bill has been laid before the Victorian Parliament, limiting the duration of Parliament to three years. A Chinaman was thrown from his horse recently at Bendigo, and his skull was so severely fractured that the brains partly protruded. A Dr. Boyd dressed the wound, and removed a portion of the brain.

Several fleer, fowls, pheasants, partridges, and singing birds, have just arrived in Melbourne, having been brought-, safe and sound, from England. A man has just completed the arduous pedestrian feat of walking 1.000 miles in 1000 hours at Ballaarat. . A printer named Morris Welsh, lately engaged in the office of the Darling Downs Gazette, lost his life by drowning. He was going, in a state of intoxication, from the wharf to the steamer, when he fell overboard, it is supposed, and no help being at hand, he was drowned. He was but a young man, and has an aged mother in Sydney. As a lady was walking near the edge of the cliffs at Newcastle, N.S.W., a gust of wind took her hat off. She snatched at her hat, and fell over the cliff a distance of nearly 100 yards. A ledge of rock which projected some distance down the precipice, intercepted her fall, and she was soon rescued, when it was found she had received severe bruises and contusions, but no bones were broken. New and rich diggings have'been discovered four miles on the Armidale side of the Rocky River diggings, N.S.W. Accounts from the new diggings, the Indigo— near Albury—continue satisfactory, and there is a regular rush from the Victorian diggings to them. "An application has been made to the Sydney Government, relative to a further search for the long lost traveller, Leichhardt. The Auld Reekie Hotel, Little Bendigo, Victoria, was lately completely destroyed by fire, and the wife of the landlord, Mr. George Walker, was burnt to death. The unfortunate woman became confused when the alarm of fire was giveu, and was enveloped in flames before she could be rescued. The Ballaarat Star has the following:—Mr. Thomas Randall, of this place, hearing a noise at his door, went and opened it. Just as he had done so and looked outside he saw a man, a little taller than himself, darkly dressed (the night was very dark,) standing close to him, and in the obscurity Mr. Randall plainly saw a pistol aimed at his face. With great presence of mind Mr. Randall turned suddenly round so as to present the side instead of the front of his person towards the weapon, and the pistol being instantly fired, the charge passed close across his chest, cutting through his coat, slightly grazing his shoulder, and thence going in an upward direction past his ear, lodging in the wall adjoining. The suddenness of the attack disconcerted Mr. Randall for a second or two, during which time the ruffian jumped over the fence, and got clear off. The Legislative Assembly of Victoria resolve in future to hold their session during the winter instead of the summer. Mr. Duffy intends to move the re-appointinent of the committee of last session on the subject of Australian federation. The Age says the Chinese have managed to do this country (Victoria) out of some £75,009 daring the nine months of the present year. It seems theframeis of the Chinese Rate Act had neglected to insert a penal clause; the Chinese soon found it out and politely refusud payment. The Government of Victoria has despatched an agent to India for the purchase of camels for use in exploration. £3000 has been placed on the estimates for the purpose. The total expenditure of the Victorian' Government for the past year was £3,662,543, which is at the rate of £7 12s. per head, or fifteen times greater than that of Canada. The proposal to invite the Rev. Thomas Binney to preach in the Episcopal Church Adelaide was not carried out. One of the liberated English skylarks has been noticed singing joyously within two miles of Heidelberg, near Melbourne. Speaking of the results so far of the Diggers' Relief Committee, the Sylney Herald says:—The amount received up to the time of this publication from the public in free -contributions, is about .£IBOO, and the Government, in addition to offering every facility for transit by railway, &c, have promised a sum equal to that subscribed. The various steam companies have also come forward t@ assist tins important movement, by a reduction in the fares. The number of persons who have thus-been helped to pass on to the Western gold-fields is 500} to Peel River and Northern diggings 112; to the Fairfield and Clarence River 134; and to Adelong 52. Total, 798. The applications have numbered 1350, about two-thirds of which number have returned from the Fitzroy River, the remainder from Melbourne. Of the applicants one-half are Victorian diggers; onefourth from the Western diggings; about onetenth from Braidwood; 25 from Adelong, and other Southern diggings; 15 from Nelson, New Zealand; but only 75 are laborers or mechanics of Sydney. By the Light of the Age ten of those rare and useful animals, Llamas, have arrived in Sydney to the aider of G. A. Lloyd. The number originally brought to England were but twenty-three, at au expense of J3OOO, but of which the ten by the Light of the Age were the first selection, and these have increased one in number on the passage. The extraordinary hardiness of these animals has been well exemplified in their having made a circuit of about 30,000 miles before they reached their destination. A man named Emanuel Brace, now lying in Sydney gaol on committal to take his trial for the murder of his wife at Eden, Twofold Bay, was the witness (a lad at that time) who turned kings evidence against Jenkins, the murderer of the late Dr. Wardell. A correspondent informs us (Sydney Herald) that a person residing in the neighborhood of Campbelltown had a parrot which was a great favorite, having been in his keeping for a length of time. He learned it to say, among other words, " Turn out, Joe." This it was accustomed to say early each morning. It was kept in a cage made of half a tea-chest, one end only being open, and that was fitted with small bars, about one inch and a-half apart. He was surprised one morning at not hearing his favorite calling out as usual, and on going to the cage, which was kept in the hut, he discovered that the bird had disappeared, ■ and a large black snake was in its place. The snake endeavored to escape, but could not wriggle its body out. The man immediately suspected that the reptile had crept through the bars with an empty stomach, swallowed the bird, and by it was so distended as to prevent its escape the way it got in. He turned down the cage, made a fire, and put on the kettle, in order to give it something to wash down Polly. When the water had boiled, he put the spout of the kettle through the bars of the cage, when the reptile seized it in its mouth, and, of course, it was indulged with its contents, which made it cry bitterly, and soon after die. Upon opening the body the bird was found whole. About a week after this, a person in the same neighborhood, who had a magpie, and, to keep it from straying, kept it tied by the kg to the leg of a stooL On getting up one morning he missed Meg, but saw the string all right to the stool. Tracing the string into a corner of the hut, he there saw a large black snake coiled up, with the other end in its mouth. On being disturbed it endeavored to escape, but could not, being held fast by the cord which circled Meg's leg-overnight. The man got a cudgel and soon despatched the reptile, and suspecting it to have swallowed Meg, opened the snake, and found in its stomach the bud quite whole. A valuable memento of the late Bishop of Sydney has been received from England by the La Hogue. It consists of a statue, of full life size, carved out of Caen stone. The figure is recumbent, and represents the bishop fully robed, with his hands placed together devotionally, and having the crozier within his left arm, and the Bible, with clasp, open, lying on his right side. The likeness is believed to be a very good one; and it is to be remarked that the sculptor has not overlooked the well known physical defect of Dr. Broughton—that of. having one leg (the right) about an inch longer than the other. So soon as the bt. Andrew's Cathedral is sufficiently advanced to receive it, it will be placed in that building. From the evidence given by Mr. O'Connor, the Clerk of the New South Wales Assembly, before the Committee on Retrenchment, we learn that "the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales transacts about one-half the public business that

the House of Commons does, and takes nearly th« same time to do it. In 1857 i the House of Commons sat 116 days, occupying 903^ hours, of. which 91| were after, midnight. The daily sittings were 7 hours 47 minutes in length; the number of entries in the votes and proceedings, 7983. The Assembly last year sat 107 days, oc- ' enpying 773 hours 47 minutes, of which 34| hours were after midnight, the average daily sitting, being 7 hours 14 minutes, and the number of entries in votes and proceedings, 519 L Lately, a fearful hail-storm swept over Bathurst, N.S.W. Hail-stones fell as large as goose eggs. Trees were stripped of fruit, garden produce was injured, sheep were killed, and a shepherd beat black and blue by this pitiless shower. At Maitland the storm was, if possible, more severe. Wheat and other grain growing, completely cut down, and the vineyards seriously damaged. The storm also visited Albury. A digger's wife at Forest Creek, Victoria, ba3 given birth to a child with seven perfectly formed teeth. It had also a beautiful head of hair, two xncheslong. , A horrible murder lias been committed at Eden^ Twofold Bay. A man, named John Brace, stabbed his wife in the eyes with a pair of scissors, and so killed her by puncturing the brain. Both persons were diunk at the time. ■Great trouble is brewing amongst the numerous and extensive cattle squatters on the Billybong Creek, in the Edward River District. The bone . of contention assumes the shape of a water question. The Billybong rans for about two mouths' in the summer, and did not the squatters -whose runs are traversed by the creek dam it up, they would be without water for their stock ten months in the year. The length of the creek is about 145 miles. Some of the squatters on the upper ..parts of .the creek have constructed such large dams as, already, to cut off the supply of water from those further down. To cure this evil, one of the upper dams has been cut through, and-the water it contained has descended the creek. A ■criminal information has been laid by the owners of this dam against the parties suspected of having cut the dam, for wilful destruction of property. The lower squatters declare they will level all the higher dams, whilst the latter aver that they will resist such a proceeding by force of arms. The value of the runs on this creek, to the owners, is said to be ,£200,000. Government will have to interfere. "Thomas Scott," a correspondent of the Sydney Herald, demonstrates, by figures, that sugar can be grown and manufactured at and near Port Curtis at a profit of £75 15s. a ton, whilst in America, by slave labor, only a profit of £30 ss. a ton can be realised. He recommends a trial of the experiment. Mr. Wilkinson, of Ballaarat, lias discovered a new material for pottery, equal to the finest Wedgenvood pottery, by. mixing the debris from his quartz-melting process with a cheap chemical composition. A. manufacture of pottery will henceforth be .a valuable adjunct to a quartz smelting furnace. Since the opening of the Pyrmont Bridge, Sydney, in March last, no less than 274,970 passengers, and 23,793 drays, besides other vehicles and horsemen, have passed over it. A very daring burglary has been committed at Pleasant Creek, Victoria, under the following circumstances :—Mr. Parker, gold buyer for the Bank of New South Wales, occupies certain premises at Mr. Shaw's, Grampian Store. One Tuesday he left the office, at about seven o'clock, to spend the evening at the Reef Ball. He went away under the impression that either Mi:. Shaw or his storeman would be on the premises during the whole of the evening.. Mr. Shaw, however, left to go to Clarendon,; the clerk, or storeman, also left the premises, and returned about eleven or twelve o'clock. The next morning he arose at 7, and very shortly found that the place had been broken into and the safe belonging to the bank taken away. Nothing else had been disturbed. The entrance had been effected by the back door, but whether before or after his return to the store, he was unable to say. The dogs about the premises had been poisoned. Information was given to the police on Wednesday morning, at about ten o'clock, bat shortly previous to that the iron safe had been found by the police in the bush, about 400 yards from the Police Station, completely broken to pieces. The property stolen is thus described":. One large iron safe, containing one large bag of gold-dust, striped, made of bed-ticking; three bars of smelted gold, A. L. and Co. marked on each ; first weighing 40 ounces, and 7 dwts., second about4orsounces,third between 14 and 15 ounces:; a deposit receipt on the Bank of New South Wales, Ararat, for £100, endorsed on back in one place " Received on account £10, Charles Hoggerty ;" in another place, " Received JS96, Charles Hoggerty;" a small pocket-book—new one ; £5 note, torn in corner; and a small number of memorandums, in favor of Monack and Co.; and about ,£IOO in single notes. Total value of property in iron safe when stolen, £1300 sterling. Three men are suspected of having perpetrated this robbery. The description of the men are as follows:—lst. 5 feet 8 inches in height, 35 years of age, dark complexion, whiskers and beard worn round chin, blue eyes, an Englishman and Vandemonian, no moustache, was dressed in a monkey jacket, black felt hat, and cord trousers. 2nd, 5 feet 8 inches in height, 35 to 40 years of age, very dark complexion, no whiskers, a beard, is an Englishman and Vandemonian, has a very villianous look, wore moleskin trousers, pilot coat, black felt hat, has a stoop in his walk. 3rd. About 6 feet high, 35 to 40 years of age, sallow complexion, brown whiskers worn round the chin, no moustache, a Vandemonian, wore a grey serge shirt outside of moleskin trousers, black felt hat. The above three men have been seen for the last five or six days walking about the Deep Lead in the neighborhood of the above office, and were missing the morning following the robbery, and have not since been seen. Every exertion is being used by the police to find a'clue to these men, but ineffectually at present. The Times has recently drawn the attention of the public to the doubtful state of, it is feared, too many private Lunatic Asylums. The conditions on which patients are" admitted are extremely loose:—"In the first place, there must be an order for the reception of a patient. What the nature of this order may be does not particularly appear in the statement which we now lay before our readers, but at any rate an order there must be. Then there must be a statement of certain particulars, signed by some friend ov relative—probably the hungry expectant of the inheritance. Next there must be two certificates to be signed by two medical men wholly uncon-. nected with each other, and who, without previous meeting or consultation, state that the patient ought to be put under restraint. So far it would appear that any unprincipled person whose interest lay that way might bribe a couple of dootorsofno consideration in the profession, and the patient is trapped. It is stated, moreover, that the practice as to the filling up of these certificates, is lax in the extreme. When the patient is orico admitted the superintendent of the asylum must within seven days, give notice to the Commissioner in Lunacy and to the Clerk of the Visiting Justices of the fresh admission. He must add to this document a certificate stating his own opinion of the case, and this must be done two days after the admission of the patientV-not before, that his observations may be matured. After this the only security lies in the visits of the commissioners and of the Visiting Justices; but it may well happen that these are not until the_sur perinten'dent has ample time convert a dubious or partial case of insanity mto (^confirmed one hy judicious treatment. When alcommissiooer sees him for the first time—the man is mad!" A gentleman who employs a great number of hands in the west of England, in oi'der to encourage his workpeople in a due attendance at church on a late fast day, told them that if they went to church they would receive their wages fpr that day in the same manner as if they had bcec at work. Upon which a deputation was appointed to acquaint the employer that if he wonld'pay them for over hours, they would attend likewise the Methodist chapel in the evening.