AUSTRALIA AND THE LONDON PRESS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1633, 13 March 1884, Page 2

AUSTRALIA AND THE LONDON PRESS.

Mr Archibald Forbes writes as fol-! lows ia the Sydney Morning Herald: It is impossible to convince the conLondon newspapers that for their readers there ought to be, and, were the work attractively done, that' there would be, more interest in communications from Anglo-Saxon communities outside of Greu.t Britaiu than in half-intelligible screeds about the wretched principality of Bulgaria, or the entente of a hill-tribe in the Caucasus, Before I left America for Australia, I suggested to a journal with winch I have had a long connection, that it might be useful were I to send home a series of letters of what I should seo and gather in my journeyings to and fro'in the .Greater Britain of the Southern ocean, Thereply'was, to summarise it," No room," and " Not sufficient interest." Well, I take some credit to myself that through my own instrumentality a man will visit Australia next year, if all is well, whoso letters will have "sufficient interest," and,will do more to familiarise the people of this home Britain with life and things in Australia than has been done by everything put together that has yet been written on that subject. The letters which George Augustus Sala will send to the .Daily Telegraph during his year's travel and voyaging in Australasia, I anticipate, will bring about a now departure in our English ideas regarding the Australian colonies. Until now Keuter sufficeth for every English newspaper in regard to Australia, with the.single exception of The Times. That journal has its regular Australian correspondent—a Victorian gentleman of great ability and long colonial experience; and its New Zealand correspondent is, I believe, a Cabinet Minister.. But the time will come—as it ought to have come already—when a great paper such as The Times will have stated letters from the capital of every Australian colony. Then we may expect to see the cloud dispersed of such crass ignorance as that of a young Victorian lady, now married in England, recently recounted to me a ludicrous specimen, She was living in a great country house iu the south of Scotland, In the drawing room after dinner a wheezy peeress languidly asked her, " Pray, my dear, is there much intermarriage between : the white inhabitants of Australia and tho native races ?"