In the last chapter I have given my general impressions of Sydney; the result of our entire residence in the town and neighbourhood, rather than a mere first view, which could only observe the surface of things, my first sojourn there being only for a fortnight, when, our baggage being landed and stored, and all other arrangements completed, we prepared for a journey “up the country.” My husband required to visit his sheep-stations on the Murrumbidgee; but my travels were not to extend farther than Bathurst, about 120 miles.

Our first day's journey was merely an afternoon drive to Parramatta, fifteen miles from Sydney, through alternate cleared land and “bush,” but all enclosed. The chief of the way-side houses were those of publicans, round which drays and carts were usually assembled, whilst their drivers refreshed themselves within, and swarms of flies added to the torment and weariness of the miserable horses and oxen, who often wait for hours the return of their brutal and drunken guide.

The system of “clearing” here, by the total destruction of every native tree and shrub, gives a most bare, raw, and ugly appearance to a new place. In England we plant groves and woods, and think our country residences unfinished and incomplete without them; but here the exact contrary is the case, and unless a settler can see an expanse of bare, naked, unvaried, shadeless, dry, dusty land spread all around him, he fancies his dwelling “wild and uncivilized.”