--As You Like It.

The title "Victoria" did not come to us until, on 1st July, 1851, we
bloomed into an independent colony, having succeeded, after a good deal
of struggle and contention, in getting separated from our mother, New
South Wales, who complimented us by being very loath, and even angry,
that so very promising a child should be detached from her. We had begun
as the Southern or Port Phillip District of that spacious colony, which
had already dropped South Australia, and eight years afterwards was to
lose yet another arm in Queensland.

I recall with interest and pleasure some early trips into the interior,
when it was in a very different condition from now, when the indigenous
reigned almost uninvaded throughout, and when aboriginal natives were in
many places as plentiful as colonists. For some years squatting life was
the predominant or rather all but the sole feature of the interior
beyond Melbourne. The little capital was at first always called "the
settlement"--a distinctive title, however, which was just expiring when
I arrived. But, for some years after, the term "settler" always meant a
squatter, and not a farmer, as might be supposed, with his "settled" or
fee-simple home.

My first trip to the interior was, towards the end of 1841, to the sheep
station of my old friend Sam Jackson, situated on the Deep Creek,
seventeen miles northward from Melbourne. There I first tasted damper
and saw the novelties of squatting life. Samuel, and his brother
William, nicknamed for some reason "The General," were of the very
earliest from "over the straits," William having been one of the party
organized and sent over in August, 1835, by Fawkner. Sam followed soon
after, and they "took up" this station on the Deep Creek, under the