Audiobook · read by volunteers
Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria
William Westgarth (1815–1889)
Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 17 chapters · 6 h 21
About the book
William Westgarth arrived in Melbourne in 1840, when the settlement was barely five years old, and stayed to see it grow into one of the great cities of the British world. Decades later he set down what he remembered: the muddy streets, the early land sales, the rush of settlers, the pastoral boom and the dramatic days of the gold fever. He writes as a merchant, a public figure and an eyewitness, and as someone who clearly loved the place he describes. The book opens with a lively medley of verse and moves through arrival, politics, commerce and the long road to separation from New South Wales. It is full of names, scenes and figures who made early colonial Victoria, and Westgarth’s tone is clear, measured and sometimes wry. Lucy Burgoyne reads the seventeen chapters. If you like history told by someone who was there, this is a vivid and thoughtful companion.
Introduction
William Westgarth was born in Edinburgh in 1815 and died in 1889. He was educated in Scotland and entered business before travelling to the colonies, and he became a leading figure in the commercial and public life of early Melbourne. He wrote on the colonies of Australia and on their economic development, and was an active voice in local debates on government and trade.
Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria was published in 1888. It is a memoir of the settlement’s first decades, written with the benefit of hindsight and the confidence of a man who had played a part in events. The book draws on his own experience and on the reports and stories of those around him, and offers a picture of a society that changed with astonishing speed as pastoral wealth and then gold transformed a small outpost.
Readers who expect a purely dry account will be pleasantly surprised. Westgarth has a sense of scene, and he is good at conveying the optimism, the uncertainties and the personal rivalries of the time. As with any memoir of the period, his viewpoint is that of a European settler, and the perspectives of the Aboriginal people of the region are not at the centre of his story, something worth bearing in mind as you listen.
This LibriVox recording has seventeen chapters and runs for about six and a half hours, read by volunteer Lucy Burgoyne. It will interest anyone curious about Australian history, colonial life or the making of a great modern city.
Public domain
William Westgarth died in 1889: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text