The dryest community on the earth. The government has lately reduced the
duty upon foreign wines. That is one of the unkindnesses of Protection.
A man invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy
enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is changed, and
the man is robbed by his own government.
On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders
called the Three Sisters--a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high
ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from
whence the boulders could have rolled down. Relics of an early
ice-drift, perhaps. They are noble boulders. One of them has the size
and smoothness and plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern.
The road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and
sorrowful. The road was cream-white--a clayey kind of earth, apparently.
Along it toiled occasional freight wagons, drawn by long double files of
oxen. Those wagons were going a journey of two hundred miles, I was
told, and were running a successful opposition to the railway! The
railways are owned and run by the government.
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