Roamin’ in the gloamin’ (1928)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SOME FISH STORIES I completed a fourteen months' tour by another extended visit to Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. This was the first time I had taken in Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmania used to be known in the old days, and the experience was novel and charming. Tasmania is a little England as the names of the territories, or counties, into which it is divided, at once suggest. There is a Devonshire, a Westmorland, a Dorset, a Cornwall, a Lincoln, and — so that Wales may not be left out altogether — there is a Montgomery and a Glamorgan ! The island is rich in agriculture and sheep pastures and in the towns like Hobart, the capital, Launceston, and Burnie there are many thriving little industries. There is no poverty in Tasmania and no unemployment. The country is well governed by its own legislature and the governor is Sir James O'Grady a former Socialist Member of Parliament at Westminster and a most popular and able man. I have never in all my travels seen better roads than they have in Tasmania. They are little short of magnificent. I was told that they were built by convict labour in the days when Van Diemen's Land was a penal settlement for British malefactors ; if this is so the convicts were amongst the world's best roadmakers and they have left behind them monuments that will last for centuries long after their murders, arsons, burglaries, sheepstealings, and highway robberies have been forgotten ! I doff my Balmoral to the memory of these Tasmanian convicts and assert that they must have been splendid fellows. The population of the island is less than three hundred souls all told and I should think there must be room for hundreds of thousands more. But don't take this from me as authoritative 280