At early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer, the _Kaikoura_, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far inland upon the gale. We had placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he could steer, but, as we reached the steamer‘s side, instead of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently before the wind, although our treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours the wind moderated, and I reached the _Kaikoura_ just before she sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbor through the boil of waters that marks the position of the submarine crater, I found that there was but one other passenger for Australia to share with me the services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons. “Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Australasian colony to another,” I felt inclined to say, but during the voyage and my first week in New South Wales I began to discover that in England we are given over to a singular delusion as to the connection of New Zealand and Australia. Australasia is a term much used at home to express the whole of our Antipodean possessions; in the colonies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in the way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a congratulatory paragraph on the amount of the New Zealand debt; the only allusion to Australia that I ever detected in the Wellington _Independent_ was in a glance at the future of the colony, in which the editor predicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would be a great naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or levying a contribution upon Sydney. New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country; New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic. Had Australia and New Zealand been close together, instead of as far apart as Africa and South America, there could have been no political connection between them so long as the traditions of their first settlement endured.