As long ago as 1829, which, for Australia, is quite ancient history, a Mr. Robert Gouger began the colonisation of South Australia. His idea was to parcel out the land into small lots and offer government assistance to people who were ready to tackle the task of subduing the wilderness. He failed to get the amount of capital to carry his ideas into practice; the government, as governments did in those days, gave him the cold shoulder, and, for the time being, his projects fell to the ground. Five years later the South Australian Association was formed. Mr. Gouger was the principal organiser of it. Then followed more correspondence with the government, and more of the usual trouble with the circumlocutary departments, and finally the South Australian Bill was brought before the British Parliament. One of the chief supporters of the Bill in the House of Lords was the Victor of Waterloo, and the first ship which landed a company of emigrants on the shores of South Australia was named the _Duke of York_. As these lines are being written, the Duke of Cornwall and York is travelling through the new-born Commonwealth of Australia, as the representative of the Emperor-King to give the Royal and Imperial sanction to the youngest, and by no means the least vigorous of the daughter-nations of the Empire. Curiously enough, too, it happened that in 1838 Mr. George Fife Angus, Chairman of the South Australian Company, brought out a company of two hundred German emigrants in a ship named the _Prince George_. After them came more Germans, then Frenchmen and Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Swedes and Norwegians, English, Scotch, and Irish; the scrub began to disappear, and the wilderness to blossom, not exactly as the rose, but as tobacco plantations. The tobacco was a rank failure in more senses than one. It grew luxuriantly, but its flavour was such that it was very much more fitted for poisoning the insects which settled on the vines which succeeded it than for filling those functions which Calverley has so exquisitely described. [Illustration: The Storage House at Seppeltsfield, forty years ago.] [Illustration: The Present Storage House through which nearly a million gallons pass every year.]