Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and VictoriaWestgarth, William
History
Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria
Westgarth, William
Victoria -- Description and travel
Another of O'Shanassy's oft-repeated jokes was a good story about Kerr,
and always told with that stereotyped good temper which I fear the
latter, with his strong Orange antipathies, would, upon opportunity,
have but grudgingly reciprocated. Two "brither Scots," happening to meet
one day in Melbourne, one of them, presumably not long arrived,
"speered" of the other, "Did ye ken ane Weelum Kerr here aboot?" "Weelum
Kerr!" replied the other, in reproachful astonishment; "No ken Weelum
Kerr, the greatest man in a' the toon!" That a hard-headed,
liberal-minded commonsense Scot, as Kerr was in most things, should have
had the Orange infirmity, may be excused, or at least explained, by the
fact of his being of Stranraer, a Scotch town almost within hail of
Ulster. That small, and not overmuch known place, has not been the least
among the cities of Scotia in contributing heads and hands to the
colony's progress, including, besides Kerr and others, James Hunter
Ross, a leading Melbourne solicitor, and my good old friend Hugh Lewis
Taylor, who, ere well out of his teens, was made manager at Geelong, and
is now manager in London, of the prosperous Bank of Victoria.
Kerr had a high order of abilities in certain literary directions, which
might have given him a much better position than he ever secured but for
his indolence and negligent want of method. He had also a bad physical
constitution, which had probably much to do with the other defects.
Perhaps it was his literary turn that led him first, in his new home, to
try a stationery business, which, under the style of Kerr and Holmes,
afterwards Kerr and Thompson, in Collins-street west, was, I think, the
precursor of that particular trade in little early Melbourne. But that
had to be given up, and after some looking about, with not overloaded
means, he established the Melbourne "Argus". The preceding press efforts
had, at my arrival, established three papers, which, by tolerant mutual
arrangement in a bi-weekly issue respectively, gave the small public the
almost indispensable food of a daily paper. Almost at the beginning,
Fawkner's practical hand supplied "The Patriot," hand-written for the
first eight or ten numbers, until type came from Launceston. This was
soon followed by "The Gazette" of George Arden, and that again by "The
Herald" of George Cavenagh. All three had, I think, the common prefix of
"Port Phillip". "The Gazette", after a brief career, under its very able
but rather erratic owner, went to the wall. "The Patriot", under
Boursiquot, who had succeeded the overworked Fawkner, was, somewhat
later, bought up by the "Argus", under Wilson and Johnston, in
succession to Kerr. The Herald, when quitted after an excellent and
timely sale by its founder early in the gold times, was soon after
shipwrecked in the storm of vicissitude that characterized some of the
first years of gold-digging.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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