Horse racing in Sydney, of course, commenced some years earlier than it did in the Port Phillip division of the Colony, settlement in the north there having an advantage of nearly forty years over the south. I find in a copy of the first Melbourne “Argus” ever printed, on June 2nd, 1846, the entries for a race meeting at Homebush. Amongst these appear the names of Alice Hawthorn and Gulnare. They are somewhat puzzling at that date, as Macarthur’s Gulnare was three and twenty years old in ’46, whilst her daughter, also named Gulnare, was still breeding in ’83, a fact which apparently puts her also out of court. The name seems to have been a popular one, for some reason or another. There was also a mob of Alice Hawthorns, and this particular individual was most probably the mare by Operator from Lorina (imp.), a bay foaled about 1840. But it is Victorian racing to which we are for the most part going to direct our attention at present. In January, 1803, a survey party had examined the site of the present Melbourne. Collins had formed a convict settlement during the same year at Sorrento, down close to the Heads, but had quickly abandoned the enterprise. Hume, as we have seen, had reached the neighbourhood of Geelong in ’24; Captain Wishart, in his cutter, “Fairy,” had entered and named Port Fairy after his little craft in ’27; Dutton, on a sealing expedition, had built a house at Portland in 1829, and Mr. Henty had made a permanent settlement there in ’34. In May, ’35, Batman entered Port Phillip Bay in a schooner from Tasmania, and Fawkner’s schooner “Enterprise” navigated the lower reaches of the Yarra in August of that year. He was the son of a convict who had been in Collins’ Sorrento picnic party, and was attracted back by his favourable recollections of the place.