Of course, there was no Turf Register in these very far-off days, and for some time the newspapers of Port Phillip were very few and far between. Just a couple of months prior to the running of that first race around Batman’s Hill, John Pascoe Fawkner had published “a rag,” a veritable “rag,” “The Port Phillip Advertiser.” It was in manuscript, and its “days were few, and full of woe.” Indeed, it was all but stillborn. There are no race records contained in its thin leaves. From January, 1838, until 1846 there was a succession of news sheets, “Port Phillip Gazettes,” “Patriots,” “Heralds,” “Figaros,” and what not, all of them weekly and weakly, squabbling, screaming, quarrelsome, puny infants, finding early deaths. The “Argus” was founded in 1846, and on June 2nd of that year its first number was printed. The racing news reported during the early years of its existence was meagre in the extreme, and was occasionally printed under the heading of “Domestic Intelligence.” But so mushroom-like was the growth of population in the later ’forties—and very much more so in the early ’fifties—that not only had a daily paper become a very flourishing concern, but the want of a weekly publication, of a purely sporting character, became so urgent that Bell’s “Life in Victoria” was established somewhere about 1855, and continued to exist until, in 1866, “The Australasian” came along with its sails bellying before a favourable breeze, and swept it out of sight. From 1860 until its disappearance, “Bell” had brought forth a little annual volume containing a list of all the principal race meetings of the past year, and “The Australasian” continued the publication under the title of “The Australasian Turf Register.” This was a thin little volume bound in red cloth, but nearly double the size of its diminutive predecessor. It has continued in an unbroken succession ever since. The production of 1866–67 ran to two hundred and twenty-three pages. The stout, good-looking, substantial volume of 1920, with its blue boards and letters of gold, contains twelve hundred and thirty. And so, in proportion, has our racing and our horse flesh waxed mightily and increased in volume. Has the quality of our sport, and the excellence of our racehorse, grown during the fleeting years to as marked an extent? We will talk about that ere we wind up the clue of the argument.