Thirty Years in Australia by Ada Cambridge

My experiences of life in Australia, long in time, have been narrow in space. Of the thirty years of this chronicle, not six months were spent outside Victoria.

In earlier times I paid little visits to Albury, just over the border. We drove from Y -- -- in our first buggy, which was bought there, taking the babies to a house that was full of playmates for them, and where a couple more or less added nothing to the family cares. Looking out of my window one morning I realised why this was so. In a back-yard below, on a kitchen chair, sat the hostess's young widowed sister-in-law, who lived with her and was the mother of two; these two, my two, and the dozen or thereabouts of the family proper, sat or stood round her like a class in school, and from a huge basin on her lap she fed the lot, each in turn, a spoonful at a time, round and round, until the supplies were exhausted. The serious faces of the little ones as they opened their mouths wide one after the other showed they were not at games, but performing a duty they were accustomed to. When I went down to breakfast I was quietly informed that the children had had theirs and gone out to play.