Explore "Thirty Years in Australia" by Ada Cambridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The thirty years covered by this chronicle came to an end with the nineteenth century and the history of these colonies as such.
On the last day of 1900 I sat at my writing window to watch the drop of the time-ball that regulates all the Government clocks -- the clocks which the morning papers had warned us to set our time-pieces by at 1 P.M., so as not to be a second out, if we could help it, when the midnight hour should strike. I cannot describe the state of tension we were in, the sense of fateful happenings that possessed us that day. The New Year and the New Century were coming to all peoples, but we could not think of them save as satellites of our New Commonwealth, arranged for the purpose of fitly inaugurating the New Nation. Australia believed herself on the threshold of the Golden Age. I myself openly boasted of my happiness -- reviewing my peaceful family life, my little home circle, unbroken since 1876 -- when we began wishing happy new years to one another.