The names of the principal streets proclaim the age of the town.  George Street and Pitt Street are the two main thoroughfares, and there are Castlereagh, Liverpool, and William Streets, while King, Hunter, Bligh, Macquarie, and Philip Streets, and Darlinghurst preserve the names of the first governors.  The suburbs first formed preserve the sweet-sounding native names—­Wooloomooloo, Woolahra, Coogee, Bondi.  Of a later date are Randwick, Newtown, Stanmore, Ashfield, Burwood, and Petersham—­the last four along the railway line.

The good people of Sydney do not spend their money so much upon outward show as the Victorians.  Hence the number of large houses in the suburbs is very much smaller.  But whereas the country around Melbourne for miles is mostly flat as a pancake, the suburbs of Sydney literally revel in beautiful building sites.  For choice, there are the water frontages below the town or up the Parramatta river, which is lined with pretty houses, whose inhabitants come up to Sydney every morning in small river steamers.  The principal suburbs, however, are much closer to the city than in Melbourne, being connected by steam tramways instead of railways.  New suburbs are also springing up along the railway lines, but until the railway station is brought into the centre of the town, they can never be nearly so populous as the Melbourne suburbs.

Adelaide.

I began with a comparison between Melbourne and Sydney, towns of 280,000 and 220,000 inhabitants respectively.  The capital of South Australia, Adelaide, with its 70,000, stands, of course, upon an entirely different level; but it possesses, to an even greater degree than Sydney, all the peculiar characteristics of a capital city.  If any comparison can be made between Adelaide and its sister capitals, it is with Melbourne rather than with Sydney.  Adelaide is a thoroughly modern town, with all the merits and all the defects attaching to novelty.  It does not possess the spirit of enterprise to so adventurous a degree as Melbourne, but neither does it approach to the languor of Sydney.  In this respect it has discovered a very happy middle course.  There is certainly something very provincial about the attitude of the town towards the rest of the world, but this helps to make it the more distinctive, and conduces largely to its progress.  It ‘goes without saying’ that there cannot be the same number of large buildings as in the larger cities, that their proportions cannot be so large, that there cannot be the same facilities for business or for pleasure.  But the emulation produced by the achievements of its big neighbours has resulted in making Adelaide a far more advanced town for its size than either of them.  Proportionately to population, everything in Adelaide ought theoretically to be on a fourth scale of its like in Melbourne.  As a matter of fact, most things are on more than half-scale, many on a two-thirds, and a few things, such as the Botanic Garden, the Exchange, the Banks of South Australia and Adelaide, are unsurpassed.