Once more we find ourselves on the southern Victorian coast, whence we started, in sight of Cape Otway, and moving up to the “heads” of Hobson's Bay.

The tide pulses heavily, with the full swell behind it of thousands and thousands of miles of ocean, and the “rip” is often like a cataract.

We pass on rapidly by the channel through shallow, splashing waters to the north-east corner, where masts and funnels cluster round the piers of the city's ports of Williamstown and Port Melbourne.

The old name of Port Melbourne describes the true nature of the place—Sandridge.

The river, a mean and canal-like stream, which the ingenuous natives, it is said, called “the flowing-flowing” (Yarra-Yarra), winds at last through mournful flats, muddy and defiled, gouged with perpetual dredging, into the sanddunes and the bay.

Port towns are pretty much the same wherever our race builds them, and all the hideousness of the alleged “strictly utilitarian” British architect flourishes in these characterless piles of brick.

And round about stretch the barren sands, thick in the detritus of silt and dust, untamed and unannexed by man, swept by the furnace blasts of northern “hot winds” and southern cold winds, and precipitating streams of fragmentary filth upon the town and into the bay.