Six Letters From the Colonies — Background and Themes

A Sailor's-Eye View of the Voyage

Seaton devotes his first letter entirely to the passage from England to Australia aboard the Hampshire. He is keenly attentive to the sensory details of life under sail: the crew's work songs, the daily variability of distance covered, and the exhilaration of twelve-knot speeds. His nostalgia for the 'picturesqueness' of sail is tempered by a grudging admission that steamers offer better food—a prosaic advantage that, he notes, 'with many people would decide in favour of a steamer.'

The letter is structured as a series of contrasts: the romance of the sailing ship versus the efficiency of the steamer, the sailor's skill versus the machine's power. Seaton's voice is that of an educated traveller who enjoys a good-humoured digression, as when he imagines Byron's pirate aboard a steamer. Readers should note that this opening establishes a pattern of personal, anecdotal observation that continues throughout the later letters.

Melbourne and Victoria: First Impressions

The second and third letters cover Melbourne and the colony of Victoria. Seaton describes the city's layout, public buildings, and suburban life, but his interest is less in statistics than in characteristic scenes. He notes the 'sullen mole' of the River Torrens in Adelaide, which the municipality dammed into a lake, turning 'an eyesore into an ornament.' This attention to human intervention in the landscape recurs when he visits an ostrich farm near Gawler.

At the farm, Seaton's dry humour emerges: the manager, a 'dry old Scotchman,' recounts being kicked by an ostrich and handing its neck over a fence to escape. Seaton observes that ostriches 'will run up against palings or wire, get their long necks entangled, and sometimes cut their throats.' Such details—quirky, specific, and slightly macabre—are typical of his method. He does not generalise about colonial agriculture but instead offers a close-up of one enterprise.

South Australia: Rivers, Gardens, and Ostriches

The fourth letter turns to South Australia. Seaton is struck by the Torrens's intermittent flow—'like many Australian rivers, the Torrens starts up in various places and does not seem to have either a beginning or an ending.' He praises Adelaide's botanical and zoological gardens, noting a black cockatoo and a white peacock as curiosities. The visit to the ostrich farm occupies much of the letter, and Seaton recounts the manager's methods with evident relish.

He describes the birds' aggressive behaviour: 'An ostrich, in attacking, kicks forward with his legs, which give tremendous blows, and then, when he has kicked down his enemy, he will probably sit upon him.' The manager's tactic of sitting down when ostriches run away—'you can't catch them'—is offered without comment, leaving the reader to smile at the practical wisdom. Seaton also notes the economic context: a £100 export embargo from the Cape, which he calls 'locking the stable door when the horse has escaped.'

Tasmania, Auckland, and Sydney: A Closing Tour

The final two letters cover Tasmania, Auckland, and Sydney. Seaton's descriptions become more compressed, as if time or energy is running short. He notes Tasmania's scenery and the growing city of Auckland, but the excerpts available do not reveal extended set-pieces. What emerges is a traveller who is consistently more interested in the odd or the characteristic than in the monumental.

Throughout, Seaton maintains the epistolary fiction: he addresses the reader directly, uses the first person, and occasionally refers to events after his return. The letters were originally published in the Eastern Morning News, and their tone is that of a newspaper correspondent—informative but personal, with a journalist's eye for the telling detail. Readers should approach the later letters as a coda to the more leisurely earlier ones, noting how the author's energy flags or shifts focus.

Seaton's letters reward a reader who enjoys the incidental over the systematic. His voice—opinionated, dry, and alert to the absurd—gives unity to a journey that might otherwise seem a mere catalogue of colonies. The ostrich farm, the dammed river, the sailing-ship romance: these are the moments that linger. To read Six Letters From the Colonies is to travel with a companion who is never quite sure what he thinks, but knows what he sees.

Reading about Seaton’s dry-eyed account of Adelaide’s parched Torrens, I remembered how my own travel journals drift toward the practical, the odd detail—an ostrich farm, a dammed river—rather than the romance I’d expected. That same quiet, observational patience filled me when I first held History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveller in the Tropics Being a Political, Historical, and Statistical Account of the Island, from its First Discovery to the Present — Inside the Classic. Both books felt like letters from someone who simply watched, unhurried, letting strange places become familiar through patience.