Undated Notes Written Some Time Either on 11th or 12th July, 1838

Note One

I was busy packing for the voyage home this morning and looked up to discover young Johnny standing in the room.

With no ship travelling from Van Dieman's Land to Adelaide, he travelled, with all the boundless optimism of the young, to Launceston, where he managed to work a passage to Port Phillip Bay on a trading ketch bound for Sydney, then sailed on a fishing boat from Port Phillip to Glenelg. 

What a delightful surprise! 

I told him how much I appreciated the effort to which he had gone and he said, "I couldn't let you head off for London without seeing your ugly old face one more time." The cheeky monkey!

It seems that the surveying job in Hobart did not come to fruition for the nonce, but something might come of it in a year or two,

Good for him!

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Note Two

There is an allegedly hilarious lampoon doing the rounds of the town at present. 

It purports to be a Mother Goose tale and in it, with a wave of a wand I am transformed from a Governor to a Sea Captain; Milner Stephen is transformed from an Advocate General to a Postmaster General to a Governor; Strangways is released from the enchanted Castle of the Colonial Secretary's Office; and Stevenson is changed into "Giant Despair".

Margaret Stevenson is completely scathing about the thing. It is, she says "exactly the sort of ham-fisted, lifelessly unfunny production that the untalented think will raise the roof."

So it will almost certainly appear in Fisher's pet newspaper this week. I suggested to Mrs Stevenson that a proper ending for the thing might have been a scene where a Princess kissed a toad, whereupon it turned into Mr Fisher, leaving the Princess lamenting that she was better off with the slimy amphibian.

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Note Three

Mr Morphett is currently offering ten pounds reward for the recovery of the chain and anchor of the Brig Dart, currently lying, though not securely, in Holdfast Bay.

Who but Morphett would be sufficiently fat headed as to lose the anchor of a ship while it was actually anchored in the Harbour?

Fix this teanged into "Giant Despair".