December 17 Tuesday – The Mararoa reached Sydney Harbor at 9 a.m. Sam’s notebook records that the weather had turned cool [NB 36 TS 3]. Immediately after his arrival Sam was interviewed by Herbert Low about his impressions of New Zealand. The interview ran on Dec. 18 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Low may not have been the only journalist pestering Sam for his impressions of N.Z.

Shillingsburg quotes Sam’s notebook (no # or TS page no. given):

The interviewer is pathetically persistent in trying to worm out of you your “impressions” of N.Z & her people & audiences, & “which city did I like best, there; & which audience; & are the audiences there as quick & bright as in Austral; & which do I think the most remarkable city, Syd or Melb; & which newspapers do I consider the best; but don’t I think them all remarkable [”] — & a dozen other questions of the same guilelessly idiotic sort, which only another idiot would answer [At Home 184].

The Clemens family took rooms at the Australia Hotel on Castlereagh St., and probably attended the dramatization of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney. Sam felt the play could not bring out the depth of the convict system as well as the book had done; Clara called the play “gruesome” [185].