Mark Twain, his wife Olivia and daughter Clara, along with his agent Mr. R.S. Smythe took the seventeen hour overland express from Melbourne to Adelaide, October 11, 1895 at 4:30 p.m. Not far from Melbourne, Dr. N. T. FitzGerald detrained at "one of those mighty estates" where the surgeon lived.

October 4 Friday – The Clemens party was still at the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne. Sam’s carbuncle problem caused the cancellation of a performance planned for Bendigo’s Masonic Hall.
From Cooper (102-3): "The next day, Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald, the leading Australian surgeon of the day and the first Australian to be knighted for eminence in medicine, attended Clemens. The doctor froze and lanced Clemens's carbuncle, gave him an injection of opium, and prescribed plasters, which Mrs. Clemens conscientiously applied."

The City of Melbourne

Cancel Queensland

My health had broken down in New York in May; it had remained in a doubtful but fairish condition during a succeeding period of 82 days; it broke again on the Pacific. It broke again in Sydney, but not until after I had had a good outing, and had also filled my lecture engagements. This latest break lost me the chance of seeing Queensland. In the circumstances, to go north toward hotter weather was not advisable.

Captain Cook found Australia in 1770, and eighteen years later the British Government began to transport convicts to it. Altogether, New South Wales received 83,000 in 53 years. The convicts wore heavy chains; they were ill-fed and badly treated by the officers set over them; they were heavily punished for even slight infractions of the rules; "the cruelest discipline ever known" is one historian's description of their life.—[The Story of Australasia. J. S. Laurie.]

If the climates of the world were determined by parallels of latitude, then we could know a place's climate by its position on the map; and so we should know that the climate of Sydney was the counterpart of the climate of Columbia, S. C., and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is about the same distance south of the equator that those other towns are north of it—thirty-four degrees. But no, climate disregards the parallels of latitude. In Arkansas they have a winter; in Sydney they have the name of it, but not the thing itself.

Sydney Heads

By and by, when we had approached to somewhere within thirty miles of Sydney Heads the great electric light that is posted on one of those lofty ramparts began to show, and in time the little spark grew to a great sun and pierced the firmament of darkness with a far-reaching sword of light.

Sept. 15—Night. Close to Australia now. Sydney 50 miles distant.

From Diary:—For a day or two we have been plowing among an invisible vast wilderness of islands, catching now and then a shadowy glimpse of a member of it. There does seem to be a prodigious lot of islands this year; the map of this region is freckled and fly-specked all over with them. Their number would seem to be uncountable. We are moving among the Fijis now—224 islands and islets in the group.

Entering the Islands of the South Seas