My young friend Bobby is, I am convinced, assured of a brilliant commercial career, provided that commercialism persists on earth until he reaches years of discretion.

For Bobby's sake I hope it does.

Yesterday I received the following letter and historical manuscript, which were combined in one rather ill-written screed and ran on without a break, as I give it here:-

Dear uncle (wrote my young kinsman) I am glad how you reelised how a picture show and things hardly paid me for the hard work I did about Victoria's history and the other exciting events in it that are awful hard to remember unless you have read about them lately.

And now I find that there is so much to write about that I find I can not get it all into one appendix like I said I would. It will really take three or four and hard work too to get it all in properly.

But you might be surprised to hear that I do not expect any payment at all for this. My father says that art should be its own reward and I didn't ought to ask any pay. So I expect he is right and I won't.

But I did want to tell you about something I saw in a shop window in Burk Strett. It was a bicicle. But father says I musent mention that either so I wont.

All this has taken four pages to write so I suppose I better get on with some more histry which I call:-

Well after the bit about Mr Laler and the gold and all that Victoria made up its mind to have a landboom which in plane language means a boom in land.

Well they had a boom like that in land and things and everybody was terribly excited.

And they had great fun because the more land they bought the bigger the price of it got till everyone got to be nearly millionaires at least they thought they were till something happened like when mother calls me in when I am nearly 50 not out in our paddick and nobody can get me out.

And this is reely what happened.

The price of land kept going up and up until people thought it would never stop but that is what it did all of a sudden when no body expected it. And it started to come down again a whole lot quicker than it went up and people were terribly surprised and sorry about that.

So then everybody was awfully poor for a while but it dident matter much because then they dident have any income tax to pay.

Well the members of parliament found it very hard to get along without income taxes so after thinking it over for a bit they made up their minds to have federation and that is what I am going to tell you about next time.

It was pretty hard to write this bit about the landboom because I reely do not know much about it reely. And I think it is going to take me a long time to write all about federation and Canbra and the great depression and cetra and I would not be surprised if I dident finish till nearly the seventeenth of next month.

And that is a funny thing too because that just happens to be my birthday when I shall be ten though I don't suppose people are verry interested in that.

BOBBY J.

"Den"
Herald, 14 February 1934, p6