reaching the inner ring of perfection, while appliances and locomotor material has been improved a hundredfold. Within the next twelve months, Mr. Short informs us, Western Australia will be possessed of mechanical apparatus and appliances for the safe conduct of traffic second to none in Australasia. Great difficulty has been experienced in obtaining competent men to fill the many vacant posts which the sudden expansion of traffic has thrown open. To overcome this a number of officers were imported to occupy the more onerous and responsible positions. Mr. Short confidently looks forward to the time when such importations shall be discontinued, and facilities shall be in existence for training a local staff. This he considers as advisable as it is just for the proper encouragement of the staff generally. As long as promotion acts as an impetus to work and an ideal to attain to, so long will there be a jealous striving after efficiency.
Mr. Short is now merged in the stream of energetic and industrious toil. One day devising, the next revising, improving, substituting, and ameliorating—these are some of the matters which engage his attention. Deputations must be received, listened to, and diplomatically replied to. Suggestions and cries for reform reach, from many channels, his offices, and what with multitudinous demands on his presence, his hours witness no masterly inactivity. Ever peering into the future to divine its weal or woe, a railway manager must be a thorough student in the art of prophecy. If the country is still on the increase, regard must be had to traffic facilities and requirements; if on a steady decline, expenditure must be curtailed. Happily, in Western Australia, all are prophets on the cheerful side, and here another quinquennial term has passed Mr. Short's area of supervision and responsibility will probably have been extensively widened. His experience of railway affairs is coeval with the working period of life, for it has been his one pursuit for the past twenty years.
Mr. Short is imbued with all the instincts and attributes characteristic of a gentleman. Courteous and kind and modest, he is deeply esteemed. He is still young, and as full of energy as when in the bright teens of youth. His mind and body are wrapt up in devotional attention to the duties of his office, and where the inclination and predilection are so strong we cannot stumble when we predict for him a bright future.
EDWARD McLARTY, J.P., M.L.C.
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Photo by EDWARD McLARTY, J.P., M.L.C. Greenham & Evans. |
WHILE Australia professes to be too democratic to reproduce all the ranks and distinctions which have been preserved from time immemorial between the different classes of society in the mother country, yet even a superficial observer becomes conscious that the law of native superiority asserts itself as strongly in the new Southern World as it does in England. To find a squire in name, for example, we should have to go to an English county, but to find that territorial magnate and magistrate in person it would not be necessary to travel far from Perth along the South-Western line. The only difference is that "at home" the squire has inherited his estates, his manor, and his governing office, whereas in Western Australia he has acquired them by his own indomitable application and the quality of his mental parts; like the champion of the tourney he has had to win his spurs before he could wear them, so that no one can regard him enviously as having been fortune's favourite. The same prizes were within the reach of other men, but they lacked the ability to pluck them, and the victor is therefore entitled to peculiar public regard, especially if, as in the case of Mr. Edward McLarty, J.P., M.L.C., he is willing to lend a cordial helping hand to those whom he has left behind in the race.
Edward McLarty is scion of an old Pinjarra family, his father having been one of the earliest settlers in that fertile and picturesque district on the banks of the Murray River. In 1848 Edward, the son of John McLarty, was born in what has since become one of the prettiest townships in the colony, and which possessed (even in those days) for so nascent a settlement, an excellent schoolmaster, under whose care the future squire of the district was enabled to store his mind with the learning which, if it is not, as the familiar counsel affirms, better than riches, is at least the advantageous accompaniment of wealth that, as in the case of Mr. McLarty, the student may afterwards achieve. After getting through his school-days, the heir of John McLarty, consulting his tastes, and true to hereditary aptitudes, for his father was the manager of the splendid agricultural estate of Mr. Singleton, resolved to turn his attention to the cultivation of the land and the raising of stock. Mr. John McLarty a little later purchased the valuable property known as "Blythewood," situated on the Murray, to which the rich cultivation paddocks have an extensive frontage, and which is
