Page:Picturesque Dunedin.djvu/80

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
70
PICTURESQUE DUNEDIN.

from his Board, he would have continued in his position, and the works would have been much further forward. However, an amount of personal feeling was introduced, and caused his retirement.

The Board from time to time has been allowed to borrow £700,000, more than half of which has been expended on the upper harbour and on the jetties, with the success that now ships drawing close on to 20 feet can be safely brought up to the city to discharge and load. The extent of the proposed reclamation will add to the city area about 420 acres; this does not include all the harbour endowment, a portion being attached to neighbouring boroughs. The revenues arriving from this reclaimed land is annually increasing. Like all the other portions of our commonwealth, the Harbour Trust has had to undergo a period of trial, but with returning prosperity it enjoys an increasing revenue, and will, no doubt, soon be able to resume those operations which scarcity of funds has caused for the present to be suspended.

With wise and enlightened policy the Board has made the new streets, which are by its work added to the city, in some cases one and a half chains wide, and in the case of Cumberland street has so increased its length as to make it about two and a half miles long. This street throughout its added length will be built on only one side, as eastward it is used by the Railway. The advantages which have accrued to the citizens generally, by the deepening of the harbour, cannot be over-estimated. That it has been detrimental to Port Chalmers cannot be questioned, and that it will soon be more so is self-evident, as the channel must be so much further deepened as to allow all vessels crossing the bar to stear up to the city wharves.

A word may be said in regard to the suburban boroughs. The first new township proposed was at the end of 1860, when Richmond Hill—a portion of what is now Mornington—was placed in the market, and meeting a fairly ready sale, was followed by Balaclava, another portion of the same borough. The township of St. Kilda next followed suit, laid out with some pretensions to be a resemblance to a town. The boroughs, in the order of their charter of erection, stand: South Dunedin, St. Kilda, Caversham, Mornington, Roslyn, Maori Hill, North East Valley, and North