Advance Australasia: A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia. Second Edition. — Key Ideas to Explore

A City of Stucco and Wharves

Bullen's disappointment with Auckland's architecture is pointed. He finds only two decent buildings on its main street, one being the Auckland Savings Bank; the rest are "jerry-built of brick and stuccoed over, or of wood." His particular scorn is reserved for imitation stone: "Of all mean shams that my soul abhors, it is the imitation stone-building." Yet he marvels at the city's maritime commerce, which demands "wharves, wharves, and ever more wharves" to serve a population only a fifth of a large London parish. The cost of land—£20 per foot frontage in the city, £400 per acre in the suburbs—strikes him as inexplicable in a new country with abundant empty land.

The Optimism of Seismic Dwellers

In a striking analogy, Bullen compares the mindset of residents in earthquake-prone regions to that of consumptives. A sufferer in the last stages of phthisis, he writes, will pity a fellow patient while insisting his own health is "vastly improved." Similarly, towns encircled by volcanoes—despite disasters like St. Pierre, Vesuvius, or San Francisco—continue "steadily on their way without apparently giving a thought to what may happen at any hour." He calls this attitude necessary for life to be lived "in decent fashion," but the comparison reveals a wry awareness of human denial. The passage is one of the few moments where Bullen steps back from observation to offer a broader reflection on character.

From Sailor to Lecturer: The Book's Origins

Bullen's preface explains that Advance Australasia began as a series of newspaper articles written during a lecturing tour. He never intended to publish them as a book, citing "the onerous nature of my lecture engagements" and the rapidity of his travel, which prevented careful attention to "form, sequence, and detail." Only after the editor reported a strong public demand did he consent to this edition. He acknowledges the articles are "the slightest journalistic impressions" with inevitable repetitions, but sends the book out without misgivings, trusting in the kindness of critics who had been "uniformly kind, fair, and generous" to his seventeen previous works.

Readers should approach this volume as a snapshot of a traveler's immediate impressions, not a systematic survey. Bullen's eye for detail—the price of land, the quality of stucco, the length of a pier—reveals more about his own expectations than about Australasia itself. The book rewards those interested in early twentieth-century travel writing, the psychology of colonial boosterism, and the voice of a seasoned mariner trying to make sense of a land he once knew by sea.

Reading Bullen’s astonishment at Sydney’s electric trams, I remembered my own surprise, years later, at a marketplace in another frontier—so much raw energy and half-built hope. It felt like the same quiet disbelief, watching old ways vanish into new streets. That sense lingers faintly in The face of Manchuria, Korea, & Russian Turkestan — Reading Companion, where every photograph seems to hold its breath before the change.