Cirrus@Austlit

A semi-serious humorous prose piece purportedly written by Quamby's Bluff [Quamby Bluff] to his 'brother' mountain, Mount Wellington - both geographical features in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Quamby's Bluff has 'read' of a trip taken by a group of 'people of ton' to the summit of Mount Wellington in a report 'written by a lady' published in Murray's Review [The Austral-Asiatic Review].

Two excursions, the first including Lady Jane Franklin wife of the lieutenant-governor Sir John Franklin, were made to the summit of Mount Wellington in mid December 1837. The Hobart Town Courier on page four of the 29 December 1837 issue mentions that a 'series of sketches of the more amusing incidents during both excursions, was made ...'.

Quamby's Bluff is 'querulous at reading such milk and water doings as seems to be the tea table tattle of the little ant hill [presumably Hobart Town] at your [that is, at Mount Wellington's] feet'. The report, writes Quamby's Bluff, seems not to take in to account both mountains' 'isolated situation, tow[e]ring alone above the flats and forests of this cold and chilling country'. However Quamby's Bluff expects 'some poeti ing [sic] upon our Bluff-hearing and bold, bald front ; as [the] report says, the leader of these people [presumably Sir John Franklin who visited the Launceston area in January 1838], and his attendants visit ...[our] domains, and ... his swarm of scribes and scribblers, poets and pencil sketchers, will, in their egotism take off old Quamby; but, Brother, we've chips of stone here, sons of the soil, hard, hard as flint, sturdy and independent, listed in our cause, who we shall employ with pencil and pen in defense of our bluntness and exterior ; and we will send you through our publications on this side, how we shall find it requisite to act.'

This piece seems to dismiss frivolous or tame descriptions of the landscape by privileged visitors in favour of more realistic depictions by 'sons of the soil'.

It may also be an allegory warning the newspapers of the Hobart region that newspapers in the Launceston area are able to write 'in defense' of their own concerns.