DECEMBER 20.-This day William, then a boy of fifteen, completed an oven which he made of iron hoops fixed in the ground in a half-circle and covered with a thick coating of clay, afterwards burned. It answered exceedingly well and we not only baked bread in it but pies and puddings, and occasionally fresh meat, when we could get it, but that was seldom. This oven was the first constructed in the colony, and remained in its primitive state, as I was told, long after we quitted Glenelg.
About this time we also built a rush hut a short distance from our tents for the better accommodation of part of our family, but they had not long occupied it before everything was suddenly ordered to be cleared out to make room for the printing-press, in order to print the Proclamation of the Colony. In this place, about twelve feet square, the first printing in South Australia was produced. The second number of The Register (the first having been published in London on June 26. 1836) was issued on June 3, 1837, on Acre 56, Hindley Street, Adelaide. But I must proceed according to dates, and will therefore describe the manner in which we spent our first Christmas Day in the Southern Hemisphere, far away from dear old England and never-to-be-forgotten friends.
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