This is a tribute to a man I never knew; a man who, some 130 years after his death, I am becoming increasingly fascinated with as I find our more about him.

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Hon. James Campbell, 1845-93, was my great grandfather.  He was an explorer in a way that people today could not even start to imagine. He was a public leader of the type that we now see only extremely rarely. He was a visionary - the quote above is just one attributed to him, written almost 20 years before Wilbur and Orville Wright created a first that has influenced our lives ever since.

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That he died young was Australia's loss, for who knows what he might have achieved had he lived to somewhere near his allotted span.  A brief history of him can be found here: Brighton Cemetery, Melbourne

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He was a visionary of uncanny accuracy at times.  Writing an opinion piece in the Spectator in 1882 called "Victoria a Century Hence" he said:

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A century hence the whole of Victoria will be covered with a network of railways (if aerial navigation does not render them useless except for heavy traffic) of which the present generation has scarcely any conception. Every main road at present existing in the colony will be represented by a railway or a tramway, of which the motive power will he electricity generated by the mountain streams, the rivers, the tides, and the winds.

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Amazing enough that he would envision hydro-electricity a full 13 years before the world's first hydro plant at Niagara Falls, but that he would discuss wind generated electricity a century before it became anything like mainstream.  Not that he was always completely right.  Further on in the same opinion piece he writes: