From Australia.

There is little fresh to record in the printing trade of this city-Unemployed are not very numerous, but those who are out find considerable difficulty in obtaining employment, and the number of admittances to the Society during the past month has not been very large. Travelling comps will do well at present not to seek Melbourne as field for labor, for there are still sufficient and to spare for the work going. And at present the indications of another such period as occurred about this time last year are very small. In October last year in the morning paper offices copy would be taken up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and very often lasted till a similar hour the next morning. It was then that the « staying » powers of a good many were tested; and, also when they were called in at about 4.30 on Sunday evenings. All thoughts of pleasure were then banished, for when « early copy » is announced there is little time for enjoyment. It was at this period that the proprietors of the leading morning paper granted the concession of a shilling an hour for all work done before 6 o'clock, and the extra pay was well earned. But this is past and gone, and I question if such a harvest for the comps. will again have to be recorded for many years to come. The jobbing offices continue to keep on the usual number of hands, and as is customary, the jobbing trade is ever fluctuating.

The Trades and Labor Journal has now been reduced to the popular penny, and still maintains its neat appearance, and will, no doubt, make a future for itself. The late Secretary of the Typographical Society (Mr Stevens) has taken over the management, and it is also the company's intention to establish a jobbing office with a good connexion.

A few old New Zealand hands express their intention of availing themselves of the excursions during the time of the Dunedin exhibition to revisit your shores on holiday purposes bent.

The printing world was not behind with assistance towards the late labor strike in London, something over £300 having been collected in the various offices.

The Sunday Times, which has for some time past been anticipated, has not yet made an appearance. Legal impediments are hard against it, and until a bill allowing it an existence comes into force, it is likely to remain a « talked-of event. »

A new morning paper, the Daily Mail, under the promotion of Mr David Gaunson, a defeated candidate in the last general election, has been announced; but the project has not yet gone beyond the publishing of the propectus.

Our Evening Herald was rather neatly trapped a few weeks ago by the Age people who for some time had suspected it of « cribbing » their cable messages. The trap was this—a few special copies of the Age were printed, containing two bogus items from London, one to the effect that another « Whitechapel murder » had been perpetrated at Plymouth, and the other that Sullivan, the pugilist, had sustained a severe accident by a fall from a cab. It was so arranged that the copies containing these messages reached the hands of the Herald only, and on the following day the items appeared in that journal, with more elaboration of detail. The trap was most successfully planned, and as unsuspectingly fallen into. The Age now accuses its discomfited rival of having made free with special items at the rate of some thousands a year—and the Herald has submitted to the attack in significant silence.