Autograph Letter Signed ('G Gray') from George Gray of Bowerswell, Perth, brother of Euphemia Chalmers Millais, Lady Millais [Effie Gray], to Col. Spencer Childers, discussing his father Hugh Culling Eardley Childers and Australia.

4pp., 12mo. Bifolium. Good, on lightly-aged grey paper. Gray begins by thanking the Colonel for allowing him to have a 'cursory glance' at his 1901 biography of his father the Liberal politician Hugh Culling Eardley Childers. Gray intends to get it 'from one of the Libraries & go over it more carefully. It is full of interest to me particularly the period of yr Fathers residence in Melbourne in Govr. Arthurs time whom he found intractable but liked Genl. McArthur whom I knew well & Col Neill with whom I often stayed at Hawthorn'. Although Gray 'often heard the Neills speaking' of the Colonel's father, he 'did not meet him as my visits were very short as I lived on the Murray River - 200 miles from Melbourne in N S Wales'. Gray considers H. C. E. Childers' career 'very remarkable': 'beginning as he did on the lowest rung of the colonial ladder & attaining one of the best posts & afterwards in this country being so successful in political life'. He sends condolences on the death of the Colonel's mother, and comments briefly on his father's role as 'Minister of War during the Transvaal insurrection', before concluding in the hope that the Colonel will 'return again to these parts'. According to Gray's obituary in The Times, 8 January 1925, 'Considerations of health caused [him] to leave Edinburgh for Australia, where he spent 20 years as a "squatter." He was, however, not a colonist at heart, [...] He was an insatiable traveller, and left few countries unvisited.'