Sunday excursion

Here's some ripper copy about the beautiful island, snatched from the pages of The West Australian:

'Marine Excursions. - The excursion steamers Gannet and Eleanor were largely patronised yesterday on the usual Sunday excursion to Rottnest, each vessel having a full complement of passengers. Favoured with delightful weather the trip was a most enjoyable one. The passengers were landed at Fremantle on the return journey bofore dark.'

Largely patronised? Delightful. Most enjoyable.

It's from the West of April 18, 1898. We got to this by idly clicking on a Google News search result: at the side of the page there's an option for getting results from the 1890s.

It's the result of a National Library thing to digitise old papers. They seem to have stuff from the Perth Gazette and West Australian Journal starting from the 1830s.