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Title: Rambles in Australia
Author: Grew, Edwin Sharpe, Grew, Marion Sharpe
Language: English
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RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA
* * * * * *
MILLS & BOON’S RAMBLES SERIES
“_The books are not designed as guides. Up to a point they may be used
as such. They are really very pleasant essays by writers who know their
subjects, and they may be read with pleasure and instruction quite
apart from their utilitarian value to the traveller._”--Liverpool
Courier.
Rambles around French Châteaux.
By FRANCES M. GOSTLING, Author of “The Bretons at Home.” With 5
Illustrations in Colour by L. LELÉE and C. R. ANDREAE, 33 from
Photographs, and a Map. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles about the Riviera.
By FRANCES M. GOSTLING. With one Illustration in Colour and 40
from Photographs. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in the Black Forest.
By I. A. R. WYLIE, Author of “My German Year,” “Dividing Waters.”
With 5 Illustrations in Colour and 24 from Photographs. Crown
8vo, 6s.
Rambles with an American in Great Britain.
By CHRISTIAN TEARLE, Author of “Holborn Hill.” With 21
Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in Norway.
By HAROLD SIMPSON. With 8 Illustrations in Colour by PAUL E.
RITTER, and 32 from Photographs. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in Florence.
By G. E. TROUTBECK. With 8 Illustrations in Colour by ROSE
MCANDREW, and 32 from Photographs. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in Ireland.
By ROBERT LYND, Author of “Home Life in Ireland.” With
5 Illustrations in Colour by JACK B. YEATS, and 25 from
Photographs. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in Holland.
By EDWIN and MARION SHARPE GREW. With one Illustration in Colour
by DOUGLAS MACPHERSON, 32 from Photographs, and a Map. Crown 8vo,
6s.
Rambles in Australia.
By EDWIN and MARION SHARPE GREW. With 32 Illustrations from
Photographs and a Map. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Rambles in the North Yorkshire Dales.
By J. E. BUCKROSE. With 4 Illustrations in Colour and 23 from
Photographs. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: KARRI COUNTRY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
Frontispiece.]
RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA
by
EDWIN & MARION SHARPE GREW
Authors of “The Court of William III”
“The English Court in Exile: James II at St. Germain”
“Rambles in Holland”
With Thirty-Two Illustrations
from Photographs and a Map
Mills & Boon, Limited
49 Rupert Street
London, W.
Published 1916
TO
OUR AUSTRALIAN HOSTS
IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
OF MUCH KINDNESS
PREFACE
This little book aims at giving such general impressions of Australia
as could be gleaned during a visit lasting from July into September,
and including some time spent in each state. We have tried to convey
some idea of the aspect of the country itself, with its brilliant
sunshine, great plains and trackless forests; of the social atmosphere
of warm-hearted hospitality; of its economic problems and democratic
legislative experiments. These last are so essentially Australian, that
it seemed impossible to omit some reference to them, but they hardly
fall within our scope, and are only lightly touched upon. Figures and
facts quoted are taken from official handbooks and pamphlets.
With regard to the illustrations, those of Western Australia were
provided by the kindness of Mr. Gibbs, of the Lands Department at
Perth, and Mr. L. V. Shapcott, Premier’s Office, Perth, who was
good enough to take special photographs for us. For those of South
Australia we have to thank Mr. Vaughan of the Lands Department.
At Melbourne the Secretary of the admirably organised Government
Tourist Bureau was kind enough to have the views of Victoria specially
printed for reproduction. For the views of New South Wales we have to
thank the Hon. Dugald Thomson, and for those of Brisbane the Secretary
of the Government Tourist Bureau for Queensland. Lastly, our grateful
thanks are due to Captain Muirhead Collins, Permanent Secretary of the
Australian Commonwealth in London, for his great kindness in reading
the proofs and for much valuable criticism.
If _Rambles in Australia_ leads even a few readers to wish for a closer
acquaintance with, and a better understanding of, this great country
of which we are so ignorant at home, it will not have been written in
vain.
CONTENTS
PART I. WESTERN AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE LAND OF THE UNLATCHED DOOR 3
II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS 9
III. PERTH: A PARADISE FOR THE WORKING MAN 20
IV. IN THE BUSH 34
V. AGRICULTURE AND GOLD 51
PART II. SOUTH AUSTRALIA
VI. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW 73
VII. ADELAIDE 88
VIII. COMPULSORY TRAINING AND SOCIAL LIFE IN ADELAIDE 98
PART III. VICTORIA
IX. COLLINS STREET--MELBOURNE 113
X. SOCIAL LIFE IN MELBOURNE 121
XI. BALLARAT 132
XII. THE BLACK SPUR 146
PART IV. NEW SOUTH WALES
XIII. SYDNEY HARBOUR 165
XIV. SYDNEY AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD 173
XV. THE BLUE MOUNTAINS AND A BUSH PICNIC 186
PART V. QUEENSLAND
XVI. BANANA-LAND 205
XVII. THE BEGINNING OF THE TROPICS 212
XVIII. A DAY IN THE QUEENSLAND BUSH 221
XIX. IN AND ABOUT BRISBANE 230
PART VI. TO THE NORTHERN TERRITORY
XX. THE GREAT BARRIER REEF 245
XXI. THE NORTHERN TERRITORY 272
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE ILLUSTRATION ON THE COVER OF A CLEARING IN THE BUSH IS FROM A
WATER-COLOUR IN THE POSSESSION OF MAJOR C. J. MARTIN, F.R.G.S.
KARRI COUNTRY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
PERTH FROM “THE NARROWS” 20
FELLING KARRI 43
OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK 49
ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD, BRIDGETOWN 59
THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA 63
NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE 89
WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE 94
WATERFALL GULLY, BURNSIDE, NEAR ADELAIDE 104
OSTRICH FARM, SOOTH AUSTRALIA 108
THE RIVER YARRA, FORTY-EIGHT MILES FROM MELBOURNE 122
THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS, NORTH-EAST VICTORIA, MOUNT FEATHERTOP, 6,300 143
THE DIVIDING RANGE 147
TREE FERNS IN THE BUSH, NEAR MELBOURNE 155
VIEW OF THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS FROM THE MURRAY RIVER FLATS 158
CIRCULAR QUAY, SYDNEY 178
SOUTH COAST, NEW SOUTH WALES 180
NATIONAL PASS, BLUE MOUNTAINS 188
SHEARING TIME, NEW SOUTH WALES 193
A FLOCK OF SHEEP, KINROSS STATION 195
MANLY BEACH 198
THE BRISBANE RIVER 214
CHARLEVILLE BORE 218
NAMBOUR 226
BOTANIC GARDENS, BRISBANE 238
TOWNSVILLE 248
BARRON FALLS SCENERY AT CAIRNS 254
THE BARRON RIVER 258
THURSDAY ISLAND 265
VIEW NEAR DARWIN 275
COCONUT GROVE, DARWIN 279
ANTHILLS, NORTHERN TERRITORY 289
PART I
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
[Illustration:
MAP OF
AUSTRALIA
to illustrate
“RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA”
_George Philip & Son Ltd_
Mills & Boon Ltd]
RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: THE LAND OF THE UNLATCHED DOOR
Opposite to us was Australia. During the long days of the voyage across
the bleak South Indian Ocean it had seemed no more than a vague area
on a map, small, as all countries and even continents are, compared
to the interminable stretches of the sea. But the voyage was ended
now, and Australia, first no more than a blur on the horizon, and then
solidifying into a shore with green trees, had now become resolved into
an island with a lighthouse; and now into a harbour with wharves and
quays and a background of houses behind the sheds and derricks. There
was a train puffing in the distance; and here fussed a launch bringing
with it people from the shore....
Quite suddenly the Blue Funnel Liner which has had the accustomedness
of a home to us for all these weeks, shrinks to the aspect of a ship,
of no more importance to us than a passenger train; and impatience
seizes us to be off. There is the land, alluring in a glow of sunset
barred with feathery clouds ... there’s a shore breeze calling, let us
go!
So much for the emotions of arrival. They are quickly submerged by
occurrences which are no less stubborn in the poetic moments of
reaching a new land, than at any other time. The Blue Funnel Liner had
been behind her time, and had not wired her subsequent gain of a few
hours; our arrival had been expected, and was to have been made the
occasion of a greeting by the Government of Western Australia to the
members of a scientific mission on board. Western Australia’s first
greeting was to have taken the form of a garden party at Government
House, Perth; and as the invitations had been distributed over
hundreds of miles of a wide country weeks before, no postponement
had been possible. The garden party was being held--in our regretted
absence--and the Port Medical Authorities, not to be done out of their
festivity, had gone to it. So there Western Australia was--at our
garden party, and there peering at the land of promise were we.
Hours went by. Those of us who had hastened over lunch and wrestled
impatiently with trunks and hold-alls that be they attacked ever so
early never can be packed at leisure, wandered about the decks, finding
that they had lost their friendliness with their deck chairs, and had
become as little homelike as a railway platform. The deck-steward, who
had become merely a deck-steward instead of philosopher and friend,
recovered some of his old standing by telling us that we were to have
an early dinner on board, after all. But it was an empty meal. We so
much desired to be gone. And at last we were. The sunset had faded,
the swift dusk had deepened into night, when at last we went down the
gangway and stood in Australia.... It was Australia, though beneath our
feet were the planks and rails of a wharf. The French have a proverb
that at night all cats are grey. This wharf, might it not have been the
wharf at Liverpool or Tilbury? Not quite. There was the Southern Cross
overhead; and in the warm darkness there was a something--something
that was not England.
The party that had been so long companions split up and were scattered.
The writer of these lines became for an hour or so more single than
any of them, for business took him at once into Perth, where he
had to find Reuter’s Agency. So looking back, and sorting out his
recollections, he remembers first the friendly host that met him and
walked to the railway station at Fremantle; and after that the Swan
River shining in the starlight as the train crossed it; and after that
nothing but the soft Australian night stealing in through the open
carriage windows and seeming to come through whispering trees--until
the train drew up at the lighted terminus of Perth. And Perth? In the
darkness it was much like any other town at which one should arrive at
night. Not like Paris, where, as a Frenchwoman in Bâle once said to
us, at ten o’clock “Ça commence,” nor yet like London, where, in times
of peace, the streets are still open-eyed. But not unlike a provincial
town; with some shops still brightly lighted, though most of them and
the office buildings, are shut; a town with lights, but not lit; and
with streets that are kept awake only by the street lamps. Through
one such street I tracked down the office I sought, receiving much
friendly aid by the way; and finally arriving at it in company with the
publisher’s clerk of the Perth newspaper.
That is another outstanding recollection: the publishing office with
two clerks, one rather sleepy, the other painstakingly deciphering an
obituary notice which a small girl had brought in. When he had at last
made it out, and felt that he could leave the office for a few minutes
in charge of his companion, he put on his hat and said he would come
with me. So he did. As a matter of history his kindness was unavailing,
except to make me feel that Australia was filled with friends, for the
office we wanted was vacant. So back I went through the gaunt streets
and on to the railway station, where I was too new to the country to
disregard the notice that smoking was not allowed on the platform; and
presently the train was again taking me back to the suburb of Cottesloe
Beach.
This was a country railway station, evidently. Just like one at home,
to the two lighted shops just outside, and the white road stretching up
a hill in the starlight. The road up which I was directed was dotted
with houses wide apart; with shaded lamps which I could see through
the shrubs; and now and again a piano tinkling. It was very still. At
last I found the house I sought. Very white, with trees about it, and
a windmill for its well; and windows lighted for the stranger. No; not
the stranger, but the unknown, welcome guest. The gate in the wooden
fence was swung back; there was a light in the hall; and the hall door
was wide open, though the hall was empty. And that was how I thought
then, and have always thought of Australia. It is the “Land of the
Unlatched Door.”
CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It behoves visitors to Australia to realise that they will have a good
many things to do for themselves that they have never done before, and
that the conditions of travelling, for instance, are very different
from those in Europe. To begin with, the station porter is absent,
and everyone has to carry his own hand baggage, for in a country,
where labour is very scarce and very highly paid, there are no loafers
ready to scramble for odd jobs, even at a port. What cannot be carried
ashore by the passengers is left to be dealt with, frequently much to
its detriment, by agencies whose representatives come on board for
the purpose and convey it, or some of it, to its owner’s destination.
Stray packages, providentially arrive in time to go on to the next
stopping-place with their owner. This applies not only to landing, but
to railway travelling; so that it can easily be arranged for by those
who are prepared in advance.
It was quite dark when we went ashore, and it is the oddest sensation
to land in an unknown country after dark. We had been told on the
boat that the station was at a distance of ten minutes’ walk, but in
the absence of cabs and porters its whereabouts was problematical. We
therefore deposited our bags and awaited events.
Then out of the obscurity a man came up with some hesitation and asked
us our names. It was our host, who had been guided to us in the dark by
some occult sense, for we were unknown to each other except by name. He
greeted us heartily with the kindly solicitude of an old friend, took
possession of us and the larger share of our hand baggage, and carried
us off to the station.
It was our first experience of an Australian welcome and Australian
hospitality; that hospitality, which for unaffected kindness and
generosity, can surely have no counterpart on any other continent. The
hospitality that makes a guest free of all his host’s possessions,
that grudges no time or trouble in his guests’ interest, and that is
bestowed in the spirit not of a giver, but the receiver of a benefit.
As we walked towards the train the ground seemed curiously soft, as if
we were walking ankle-deep in dust. It was not till next day that we
found that this part of Western Australia consists everywhere of loose
yellow sand like that by the seashore. The night was very mild after
the keen sea air, and encumbered with bags and our heavy coats, we
arrived at the station in time to see the train go out, and waited for
the next one in a large empty booking-hall. At last the little train
rattled in, and we started. We crossed the broad Swan River, above
which a crescent moon was hanging, and Venus shone with the luminous
brilliancy of southern skies. One of us went on to Perth: the other
descended at Cottesloe Beach.
Here the station fly was waiting. It was shaped like a French diligence
and drawn by two ruminative old white horses. The driver, surprised and
startled at the apparition of a fare, climbed down, and lit a candle
inside the fly, the light of which disclosed white lace curtains at
the windows tied up with red ribbon. A few minutes jolting drive, and
we were at our destination, and, jumping out, plunged immediately into
soft, deep sand, before the entrance to a large one-storied house, its
corrugated iron white-painted roof shining in the starlight as if it
were covered with snow.
Our hostess, who had waited dinner for us an unconscionable time, had
neither allowed that, nor her welcome to get cold in the interim, and
took us to a room sweet with the scent of a great bowl of wattle, and a
bunch of very large, deep purple violets--a room that seemed strangely
quiet after the long-heard straining and cracking of the timbers in our
cabin. Here our sleep was lulled only by the fitful creaking of the
little windmill in the garden.
The charming house in which we stayed at Cottesloe Beach was typical
of nearly all West Australian houses. It stood, as even the smallest
workman’s cottage stands, in its own grounds detached from its
neighbours’, a roomy bungalow with a broad verandah running right
round it. The verandah is an essential, all-important part of a West
Australian house. The family sleep in it all the year round, using the
bedrooms merely as dressing-rooms; they live on another side of it
during the day.
In the country suburbs the houses are built on piles to protect them
from the attacks of white ants. White ants can eat everything except
jarrah, a hard red eucalyptus wood, which has been tried for paving
London streets. The foundations of all the houses are formed of jarrah
piles; on the top of every pile is put an iron saucer, and on this
again is erected the superstructure of the building. The iron saucer
is indispensable, and, “capping the pile,” takes the place of laying
the foundation-stone. The white ants can neither penetrate it, nor run
outside it, for they won’t come into the light.
An immense corrugated galvanised iron water-tank stands beside every
house, and most of the larger ones have their own windmill for pumping
up water.
All the gardens were gay with flowers in this beautiful climate,
even at the end of the winter. Masses of purple kennedya,[1] a showy
climbing plant with a small pealike flower, hung from a high wooden
fence surrounding our host’s house. Geraniums grew like shrubs, and a
magenta bougainvillea was a curtain of colour.
We arrived in Australia with the wattle; the mimosa sold in London
shops can give but little idea of its trees, shining like cloth of gold
among the grey eucalyptus, and outlining the streams. It is comparable
to our hawthorn, though it is not in the same way a harbinger of
spring, for the mild and flowery winters have no terrors. Australians
are immensely proud of their wattle. They never lose an opportunity
of commenting on its beauty, and just as no two Irishmen can agree
on the exact identity of the Irish shamrock among a variety of small
trefoils, so wherever you go in Australia a different variety of mimosa
is pointed out as the “true” Australian wattle.
One soon takes as a matter of course the brilliant unvarying Australian
sunshine, but on our first walk the day after our arrival, it seemed
as if we were wandering in a land of limelight; its hard dazzling
white brilliance appeared artificial and unreal. There seemed to be
an absence of chiaroscuro, and of atmosphere, the clear-cut distance
gave an illusory impression of nearness, annihilating perspective; the
eucalyptus with their light, springing branches, sparsely covered with
long, narrow leaves, give little shade. From pictures and photographs
one is led to suppose that Australian scenery is not unlike that
of England. It is wholly and entirely different, not only in its
atmospheric effect, and in the more uniform and heavier colouring of
its foliage, but every individual plant is unfamiliar. Australia, one
may say, roughly speaking, is one vast forest of eucalyptus or gum
tree. The gums have many varieties, far too numerous for the traveller
to distinguish, from the slight pale trees that are not unlike a
silver-barked birch, to the soaring giants of the karri forest, with
their smooth white stems; but whatever the variety, the prevailing
tinge is a bluish grey. Sometimes the forest or “bush” has been cleared
away to make room for orchards, and crops, or towns, or grazing land;
sometimes acres of trees have been “ringbarked,” as it is called, a
rapid and cheap way of clearing land, by cutting out a ring of bark
so that the tree dies, and only a skeleton forest remains, letting in
light and air to the soil. But the “bush” is never very far away. It
seems to be only waiting to close in again, and swallow up once more
what has been so laboriously cleared. West, east, north, and south,
the gum tree predominates, though the bush varies in the nature of its
undergrowth, which in the tropics becomes rich and beautiful.
The general effect of Australian landscape to English eyes produces an
impression of austerity. It is never friendly, perhaps because of the
general absence of water, the sombre wooded hills, the vast dun plains,
have something aloof and forbidding.
It would be difficult to find anything in life more stimulating and
delightful than the first walk in a new country, where every sight and
sound is unfamiliar. Strolling along the soft, hot sandy road that
first morning, past the low-verandahed houses, each with its wooden
palisade, its windmill and big grey water-tank, we came to rising
ground overlooking the Swan River. Behind were the low deep blue hills
of the Darling Range, and the broad river lay glassy in the heat of
the sun, blue as the Lake of Geneva on a summer’s day. Its wooded
banks run out in little spits of land with white sandy foreshores, one
or two small white-sailed boats were floating idly on it, and some
water-fowl swam on its unruffled surface. The foliage of the gums with
which its banks are covered is dark and uniform in colour, and had the
massive effect of our trees in autumn, before the leaves have begun to
turn. The air was heavy with the scent of some white-flowering shrub,
the stillness was unbroken except by the note of a magpie; the place
seemed a paradise. So it must have looked to the first settlers, the
first pioneers, who stood, as we stood, looking down on it. It left an
ineffaceable impression, and we never again saw anything more beautiful
than that view.
Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers. We were a month too
early, but even so we saw many strange and beautiful varieties. They
are more numerous here than anywhere else in the world, even now many
have not been classified. The most characteristic are as unlike as
possible to our delicate evanescent wild flowers at home; strongly
growing, determined, having adapted themselves, by becoming wiry or
leathery, to all exigencies of heat or drought. The banksia, for
instance, looked as if a fir-cone had suddenly burst into bristling
pink flowers; the hard cone of it is called by the natives a “mungite,”
and is used to kindle fire. Some unobservant person once told the West
Australians that their birds were all songless, their flowers all
scentless, and being naturally self-depreciatory, they have quoted it
ever since. The bird-notes are very beautiful and clear in quality of
tone; the note of the magpie will at once occur to the most casual
observer, to quote only one instance. Old Dampier, in 1699, on his
first landing in Western Australia was struck with “the small birds,
all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes.” He mentions too,
being observant, as befits an explorer, “the small flowers growing on
the ground, that were sweet and beautiful,” and where else is there a
better description of the eucalyptus “sweet-scented and reddish within
the bark,” and “with long narrow leaves ... on one side whitish and on
the other green.” But the “racoons” (kangaroos) which were so numerous
as to be easily caught, and were “very good meat,” are now but rarely
to be seen, where he first sighted them.
Cottesloe Beach, our headquarters while we were in Western Australia,
is a pleasant seaside suburb, with, as its name suggests, an immense
beach of finest white sand, lapped by smooth waters and protected by
Rottnest Island from ocean storms. The cliffs of Rottnest Island,
showing yellowish in the bright sunshine, with the white needle of
the lighthouse sharply defined are the first sight of land as ships
approach West Australia.
The half an hour’s railway journey to Perth runs through other little
garden suburbs, for all Australian towns straggle out for many miles
into the country, and cover a very large extent of ground. Space is
unlimited, and nobody’s domain large or small, need elbow that of his
neighbour. The little train on its narrow gauge railway rattles past
roads of one-storied houses, standing on their piles; each with its
verandah, and sloping iron roof, each surrounded by its palisaded
garden, with its purple kennedya, its pink geranium and wattle, each
with its inevitable tall grey iron water-tank; somewhere about there is
sure to be an array of the ubiquitous kerosene tin, utilised either as
a pail, a basket, a flower-box, or all three. We saw them used to form
chimneys, even to construct a raft. These suburbs have an air of having
loose ends left hanging out. It is all so new; there is no time to
attend to details when time is so essentially money. So bordering the
low fences are rough undergrowth and gum trees and banksias, and coarse
wiry grass--the beginning and the end of the bush.
CHAPTER III
PERTH: A PARADISE FOR THE WORKING MAN
The city of Perth is in a transition stage. Scattered over the low
hills of the Swan River, its situation is magnificent, and its climate
superb, but it is as yet only partly built, or rather it is undergoing
the gradual process of rebuilding. As the municipality becomes more
wealthy, handsome houses are replacing temporary structures, so that
imposing white official buildings alternate with makeshift affairs
hurriedly run up in earlier days, when need was urgent and money was
scarce. Perth is, then, on its way to becoming a fine town, and its
public buildings are being constructed from simple designs in good
taste.
[Illustration: PERTH, FROM “THE NARROWS.”]
But what most impresses the new-comer from Europe in Australian
towns is not the buildings, but the people. Here is no miserable
sordid fringe of the poor and wretched. In this happy country there
is no poverty. Its people are well fed, well clothed, well housed,
well-to-do. Whatever her problems, and they are many and difficult,
and not to be lightly pronounced upon by the casual visitor, it is the
glory of Australia that she has no poor.
It appeared to us, especially in the West, that a characteristic type
is developing; lean, loosely hung, wiry, with eyes deep-set from the
strong sunlight. In odd contrast to European towns, men everywhere
preponderate over women in the streets. Perhaps because of its newness,
the attitude of the other states to Western Australia is still a
little patronising. Western Australians themselves are fully conscious
of this, they on their part always talk about “the East” in tones of
desire: “I hope we shall go to the East next year,” is often heard in
Perth. At first we thought they meant China or Japan, but we soon found
that in Western Australia “the East” means Melbourne or Sydney. They
stand for London or Paris, and one lady said plaintively: “If I have a
nice dress, when I go to see my sister in ‘the East,’ she says, ‘You
didn’t get that made in Perth.’”
Perth, however, is looking forward. She knows the time will come
when she can compete fearlessly with her elder sister the capital of
“the East.” Meanwhile she has achieved the acquisition of the most
attractive zoological gardens of any Australian city. They are small,
but charmingly laid out, the animals left free to roam about in their
own little grassy paddocks. The pleasant shady walks are lined by the
pretty Cape lilac, which in July is bare of leaves, but covered with
clusters of yellow berries, very decorative in effect. These gardens
lie on the far side of the Swan River, and a ferry-boat plies across
its shining blue waters. Numbers of black and white water-fowl swim
alongside, diving below and bobbing up again, or settling on a row of
posts that run out from the shore, each one like a little black and
white carved ornament. The gardens are a few minutes’ walk from the
landing stage. We found them charming, the darker evergreens everywhere
lighted up by patches of golden wattle. The kangaroos and wallabies
feeding in their little enclosures hop up and put gentle inquiring
noses into your hand.
Perhaps it is because the little wild Australian animals are so
pathetically confiding that they are becoming extinct. The authorities
do all they can to preserve them, but it appears to be inevitable,
though deplorable, that the native wild animals of Australia, charming
little inoffensive creatures, are becoming rarer every year, in spite
of large reserves or national parks, where everything is left untouched
in its wild state. Unfortunately some of the most interesting cannot
be kept in captivity. This applies, for instance, so we were told,
to the koala, or little tree-bear, and to the curious duck-billed
platypus, a little animal covered with a wiry brown fur, with the bill
of a bird, and something of the habits of our river otter. The gardens
possessed a one-eyed alligator that caught pigeons in its mouth with
astonishing dexterity, and swallowed them whole in two gulps; and
some fascinating cranes with beautiful vermilion legs, that danced
as gracefully as any ballerina. Our own visit to the gardens was
pleasantly concluded by tea, which an Australian lady was hospitably
dispensing to ourselves and some other English visitors.
Tea is a most important feature of Australian life. Tea comes in with
the maid and hot water in the mornings, and tea is drunk at breakfast;
“Morning tea” is a settled social institution. We were invited to it
on several occasions, it is served at eleven o’clock. Tea next appears
at or after lunch. Afternoon tea is a matter of course everywhere;
but it comes in again at or after dinner, and is very often drunk the
last thing at night. One would think so much tea would undermine the
strongest constitution, but it is made very weak with a great deal of
milk. Australians themselves feel that their indulgence in tea-drinking
is rather excessive but they account for it by saying that “In the
bush you cannot get anything else to drink,” and neither seek nor offer
other explanation.
It was at this Perth tea-party that we first saw the brown heavily
scented “boronia,” for which West Australia is famous. The tables were
decorated with that and the delicate pink Geraldstown wax flower.
Boronia has a small chocolate-coloured flower, yellow inside, and is so
sweet that its scent is overpowering in a room or on a dinner table.
The genus was named after an Italian botanist. There are many varieties
in Australia, which, to the uninstructed eye, do not in the least
resemble each other. _Boronia megastigma_, the West Australian variety,
is used for the manufacture of scent, and is cultivated for sale; it is
one of the most characteristic spring flowers.
We were not long in discovering that Western Australia, whatever
course its future development may take, is at present a paradise for
the working-man. Nowhere else is life made so pleasant and easy for
him in such matters as housing and education; nowhere else are his
children given such facilities for making their way in the world in
their turn. To begin with, education is provided free of cost, from
the primary school to the University. In the primary schools boys are
given manual training, and girls are taught cooking and domestic
economy. Special facilities are provided by the Government to meet
the needs of scattered settlers in the bush remote from centres of
population; wherever it is possible to assure an average attendance of
even ten children within a radius of three miles, schools are already
established. The Education Act even takes into consideration the case
of isolated families, where the muster of children is less than ten;
the department pays £7 a year for each child on condition that the
parents find a suitable teacher, and will supplement this grant, so
that he may have a minimum of £30 a year over and above the cost of his
board and lodging.[2] In effect the Government pays part of the salary
of a private tutor. It can be easily imagined that the education grant
must be a very heavy one, in proportion to the population. It amounts,
in fact, to about £1 annually for every individual in the state.
From the primary schools children are drafted into the secondary
schools, when they are able to profit by the advanced standard of
teaching. There are also technical schools, where trades are taught,
and a training college for teachers.
We visited one of the intermediary schools, the Perth Modern School,
as it is called, at Leederville, a suburb between Perth and Cottesloe
Beach. We found a handsome red brick building, looking like a
Nonconformist college in one of our older Universities. In the large,
well-kept grounds there is room for football, tennis, hockey, and a
gymnasium is provided in a detached building.
The school is admirably constructed for its purpose, the classrooms
opening out of a large central hall. We were unexpected and
unannounced. In the course of our researches in pursuit of the
headmaster we were impressed with the excellent discipline and tone of
a school in which the children’s attention was not to be distracted by
the presence of strangers glancing into their classrooms in passing.
The teachers, masters, and mistresses, all wore university gowns.
The headmaster, alert and enthusiastic, showed us over his spacious,
airy school-buildings, including the well-equipped laboratory and the
department of domestic economy. Western Australia does not neglect the
practical side of its children’s education, and here the girls are
taught dressmaking, millinery, and cooking. The dining-rooms of the
staff, and those pupils whose homes are at a distance, had the air of
a well-appointed restaurant, with its small tables daintily set out
with clean linen, and fresh flowers brought by the children. We noticed
among them what looked like a small edelweiss, the Australian “flannel
flower.”
The period of education at these intermediate schools consists of a
four years’ course lasting from 12 to 16. A “Leaving Certificate”
on the completion of the four years’ course must be obtained by
examination to enable the student to pass into the University. Some
students are drafted into the Training College for Teachers, or, after
the four years’ course is finished, students may stay on at the school
to study special subjects. We were impressed with the appearance of the
children. They were healthy, well-to-do, and attractive; their manners
were frank and without self-consciousness.
One of the older girls, who was deputed by the headmaster to show us
the way to the station, would have compared favourably with any English
schoolgirl of the same age. Her father had visited England, “and
you have no _sand_ in England,” she added, half incredulously, “and
father could not make them understand about the sand here.” She came
from up-country, and was able to tell us that two handsome large grey
and black birds with a singularly limpid note were “rain birds.” She
also pointed out to us two large castor-oil trees, and told us that
the magpies, predatory, knowing-looking birds, which are to be seen
everywhere in Australia, are called “break o’ day boys” in the country,
because, like our cocks, they call the neighbourhood.
It is only quite recently that Western Australia has acquired its
University; it is in fact of such new foundation, that, like some
of Perth itself, it is still housed in temporary buildings. Its
professorial staff is appointed, and it confers degrees, but the
scene of its labours is at present in a number of classrooms beneath
a corrugated iron roof, opposite the charming gardens of Government
House--Australia is very good to its governors in the matter of houses
and gardens. But Perth is developing with great rapidity, and a
probable permanent site for the University is already talked of, on the
banks of the Swan River, in the National Reserve or King’s Park.[3]
If working-men are liberally treated by the state as regards education
for their children, they are treated no less generously as regards
housing accommodation.
One afternoon we visited, in company with the State Premier, some of
the houses the state builds for working-men. The bungalows were built
on the Western Australian plan on piles; one-storied verandahed houses
each in its own palisaded plot of ground about a quarter of an acre in
extent. Outhouses, including a washhouse, were at a little distance
from the main building. The houses were pretty and picturesque; they
were constructed of coloured “sand” bricks, made of cement and sand,
and had corrugated iron roofs. They vary in type, and the intending
purchaser can see the plans and make his own selection according to
his taste and means. Those we visited were situated on the pleasant
outskirts of Perth, with a view over the Swan River. We went over
several in the course of construction, and then made our way to a
street of occupied houses. We left the motor-car behind here, for the
roads were of soft sand like a sea beach. The sand was held together
by a low-growing plant, a kind of mesembryanthemum, locally known as
“pig’s face.” It has very thick, succulent leaves and an attractive
flower like a large primrose-coloured thistle. Sheep or cattle will
eat it, and it is almost independent of moisture. We visited some
new-comers who had lately taken one of the houses. The owner was a
member of the Legislative Council, and had recently left the goldfields
to come and live in Perth; for Western Australia holds that it pays
its legislators to legislate, and requires of them whole-hearted
devotion to the service of the state for their £300 a year salary. He
had already made his garden. The front lawn was sown with grass and
sanded over, and he was busied in making a vegetable garden in the
sand, in which early spring flowers were showing even then.
Inside, the rooms were large and well furnished, the bedrooms opening
on to the broad, shady verandah that faced what would eventually be the
lawn. As we drove away the Premier pointed out a small wooden house in
a tiny plot of ground--that, he said, is all a man can do without state
aid for the same money.
As to the financial part of the scheme, it is regulated on no principle
of extravagant philanthropy, but is conceived on a sound commercial
basis, to repay the Government the interest of 4½% on the capital
expended. The payments of the tenants are calculated on a basis of
5%, with a rebate of ½% on punctual payment. The land on which their
houses stand is inalienable, that is, at the end of ninety-nine years
it reverts to the state, and in the meantime the owner cannot dispose
of it except to the Government, who will take it back on a valuation,
allowing compensation on improvements, or making deductions from the
original cost on depreciations. To be eligible as a tenant a man’s
income must be under £400 a year, and he pays a small deposit. The
most expensive houses vary from £600 to £700. The tenant’s weekly
payments, which may be spread over a period of thirty years, eventually
make the house his own; but his payments may vary in accordance with
his means, and he can make his house his own at any point by paying
off the balance. No wonder that with such inducements to linger in
the neighbourhood of a town, men should shrink from the harder, more
vigorous life up-country. Yet it is “up-country” men that Australia
wants, to clear, sow, and till her rich, fertile soil; with enterprise
and energy to win certain fortune, and courage to face the initial
hardships and loneliness, which bring their own reward.
With all her natural advantages Western Australia’s development is
only a matter of the last twenty years. Like most of the rest of the
continent, she has an inhospitable and forbidding coast. The Dutch
knew of the existence of a southern land or, “Terra Australis,” before
the end of the sixteenth century, and Dutch captains sailing from the
Cape to Java and the East Indies not infrequently found themselves
within sight of a desolate and unknown coast, which they gradually
charted, till it was mapped in outline from the Gulf of Carpentaria to
Cape Leeuwin. It was not, however, till nearly the end of the century
that the first Englishman landed in Australia, when Captain Dampier,
commanding the “Roebuck,” navigated the western and north-western
coastline in 1699, and was not encouraged by what he saw there.
Sailing from the Downs in January with fifty men, and twenty months’
provisions, Dampier sighted the low, even shores of Australia in August
of the same year, and entered Shark’s Bay, as he called it. He and his
men went ashore, but sought in vain for water on that waterless coast,
digging wells, but to no purpose. A hundred years later, in 1803, the
continent was circumnavigated by Matthew Flinders, who suggested that
“Australia” should be substituted for the Dutch name of New Holland.
Still nearly another century passed away before Western Australia begun
to grow and prosper. In 1826 Major Lockyer was sent from Sydney, with
troops and a party of convicts, to occupy King George’s Sound on the
south coast, where the Port of Albany stands to-day, and a few years
later the Swan River Settlement was formed in the neighbourhood of
Fremantle and Perth; but these first beginnings of the colony were
unpropitious, and it languished till the discovery of gold brought the
first great influx of population, and with it the consequent demand
for agricultural produce, which at last gave an impetus to Western
Australian development.
Slowly the outside world began to realise the immense possibilities
of this great territory, which occupies about one-third of the whole
continent, and has an area eighteen times that of England and Wales.
Within its fertile and beautiful interior, stretching from the
temperate to tropical zones, were found districts well fitted for
raising cattle and sheep, for agriculture, and fruit-growing and the
cultivation of vines. Vast primeval forests of valuable timber cover
many square miles, while the discovery of coal and other minerals
accompanied that of gold. Western Australia is no less fortunate in
its climate than in its natural resources: over the greater part of
the state it is equable and pleasant without violent extremes. The dry
season lasts into April; the greater part of the rainfall, which varies
in different districts of the state from 40 to 10 inches, taking place
between May and September.
CHAPTER IV
IN THE BUSH
One great source of wealth to Western Australia are the karri forests,
covering thousands of square miles. Karri is a kind of eucalyptus
closely allied to the better-known jarrah, one of the hardest woods
in existence. It has been used at home to pave the streets of London.
In all but one respect karri is as good as jarrah, its only point of
inferiority is that it cannot be employed for underground purposes,
while jarrah can be left under water for twenty years without being any
the worse for it. Karri has to be specially prepared--“powellised” is
the technical term--and that is an expensive process. Otherwise it is
almost impossible to tell the two woods apart, except by the ash after
burning.
Western Australia asserts that its karri trees are the tallest in the
world, though Victorians make the same claim for the giant gums of
Gippsland. So far these Gippsland trees have been proved to be the
tallest in Australia. The official measurements are: height, 326 feet
1 inch; girth, 25 feet 7 inches; measured six feet from the ground.[4]
Their dimensions are surpassed by the Californian redwood, which have
been found attaining a height of 340 feet; but whatever the actual
measurements, the effect of the immense height of the Australian
trees is everywhere imposing enough to warrant competitive statements
concerning it.
Remote from all habitation, the difficulties in the way of felling
and transporting the karri are very great, and the Western Australian
Government have in consequence established some state sawmills about
two hundred miles up-country, in the heart of the primeval, uncleared
forest. It is the nucleus of a new township called Big Brook. Australia
has not shown herself altogether felicitous in her nomenclature, for
generally it is neither original nor descriptive, except where native
names have been adopted, which, if not euphonious, have a meaning.
We had the good fortune to be in Perth on the occasion of an official
visit organised by the Government. Australian trains always run at
night, and so avoid much tedium and loss of time. After an early
dinner, we started from Perth at 7.30 for Big Brook in a special train.
The line, like all Western Australian railways, was laid on a narrow
gauge, with the result that the carriages jolted and rocked like a
small boat in a storm. An odd little characteristic feature of West
Australian travelling is that at the end of each carriage is suspended
a canvas water-bag, with a cup attached to it. They are also seen
hanging in verandahs, impressing on the stranger that he is in a dry
and thirsty land, where water is always precious.
One of the advantages of the Western Australian climate is that
the nights are cool, though the spring sunshine was intensely hot.
Whoever organised this Government visit to the sawmills had a very
high standard of comfort, for from first to last it was most admirably
arranged. We were a small but very pleasant little party, and met and
talked in the friendly Australian way, in each other’s compartments.
About nine o’clock a light supper was brought round, and we soon after
went to bed and fitfully to sleep under a mountain of rugs. Whenever
the train stopped there was a loud chorus of frogs from unseen swamps.
We were called next morning by the conductor bringing us tea, and
later, while we were dressing, he came round with fruit. We woke to
find ourselves already in the depths of the forest among the soaring
white trunks of the karri, the early sun tinging their smooth trunks
with red. The line had been recently made, and the sleeping cars were
very heavy, so we proceeded slowly. There was very little sign of life;
we could almost feel the great deep silence of the forest, moist, and
fresh, and cold, in the frost of early morning, for it lies 400 feet
above the sea level, and the temperature was very different from that
of the dry sandy plains of Perth. At long intervals solitary wooden
houses stood in little clearings, with grave-eyed children before the
doorway, shading their eyes to watch the unfamiliar passage of a big
train. More seldom we came upon a scattered village of tents, roughly
put up like a gipsy encampment, pitched among the damp undergrowth.
There was something pathetic in the deep isolation of these pioneers,
though the near neighbourhood of the railway made their lives almost
metropolitan, compared with those of many Australian settlers.
As we drew nearer to our journey’s end, we passed an occasional small
clearing, where the yellow sandy soil had already been planted with
apple trees for the fruit growing, which is one of the industries
of the future for Western Australia; or patches of forest had been
ringbarked,[5] and left to die, after the cheap but wasteful method
of clearing in use. Visitors to Australia cannot help being impressed
with the waste of timber, which seems appalling to an inhabitant of
an over-populated northern country, where everything grows slowly,
and every inch of wood has its economic value. They are too ready to
rush into print, or public pronouncements, on a subject of which only
prolonged residence in the country, and a more than superficial study
of its economic problems, could enable them to judge. In the first
place the cost of transport is prohibitive, or means of transport may
even be non-existent; and secondly, in a new country time is money.
Great tracts of forest all over Australia are ringbarked and left to
rot. In the Government sawmills at Big Brook, the debris of the great
karri trees is lost. There is wholesale waste, wholesale destruction
of timber going on in Australia, the least intelligent observer
cannot fail to mark it, but time is literally money in Australia. “We
can’t afford to wait,” said one of the leading statesmen of Western
Australia, commenting on the waste of timber at Big Brook. “We
sacrifice five pounds to gain twenty,” said one of the shrewdest and
best-informed officials of Victoria.
By the common process of ringbarking, dead trees are left standing
over great areas of forest land, vast white skeleton armies, a strange
and desolate sight. If the land is to be used for arable purposes,
the trees have to be removed; but for pasture, when the trees are
dead, and can no longer deprive the grass of nourishment and moisture,
they remain standing for years, till in time with the process of
the seasons, and the attacks of insects, the hard wood decays and
crumbles away. Thus the destruction of forests goes on in order to
provide timber for building; for fencing, mining, fuel, as well as
for commercial purposes of export, or to improve, or create, arable
or pasture land. In Western Australia besides, green timber is cut
for fuel, in the neighbourhood of the goldfields, because of the
scarcity of coal, but natural reafforestation is usually allowed to
proceed. However, when all these necessities are admitted, there has
been a deplorable waste of timber, the want of which is already felt
in settled districts; and it is hoped that further wanton destruction
will be prevented, and replanting will be undertaken by all the states.
Official opinion is becoming alive to the importance of the question
to the future history of Australia. Victoria and New South Wales are
doing some planting, but South Australia is the only state in which
forest plantation is being carried on on a large scale.[6]
The railway ended abruptly in a large clearing in the forest about
fifteen miles from the coast and two hundred miles from Perth. The
air was that of a keen autumn morning, and we climbed down from our
carriages, for there was of course no platform, feeling stiff and
chilly, to find breakfast waiting for us in a big wooden hall, with a
great fire blazing in the kitchen, which opened out of it, the most
cheering and comfortable sight in the wilderness. These halls are a
feature of backwood settlements in Australia; they are utilised for
all social and business purposes, and are the common meeting ground of
the community. In this instance the landlord leased the building from
the state, and provided meals for the men employed in the sawmills.
He invited us to inspect his pleasant kitchen, the floor sanded with
sweet-smelling, deep-red sawdust. At the back he was putting up
bedrooms in small detached one-storied wooden buildings. Big Brook with
its keen, pure air, the sweet, clean scent of the fresh-sawn wood, and
all round, the illimitable forest, mysterious and impenetrable, would
be an ideal resting-place, if anyone in Australia were ever over-worked.
But meanwhile breakfast was waiting for us, a never-to-be-forgotten
breakfast of good coffee, hot rolls, porridge, new-laid eggs, and
chops the tenderest in the world, the product of the local sheep. Fig
jam, with which it concluded, was excellent. Figs grow readily in
Western Australia, and produce abundant crops of fruit. They were very
noticeable at this time of year, as they were the only deciduous tree.
After breakfast we visited the whole settlement, which of course was
built entirely of wood. In the school, in a bright, cheerful classroom,
a master was conducting the tiny classes of well-dressed, rosy-cheeked
children. Opposite the school was a billiard-room, where the men could
meet in the evenings; there was also a bank, and a post office. We were
impressed by the splendid physique of the men; they were as agile as
cats, muscular and supple; and these qualities were necessary, for the
work is very dangerous from the moment the axe is laid to the root of
the tree. The logs are of immense weight, they bound and crash down the
incline to the back of the mill, when they are unloaded from the truck,
and fly asunder with great force when they are sawn. The log, or trunk
of the tree is first sawn in two longitudinally, and is then again
cut into smaller and smaller slices, till it becomes planks. The saws
are graduated, becoming more and more fine. The task of keeping them
true is an accomplishment of great delicacy, it is one man’s work; he
corrects deviations in the metal with a hammer, judging them entirely
by eye.
In the neighbourhood of the sawmill all the air is filled with flying
sawdust, and the sweet scent of the freshly sawn wood. The dust falls
to the ground in deep red masses, the flying chips look like scraps
of raw meat, but the rich colour fades when they dry. The process of
preparing the karri wood for use is at present a very expensive one.
The planks have to be stewed in order to preserve them. They are put
for this purpose into immense tanks of molasses, and left seething
there to harden. It is hoped that scientific experiment may evolve
a less costly method. After going over the mills we were taken up a
little railway line into the forest to see a tree felled. We sat on
benches on trucks behind the engine, which carried a supply of wood
for its boiler, for the cost of bringing coal up to Big Brook would be
quite prohibitive. Even the boilers that work the mills are fed with
wood. The engine was run by a magnificent-looking old stoker with a
white beard and the air of a patriarch. When we scrambled off the
trucks on to the soft, rich earth of the forest, we had to wait to let
a bullock team go by, twenty-four of them pulling one log with a big
metal “shoe” on the end to prevent its digging into the ground. The
passage left a deep slide in the red earth. The bullocks are bound
together in twos by very uncomfortable-looking, heavy wooden yokes, and
their progress is punctuated by frightful yells and cracking of whips
from the drivers.
[Illustration: FELLING KARRI.]
We had not far to walk; the sun was now almost oppressively hot, and
the steamy atmosphere was full of the rich, moist smell of the damp
earth and the undergrowth. The woodcutters, who fell these immense
trees, are so skilled that they can gauge the exact spot on which they
will fall to within a few inches; such accuracy is a matter of life and
death in tree-felling. When we arrived on the scene the great trunk
of the karri was already sawn through by two men working on a kind of
little platform erected round it. For an instant the slim, white tree
tottered, while we held our breath, then it began to fall slowly, at
first with a crackling sound; finally it came crashing and tearing its
way among the neighbouring trees, followed by a shower of leaves; there
was a sound as of the firing of a big gun; all the earth trembled; it
seemed, as if the whole vast silence of the forest was shaken. A second
tree that we saw felled measured one hundred and fifty-eight feet to
the first fork.
The woodcutters are paid by the load that the bullocks draw, the bare
trunk of the tree when its branches have been lopped off. We were told
that they can make as much as £6 a week. The cost of living does not
amount to much more than 25s. a week for a single man, as he can board
sumptuously at the Hall for 22s., and the price of lodgings is about
1s. 6d. This leaves a considerable surplus, and in Big Brook there is
no means of spending money. In consequence, men occasionally go off to
the nearest town when they have amassed a small capital, and stay there
till it is all spent, and they have nothing to show for it. They work
eight hours a day, and everything is regulated by contract. They are of
various nationalities, but all of magnificent physique. While we were
waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks
passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers
cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a
frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to
the bullocks. Soon after we began the return journey we passed through
a belt of jarrah, the still harder kind of eucalyptus that we had only
seen in the form of piles; the trunks were reddish instead of white
like the karri.
We saw also for the first time a common feature of the Western
Australian bush, the curious “Black Boys,” called in Queensland “grass
trees.” They look like a knotted dead trunk with bulrushes growing on
the top in thick bunches. Sometimes the trunk is forked, and there are
a pair of odd bushy heads on one black misshapen trunk.
The bush in this part of Australia has little diversity. The keen
air of the early morning had made us very hungry, in spite of so
substantial a breakfast, and we were not sorry to reach Jarraduck,
the settlement in the forest where lunch was waiting in another large
wooden hall. The long tables were decorated with masses of golden
wattle and purple kennedya. Lunches of this kind, and we sampled very
many, are always just alike, varying only with the resources of the
neighbourhoods,--lots of flowers and a warm welcome, plates of assorted
cold meats, of which turkey is an almost inevitable ingredient;
elaborate sweets, of which one is always an excellent trifle, and fruit
of the district, in this case the small, sweet, thick-skinned local
orange.
The refined-looking, sweet-faced landlady seemed inappropriate to
the rough surroundings. “We shall just stay here till we can better
ourselves,” she explained. A few more hours brought us out of the
forest, there were more clearings, homesteads became more frequent,
the red soil was freshly ploughed for oats, orchards began to take
the place of the eucalyptus, with apple trees not yet in blossom,
and orange and lemon trees covered with fruit. The country became
hilly, and half-castes were at work in the fields, shock-headed, and
unintelligent-looking. We had left the bush behind, and were now in the
region of an older settlement, the fruit-growing district of Western
Australia. Fruit-growing is becoming one of the most important factors
of Western Australian industry, and it is hoped that it will prove an
even greater source of prosperity, because a more permanent one, than
the gold that cannot last for ever. The climate, and much of the soil
in the South-West are admirably adapted for all kinds of fruit-growing.
The apples are excellent, so are the oranges, pears, plums, apricots,
and peaches, strawberries and gooseberries, all of which are grown
successfully. Fruit-growers, who have taken care in selecting a holding
where the soil and conditions are favourable for their crops, have not
long to wait before reaping their profits, as six-year-old apple trees
have been known to produce from £50 to £60 an acre. It is important
also to select a fruit for growing that will travel and keep. In 1913
there were still more than 88,000 acres suitable for the cultivation of
fruit or vine-growing, subdivided into convenient blocks and waiting
for selectors.
Bridgetown is the centre of the fruit-growing district of Western
Australia. Motor-cars were waiting to show us the neighbourhood,
and we started in the golden light of the late afternoon sun to see
something of the country. It was our first experience of Australian
motorists. To enjoy motoring in Australia one must have an adventurous
disposition. Except in the neighbourhood of large towns the roads are
very rough; indeed, the long droughts make it impossible that they
should be otherwise. The soft, dry soil crumbles away, the light dust
is stirred up by every passing vehicle, leaving deep ruts, so that the
same road is often on different levels, and a car runs along at a sharp
angle, with one wheel poised on the edge of a rut, and the other in a
hollow. Practised drivers achieve this difficult accomplishment with
much skill and the minimum of jolting, but even so, the car often takes
flying leaps. So we started on an apparently breakneck career, holding
tight on to the sides of the motor, and dashed up and down hills that
an English motorist would have hesitated to look at, red and rutty as
a Devonshire lane in winter. We never knew the name of that kindly
motorist, who so gallantly risked his own and our lives, not to mention
his machine, in showing us as much as possible of the surrounding
country before the light faded. He was one of the many, many unknown
friends who did us some passing kindness on our rapid journey, leaving
only a warm memory behind it. Hail and farewell to each and all of them!
The country-side was very beautiful, more English, and less
unfamiliar-looking, than anything we had yet seen, with steeply
undulating hills and valleys, springing young green crops, and
orchards, with apple trees whitened against some parasitical scab, or
oranges and lemons. The comfortable homesteads had a more finished
and abiding air than anything we had yet seen; for Bridgetown, as our
host explained to us, “is a very old settlement--sixty years old!” It
even possessed a tiny stone church, which gave it a pleasantly homely
and established air. We crossed the beautiful Blackwood river by a
picturesque wooden bridge where the river flows through a deep gorge
up which black and white wild duck were sailing. In the fading glow of
the sunset the country looked still more English, for the groups
of gum trees that crowned the hills were indistinguishable, and the
evening light seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of calm contentment over
the thriving country-side, as of a day’s work well done. We ran through
the little scattered township, to the Freemason’s Hotel, at which our
friend the motorist deposited us, and vanished into the dusk.
[Illustration: OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK.]
As we went in out of the darkness one of our fellow-travellers brought
us a specimen of the pretty, curious “kangaroo paw,” a flower that
looks as if it had been cut out of bright red and green moss, whose
buds take the exact shape of a kangaroo’s little foot. After dinner
we strolled along the broad, silent country road, leading out into
the deep stillness beyond, broken only by the barking of the village
dogs, and the croaking of unseen frogs. The men of the neighbourhood
loitered in the light of the shop windows, kindly looking and highly
curious. We met at Bridgetown a Government official at the head of the
Fruit-growing Department. He told us that this corner of South-Western
Australia, a district as large as the state of Victoria, was the finest
soil for fruit-growing in the whole state. The industry was of very
recent growth, the first trial shipment was only made ten years ago,
but since 1907 the trade had been established upon a commercial basis,
and the export of apples was greatly increasing every year in quantity.
Western Australia has also successfully exported grapes, but
unfortunately the manufacture of wine is now on the decline. A very
delicate and pleasant chablis is produced there. We tasted two kinds,
a pale, and a warmly coloured golden chablis. They compared favourably
with the light wines of Italy, and though like them, they would
probably lose all their character and flavour after being fortified for
export, they could be grown for home consumption. The explanation of
the decline given to us at Bridgetown was that since Federation, and
the abolition of inter-state customs, growers cannot afford to mature
their wines sufficiently to compete with the longer established trade
of the Eastern states. It is hoped that raisins and currants may be
produced, and the climate is also suitable for the growth of olives;
the evergreen trees would serve the further purpose of affording
shade for the cattle. Our return journey was made successfully and
uneventfully, and we slept soundly, only awaking occasionally, to find
ourselves being shot to and fro like shuttles in a spinning mill; and
arrived home to breakfast at Cottesloe Beach.
CHAPTER V
AGRICULTURE AND GOLD
It was the discovery of gold in West Australia that gave the first
real impetus to the development of the state. In the earlier half of
the nineteenth century the country was urgently in need of labour, and
from 1843 onwards was glad to supply the deficiency by the importation
of convicts. The convict system “assigned” people, as it was called,
to the settlers to live upon their property and perform compulsory
labour for them; the residue worked in “road gangs” or in Government
penal settlements. All the other states, as they grew and prospered,
began to resent the dumping on their shores of the least desirable
element of the population from home. As early as 1837 a Parliamentary
Committee was appointed to inquire into the whole question, both from
the point of view of the unhappy convicts and their Australian hosts,
and recommended that the practice should cease. It was, however, too
convenient a solution of a difficulty to be readily relinquished by
the home authorities. It continued in a modified form till the Eastern
states protested so vigorously and actively, that soon after 1848 the
home Government, not without reluctance, were obliged to limit the
importation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then
called, and Western Australia.
The fact that Western Australia was glad to utilise this forced labour,
and continued to do so, for many years later, provoked deep resentment
in the Eastern states; it was seriously suggested that Western
Australia should be boycotted by the other colonies. It was not till
1868 that transportation was finally abolished, and by that time the
colony was firmly established.
So far the most important product of Western Australia has been her
mineral wealth. As early as 1842 mining operations were begun with the
discovery of lead and copper. Minerals form three-fourths of the value
of all the exports by the state since 1900, and nearly a third of the
whole mineral produce of the continent from the same date. The chief
mineral has of course been gold. It was discovered in the north at
Kimberley in 1882, and the announcement of the discovery brought many
fortune seekers whose adventure ended in disappointment, for Kimberley
has not produced any startling results. The real history of mining
in Western Australia did not, however, begin till 1892. It was in the
early nineties that the gold rush took place to the mining centre of
Coolgardie, and it is the East Coolgardie goldfield which includes the
mining centre of Kalgoorlie, that has produced more than half of the
whole value of the mineral products of the state. The total produce was
calculated up to the end of 1912 at more than £113,000,000, and of this
total more than 54% was produced by the East Coolgardie goldfield.[7]
The principal part of it came from the famous group of mines which
form the “Golden Mile” at Kalgoorlie. Much has been written about
the goldfields of Western Australia, and the gold rush of the early
nineties. Now Coolgardie has burnt itself out, is a dead city, though
mining is still carried on at Kalgoorlie. When gold was discovered
there was no water within three hundred miles of Coolgardie, and an
engineer of rare gifts and indomitable enterprise, conceived a scheme
for conveying water from the hills round Perth the three hundred odd
miles through the intervening almost desert plains. His name was C. Y.
O’Connor, and he is also responsible for the artificially constructed
harbour at Fremantle.
He got his water from the Darling Range, the low wooded hills that
make such a charming background to the Swan River, utilising a stream
in the hills to form a great dam or weir. Mundaring Weir is one of
the sights of Perth, not merely as a triumph of engineering, but for
its beautiful scenery. We started early in the afternoon one hot day
on the pretty little journey up to the granite slopes of the Darling
Range. The intervening country is almost populous, and very busy. The
line runs through Midland Junction, where the rolling stock for Western
Australia is constructed, and past a blank stretch of brickfields. The
granite begins to crop out on the grassy slopes of the hills as the
train approaches Mundaring. The neighbourhood is very fertile, with
large vineyards, and groves of orange trees covered with fruit. The
river, which forms the weir, had the appearance of a large lake lying
between steep, wooded banks, in the hot afternoon sun. It was faintly
reminiscent of Coniston, except that a large area of the trees on the
distant hills had been ringbarked to increase the water supply. They
stood a melancholy sentinel company on the hills they had once clothed,
tossing twisted, white arms to Heaven in mute appeal. The air was heavy
with the scent of wattle flashing golden among the sombre grey of the
other trees. The distant rattle of frogs in some backwater below, and
the occasional sharp trill of a bird were the only sounds to break the
stillness. We descended the rocky bank to get a better view of the
great dam. Its concrete walls are so sloped that the falling water does
not leave them at any point, and so an impact that would wear out the
wall is avoided.
In the course of its construction a large fissure was discovered in the
bed of the river, which had to be filled in with cement. We visited
the power-house, where the great pumps are busy day and night sending
water to the goldfields. It took eleven days from the time the first
trickle of water left Mundaring Weir for it to reach Coolgardie.
While the work was nearing its completion, its successful achievement
seemed incredible to the outside world. Unfortunately the inventor of
this great experiment, Mr. C. Y. O’Connor, died just too soon to know
that the water from Mundaring Weir had covered the three hundred odd
miles to the goldfields. A statue of Western Australia’s famous state
engineer stands on a hill above the scene of his greatest achievement.
The execution of this scheme, as well as that of the harbour at
Fremantle, were largely due to the influence and interest of Sir John
Forrest, first Premier of Western Australia, to whose enlightened
views and active patriotism the state has owed much.
We had tea at a hotel, whose verandah overlooked woods falling steeply
away at the back. It was a charming little place, and we should have
liked to stay there, forgetting that in Australia there is no soft,
lingering twilight, but dusk follows immediately, darkness very
swiftly, on the setting of the sun. Sometimes there is an afterglow,
a luminous orange light suffuses the darkness, and the heavy masses
of gum trees stand out inky black on the horizon. Such an afterglow
illuminated our return journey from Mundaring Weir to Perth.
Apart from its natural beauty and engineering achievement, Mundaring
Weir, or at least its neighbourhood, has a peculiar interest for the
zoologist. It is the home of a certain little black animal. To the
uninitiated its appearance is something between that of a small black
slug and a caterpillar, but to the scientific man it is of paramount
importance, because its legs are not real legs. Peripatus is its name,
and it lives under stones. Only recently, however, the secluded and
innocent life of the unfortunate peripatus has been rudely interrupted,
and he was in fact well-nigh exterminated by the visit to Perth of a
learned society all in search of specimens. So that henceforth the
peripatus will be more esteemed than ever in the scientific world.
We said it was the gold rush that created, or at least accelerated
the agricultural development of Western Australia. The influx of
population, with the direct aim of gold-digging, brought in its train
a dependent and attendant crowd of settlers to minister to its needs
by the provision of agricultural produce, meat, flour, butter, and
vegetables. Moreover, many of those who had come out to seek gold in
the mines, sought it instead in the fruits of the earth, in grain, and
in hay, in fruit and corn-growing. In the extreme north, known as the
Kimberley country, cattle are raised; south of that, in the south-west
pastoral district, sheep are the principal stock. The wheat belt, as
it is called, is a strip of country stretching about five hundred
miles from the Murchison River in the north, to the south coast east
of Albany. But the limits of the wheat-growing area cannot at present
be defined, the riverless districts of Australia are not desert in the
sense that the Sahara is a desert; strips throughout the so-called
desert are pastoral country on which grass will grow, supporting a
more or less sparse vegetation. After rain the desert is clothed with
vegetation, and the permanent plants depend on small local supplies of
subterranean water. But there is besides a vast artesian storage. These
so-called desert areas are shrinking every year, and the “wheat-line”
is encroaching upon and absorbing them as improved methods of
agriculture prevail. Thus at present farmers “are getting remunerative
crops from regions of low rainfall and light sandy soil, which would
have been looked upon as chimerical a decade ago.”[8]
The land laws in Western Australia are framed on easy terms for the
settler. The holdings are limited to two thousand acres of agricultural
land, including a homestead farm, or the equivalent of five thousand
acres in grazing land, but the husband or wife of the holder may select
an additional thousand acres of agricultural land, or two thousand
five hundred acres of grazing land. A homestead farm of 160 acres can
be taken up by new settlers on payment of about £9 in fees, with an
additional 30s. for a Crown grant at the end of seven years. Larger
grants may be had at from 10s. an acre, payable in twenty years without
interest. Certain conditions attach to land purchase. The holder of a
homestead farm of 160 acres, for instance, must reside there for six
months in each of the first five years; he must expend four shillings
an acre within the first two years, and a total of fourteen
shillings an acre in seven years, of which total only £30 is allowed
to be deducted in value for the cost of his house. Half the land must
be fenced within five years, the whole within seven years. One hundred
to a thousand acres of “Conditional Purchase Land,” at from 10s. an
acre, may be taken up. It is paid for in forty half-yearly instalments,
which, during the first three years, need not exceed 3d. an acre.
Conditions of residence, relating to improvements and fencing are, of
course, attached to these holdings. Conditional purchase by direct
payment is made on equally easy terms.
[Illustration: ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.]
We spent a Sunday in Perth, which was devoted partly to attending
the cathedral service, and partly to visiting a native compound
some distance away. Perth appeared to be a church-going place,
and its people, Prayer Book in hand, and in their Sunday clothes,
were setting off to their various places of worship, of which the
neighbourhood affords a great variety. The service in the cathedral
was well attended, and was conducted with that dignified simplicity
characteristic of the best traditions of English church worship; and
the familiar words of the liturgy seemed more deeply filled with
meaning in this far-off country. The singing of the choir was an
admirable performance, and would compare favourably with that of most
English churches.
After the service we were to lunch with the State Premier, and his
car was waiting for us. The chauffeur was not the uniformed and
correct personage, who drives our cars at home, but, as befits a
democratic country, a genial and friendly soul, who having bade us
welcome to the car, whirled us up to Mount Lawley, throwing occasional
information at us over his shoulder. Mount Lawley is a pleasant suburb
of Perth, if one can talk of suburbs where all is suburban; it lies
upon the slopes of the Swan River, and commands an inspiriting view
of the city, spreading out far and wide over its hills in vigorous
new growth. This Australian household in which we were guests had a
charmingly patriarchal atmosphere, for three generations sat at table:
a delightful, picturesque old couple, who had come out to Australia in
those hard and grinding early days, before a colonist had his bread
buttered, and his house built for him immediately on his arrival.
It was on this occasion that we saw for the first time those
formidable, but insignificant-looking Australian pests, the white
ant. We had gone out to see our host’s collection of wallabies,
large, brown, rat-like creatures, with the hind legs of a rabbit,
and we expressed a wish to see also the insect that could eat
everything except iron and jarrah wood. Australians cannot bear to
disappoint a guest. They would regard it as a breach of hospitality,
and an exhaustive search was made at once, till some white ants were
discovered under a wooden tub of plants--tiny white specks hurrying
away from the light.
The road to the Native Compound, for which we started after lunch, led
through the King’s Park or Government Reserve. Near all large townships
the Government has wisely set apart a tract of country to remain public
property. These are not parks in our sense of the word, for they are
not laid out in trim lawns and flowerbeds, or at least only a small
fraction of them; but the bush is left in its wild state, a sanctuary
for birds and animals. In the King’s Park red carriage drives lead
through the bush, at one point giving place to lawns and flowering
trees, and commanding a fine view of the Swan River and of Perth,
whose extent we for the first time realised. We were impressed by the
prosperous air of the crowds, whom the fine warm Sunday afternoon had
brought out; there were none among them who did not look well-to-do.
But our afternoon was only beginning. The Native Compound lay in the
direction of Guildford, a village about ten miles off, a settlement
of some antiquity compared to Perth. The way out into the country was
crowded with innumerable buggies taking whole families for an airing,
and a haze of red dust hung over the road.
We passed the race-course, as indispensable to an Australian town
as the post office, and the football ground, where we paused for a
moment to look on at a vigorous match between “the jockeys” and the
“bread-carriers.” Farther on people were playing on a newly laid-out
golf-course, driving off from tees on which the unfailing kerosene
tin did duty for sand-boxes, though one would hardly have thought
it necessary to collect sand in boxes in Western Australia. Turning
up a narrow, muddy road, we passed a lot of small nursery gardens,
“Chinamen’s gardens,” with the Chinamen busy in them, but the activity
of the Chinaman in Australia is hardly more popular than that of the
white ant. We ploughed and splashed our ways along this side track, for
the road was not made, till it ended abruptly in a gate. Now inured to
the methods of the Australian motorist, we almost expected the car to
take the gate in its stride, but having opened it, we ran up the side
of a grassy bank on to a sort of plateau, girdled by the bush, with
what looked like a very low-class gipsy encampment in one corner,
not aristocratic gipsies with vans, but dirty little round tents
like those that were formerly dotted about the banks of the Thames,
near London, in haymaking time, but which have vanished before a too
inquisitorial County Council.
[Illustration: THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.]
This was the native camp we had come to see; it had been a
camping-ground for the blacks from time immemorial, and the present
owner of the estate leaves it free to those, whose camping-ground was
formerly the whole vast continent. There are not very many natives
in Australia now; it is supposed by some that they were never very
numerous, that the struggle for existence on those arid plains and
waterless hills was too severe for these hardy nomads. Be that as
it may, they are dwindling, and in contact with the whites they
lose the primitive virtues they possess. The natives we saw at the
camping-ground near Perth certainly did not appear to have primitive,
or any other virtues. They were, it is true, principally half-breeds,
and whether regarded from the physiological or moral point of view,
they were a depressing spectacle. They were provided with Government
blankets, instead of kangaroo skins, and some form of a mission was
singing hymns for their edification; but both men and women were a
miserable, degenerate, apathetic looking crew. They talked English
with a cockney accent. The strange mob of yapping, small dogs of
indistinguishable breeds were the only thing that evinced much vitality.
There were, however, among them a few full-blooded blacks. One of
these, a shrewd-looking old woman with a grizzled mop of hair, told
us that when she was a baby, “the white people took me, but I lay
in the wood and listened to my people talking till I learnt their
language; then I ran away and went back to them.” We were anxious for
an exhibition of throwing the boomerang, or “kyle,” as they call it,
that curved stick, which, apparently missing its aim, describes an arc
and returns to the hand that threw it. The half-castes have lost the
art both of throwing and carving the kyle, and are too indolent to
achieve either, but an old native stepped out from among them to show
us how it was done. He had thick black hair, and his bright dark eyes
gleamed in his flat, glistening, ebony face. It was very curious to
watch him standing there turning his head about, sniffing and feeling
the direction of the wind, and at last he threw the kyle, spinning,
circling, returning, many times, while we watched him fascinated, and
the motley crowd of half-breeds looked on too at the art they had no
skill to practise. They have even lost the art of making fire with
the hard fruit of the banksia, “mungite” is the native name for it.
“Never go before a black,” they say in Western Australia; they can’t
be trusted, apparently, not so much from their malevolence as a sort
of light-hearted instinct of destruction. For instance, seeing a man
standing by the wall of a small shed at a little distance from the
camp, one of the blacks playfully let fly at him with a boomerang. He
fortunately missed the man’s leg, but made a hole in the building.
We left the camp, for there appeared a pretty little English girl,
who, having heard that there were visitors to the compound, had been
sent by her mother to ask them to tea in the hospitable Australian
fashion; so following a grassy track, we came to our great surprise
upon a dignified old country house on a wooded promontory overlooking
a higher reach of the Swan River. The owners of this beautiful estate
belonged to one of the “Seven Families” of Western Australia; that is,
they were descended from Australian grandparents on both sides. In
Australia one says, “My grandmother came over in 1830,” as we should
say in England, we came over with the Conqueror; for 1830 is in the
West, at all events, the beginning of Australian civilised history,
and those early settlers had a heroic struggle, and had to face every
sort of hardship, hunger, and the want of any kind of comfort, in a
way that settlers of to-day, even those who venture upon the strenuous
life of the backwoods, can never experience. The details of the lives
of these pioneers would form an extraordinarily interesting chapter in
Australian history, and, as was the fashion at that time, they beguiled
their loneliness with keeping diaries, a most valuable fashion to the
historian, for even the dullest chronicler unconsciously throws light
on manners and customs of the day, commonplaces to him, that the next
generation has forgotten. But invaluable as these old diaries would be,
they have unfortunately been in most cases destroyed.
Our hostess told us regretfully of several instances she had known of
this being done by very old people. They were very small communities
in those days, the life was rough and wild, and there was no public
opinion to control it, and, for that very reason, these intimate
records would have been all the more valuable and curious. As we sat
at tea in the charming drawing-room, with something of an old-world
atmosphere, somebody commented to our hostess on the extremely
difficult approach. Yes, she said, matter-of-factly, I prefer to have
no road to the house, it keeps “sundowners” away. The sundowner is
the Australian tramp; he arrives at nightfall and demands food and
lodging; if he does not get it, the householder pays the penalty in
missing poultry, or burnt ricks. Of course he only extorts this toll
in lonely places; but what a delightful career for a man of indolent
habits, and sufficient obtuseness of feeling, to wander through that
beautiful country, where the sun always seems to shine, sure, if not of
a welcome, of supper, bed, and breakfast, where he would.
The golden light of the setting sun was flooding the river and the
wooded hills, when we came away, our host and hostess pointing out to
us sadly a noble English oak tree on their lawn, that the white ants
had riddled through and through, reducing it to touchwood. We hurried
back, entering once more, as we neared Perth among a crowd of returning
cars, buggies, and bicycles, a haze of its soft red dust, while from
its hills the city itself was wrapped in a mysterious dull grey
twilight.
On one of our last days at Perth we paid a visit to the Parliament
House. Only the back is finished, and is impressive in its simplicity
of white freestone columns. The designs for the front are very
effective, the interior simple and well proportioned. While as for the
Upper House it is as luxurious as the council chamber of a medieval
Dutch town hall. We observe in passing that they provide remarkably
agreeable hot buttered toast there.
Our host on this occasion was an ex-Minister of Education, from whom
we learned many interesting facts about the social and economic
development of Western Australia. He was especially enthusiastic on the
importance and good results of cadet training, which he had done much
to promote. In the case of schoolboys of twelve to fourteen years old
it consists mainly of physical training calculated to produce better
development. This training carried out by the school teachers is given
for not less than fifteen minutes a day, the boys learn marching,
drill, and either first aid, swimming, or miniature rifle-shooting.
Teachers are trained for the purpose of giving this special education
in Government Schools of Instruction, where certificates of proficiency
are conferred; but the whole subject of the complete and admirable
system of Australian military training is dealt with in another chapter.
Soon after our arrival we were overtaken by rumours of European war,
almost incredible, except that Europe seemed so remote. Then came the
news that Germany had declared war on Russia and France. Great Britain,
it was said, would stand aloof. Even so the news was sufficiently
serious, and telegrams on the Perth post office were eagerly scanned.
It was not till quite the end of our visit that definite intelligence
arrived that England had joined the cause of the Allies, and even then
nobody realised it in the least.
Our last day came all too soon, warm and sunny, when we made the short
journey from Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle. The war news seemed more
real, when we saw a German tramp held up in the harbour, with the guns
of the forts trained on her. The big Orient liner was lying alongside,
and we boarded her with many regrets at what we were leaving behind,
for we had to say good-bye to many friends, and our cabin was filled
with flowers, sweet violets, and the heavy scented boronia, of which
Western Australia is so proud. At last we started on the four days’
voyage to Adelaide, and it was not till we reached Northern Queensland
that we again encountered that atmosphere of primitive freshness and
novelty, that we were leaving behind. So we left Western Australia,
with its warm-hearted, generous people, its vast, almost untouched
resources of primeval forest, and rich soil, its social problems,
on which the visitor is incompetent to pronounce, problems acute in
the old world, making themselves felt even here, especially that
seemingly irreconcilable one of the interests of the Labour man and the
Liberal. Irreconcilable so it seemed to us, for the Labour man may be
clear-sighted, but he cannot afford to be far-sighted, because, as he
himself would put it, he can’t afford to wait.
PART II
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER VI
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
In a poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific
Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined
dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching--head to head,
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?
This is what the Engines said
Unreported and unread.
Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each
engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine
from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and
the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West
rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storied East:--
All the Orient, all Cathay
Find through me the shortest way.
That parable will find a new application (will have found, perhaps,
we should say) in the meeting of the engines on the track which is
to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to
Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would
say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and
would be entitled to add others concerning Afric’s sunwashed lands,
for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through
Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland.
But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in
steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet
another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make
that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects
for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San
Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims
on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West
and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within
itself.
The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say
that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the
world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as
close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn,
were older than mankind, and if by some accident of social progress
its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western
Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip
of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear
on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks
on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the
vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. No
tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except
Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world.
But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam,
to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it
say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best,
man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in
the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll
upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of
enchantment in the bush; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and
here--you could see him at the beginning--he was carving wheat-lands
and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his
fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to
the markets of the East.
The locomotive from the East, with puffs which politeness had hitherto
repressed, would yield the point about antiquity in order to show that
in the more modern period the East had done very well with its time. On
the progress of Melbourne and Sydney it would not enlarge; suffice it
to point out the advantages of Adelaide.
It lies between the hills and the sea, a trap for sunbeams; a garden
city sweet with almond blossom in spring, tree-shaded in summer. A
girdle of parks is about its comely waist, and beyond them lie suburbs,
where the houses all have room to breathe. In the towns of the old
world the houses are on the top of one another, and the people too. In
Adelaide expansion takes place laterally, stretching out always to the
encircling range of hills; and the houses are one-storied. The city is
linked with its suburbs by radiating tramlines; and here one may pause
to interpolate an anecdote. Some years ago, when the writer was in
Naples, he was journeying by one of the trams which runs round the rim
of Naples’ incomparable bay. On the garden seat in front of him were
two Americans, who looked with him at the lovely vision, and said one
of them: “Well, I’ve been most everywhere, and seen most everything,
but I’ve never seen anything to compare with----” The writer leaned
forward to catch the anticipated eulogy on the view. “But,” concluded
the American lady, “I’ve never seen anything to compare with our car
service at Seattle!”
That is what the locomotive from the East would say about the car
service at Adelaide, which links up the spreading homesteads of the
periphery with the nucleus of handsome buildings, official, municipal,
educational, commercial, at the centre of the city. Adelaide is a
city within a park, surrounded by a garden suburb, and that is as
good a definition as one can find of it. It is handsome within its
city limits, taking a pride in its big buildings, the University
standing among lawns, its handsome private houses, its broad streets,
its general air of competence; but outside them, beyond the parks,
one would rather call it charming. The motor-car is bringing its
changes to Adelaide as to other places in the world. Just as in
London a generation ago the merchants and the well-to-do City men
built big houses at Streatham and Dulwich, but now are moving out to
Ascot or Sunningdale, so in Adelaide the prosperous are now building
towards Mount Lofty and the hills--though the gradients here are
trying even to the hard-driven Australian motor-car. The fringe of
suburbs is therefore occupied by what in England we should call
the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the
trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as
in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from
other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class--or
may we say a professorial class?--than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney,
or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying
that Adelaide represented “culture” in the Commonwealth; but that is
unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia
is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But
Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs,
interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic
problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of
pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another
story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical
canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to
primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities
of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the
studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that
most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, and he
produced a representation of “The Board of Irish Agriculture sowing
the Seeds of Progress in Ireland.” It was a picture which was full of
remarkably fine drawing, as one might expect from one of the best two
draughtsmen in Britain, and the nude figure of the lady distributing
seed (on the left of the canvas), as well as the two naked babies in
the middle, and the black-clothed missioner on the right, were all
admirable. But what did it mean? Most English critics were silent on
this point, and nobody seems to have troubled Mr. Orpen to explain
himself, for, as Wilde wrote to Whistler, “to be great is to be
misunderstood.” However, the picture was bought for the Adelaide Art
Gallery, which is rightly anxious to collect work of the younger
artists, and made no mistake in choosing Mr. Orpen as one of the most
brilliant among them.
When, however, the picture was hung at Adelaide, the people gasped.
Then they wrote to the newspapers. Then artists wrote to the
newspapers. Some of them sympathised with the public bewilderment.
One of them, the best of Australian water-colourists, bludgeoned the
public for their ignorance in not appreciating the colour and drawing
of the masterpiece; but he did not insult the picture by saying what
it meant, and that was what the public wanted to know.... Probably
the discussion would be going on yet, but the War put an end to it,
and the picture in 1915 still adorned the Art Gallery; and we hope
it may continue to do so, though it was rumoured that Mr. Orpen had
offered to substitute something less recondite. However, this anecdote
will perhaps illustrate the vividness of the interest which Adelaide
takes in artistic and intellectual movements. It is an interest which
may be perceived in its active University, a University that has
contributed several first-class men to English Universities, and is
no less perceptible in its society which reproduces very closely the
social atmosphere of an English University town such as Cambridge. The
resemblance becomes closer still if the comparison is made between
Adelaide’s flowering and tree-shaded suburbs and the residential
environs which stretch away from the University town at home.
Such is Adelaide. Beyond and outside it, and on the farther side of the
tree-covered barrier of hills is rural South Australia, which, if one
were to indicate on a map, one might shade off to the northward as the
population grew less dense and the region of widely separated sheep
stations became more prevalent. As the herbage grows more scanty and
the water supply more precarious, the sheep stations themselves become
larger and fewer, till they give place to desert. Perhaps the greatest
surprise to a European visitor is the kind of land which in the more
distant stations, where the rainfall sinks very close to the margin of
double figures per annum, is called pasture land. It is khaki-coloured
and scanty, and one would imagine that only a persevering sheep could
find anything on it to eat. Industry is certainly demanded of the
sheep, for the phrase of three acres and a cow is altered in Australia
to five acres to a sheep. When the rainfall sinks the sheep has still
farther to travel for its daily meal; when it fails, the back block
sheep farmers see their sheep die by the thousand and ruin approaching.
Nowhere does the rainfall become a factor that can be neglected, and
South Australia was suffering from drought in the year 1914, when
we visited the state; but though the extremity of scarcity had not
been reached, there seemed to eyes accustomed to English well-watered
pastures, hardly any water at all. From the summit of Mount Lofty,
whence one could so easily see the vast shield of the sea, there were
also pointed out to us nearer patches of water shining like dull steel
in the hollows of low hills. These were the reservoirs, basins filled
by streams which we called brooks. These storage reservoirs are the
device which South Australia is developing to counteract drought; and
we visited a new one in course of construction among the hills to the
north-west of Adelaide.
That was the day on which we visited Mr. Murray’s sheep farm, a mere
trifle of forty miles from Adelaide. Before leaving the subject of
the reservoir, which was interesting from the engineering design of
its dam, then being thrown across the gap of two hills--a difficult
and masterly piece of work--one may give some idea of the size of the
basin by remarking that Mr. Murray, who lived some ten miles away,
had protested against the first plans. The reason was that when the
reservoir became filled it would have come flooding up to his front
door. A very pleasant front door it was too, belonging to something
that was part manor-house, part farm, and the counterpart of which
might have been found in many an English county. A long, low house with
windows meant to shade large, cool rooms, a wide hall, with pictures
and polo sticks and photographs--photographs of famous sheep--and a
side table gleaming with silver--the cups won as prizes. In front of
the house roses and flowering borders and a lawn--on it playing a
collie and a tame kangaroo. Beyond, the orchard garden. And not a sheep
in sight.
Far better as a picture, our host and his tall sons on the stone steps
to welcome us; and in the pretty drawing-room--the drawing-room of a
Victorian house at home--the hostess and her daughter. You might see
them both any summer’s day at Hurlingham, or Henley, or at Lord’s when
the Oxford and Cambridge match is being played.
However, our purpose was to see sheep. Could this be a sheep farm?
Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the
landscape--as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling
downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which
made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were
the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a
flock of wild cockatoos--and though that may seem nothing to you who
read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild
anything that one has never before beheld except captive. There were
flocks of green and red and blue parrots too, and the laughing jackass
perched on the tree-stumps. But about the sheep?
They are there; no doubt about that. An Anglo-Australian whom we
know at home once confessed to us that the only blot on life in that
southern continent of free air and sunshine was that there was too
much sheep in the sheep-rearing districts--there was nothing else to
talk about. And at this point we recall an anecdote told to us by Dr.
E. S. Cunningham, the editor of “The Melbourne Argus.” There was a
Colonial Conference in England some years ago, and he and some of the
others who came to it, Mr. Deakin among them, went back to Australia
across the United States. One night in the Far West their train was
held up by accident, and they stopped at the hotel of some wayside
station. After supper, as they sat round the red-hot stove of the
hotel parlour, some of the citizens of the township blew in for their
evening conversazione, and hailed the opportunity of conversation with
strangers.
They quickly found that the strangers were Australians, and as quickly
turned the conversation on to the comparative advantages of the two
continents.
“I suppose now,” said one of them, “that you reckon to have a few sheep
in your country. We have sheep here too. Some. Now what size holdings
do you put up down there?”
Mr. Deakin, to whom the question was addressed, paused reflectively
and said: “Well, I don’t know that I’m well posted about sheep; but I
believe my friend has some knowledge of the subject. Cunningham, what
was the size of that farm that Colonel Burns got rid of last autumn?”
“I can’t quite tell you the size,” said Dr. Cunningham, after assumed
cogitation. “It was pretty big. There were about a quarter of a million
sheep with it.”
The American looked from one to the other, and expectorated at the
stove in a discontented manner. After a minute or two he started in
again.
“We get a good figure for our stock hereabouts,” he observed; “we breed
for quality. I guess wool is your strong suit. Now what about is your
figure per sheep over there?”
Again Deakin referred to Cunningham, the authority.
“What was it Murray of Adelaide was asking for that merino ram of his,
Cunningham--it was called Lion II, I believe?”
“I don’t know what he was asking,” returned Cunningham swiftly, “but I
can tell you what he got for it. He took eleven hundred guineas.”
The American looked from one to the other and swallowed hard.
“Thunder!” he said. “Give me cattle!”
* * * * *
Well, we didn’t see the quarter of a million sheep, and Mr. Murray’s
thousand-guinea ram lives only in portraiture in the hall of his
farm; but we did see some of the famous herd of which Lion II was
the congener. They had been rounded up for us, about fifty of them,
in one of the shearing yards; and most attractive animals they were.
Their thick merino fleece was about five inches deep, like soft fibre,
and their thick necks were in folds--concertina folds, as they are
called. They have been bred to this type, and their peculiar scientific
interest is the information which they afford to the explorers of
Mendelian principles of the permanence of the so-called “factors of
heredity.” But to the practical stock-breeder their immediate interest
is the vast amount of wool they yield. Mr. Murray said (if memory is
not at fault) that they each yielded about fifteen pounds’ weight of
wool at a shearing.
Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was
a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on
it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the
thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage.
It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought
together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep
farms--especially in the back blocks, where the life is wilder, the
herbage scanty, the seasons precarious--are interesting enough, though
here we cannot dwell on them. What does remain as the recollection of
Mr. Murray’s sheep farm is that of a hospitality and a generosity which
are so natural that they are never ostentatious, but which, long after
the day and hour have gone, warm the heart with the memory of them.
CHAPTER VII
ADELAIDE
We had been warned to expect cold and rough weather, if anywhere, in
the great Australian Bight, but like everything we had ever been told
about Australian weather, the prophecy was fallacious. The Tuesday in
August on which we sailed from Fremantle and the four following days
of the voyage were fine, calm, and sunny. We skirted a coast bound by
gneiss rocks, rounded, ground, and weather-worn to smoothness, with
immense breakers dashing their foam up the face of the cliffs. Except
the beautiful harbour of Albany, it is a most inhospitable-looking
coast.
On the third day out a wireless message from Perth warned the captain
to alter his course and to moderate the ship’s lights at night so as
to disguise her. It was a significant suggestion, that the War, the
outbreak of which took place while we were at sea, but in which we
hardly yet believed, was a matter of grim earnest. Otherwise the voyage
was uneventful. We reached Adelaide, sliding in through glassy water,
with land on either side, and numbers of diving birds swimming
round us. After the inevitable delay of disembarkation that seems so
unnecessary to the impatient traveller, we at last got ashore, walked
through the Customs, merely an amiable formality, and took the train
for Adelaide, which is at some distance from its harbour. The line runs
through salt marshes, dotted with pink mesembryanthemum in flower.
Then come trim suburbs with English names, a Cheltenham among them;
presently the train appeared to be running through the streets of a big
city, and we had arrived at Adelaide station.
[Illustration: NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.]
The different capitals of the Australian states are as unlike each
other as possible, and Adelaide is especially distinctive. This
graceful garden city has none of the rawness of our dear Perth. She
has, on the contrary, an established air. The hotel at which we
stayed might have been in any large town in the world, except for a
certain friendly loquacity on the part of the staff, and a trifling
indifference to details characteristic of Australia.
The first impression of Adelaide is a delightful one. She is a city
of space and light and air, with broad, tree-planted streets and fine
buildings; in fact, more like the Australia we had imagined, because
less unlike England, than the West. The cathedral with its twin
spires dominates the whole from rising ground. The city is laid out in
straight lines, separated by parks from its spreading, growing suburbs,
the whole place is green and restful.
In the afternoon of our arrival we were motored round the city and its
suburbs, and a closer acquaintance deepened this impression, for we
passed through avenues of plane trees and saw English plants growing in
the gardens. Rising ground revealed the lovely situation of Adelaide
and gave a view of the city as a whole, scattered among her trees and
gardens, girdled by green hills rising abruptly from its environs, with
the grey Pacific spread out to infinite distance beyond. The cloudy,
hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day
at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such
names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall
always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early
spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond
blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home.
Of course, there was a great deal that was unfamiliar: here were hedges
of olive, thick-set and cut like box, other hedges were made of the
South African box-thorn, and everywhere the sides of the roads were
yellow with a pretty pale oxalis, regarded by the inhabitants as a
noxious weed and called Sour Sod. There were many vineyards, and sheep
and lambs feeding, for South Australia is largely a pastoral state. The
development of pastoral industries has been an important element in her
general prosperity. The pastoral settler gauged the capacities of the
land and paved the way for agricultural and closer settlement. South
Australia now has a larger acreage under cultivation in proportion
to the population than any other state, and the annual returns from
pastoral industries amount to nearly £4,000,000. In 1912 between two
and three million pounds’ worth of pastoral products were exported,
including sheep, cattle, horses, frozen meats, skins, hides, tallow,
and wool.
South Australia was declared a province under the British Crown in 1836
by Governor Hindmarsh in the reign of William IV, so that the state has
a history stretching back over a period of nearly eighty years, during
which time she has progressed rapidly, and at the time of our visit
was actually enjoying great prosperity after a series of good seasons,
though we heard on all hands in Adelaide that there had been two dry
springs and rain was badly wanted.
The climate is mild, the high temperatures that occur in summer are
mitigated by the absence of humidity, and extreme cold in winter is
unknown. Sheep, cattle, and horses live out of doors all the year round
and thrive on natural herbage, so that neither artificial feeding
nor housing is necessary, and the cost of production is thus greatly
reduced. It is superfluous to enter here into figures showing the
purposes for which the area of the state is leased or alienated, but
beyond the limits of agricultural settlement more than 143,000 square
miles are held by Crown lessees as sheep or cattle runs. Formerly the
principal part of South Australian wool was shipped to London, and
it was not till within the last forty years that local wool auctions
attained importance.
Agriculture is determined by the rainfall, which varies from 10 or
11 inches in northern and inland districts to 30 or 35 inches in the
south and in the more hilly regions. Within these widely varying
conditions almost anything can be grown from corn to grapes, nearly
every kind of cereal, fruit, or vegetable. But economically all the
conditions of agriculture are very widely different from those at
home, for it must be taken into consideration that the wages of farm
labourers are about double those paid in England, and the cost of
plant and implements about 50% more. Wheat predominates in the value
of all crops grown, for while it is estimated that the total value of
all crops, including fruit, amounts to £18 per head of the population,
the value of the wheat crop for grain and hay is over £13 per head.
The production of hay in Australia is intimately associated with the
cultivation of cereals, as the greater bulk of this fodder is composed
of wheat or oats. The Year Book returns for 1911–12 show more than two
million acres under wheat cultivation with a total production of over
twenty million bushels, a low average compared with other countries,
but against which must be set the exceptionally low cost of production
brought about by conditions of soil and climate.
One peculiarly local industry is the growth of wattle for its bark,
which is utilised for tanning leather. The industry is a lucrative one.
At from five to seven years old, when they are fit to strip, the trees
yield from one ton an acre, and the market price of the bark is from £5
to £8 a ton.
But we must again insist that in trying to estimate the position of
agriculture in Australia the different labour conditions have to be
taken into consideration. In the first place it is possible for a man
owning a team of eight or ten horses and the latest and best machinery,
to do all the work on a holding of from 200 to 240 acres of wheat
himself, with some extra help at harvest time, so extensive is the use
of labour-saving machinery--multiple furrow ploughs, for instance,
12 or 14 furrow twin ploughs on the lighter land, and 8 to 10 horse
cultivators. This being so, it can be easily seen that there is no
surplus of skilled labour, for under such conditions a capable man very
soon saves enough to begin farming on his own account, especially as he
can get cheap land on easy terms. This, of course, applies to Australia
generally; at harvest time, though the demand for labour is great and
the pay high, thoroughly efficient men are not to be had. The same
thing is true of dairying, so that the farmers are actually reducing
their herds to numbers that can be conveniently managed by their own
families with the aid of milking machines.
[Illustration: WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE.]
At the same time the Labourers’ Union has drawn up a “log” of prices
and hours of labour, and requires its acceptance on the part of the
farmer, who would be willing enough if the supply of labour were
efficient. Economists question whether, if these conditions, including
the regulation of hours, were enforced, the result produced might
not be an increased adoption of grazing, where hardly any labour is
required.
In the pastoral industry all conditions of labour and living are fixed
by the Arbitration Court, and good accommodation is provided for
shearers. Among farmers, on the other hand, though good food is always
provided, the men often have to sleep in machinery sheds. Here, as
everywhere else, labour is dependent not merely on supply and demand,
but on desirable conditions of employment, and it is extraordinarily
interesting to see our tentative efforts in the direction of Wages
Boards, and the regulation of employment, reproduced in the form of
the finished article in the Commonwealth, which had no great mass
of vested interest and tradition to oppose to a generous system of
Labour Legislation. It must be remembered, however, that Australia
can hardly yet be considered as a manufacturing country, though her
industrial development has been so rapid in recent years, that the
total value of manufactures already amounts to more than a quarter of
the whole production of the country. It is calculated that the value of
productions from all sources per head of the population exceeds that of
any other country.
The Australians meanwhile, seeing the course which the future
development of their country is likely to pursue, have taken time by
the forelock, and in order to obviate the recurrence of the disastrous
conditions in the Old World have inaugurated an elaborate system of
Labour Legislation calculated to safeguard the interests of working
men and women in all branches of occupation. Such measures as Wages
Boards, Conciliation and Arbitration Court Systems, a minimum wage
under the Factory Acts, an eight-hours day, early closing, and holiday
regulations, are accomplished facts all over Australia, though their
constitution is not uniform in the different states.
A Government Labour Exchange was established in 1911 to bring employer
and workmen into communication. This does not, of course, include
professional and clerical labour. All the departments of Public
Service, including the railways, apply to the Labour Exchange for
workmen, and if the work lasts for less than two months the men’s fares
are refunded to them.
Of course, not all Australians see the social development of their
country in the same rose-coloured light. The social reformer and the
moral enthusiast are seldom business men; to such the question appears
in a wholly different aspect--in terms of material profit and loss.
Each state has its own industrial problems, and the question of
water supply occupies the attention of all who are concerned with the
development of South Australia, for the only area in the Commonwealth
having an average annual rainfall of less than five inches, the Lake
Eyre region, lies within the limits of this state. Throughout the more
closely settled part of the state the difficulty has been met by the
Government by the construction of reservoirs and the distribution of
supplies.
CHAPTER VIII
COMPULSORY TRAINING AND SOCIAL LIFE IN ADELAIDE
Adelaide, when we reached it, was like the rest of the Australian
continent, celebrating the declaration of war by a tremendous outburst
of patriotism; the whole place fluttered with little flags, Union
Jacks were on every bicycle or cart or motor-car, loyal crowds were
assembling at street corners. We in England have no conception of
the depths of feeling that our fellow-countrymen in Australia have
for “home.” It embraces all those who come out there on a visit, so
that instead of strangers in a strange land they feel like a dear
and welcome friend returning to his own people. By the evening the
occasion had been felt to be so momentous that the youthful male
population, with whom the streets were crowded, had celebrated it in
some cases to excess, and this was the sole occasion on which we saw
anything approaching to intemperance while we were in Australia, or
on which the population forsook its habitual and universal beverage
of weak tea. That they were carried away by enthusiasm was all to
their credit. Trained to military service from his school days every
Australian realises, as few Englishmen have yet done, the importance of
self-defence, and the obligation of every man in the country to take
his share in it.
We have much to learn from Australia, but in no respect more than in
her admirable system of universal military training. We have already
mentioned her cadet training in schools. When a boy reaches the age of
fourteen he becomes a senior cadet, and a general military training
is added to the physical training that is already part of his school
curriculum. At the beginning of the year in which he reaches his
fourteenth birthday he has to be registered, and his registration
papers are sent to the Area Officer, under whose jurisdiction he
now passes. This officer sees that the boys go up for their medical
examination; after passing this, a boy is measured for his uniform,
and allotted to his company in the senior cadet battalion of the area.
The average percentage of rejections after the medical examination is
only seven and a half. The senior cadet is now subject to military
discipline and becomes part of the military system of the country. He
has to attend four whole-day drills of at least four hours, twelve
half-day drills of two hours’ duration, and twenty-four night drills of
one hour’s minimum duration. Boys who are still at school may be formed
into special companies. It is an important feature of the system that
all the companies in a battalion area form one battalion independently
of the numbers involved, for the battalions are training, not fighting,
units. The training for senior cadets consists of physical drill,
company and some battalion drill, field training and musketry. An
excellent provision secures good work on the part of the cadets. At the
end of each year’s training an inspection takes place, and all who fail
to satisfy the regular officer responsible, lose the value of their
year’s work, as the Act requires an additional year’s training for each
failure of the inefficient.
Ammunition and uniforms are supplied free. In his fourth year of
training the senior cadet must satisfy the medical officer of the
training area of his fitness, those falling below the standard are
certified in their record books as “exempt.” In the third stage
of his training, from eighteen to twenty-six years old, the young
Australian becomes a member of the Citizen Forces. This system is
gradually superseding the older militia, which prescribed a period
of three years’ training only, and consequently attains so much the
more an efficient military standard. The training is arranged as far
as possible with a view to the convenience of the men, who are only
obliged to be absent from home during a short period spent in camp
every year. Parades are held on holidays, Saturday afternoons, or in
the evening. In some districts Sunday training has been advocated
and has raised considerable opposition, but Brigadier-General J. G.
Legge, C.M.G., commanding, at the time of writing, the Division of the
Australian Forces in Egypt, in an article on Australian Defence,[9]
reminds his readers that “not so many centuries ago it was the law of
England that every able-bodied man should practise with the bow at the
village butts on Sunday after church hours, and why not now on Sunday
afternoons? This would get over the difficulty with employers quite
well.” Pay is given for attendance at parades in the Citizen Forces.
Under the universal training system all start as privates, and each
rank competes for promotion to the one immediately above it. But it
must be remembered that in Australia, as in other new countries, there
are no sharply drawn class distinctions, there hardly exists an idle
class, and to quote Brigadier-General Legge once more: “Brains and
practical proficiency alone will carry weight with units such as we now
have to lead and discipline in Australia.” There is no room in that
happy land for the promotion of influential incompetence.
The Australian system is working smoothly and well, and presents the
spectacle of a trained and disciplined people, far indeed removed
from militarism, yet with a corporate sense and a deep and zealous
patriotism. Almost equally important is the fact that the Australian
Government makes ample provision for all munitions of war and equipment
for its forces.
It is with the boys that every country must begin. “I believe this,”
wrote Lord Methuen,[10] “to be the proper solution for the national
defence of this country.... It is to be noted that each colony has
adopted compulsory cadet training as its foundation. We worked on Lord
Kitchener’s admirable Australian scheme in forming the Citizen Army in
South Africa.... The physique and discipline of our nation will gain
enormously if the lad is trained from the age of twelve till he reaches
eighteen.... Let the nation accept the principle and the details can be
made to fit in without any difficulty.”
With regard to Education South Australia is, in one respect only, the
least progressive of the states, for it has fixed the minimum age at
which children may be employed in factories at thirteen, as compared
with fourteen elsewhere. Victoria leads the way with a minimum of
fifteen for girls. On the other hand, the state has been a pioneer in
dealing with destitute and neglected children. The Chief Secretary of
the Government appoints a State Children’s Council composed of men
and women. Its work is conducted on the most enlightened methods.
The children, whether, as in most cases, they are boarded out, or in
institutions, are judiciously looked after and provided for, till the
boys have reached the age of eighteen, and the girls of twenty-one
years. The work, whether paid or unpaid, of the large staff of
assistants in urban and country districts, is given alike “ungrudgingly
and in the spirit of the volunteer,” says Mrs. Margaret Wragge, a
member of the council. Thus the state is providing with foresight for
the useful careers of every one of its future men and women.
In the matter of general education the system is that in force
elsewhere. Primary education is free and compulsory, there is an
elaborate system of training for teachers, who are given every
facility for self-improvement. Technical education is provided for
by the “School of Mines and Industries.” The Adelaide University is
of comparatively old foundation, as it dates from 1874. It has been
fortunate in receiving generous endowments from local benefactors, and
has handsome spacious buildings. The name of the late Sir Samuel Way,
the Chief Justice, and a prominent, active citizen, will always be
associated with the progress of the University.
* * * * *
As we have said, Adelaide is girdled with hills, of which the most
important is Mount Lofty, and part of this high ground has been set
aside as a national reserve, a park in perpetuity for the community; a
large area left in its natural state, to show what Australia once was
to the children’s children of the first settlers.
[Illustration: WATERFALL GULLY, BURNSIDE, NEAR ADELAIDE.]
The drive up the hills is not an easy one, for the road ascends steeply
and the ground falls sharply away. The view over Adelaide grows more
and more beautiful with every few feet of the ascent, as the semicircle
of hills, with their valley and city, and the illimitable expanse of
ocean are spread out below. The reserve is a vast area of sloping green
lawns, more or less thickly covered with trees. Growing among the gums
were the curious shea-oak, and the still more curious wild cherry,
whose stone grows outside the fruit; the wattle was here only
bursting its yellow balls into flower. We saw a clump of the pretty
drosera or sundew, and a quantity of small purple orchids not unlike
our blue squills in shape and size.
All kinds of birds live in this retreat: especially the Australian
magpie with his odd conventual air, and the white cowl and black frock
that make him look like a Dominican friar.
The magpies are sociable birds, friendly and companionable. They are,
besides, greedy and carnivorous. An Australian lady, who was acting
as our hostess on this occasion, told us she had once seen a magpie
swallow three mice in succession, and sit afterwards ruminating over
their digestion with the three tails hanging down from his beak.
There, too, was the laughing jackass, or to call him by his musical
native name the “kookaburra,” who resembles in shape and colour a
large untidy jay. We heard for the first time the sweet note of the
Australian thrush, and saw several redheaded parrots. The road led into
a beautiful wooded glen, a favourite place for picnics.
Picnics are a great institution in Australia, and to avoid the dangers
of bush fires little open-air hearths are made in such places as these,
with an iron rod across them and hooks for hanging the “billy” to boil
the water for the weak tea that is the invariable accompaniment of all
meals. There is always plenty of dry wood in that dry climate, and
generally a little shelter is put up, with a rough table and benches,
sometimes a tank for rain water, but this, when it is there, has a way
of being rusty. On this occasion time demanded our return, for we were
lunching with one of the University professors, so we came back to the
city that is only less pastoral than its hills, and were deposited at
our destination by the kind new acquaintances, who had devoted a long
morning to us.
Our hosts lived in a charming bungalow on the side of a hill, the
garden was full of early spring flowers, jonquils and other bulbs.
Their guest house was detached, as it were, in a little garden of its
own, which seemed a particularly pleasant way of entertaining one’s
friends, giving a sense of freedom both to visitors and hosts. In
the drawing-room was a big bowl of camellias, which flourish in the
open air in Australia. Our host and hostess came of one of the oldest
Australian families; that is, their daughter told us her grandfather
came over in 1837 and her grandmother three years later. Life was a
hard thing in those days. To begin with, there was the six months’
voyage in the old sailing ships. In their early days of married life
they had no food except salt pork and damper, or a kind of bread made
without yeast, which is very nice on a picnic, but would be trying
as a staple form of food. On Sundays they had rice boiled in water
and raisins. “My grandfather used to be so hungry that he once shot
a sitting magpie.” It must, even so, have been a meal of bones and
feathers.
There was something patriarchal about this pleasant, cultivated
household. The settlement which the earlier generation had won from
the bush remained in the family, and the descendants of its servants
still served them. After lunch we were taken off to tea in the
hospitable Australian way to some friends of our hosts’ who were
giving a tea-party. Their house lay at some distance from the town,
with its back to the hills. It was approached by a park much like an
English park, with eucalyptus for oaks and magpies for rooks, and the
house itself was much like an English country house, and an English
tea-party, with great bowls of roses and violets in the drawing-room.
It would be difficult to find anywhere a lovelier situation than the
slopes of these hills, facing the far-distant sea. The entrance to
the drive was heavy with the scent of stocks, and gay with masses of
red geranium, a bougainvillea covered with purple flowers hung over
the flight of steps, and below the garden lawns, on which the large,
handsome black and white Australian wagtails were hopping about,
orange trees displayed their golden fruit and glossy leaves against a
background of almond blossom, and ripe limes and grape fruits.
As it was only about three miles back into Adelaide, with a good road
and a fine evening, we proposed to walk home to our hotel, as we had
had no exercise since we had left England. The suggestion, however, was
considered so entirely impracticable as to be not worth discussing. It
was merely waved aside, and the whole time we were in the country we
were impressed by the fact that Australians never seem to walk. They
motor, they have excellent tram services, but except up-country they
don’t seem to ride. An older resident at Adelaide lamented that there
were actually so few young men who could ride in the district, that
their numbers were insufficient to keep up the local Hunt Club.
[Illustration: OSTRICH FARM, SOUTH AUSTRALIA.]
We left Adelaide on a warm sunny August day. The long, long railway
journeys from one state capital to another are made by night. The
trains are dusty, the scenery monotonous, so that the tedium and
discomfort are by this means minimised as much as possible. Of
course, there are beautiful tracts of country, that the railroad
passes through, but in a land where the eucalyptus is everywhere
the prevailing form of vegetation, and water is rare, monotony is
inevitable. On leaving Adelaide the main line towards Melbourne runs
through charming park-like country, with green lawns and trees and deep
gorges. The train climbs the Mount Lofty range with delightful glimpses
of the sea, and an ascent punctuated by peculiarly sulphurous little
tunnels, reminiscent of those on the Apennines.
Afterwards we crossed a spacious pastoral country dotted sparsely
with homesteads, peaceful in the great calm of the luminous evening,
then the swift dusk fell and blotted out all. At Murray Bridge we
paused for dinner, in the old-fashioned continental way. Dinner in
railway stations in Australia is simple and expeditious, and in our
experience invariably excellent. It is thrown at the traveller by a
miscellaneous assortment of young women, who fall over each other
in their hospitable anxiety to get through the menu in time. That,
however, did not suffice, for having hastily despatched our soup and
the very good turkey, which is always a standing dish in Australia,
and trifled with a sweet, we were summoned back to the train. Here
we observed in passing along the corridor to our own carriage a
bulky-looking passenger disgorging from his pockets large quantities
of the dessert, which we had had no time to eat, and which he had
adroitly commandeered. He was bulging with it, in fact, and was now
proudly exhibiting a selection of it spread out on the opposite seat
of the carriage--five oranges, three apples, and some bananas. Seeing
our eye upon him he offered us a share of the spoils, as a species of
hush money in kind. Oranges and apples and bananas are delicious in
Australia; the dry soapy things sold for bananas in London give no idea
of what a pleasant form of food a fresh banana can be.
He is no traveller who cannot sleep on any occasion under any
circumstances, even in a rattling and draughty train. After a good
night we woke up next morning to see an immense grassy plain stretching
away to the horizon on either side. Cattle and sheep were feeding, and
there were patches of plough land. For the first time the “bush” had
retreated to a respectful distance.
PART III
VICTORIA
CHAPTER IX
COLLINS STREET--MELBOURNE
On the day we reached Adelaide the train that took us from Port
Adelaide to the city slipped by an encampment of tents, those of the
naval division; and on the day we left Melbourne we saw the recruits
for Australia’s first contingent swing past us along Collins Street.
Splendid they looked: young and strong and confident. The cars and
motor omnibuses bunched up by the pavement, and the people hung out
of the windows to cheer as they went by. I remember I suddenly found
myself without a hat and the tears running down my cheek, when the last
of them disappeared in the dust, the crowd closing in behind them.
There was only a fortnight or so between that first glimpse at Adelaide
that war had begun, and the assurance that Australia had grasped what
was to be her share in it, when she sent her boys on the way to camp
through Collins Street.
Collins Street. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, Melbourne
will always be expressed to us in terms of Collins Street. It is a
wide street of tall buildings, and it photographs well. It has not
grown up haphazard. It is rectangular; and it exhibits Melbourne’s
ideal of doing the thing well, and of doing it in an official way. No
street in London is very like it, though Melbourne has more in common
with London than any other city we have ever seen. There is the same
nucleus of business and trading, shopping and luxury; the parks almost,
but not quite, set in the middle of things; and trams and suburban
lines linking up nearer suburbs (with High Streets of their own), and
more distant ones with large houses and their gardens, and more distant
ones still where the houses are cheaper. It has an official residence
for the Governor-General, set, as Buckingham Palace is, in a green
park; and it has a river though we will not press the point of any
resemblance in it to the Thames. In short, if you were to name anything
in London to us--Regent’s Park or Tottenham Court Road, the Mansion
House or the Natural History Museum, St. Pancras Railway Station or
the Reform Club--we believe we could find you something of the kind in
Melbourne. They have even a Tate Gallery, and it has pictures which
might have been the choice of the Chantrey Bequest.
One word more about Collins Street, and then, having served its
purpose as a simile, we may leave it. It is a London street, the artery
of an organism much smaller than London, so that it is a composite.
It has shops and clubs, hotels and banks, and nearly all are square
and solid. It is as wide as Kingsway, but less uniform than that
thoroughfare will be; as busy as Cheapside, but less heterogeneous; as
popular as Regent Street, but one of less specific attractions; and
the one characteristic of it which is unmistakable is that it is the
principal street of a big city. That is what Melbourne is. It is a
city, a city where money is made, and big business goes on. It is to
Melbourne and to Collins Street that you must come if you are to talk
to the men who are planning and financing and ordering the Australia of
the future.
There is a Melbourne of another kind, just as there are many Londons.
There is Melbourne of the University, nestling in its gardens and
secure in the strongest foundation a University can have, the solid
research of its professors and teachers. It would not thank us for any
forced comparison with the ineffable charm that the years and memories
have brought to our own older Universities; but it has their air of
unself-consciousness and breeding.
There is Melbourne, too, which sets the fashion; and which, if the
word were not so detestable, forms the “society” of the capital.
But “society,” so misused a word elsewhere, is more vague in its
application in Australia than elsewhere. Government House is the
vortex about which it eddies; and perhaps cards for Government House
garden parties, or receptions, or invitations to Government House
luncheons and balls may be the fount of as much rivalry and as many
heartburnings as in the oldest capitals of Europe. Certainly Government
House maintains a ceremoniousness which is in extraordinary contrast
to every other usage in this land of democracy. Ladies curtsey to the
Governor-General’s wife and to the Governor-General, as if they were
of Royal blood, instead of the representatives of Great Britain. The
Governor-General goes out to lunch attended by an aide-de-camp; nobody
would go to a reception at Government House in anything other than the
most official dress he was entitled to wear; nor would any lady go
in anything that was a stitch less than the best of her dresses--for
Government House is the Court. And yet ... one day when one of us was
lunching at the Melbourne Club,[11] the Governor-General came into the
luncheon room and sat down at our round table, with his aide and a
friend, and the other lunchers at the same table, who all more or less
impartially went on with their own conversation or exchanged a word
or an answer with the Governor-General, were an editor, a doctor, two
business men, a lawyer and a geologist. There was somebody else whose
profession I have forgotten, but the luncheon party was very typical
of the social life of Melbourne, and typical, too, I think, of what is
the most vivifying and vigorous thing in Australian intercourse and
converse.
In England, not altogether as a consequence of our social conventions,
though they are the chief thing, the people of one social circle know
very little of one another; and doctors, lawyers, artists, or literary
or scientific men, merchants, men in commerce or finance, tend to limit
their intercourse to those of the same profession as themselves. There
are exceptions to this rule, of course; and it grows less rigid. But in
Australia such limitations hardly exist at all. If you have a job of
any kind, in letters, or politics, or science, or commerce, or trade,
and are doing it well; and if you are a man of intelligence--then you
stand on your merits, not on your social position, and you are of the
same standing as anyone else. A few years ago in an English novel
written by a lady of talent and insight, a duke is made to say, as
almost his last utterance on his death-bed, “We big-wigs have a good
time.” Such an incredible observation would appear even more fatuous
in Australia than in Eaton Square; for there are no “big-wigs” in
Australia.
It would be hard to say who or what takes their place in such a
democracy: talent perhaps; ability in such public affairs as bring a
man into relation with European politics or with the home country,
though in politics or affairs men do not stand apart from their fellows
as they do over here. In England, or in any European country, the men
of affairs are known to their countrymen chiefly by their photographs.
How many people, for example, in England have ever seen Sir Edward
Grey? But in Australia the public men are not photographed; they are
known to everybody and are spoken to by everybody. The only exceptions
are the Governors. If they are men of great ability, a limited divinity
hedges them, but they are the only people thus fenced in, and the
fence can be seen through if they are not first-rate. If there are no
big-wigs in Australia, the land is knee-deep in critics.
In the absence of any deeply separated social circles in Melbourne,
there is a social life of unbounding vitality and capacity for
enjoyment. During our stay there, despite the outbreak of war, a
great deal of ceremonial festivity was taking place, so that abundant
opportunity was given for surveying Melbourne in its ball-dress at
Government House, or in its silk hat and morning coat at official
garden parties. One impression left on the mind and the eye was that
these things were sufficiently uncommon and sufficiently enjoyed for no
one to leave them out if they could attend them. I have a recollection
of good-tempered struggles for hats and coats at the City Museum and
Library (where a conversazione was held), such as obliterated every
other impression--even the impression of that massive and graceful
City Library with its domed roof and white arcading; or of the serried
multitudes coming and going from the supper rooms. There was the
hunt for the motor-car, too ... in a sudden night wind that brought
stinging dust from the north ... and there were the throngs of ladies
quite cheerfully sacrificing their satin shoes as they walked along
the streets to the cars, sometimes to the street cars. For if you go
home by street car in Melbourne it makes no difference to your social
standing.
Gay, cheerful, social, hospitable Melbourne. It is full of memories
of kindnesses, of hospitality, of dinner parties, of gay and--forgive
the blighting phrase--of that cultivated converse which our better
instructed grandfathers called “good talk”; of houses which were
luxurious and homes which were deeply comfortable--and of one house, to
which, however long and tiring the day, we always came back as those
who come back home.
CHAPTER X
SOCIAL LIFE IN MELBOURNE
The country surrounding Melbourne was far more populous than anything
we had yet seen. The land was very flat, and the plain was extremely
bare, even denuded; there was hardly a tree to be seen on the great
expanse; scattered over it were innumerable little yellow boulders,
thousands of them. Sometimes they had been laboriously collected and
heaped up to form walls. These are the recollections which the approach
to the Victorian capital by railway from the west leaves in the mind.
The entrance to Melbourne itself is much like that to any other great
seaport. The masts of the ships showed above the houses, the air
was cool and fresh, and invigorating after the night in the train.
Melbourne was in fact the coldest place we visited in Australia, but
even here heavy winter clothing such as one would wear in an English
winter is unnecessary in that dry air and brilliant sunshine.
Our hosts had sent their car to meet us, and we spun out of the station
yard into a city of immensely wide straight streets, sometimes rather
sharply ascending and descending, with handsome tall buildings, some
of which had a quite venerable air; the cathedral of St. Paul’s,
for instance, is grimy with age. From a local station people from
the suburbs were pouring out to their day’s business, as if it were
a London terminus, and there was little to distinguish them in
general appearance from the London morning throng. We gleaned a rapid
impression of gardens and parks and open spaces, and after crossing the
Yarra River, arrived in the pleasant green hilly suburb of South Yarra,
where we were to stay. The car drew up at a large bungalow in a sloping
street of bungalows each in its own garden. A broad verandah ran round
the one-storied house; at the entrance to the garden a pepper tree had
been cut back and a rose trained over it. These lovely trees, with
their grey fern-like foliage and strings of red berries are very common
in Australia, but they are untidy things in a garden, with obstreperous
roots. Geraniums were in flower even here, and a pink camellia bush.
[Illustration: THE RIVER YARRA, 48 MILES FROM MELBOURNE.]
The door was flung open by our hostess almost before we had had time to
ring the bell. We had arrived unseasonably early in the morning, rather
chilly, rather tired, with that uncomfortable, unkempt sensation
attendant on a hurried toilet in a rocking train, breakfastless, very
hungry, and it is only on such an occasion that the whole-hearted
warmth of an Australian welcome can be appreciated at its true worth,
a welcome no less generous to strangers than to recovered friends.
Our host and hostess in Melbourne had never seen us before, yet not
only were we made to feel as if we belonged there, as if their house
was a home in which we had the claim of longstanding friendship or
relationship, but though they were both very busy people of many
engagements, their car was placed at our disposal during our visit,
and they themselves made use of the very efficient Melbourne tram
service. Perhaps this extraordinary and generous kindness, which we met
everywhere, differing only in degree, not in kind, exists in Australia
as nowhere else.
It is sometimes spoken of as Colonial; and so in the best sense it
is. We had some foreshadowing of it at the Cape. Here certain of
the passengers had a collective invitation to a motor drive round
Table Mountain by the members of the local automobile club. A day’s
entertainment was planned by them, but owing to contrary currents our
boat was late. We only had a few hours to spend there. It was between
seven and eight o’clock in the morning when we went on deck, and
our host for the moment, a boy of about seventeen, came up smiling
and helped us into our fur coats. “Are you always as nice as this to
strangers?” we asked. “_You’re_ not strangers,” he said, with genuine
surprise, and even a little hurt. And it is that feeling that makes
colonial travelling such a delightful experience. Even the conductor
on the train will bid you a cordial farewell and hope you will enjoy
yourself. England must seem a cold place to Australians when they come
to it on a visit. We once heard some travelled Australians discussing
this very point. After lavishing hospitality on his English visitors
the Australian comes to London, and perhaps meets his former guest at a
club. After some few minutes’ conversation he says, “When are you going
back?” and adds, “Ah, I hope I shall see you again before you go!” and
that is all.
On the afternoon of our arrival in Melbourne, we went to a tea given
by the Women’s Union at the University. Australian women are in a
very superior position to their British sisters; they have the vote,
and their share in political life takes place quite unobtrusively
and as a matter of course. Women’s suffrage was adopted in Victoria
comparatively recently, and the state is now governed by the vote
of all those over the age of twenty-one who have not been convicted
of felony. Consequently there is no aggressive “Women’s Movement,”
though women have their own separate clubs in all the large towns,
and do useful and active work both in connection with public bodies
concerned with their interests, and in political organisation. We were
frequently asked with surprised incredulity if the newspaper reports
of suffragette activities at home were not wholly untrue or at least
greatly exaggerated. To women in peaceful possession of the vote, the
exasperated fuss on both sides about conferring what seems to them so
simple and obvious a benefit was wholly incomprehensible. It appears
that in Australia it has had very little effect on the balance of
parties except that of strengthening the Labour vote to some extent.
An active and experienced citizen of Melbourne has recorded his own
conviction that the measure “has produced little or no change for
better or worse in the general course of legislation. It has not
purified public life in the sense in which the term is generally used;
it has not enabled women to obtain adequate treatment in the subjects
they are specially interested in. It has in my opinion made but one
substantial alteration--the capacity of women to organise political
associations has been demonstrated repeatedly, and the interest of
women in public affairs is in conspicuous evidence.”[12] Working
women are, however, already in a better position in Victoria than in
any other part of the world. As long ago as 1873 an Act was passed
forbidding the employment of any female for more than eight hours in
any day in a factory. Nowhere is the factory worker, whether man or
woman, better looked after as to his wages, personal safety, health,
and moral surroundings than in Victoria.[13] A little over 33% of all
the women in the state are employed in factories, earning an average
wage of 17s. 4d. a week.
In any comparison of labour conditions at home and in Australia it must
be borne in mind that though foodstuffs cost about the same, imported
manufactured goods of all kinds are dearer. The higher wages are not
therefore proportionately greater in purchasing power. They have,
however, been much affected by the institution of Wages Boards. These
were first established in 1896 with the definite object of raising
the wages of women employed in the clothing trade, especially the
sweated home workers. The measure had the immediate effect of raising
wages in this trade. The Boards, which are composed of equal numbers
of employers and employed, elect a neutral chairman, discuss all the
aspects of the trade, and fix a minimum wage accordingly. The system
has now been gradually extended to practically all urban industries,
in which wages have in consequence steadily risen. The Wages Board,
says the Chief Inspector of Factories, “has now come to be regarded
pretty generally as the most nearly perfect system of fixing fair
wages and conditions that has yet been devised.”[14] It is a cardinal
principle of the Victorian system that, having provided the workers
with the means of securing a fair living wage, it takes no cognisance
of strikes. It is claimed that the Victorian method has had the result
of preventing strikes.
But to return to the Women’s Union tea at the University. Our hostesses
were representative of Melbourne’s social activities, and it was a
pleasant and interesting festivity, as well as an introduction to the
University, the centre of Australian intellectual life. The University
has done much to leaven Melbourne society, and has been fortunate in
securing first-rate men, not merely in point of scholastic attainment,
but in an equally invaluable social refinement. A splendid growing
country like Australia should have only the best we have to send,
whether as teachers or governors, nothing less is worthy of her deserts
and importance as a factor in the empire. The University is the
coping-stone of the educational machinery of Victoria, where the whole
of the primary and secondary education is in the hands of the state,
with the exception of certain schools owned by religious corporations.
There is an admirable system of small rural schools, and teachers
earn promotion by good work done in them. There are also a number
of technical schools and Agricultural High Schools--an interesting
development--one of which we visited.
The University Buildings stand in tree-planted grounds, with the
imposing Wilson Hall in the foreground. It is used principally for
social purposes and for examinations, and is an ecclesiastical
building, like a large college chapel, spacious and well proportioned.
In front of the open doors stands an immense Moreton Bay pine, one of
the handsomest of Australian trees, evergreen, like all the native
vegetation, large and shapely with glossy dark leaves. It is so called
from the beautiful Queensland bay on which Brisbane stands, where it
grows in great profusion. On the lawn beyond, two great black swans
were feeding, looking oddly incongruous. The various schools have their
main lecture rooms and laboratories grouped round an artificial lake
in the middle of the grounds. Residential denominational colleges are
erected on grants of land within the University precincts. One of them,
the Methodist College, we visited through the kindness of the wife of
the President, who showed us over the buildings.
It was vacation, and all was swept and garnished, but we saw the little
chapel, the dining-hall, library, and the men’s rooms. All was very
pleasant and comfortable, with fine views over Melbourne, and all was
as unlike as possible from the dreamy, stately old halls where our
English boys go and learn to be luxurious and extravagant at home, and
also learn other things which after all cannot be learnt elsewhere.
We were present at the conferring of some honorary degrees at the
University. It was a gay and picturesque scene, with the doctors’
scarlet gowns on the platform; and what we missed in the ancient
academic atmosphere that gives to such functions their impressiveness
at home, was compensated for by the lively interest and enthusiasm
of the visitors by whom the hall was filled. The ceremony was
incidentally memorable from the fine enunciation and beautiful voice of
the Professor who presented the candidates to the Chancellor.
After the degree ceremony we went on to the Town Hall, where the
Lady Mayoress was giving a tea-party. Mayors and Mayoresses are very
important people in Australia; they are lavish in their entertainment
of strangers, and are the centre not only of the civic life of a
town, but often of its social life as well, the two things being
usually indistinguishable. The Melbourne Town Hall is worthy of a
great city that is the seat of government, and the rallying point
of all the different phases of life on the continent. One sumptuous
council chamber is decorated with Australian woods, many of them very
beautiful, the central panels of black wood especially, which were
delicately variegated like the back of an old fiddle.
The same day we went to an evening party at Federal Government
House. Melbourne is the seat of the Federal as well as of the State
Government; and the balls or receptions at Government House bring
together what in a less democratic country one would call the society
of the state. Society in Melbourne is very cultivated and agreeable. It
is more settled, more homogeneous, more cosmopolitan than elsewhere
in Australia, so that here, if anywhere, one loses the sense of a
new country, which is at the same time part of its charm. The women
and girls in Melbourne are also prettier, and more prettily dressed
than elsewhere, and it makes a cult of charming-looking, elderly,
white-haired matrons, wearing the dignity of their years becomingly.
Not that pretty women and girls are not to be found everywhere, but
Melbourne has a colder, more bracing climate, and is more in touch with
the outside world. Two facts that tell in complexions and clothes.
CHAPTER XI
BALLARAT
Nobody has seen Australia who has not seen a goldfield, and though with
a certain reluctance, for the way was long and the trains unprovided
with restaurant cars, we decided to visit one from Melbourne, whence,
as one counts distance in Australia, they were easily accessible. The
choice seemed to lie between Bendigo and Ballarat; they were equal as
far as we were concerned, but there was something about the name of
Bendigo that expressed a smug prosperity, while Ballarat suggested
something of the unbridled spirit of adventure and undisciplined
audacity of the pioneer. We elected in favour of Ballarat. We started
very early in the morning, as you have to do in Australia if you
want to get anywhere, feeling full of enterprise and prepared for
any hardship. There had been a riot in Ballarat, they told us, quite
a serious affair, with military intervention. The line to Ballarat
runs at first through the flat country that we had already traversed,
covered with the odd little yellow boulders, which a well-informed
passenger now assured us were formed of lava. There had been a lava
flow all over the plain in some former geological period, he said, and
the lava had gradually broken up into these little yellow boulders.
The line then crosses the Bacchus Marsh Valley; this neighbourhood is
the centre of the milk and butter trade, and china clay is also found
in the district. Farther on we passed through the beautiful Werribee
Gorge, remarkable for having been “eroded through glacial conglomerate
into the underlying Ordovician sediment,” a well-informed passenger
hastened to explain to us. While we listened respectfully an immense
bird appeared hovering, lonely, majestic, above the gorge. “Aquila
audax,” cried the too well-informed passenger eagerly; the largest
known eagle. “How do you spell “Hordax?” inquired a lady. This tacit
reflection on his pronunciation so discomfited him that he retired to
another carriage, and we proceeded on our way unenlightened.
No sooner were we within sight of Ballarat than all our hopes of
adventure were dashed; instead of the mining town that we had expected
with little rows of corrugated iron huts, and miners in wideawakes
and shirt-sleeves, what we did see was a cloud of white dust driving
along a road, and behind it a town like any other town, containing, as
a guide-book informed us, a “Hospital, Orphan and Benevolent Asylums,
Women’s Homes, Mechanics’ Institute, with Library, Fine Art Gallery,
Banks, Commercial Houses, two Town Halls, three theatres, forty
churches, School of Mines and Museum, Agricultural High School, State
schools, six iron-founderies, a brewery, a flour and two woollen mills,
boot and other factories...!”
We were fifty years too late. We had come to see Ballarat, and we
were shown it by a kind and hospitable stranger to whose care we had
been consigned for the purpose. There is a tremendous fund of local
patriotism in Australia. Everybody is very proud of their own town,
for the simple reason that they have seen it grow and helped to make
it. They have a paternal or proprietary interest in it. In Ballarat
they are most proud, and justly so, of their principal street, Sturt
Street, called presumably after the pioneer who named that wonderful
hanging scarlet and black flower “Sturt’s desert pea.” Ballarat lies on
the side of a hill, and Sturt Street, very wide and planted with trees
in the centre, slopes sharply away through and out of the city towards
a green hill that rises abruptly, and is framed, as it were, by the
street.
Ballarat, we found, was gradually relapsing into what it had originally
been, an agricultural centre. It was in the year of Queen Victoria’s
accession that six prospectors, seeking good pastures for their flocks,
reached Mount Buninyong, and looking westward saw a rich expanse
of well-watered country that was soon settled as sheep runs, with
its centre at Buninyong. It was not till 1851 that gold was first
discovered in New South Wales, and the Melbourne authorities, alarmed
at the consequent exodus of population, offered a reward of two hundred
guineas for the discovery of gold in the state of Victoria. In July a
man accidentally discovered gold in felling a tree at Buninyong, and
a further search revealed the presence of gold in immense quantities
on the site of what is now Ballarat. In those early days, “The Roaring
Fifties,” as they were called, diggers hastened to Ballarat from all
parts of the world, including New South Wales itself, for gold in such
quantities had never been seen before. The whole neighbourhood became a
vast encampment of tents and huts, and the peaceful sheep-farmers were
forced to migrate.
The Government sought to enforce order among the cosmopolitan riotous
crew of diggers. Licences were issued for a fee permitting them to
work within certain specified limits, and the violence used in
enforcing this rule in 1854 produced a riot among the diggers, who
opposed armed resistance to the police and Government soldiers at what
was known as the “Eureka Stockade.” Order was restored after some
bloodshed, but the ringleaders went unpunished, for public opinion
was on the side of the diggers. The gold licences were withdrawn and
the grant of parliamentary representation soon brought about more
civilised conditions, or, in the words of the local guide, “Thus these
early years of revelry and devilry have faded and dissolved into the
far-famed golden city of the south, the garden city of Ballarat.”
That was sixty years ago. The greatest output of gold for any one year
in Victoria occurred in 1856, and amounted to nearly £12,000,000 in
value; for many years afterwards the mines yielded annually more than
five millions sterling. It can be easily seen that the discovery of
gold had a very great influence on the prosperity and development of
the State and the disposition of its cities. Ballarat and Bendigo, for
instance, are respectively the second and third cities in Victoria.
As the extraordinarily rich surface alluvial deposits of gold were
exhausted, mining was carried on at lower depths, involving greater
expenditure of plant and machinery, and producing smaller profits.
But in Ballarat, both east and west, there is a profitable field for
further development. After having been well fortified with lunch, our
host of the day took us off to see a gold mine.
We motored through the handsome main street of Ballarat, noting with
surprise the number of very large and important drapers’ shops, with
their impressive expanse of plate glass. They were all having what
they called “clean up sales,” and we wondered how a population of
about 42,000 could possibly support them, till our chauffeur, who was
also the owner of the car, explained that Ballarat was the metropolis
for the whole surrounding agricultural neighbourhood of the mines. On
the way we passed through old Ballarat, the driver jumping a gutter
with surprising skill. Old Ballarat is a wonderful, ramshackle-looking
place, run up anyhow in the early days of the gold rush, when fortunes
were made in other ways besides digging, and a “pannikin of rum”
fetched an ounce of gold. It had the air of Earl’s Court after the
season, when the exhibition is shut; the houses were of all shapes and
sizes, and the arcades over the pavement were the only concession to
convenience.
Gold-mining, like all other forms of mining, is an untidy process, and
we presently came to rough, shapeless patches of irregular yellow
ground, all holes and hillocks, and now partly overgrown, where mining
had formerly been carried on. Our destination was a hill of grey heaps
and smoking chimneys. Even an Australian motor-car looked askance at
the approach to it, so we walked up, for this was the mine we were
asked to visit. We were shown into an office out of which opened two
dressing-rooms. A litter of old boots was on the floor, the walls
were hung with derelict felt hats and clean suits of butchers’ blue
overalls. Here we were asked to attire ourselves suitably for the
occasion. It is an odd feeling that of walking out into the light of
day for the first time untrammelled by skirts, but this agreeable
sensation was detracted from by carrying several pounds’ weight on
either foot and by the difficulty of keeping on a large alien hat.
Some other visitors were going down the mine, and one of the ladies’
hats blew off. Retrieving it from the mud, a man politely offered her
his own, a quite clean one, in exchange. It belonged to somebody else,
but he had had the foresight to select it in the dressing-room in
preference to those provided for visitors. We were each furnished with
a tallow candle.
Going down a gold mine feels exactly like being one of a new box of
Bryant and May’s matches. A little two-storied platform takes down
eight adventurous souls at a time. There is a bar across to hold on
to; two people stand on either side squeezed close together. Then the
platform is lowered so that four more can get on to its upper story.
With stringent warnings to inexperienced passengers to keep their free
arm pressed close to their side, the platform descends the shaft just
like a box of matches being pushed into its case. It is quite dark in
the shaft. A sound of running water accompanied us, and we could hear
it swishing far below. As we got lower it got hotter and hotter, till
it felt as if we were suspended above the steam of some immense kettle,
producing a curious feeling of suffocation, which, however, wears off.
We had a general impression that the bottom of a gold mine would be a
beautiful, glittering thing, with shining white walls of quartz and
glimmering threads and patches of gold shining in it like the small
samples given as mementoes to visitors. Nothing of the kind. It might
as well have been a coal mine. On scrambling rather breathless out of
the little cage, we found ourselves in a low, small, open space, with
walls of some dun-coloured reddish stone, and narrow tunnels running
off it with wooden supports for the roof. That was the gold mine,
and except that in this Turkish bath of grotto and passage men were
“picking” walls like rock-salt or alabaster, nothing more is to be
said.
Coming up the shaft we were on the top of the platform, and the water
we had heard going down now splashed on to us, as if somebody with
a primitive sense of humour was watering us from above with a large
watering-can. Altogether, we were very grateful for the blue overalls
and the hats. Apropos of these, when we had recovered our own clothes
and were waiting to inspect the machinery above ground, a distraught
gentleman was passionately inquiring for his hat. The lady who had
exchanged hats observed innocently that there was quite a nice hat
hanging up in her dressing-room. He hurried off to look, and emerged
ruefully with the hat in which she had been down the mine. It had been
well watered with muddy water, and was now almost indistinguishable
from the hats provided for the purpose.
The machinery was to the uninitiated much like other machinery. There
were enormous pumps, fascinating like all such powerful, ruthless
looking things. We saw the slim-looking cable that draws the cage up
the shaft--(“Looks thin, don’t it?” said the workman in charge of
it)--and the stamper for breaking up the quartz, and the sifters, which
sift the mineral when it is crushed.
But there was much more to see. We were taken to see the Agricultural
High School. These schools are an interesting feature in the Australian
system of education, and play an important part in it. The Ballarat
Agricultural High School is a large, well-lighted building standing
in its own grounds, where students can learn the practical arts of
agriculture, at the same time that they attend classes, they learn to
test milk and to understand the properties of soils. As it was Saturday
we were unfortunately unable to see any classes at work. The art room
had a south light, which is the aspect corresponding here to our north.
The afternoon was now far advanced, so we paid a rapid visit to the
Botanical Gardens, very large and handsome ones, adorned by statuary
that is the great pride of Ballarat, the work of a local artist.
Finally, skirting Lake Wendouree, a piece of ornamental water on which
pleasure steamers run in the summer, our host took us to his house,
where we had a high tea, with one of those sumptuous cakes that only
Australian housewives can produce. The journey back seemed very long,
and we were very tired. There were innumerable stations, all quite
dark, so someone ran along the train, inquiring at each carriage,
“Anyone for ...?” whatever the name of the place happened to be. There
never seemed to be anyone, and he then said in disappointed tones,
“Right Oh! Jerry,” and we slowly creaked under way again.
We were very glad when we at last steamed into the brightly lighted
Melbourne station, and found our kind host and hostess waiting
there for us with their car, in spite of the lateness of the hour.
Afterwards, in talking over the development of Australia with the
people who lived there, we learned how great a part had been played by
the discoveries of gold in populating the state. The first permanent
settlement in Victoria, the smallest of the five states of Australia,
was made by some immigrants from Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was
then called, in Portland Bay in 1834. This is an open bay which lies
at some distance from Melbourne to the south-west; it was found to
be unsafe for shipping, and there was a lack of good land in its
immediate neighbourhood. Melbourne was founded the next year at the
head of the deep inlet called Port Phillip Bay by parties of settlers
from Van Diemen’s Land. Other settlers came from Sydney, and beginning
to explore the interior were struck with its great capabilities.
Immigration rapidly progressed, regular government was established
under Captain William Lonsdale in 1836, and the capital was named
Melbourne.
[Illustration: THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS, NORTH-EAST VICTORIA. MOUNT
FEATHERTOP 6,300 FEET.]
By the end of 1850 the population already numbered more than 76,000
people. The next year gold was discovered, and in 1851 the population
had risen to over 400,000, and was six times that it had been before.
The gold boom brought in its train cultivators, and pastoral settlers,
for the staple of Australia is still wool. The state has an area of 56
million acres, less than 6 millions of which are under cultivation. The
climate varies greatly according to rainfall and elevation, and there
are even snow-bound districts during the winter months. Part of the
country with a low rainfall is excellent for the cultivation of wheat,
and one of the principal problems in Victoria is to guard against an
uncertain rainfall by the conservation of water. For the north-east and
north extensive irrigation works have already been undertaken, but the
whole question awaits further investigation.
At present it is not known whether drought cycles can be predicted; how
far the large quantities of water which flow through the Murray River
and its tributaries could be utilised for irrigation; how far improved
methods of farming will increase the extent to which the rainfall can
be utilised. “No country in the world,” says Dr. T. W. Barrett, whom
we have already quoted, “is more dependent than Australia on such
knowledge as can be afforded by meteorology; and perhaps no country in
the world is more disadvantageously placed, since at present there is
no means of obtaining information from the waste of ocean which lies to
the south.”
This brings us to a problem of very great interest in the land
question in Victoria, a tendency to convert agricultural into grazing
land. Returns show that the very large holdings of 10,000 acres are
decreasing in number, and that an aggregation of holdings of from 500
to 800 acres constitutes the present problem. The successful farmer
tries to increase his holding, but when he begins to grow old, and is
confronted with the disorganisation and high wages of agricultural
labour, he relinquishes cultivation and resorts to grazing stock on
his larger area, which will provide him with a comfortable living.
Consequently less labour is employed, the local schools decline, the
trade of the neighbourhood languishes. So it comes about that many of
the richest districts of the state are the least progressive. “The land
around these centres,” says Professor Cherry of Melbourne University,
“is probably as rich as that in any part of the world. But instead of
the farm areas being reduced by subdivision they are steadily growing
larger by aggregation.... The evil is intensified, because as the land
goes out of cultivation, the workmen leave the district and general
stagnation ensues.... Not one-tenth of the available land is under
cultivation.”[15] And it must be borne in mind that agriculture is the
basis of existence in Victoria.
The Government realise this. There are the Agricultural High Schools,
an Agricultural College, a School of Agriculture at the University,
and every primary school has its experimental plot of ground for
gardening. Australia has its own peculiar problems to solve here as
in other districts, especially that of breeding wheat which will
be “drought-resistant and capable of growing outside the existing
rainfall margin of profitable cultivation.” It is believed that vast
areas of pastoral country in the interior of the continent, which now
support a few sheep, might be successfully brought under cultivation,
if a kind of wheat could be evolved that would grow, as many native
grasses grow, under a low rainfall. As yet the average of wheat grown
per acre is very low, only amounting in ten seasons up to 1911–12 to
10·58 bushels an acre, due, it is believed, partly to imperfect methods
of cultivation, as well as to the growth of wheats that are not well
adapted to local conditions.
CHAPTER XII
THE BLACK SPUR
The Victorian bush is very beautiful owing to the immense tree-ferns
that grow among the gums, and during our stay in Melbourne we were
motored out to Black Spur, a favourite objective of Melbourne picnic
and week-end parties, and a point of the “Great Divide,” as the
Dividing Range of Australia is familiarly called. From Melbourne, which
lies at the edge of a plain, the country rises to the great Dividing
Range. This belt of highlands starts from Queensland, and separates
the coastal drainage from that flowing westward. An early rain had
laid the dust, so that we had ideal conditions for motoring, as we
left the city behind us, and passed through a region of trim villas
or bungalows in gardens, each one of which showed its patch of wattle
gleaming among the grey gum trees. At one point the road was bordered
by fir trees, often planted by early Scotch settlers to remind them of
home. Presently we had left all traces of the suburbs behind and were
crossing “Kangaroo Ground,” where, alas! kangaroos have long ceased
to browse and skip. The distant mountain range loomed up before us
gloomy and threatening. Every stream we crossed had its course marked
by a ribbon of wattle flashing among the sombre eucalyptus. Boys were
going out rabbiting this spring morning with bags of ferrets; the whole
country-side lay open to these infant patriots intent on slaying their
country’s enemies. The day was like a showery April morning at home,
with heavy drifting clouds, that threw deep shadows on the dark mass of
the mountains rising on our left. Sometimes we ran through cleared open
country with pale patches of early crops, oats or barley, springing
here and there, or lean store cattle, brought from up-country to be
fattened for sale, and feeding on the richer pastures. Sometimes our
way led through the bush, sometimes through occasional villages.
[Illustration: THE DIVIDING RANGE.]
At last we had climbed Christmas Hill, and stopped to survey the famous
view from its summit. Here the road runs between banks with the dark
shining gum trees stretching away on either side. We climbed through a
fence, where a little cleared space enabled us to look over the tops of
the trees to the valley of the Yarra spread out beneath; a wide, wide
plain with the stern-looking ranges in the background. Below us the
Yarra meandered like a yellow ribbon threaded through the green, for
its course was outlined by flowering wattle. Beyond, the gloomy and
forbidding wall of the Great Divide went up to meet the low-hanging
clouds.
At the foot of the Black Spur there is a sort of pleasure place,
with villas, hotels, and a golf course. Immediately afterwards we
began to ascend a very steep gradient. Here the Government have taken
over a reserve large enough to provide a sufficient water supply for
Melbourne. From time to time we had seen the aqueducts on our way. In
the early part of the year there had been a great bush fire; it had
raged for three weeks, and the smoke had hung about distant Melbourne
like a fog. The after effects of the fire were curious and very
interesting. In some places a whole gully had been burnt out, leaving
only the immense white poles of the gums upstanding like the masts of
ships. So wonderful is their vitality that in many cases the gum trees
had begun to reclothe themselves with young green shoots as if with
ivy. Great tree-ferns shot up too in the cleared spaces, repairing the
havoc that the fire had wrought; bracken covered the ground, and some
kind of pink heath was coming into flower. The fire had been curiously
partial, sometimes leaping the road, sometimes leaving a small area
untouched. Nothing can be done to stem the torrent of these fires or to
arrest their course, for they travel at sixty miles an hour.
Descending from Black Spur, we stopped to lunch at one of the
characteristic Australian picnic places, above a tumbling mountain
stream close to a place called Fernshaw. A fine rain was falling, and
it was pleasant to find the shelter of a roof, and dry benches and
tables. The place was a bird sanctuary; beautiful, and to us, unknown
varieties came and watched us from a wooden fence that bordered the
little clearing, or hopped about on the grass. The gorgeous Australian
robin flaunted his brilliant vermilion and black plumage, here was the
fabled “blue bird” in the life, a kind of wren; green finches, a large
crow, the ever-present magpie, of course, and pretty fawn-coloured
honey birds, said to cull honey from the flowers like bees, and the
peewit, black and white, like a smaller magpie, and so called from his
shrill, insistent note.
On the slopes of the Black Spur the eucalyptus attain to an unusual
height, even for their soaring growth, and some of the tallest trees
in Australia are to be seen here. It is impossible to be long in the
country without hearing much discussion on questions of forestry. A
great part of Victoria is still forest, about 4,000,000 acres of which
are reserved by the state. But though there is much valuable timber--in
the mountain ranges in the north-east especially--it is impossible to
transport it. Much forest country is let for grazing at nominal rents,
and forest let for grazing is inevitably burned. The timber is cleared
out by fire to obtain pasture. The fires are generally lighted on
purpose, with the consequent enormous destruction of valuable timber.
On the other hand, there are few cases in which the timber could be
profitably sent to any market, and a land covered with forest cannot
be used for grazing. Australian public opinion is becoming alive to
the importance of this question, and there is a Department of Forests
in the state of Victoria, but it is not considered that its powers are
sufficiently drastic and untrammelled, or its supply of expert opinion
adequate.[16]
The return journey was an exhilarating experience, for it was downhill
most of the way, and we spun through the sweet invigorating air, with
one wheel generally poised on a higher level than the other, bumping
and plunging, dodging the deep broad ruts, holding on tight with that
pleasant sense of adventure and hairbreadth escapes that only an
expert Australian motorist can give. At one point we stopped to take
a photograph of the Yarra, where its swift green stream took a sharp
bend in a low-lying meadow. Its opposite bank was one brilliant blaze
of wattle; through a gate in the hedge the mountains showed blue and
distant. While we were adjusting the lens a kookaburra somewhere out
of sight burst into his peals of derisive laughter; the shrill chorus
of unseen frogs, an ever-present accompaniment to the stillness of the
Australian country, was the only other sound. It was so typical, so
arresting, so unlike anything to be seen elsewhere, that we wished we
could have transferred the whole scene with its intensity of colour and
freshness to these pages. While we were busy on the bank a boatload
of rough boys swung into sight, shouting, barging, and splashing,
disturbing the peaceful charm of the little picture, breaking up and
destroying the reflected wattle on the smooth water by the bank. We
called to them to put ashore. They immediately did so, and, landing,
came up to us and asked some technical question about the photographic
process--it was a colour photograph on glass--with perfect civility
and friendliness. The little incident was such a marked contrast to
the relationship of different classes of the community at home that it
impressed us as being equally characteristic with the scene in which
it took place.
As we neared Melbourne the wet roads of the morning had already dried
and we were swept home in a cloud of dust. We arrived in time for a
very late tea, and went on to dine at one of those pleasant colonial
houses, whose warm friendliness and lavish hospitality is so homelike
and yet so un-English.
The next day, after lunching at Government House, we visited the
zoological gardens. This was the first unpleasant example of Australian
weather; it was like a nasty March day, with gusts of cold wind
sweeping up swirling clouds of blinding, stinging dust. It only lasted
one day as a weather sample, but it was a singularly objectionable day,
with a kind of parching quality in the air.
On this occasion we pursued a fruitless quest on which we had already
exercised considerable energies since our arrival in Australia. We
were very anxious to see a live platypus, that curious little hairy
animal, with the bill of a duck, which burrows, or used to burrow,
for it is becoming very rare, in Australian river-banks. We were told
that if we wanted to see a platypus we must go to Tasmania, there were
plenty there, but this was not part of our programme; however, there
was actually at the moment a live platypus in Melbourne. They do not
survive in captivity, but this hapless platypus had been sacrificed
in the interests of science, and was on exhibition at the zoological
gardens. We therefore made our way thither, our hearts beating high
with hope and excitement. The porter at the gate was calm, not to say
indifferent; it was also approaching closing time. We entered vaguely,
none of the animals could help us in our quest for the platypus,
neither the mild and browsing kangaroos, the haughty eagles on their
perch, or the slim cranes, like the answer of the winds brought by
‘sage Hippotades,’ “they knew not of his story.”
We were at last directed to a large wire enclosure, in the midst of
which lay a little muddy pool, it was planted with tall bamboos, amid
which fluttered innumerable small birds. Here, said a passing official,
the platypus was incarcerated. We eagerly watched and watched in
vain the unruffled and opaque surface of the pond. The platypus had
effectually concealed his outraged feelings in the mud. He is a shy
animal and resents observation. By this time, however, we felt that our
journey to Australia was vain unless we saw that platypus. Night was
drawing on, it was long past closing time. In these desperate straits
we penetrated with sacrilegious feet a threshold inscribed “private”
and unearthed the daughter of the keeper. She was very sympathetic,
but not encouraging. Her high authority, however, produced a man with
a key, and we squeezed in among the bamboos, which we found sharp
and aggressive plants, and with ruthless cruelty warmly applauded
the efforts to stir up the platypus out of the mud with a stick; but
the despairing platypus had buried itself beyond the reach of human
intervention. We were forced to give up and retreat, and it seemed to
us, as we went out of the gates, that the large blue parrot, who sits
sentinel on his perch at the entrance, winked at us derisively.
The same evening we were at least gratified by the sight of a stuffed
platypus. It was at the museum, where there was a civic reception. The
municipal buildings at Melbourne are on a most imposing scale. The
museum, picture galleries, and free library are all under one roof. The
museum is beautifully arranged. Most interesting to English visitors
are the complete collections of native animals of all kinds. Every
sort of kangaroo and wallaby is represented. From immense creatures
sitting up with that air of surprise peculiar to them, as if they were
wondering what had happened to their forelegs, to little things of the
same species no bigger than a cat. We saw the curious sharp-nosed
bandicoot, and at last our search was rewarded by a sight of the
platypus. All these smaller animals were exhibited under their life
conditions, with sandy burrows, or whatever they might be, carefully
reproduced.
[Illustration: TREE-FERNS IN THE BUSH NEAR MELBOURNE.]
The picture gallery consists principally of modern paintings, many of
them by Australian painters or of Australian scenes.
It seemed to us that the painter has yet to arise who will really
capture the spirit of Australian scenery. It is so wholly individual a
thing in colour and chiaroscuro. In a photograph it shows not unlike
Europe, but the heavy opaque look of the gums seen massed together at
a little distance does not resemble anything on this continent, nor
does the rather sad, almost dun-coloured effect of the grey eucalyptus,
near at hand, nor the translucent atmosphere, the clarity of light, the
brilliancy of sun, that makes a London winter seem a thing of abysmal
gloom following on those illumined days.
Leaving the picture gallery, a long corridor leads to the free
library, and Melbourne is justly proud of its beautiful and luxurious
reading-room, in every way worthy of the chief city of a great
democratic country. Circular in shape, it is surmounted by a dome so
high that it rather dwarfs its proportions. But looked down upon from
an upper gallery the effect of space and the soft radiance of the
electric light falling on the white walls combine to give a charming
architectural effect to the whole. Every member of the public over
fourteen years of age has the right of free access to the library. The
trustees have evolved an admirable system of a “travelling library,”
for circulation among country residents of the state.
It was a very pleasant evening. Every section of Victorian social and
official life was represented, for in an Australian town if there is
an evening party everyone goes to it, because there are not dozens of
other things going on at the same time as in London. So that everyone
goes to everything, and thus in the smaller societies of colonial towns
a few days in a place suffice to make many acquaintances, and a visitor
can never feel a stranger.
The authorities, however, always hopefully provide an amount of
cloakroom accommodation, which is to the needs of the guests in the
proportion of a sentry-box to an army. Having already experienced this
idiosyncrasy at Adelaide, we prudently deposited our wraps behind
a large stuffed kangaroo and asked him to keep an eye on them. He
faithfully fulfilled his charge.
We lunched next day with one of the leading citizens of Melbourne, one
of those active, public-spirited men that colonial life produces, whose
patriotism has grown with the growth of the town he has done his part
in building. It was interesting, because in the colonies everyone is
doing something and is ready to talk about his business, whatever it
is. One of the guests, for instance, had a thousand acres of dairy farm
in the neighbourhood of Bacchus Marsh. He could grow seven or eight
crops of lucerne a year, but it cost him 30s. an acre for irrigation.
Our host had a fascinating hobby of keeping a small private menagerie.
In a sloping paddock beyond the garden a number of kangaroos were
nibbling the grass; they were quite tame, but their pace if they are
startled is incredible; they don’t appear to touch the ground, but seem
to fly with their long hind-legs stretched out like a bird, skimming
the ground with a curious effect of great speed.
This was the only occasion during our stay in Australia on which we
saw a wombat. He is a thick-set, squat animal, about three feet long,
and not unlike a large guinea-pig in build. He lives on grass and
roots, and in his native state burrows a home for himself with his
sharp claws. He is such an inveterate burrower that in captivity he
can only be kept in an enclosure with a concrete floor and corrugated
iron sides without a door; in fact, his pen resembled those in which
pigs are incarcerated for life at Las Palmas, except that it was quite
clean. He seemed not unfriendly in a molluscous way; he lifted his flat
head to take grass from our hands, and his odd bristly fur felt like
the spines of a porcupine to the touch.
But the most engaging denizens of the garden were the little opossums.
The opossum bears a rough sort of resemblance to a squirrel with a
long prehensile tail, and, like squirrels, lives in trees. When we
went to look at them only the little pink inside of an ear was showing
through the open door of their hutch. Then one brown eye appeared, a
little hand-like claw was cautiously advanced towards the biscuit held
out to it, a bushy whisker emerged, and slowly the whole opossum came
into the open. They are most charming little things, very gentle and
well-mannered; they gingerly hold your hand in their tiny white claws
while they delicately nibble at your biscuit, and if they inadvertently
bite your finger by mistake they immediately draw back with an air
of distressed apology. Little Australian animals have an exquisite
urbanity that makes them the most endearing acquaintances.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS FROM THE MURRAY RIVER
FLATS.]
It was a bright afternoon of sunshine, and the Botanical Gardens to
which we went on the way to an At Home were looking their best after
an earlier rain. They are laid out on rising ground, with ornamental
water, sloping lawns, and graceful groups of trees.
In the evening we dined very pleasantly with a university professor,
when a fellow-guest at dinner described his experiences in shooting
the rapids of an Australian river. He and the friend who went with him
had to keep their food in watertight bags, as the canoes continually
upset. The one thing, he said, was whatever happened never to let go of
the canoe, or you would find yourself two hundred miles from anywhere,
bereft of all means of existence. “Was it dangerous?” somebody asked.
“You are never out of danger,” was the reply. And it is this sense of
the possibility of adventure that constitutes part of the charm of
colonial life, where men come into contact and into conflict with a
nature not yet all sleek and combed.
Our last day at Melbourne we spent in driving round the city and such
of its environs as we had not already seen. We visited St. Kilda’s, the
watering-place of Melbourne. A low, grey, cloudy sky threw a pale light
on the waters of the great inland sea, with its pretty opposite shore.
This is Melbourne’s pleasure-place, with hotels along the front.
Returning through the older part of Melbourne we saw the old road
along which men went out to the diggings, with some of its original
galvanised iron buildings still standing. We passed by the cemetery,
where the first settlers were buried, closed long ago. As we
returned into the everyday busy streets of the great city we met the
newly formed Australian contingent of troops marching out to their
camping-ground. There can be few people so invertebrate that they can
watch levies on the march without a responsive thrill, even in time
of peace, and these men were going to fight not for their homes and
families and country, but were relinquishing all for their distant
kindred in a life-and-death struggle miles away. This great unpeopled
country, where men are so urgently needed, was gladly sending of its
best to “the Old Country”--“home,” as they tenderly call it, with a
depth of sentiment incomprehensible here, and incomprehensible to
anyone who does not know and feel his own patriotism awake and flourish
on alien soil.
Our last visit was to the Tourist Bureau, which in general management
and organisation is incomparably the best in Australia. Here we were
given our choice of the admirable views of Victoria and small handbooks
of local interest. That afternoon our visit concluded.
We left Melbourne feeling more Australian than the Australians. The
afternoon sun was gilding the level plain as we sped across it, passing
scattered villages, often little more than clusters of iron-roofed
shanties, with a horse, its bridle hitched to a post, and children and
dogs playing in the road. After the swift darkness had come, there
was a clear night of stars lighting up the dim country, the great
spreading empty plain with its scattered gum trees, while the lamps
of the carriages sent out shafts of light, like searchlights, across
brilliantly illuminated patches, momentarily visible in the darkness.
PART IV
NEW SOUTH WALES
CHAPTER XIII
SYDNEY HARBOUR
When we were sailing from Batavia in Java to Colombo there was a New
Yorker on board, who was buying rubber in anticipation of the needs of
belligerents, and who knew most of the places in the world where rubber
was to be raised or bought. His views on Australia we have forgotten,
and his denunciation of the Indies, as places where the white resident
must deteriorate, do not matter here. What we do recall is the dislike
he expressed, as an Eastern American, for the pretensions of the West,
especially of California. “There’s nothing they’ve got,” he would say,
“that they don’t want to tell you about. Why, you take a Californian,
and he’ll stand there and blow out his chest, and talk to you about his
climate and climate! There’s Los Angeles.... I want to tell you right
now, that Los Angeles is the one place on God’s earth, where you can
get a sunstroke and a frozen foot at the same time.”
Other Americans, Californians, to whom we have repeated this
description, attempt to palliate it, but they admit its force; and the
fact is that being a people with a sense of humour, they recognise the
exaggeration as the recoil which we all experience when anything is
over-praised to us. It is very hard for a young country not to praise
its possessions, not out of conceit, but from a human desire to elicit
praise from a superior critic. We “know you’ve got some great things,”
they say by inference to the visitor, “but you’ll admit that this thing
of ours is not so bad.” Thus when the citizen of Ballarat points out to
you the glories of his main street, he does not ask you to compare it
with Piccadilly or the Champs Elysées, but he would like you to think
that it is something for a mining community to have cut out of the Bush.
So now to Sydney Harbour. Long before we ever saw it we had heard of
it. They think no end of Sydney Harbour, we had been told. They say
it’s better than the Bay of Naples. “If ever you meet an Australian,
and tell him you’re going to Australia,” Phil May once said to the
writer, “he’ll be sure to say, ‘Well, you look out for Sydney Harbour.’
It’s a fine place,” added May reflectively; “but, you know, if you tell
an Australian that the only thing you have to complain of in Australia
is the toughness of its beef, he’ll say, ‘Tough? Well, what of it?
You have to have it tough to sole boots with it.’” With which cryptic
observation he left the subject of Sydney Harbour, of which he was
quite incapable of giving any further description.
We are in not much better case. But let us say at once that whatever
one might expect of Sydney Harbour, whether having heard so much of
its beauties, one came to it prepared to deny them, or whether merely
eager to confirm one’s expectations, Sydney Harbour would always be
ready with its surprise. It reminds one of that Street in Tours to
which Balzac paid so affectionate a tribute, the Street where there was
always sunshine and shadow and a fountain playing, the Street that was
like a coquette ... in brief, the Street where he was born. For Sydney
Harbour, too, is everchanging; the Pacific is at its gates; and it has
a beauty which captures affection; in brief, it has charm. But it is
quite unlike what one expects of it. Our first glimpse of it was from
a heavy vehicle ferry, and when we rubbed the rain from the windows
of our car, we looked through rain on a prospect that might have been
Portsmouth, so little could we see. But if anyone should come to Sydney
Harbour by sea, he might arrive at the right first impression. If you
will lay your hand on the table with the fingers spread, you will
have some sort of a notion of the shape of this noble inlet. From the
sea you would come into it at the wrist between Sydney Heads, which
are jutting cliffs of sandstone, with the sea breaking at their base.
Then far away inland, the fingers of the harbour stretch for miles,
fingers very uneven in length and thickness and formation. On one of
them stands Sydney and the suburb melodiously named Wooloomooloo,
which was once a swamp, and is now as valuable as Brixton. On other
fingers are springing up Dulwich’s and Wimbledon’s and Surbiton’s; some
fingers dig so far into the continent that their headwaters are lost
among tree-clothed hills miles and miles away ... and all this, town
and suburb, and garden city and seaside and country village--all is
Sydney Harbour. We saw it a bit at a time, as this or that excursion
took us along its ramifications, now in a motor drive to Sydney Heads,
or in a taxi through the park that runs to the edge of its waters.
But it was most familiar to us, as to anyone who lives in Sydney,
by its ferry-boats, which run to and from its many promontories and
its growing suburbs, and find their terminus at the Charing Cross of
the harbour--Circular Quay. At night with their lighted saloons and
incessant movement, coming and going, the ferry-boats make Sydney
Harbour into a feast of lanterns. In the daytime no one could describe
it and convey any impression of it; for it changes so, and has so many
aspects:
The haze on the hills northward and westward.
The large and small steamers in motion....
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of
the wheels.
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset.
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight.
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the grey walls of the
houses by the quays.
On the neighbouring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys
burning high in the night.
Or again:
I too, many and many a time crossed the harbour of old.
Watched the seagulls....
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging in towards
the south.
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water.
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams.
Looked towards the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving.
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me.
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at
anchor....
That was written by a poet of another harbour, but it catches better
than any description I can give, the life, the humanity of Sydney
Harbour.
It will be the same, perhaps not less beautiful, fifty years hence.
But people who have lived there long, look at the encroaching villas
of Mosman’s Bay, and all the suburbs on that side, and say rather
sadly, “I can remember the time--ten years ago, twenty ... when there
wasn’t a house there.” And one cannot help an apprehension lest in
years to come, the tree-clothed heights and headlands may not all be
whity-brown with the houses of citizens. Doubtless on the side of the
harbour opposite to Circular Quay another Sydney will spring up which
will be to the old one what Brooklyn is to New York, and will have
its own factories and its own Mayor. One can hope only that it will
grow up maintaining some idea of public parks--which ought all to come
down to the water, and fend off the encroachments of houses--and of
town-planning. There is plenty of room now. Room will be dearer later
on.
Sydney itself is an object-lesson. It is a fine town in parts. It has
a fine park. Macquarie Street is fine; so is the enclosure of the
University; and there are the Botanic Gardens, and the Domain. You
cannot ask for better than that. At least I cannot, who am a Cockney,
and found in Sydney a town which had grown up haphazard very much like
London. Its best streets rather narrow and far from straight, just like
London’s; its Circular Quay bearing signs of reform that must have been
very much needed; its plebeian insertion of Wooloomooloo dropped in
the middle of the town much as Clare Market and Drury Lane were, or
are, left in between the Strand and Holborn. To a Londoner Sydney will
always be a homelike place. Those who live there will seem to him like
lifelong friends, and it will be his fault if they are any less.
The Glasgow Scot, it will be remembered, said that Glasgow was a
gran’ place to get out from; and New South Wales is very accessible
from Sydney. During most of the year the inhabitants do not live very
far from the city; for it is so much more easy to reach the spring
woodlands, the summer and the sun than it is from London. Manly Beach
and surf-bathing are just over the road; Broken Bay, where the simple
life presents itself without affectation, is round the corner; Pitt
Water and sounds and creeks and broads, where in September the wild
swans come, are a cycle ride away. In the background hover the Blue
Mountains; rather mysterious heights, because the light reflected
from the glossy leaves of the trees which wrap these hills as closely
as fur, gives always to them a bluish sheen. Even Melbourne admits
the Blue Mountains, and says without grudging that nowhere is there
anything quite like them. In the hot days of summer ... it can be hot
in Australia--once on a scorching day at Lord’s I remember that Jim
Phillips, the umpire in many Test matches, responded to a remark on
the heat: “Hot? Why, in Australia they’d call this ‘a break in the
heatwave!’” ... in the hot days of summer people take bungalows in the
Blue Mountains and come by morning train to town. It is worth it. In
the winter, by way of contrast, the holidaymakers can go still farther
up-country, and obtain ski-ing.
CHAPTER XIV
SYDNEY AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
The approach to Sydney by rail lies through wooded hills with beautiful
views of dark ranges in the distance. It had been raining overnight,
and everything was glistening in the early morning sun that lighted up
the red shoots of the gum trees. Along the line were small encampments
of workmen, who have to live under canvas to be within reach of their
employment on the railway.
We had been told that Sydney would be very hot, but our first
impression was one of all-pervading moisture, for after the long
spell of dusty, dry weather, the rain had caught us up at last; a
fine driving rain that made everything sodden. Our host met us at the
station, and took us to identify our luggage, which was lying in the
mud on another platform. Our first view of Sydney was of tall houses
crowded together in narrow streets, more like those of a European town;
for the city has grown up anyhow, instead of being schemed on the
rectangular, spacious plan of the newer capitals. We caught passing
glimpses of fine buildings and open spaces, “Hyde Park,” and Macquarie
Street, the Harley Street of Sydney, where all the doctors live,
advertising their whereabouts with immense brass plates on the railings
of their houses.
Descending this broad street, we were on the famous Sydney Harbour,
the most beautiful in the world, Valparaiso its only rival. One always
thinks of a harbour as a round place full of shipping, with crowded,
dirty wharfs. Sydney Harbour is quite different from this; it is a
series of creeks running up into the land, its different arms separated
by wooded hills, whose trees are rapidly disappearing in a tide of
villas. Wherever you are in Sydney, you are never far away from some
fresh aspect of the harbour.
Our car ran on to a steam-ferry, already crowded with cars and carts,
climbed the bank on the other side, and passing a terrace of houses,
like an old-fashioned London suburb, drew up at a garden gate. We
never saw anything prettier in Australia than that garden. A sloping
tree-shaded lawn, bordered by grey, close-clipped salt bush, led down
to an old house, chocolate-coloured, two-storied, gabled. On the right
of the path was a large tree, still bare of leaves, but covered with
long, scarlet blossoms. It was the coral-tree (erythrina), common
in the warm north-eastern latitudes of Australia. The house itself
had an old-world charm, and a certain exquisite freshness that caused
us some anxiety as to the effect of our very travel-stained luggage
on its spotless interior; but the wise Australian hostess, whom long
experience has acquainted with the treatment her guests’ trunks will
have received at the hands of railway officials, sets an uncarpeted
room apart for their reception. Here the muddy, battered things are
deposited, and their owner can gingerly approach them there, for it is
not usual in Australian households for the maids to unpack visitors’
luggage, and, generally speaking, one may say this is fortunate for the
visitor.
The front of this charming old house was no less beautiful than the
back. It had been built long ago by convict labour, and was heavily
barred and shuttered against their possible depredations. The bedrooms
looked out over the harbour, a beautiful view of never-ending
kaleidoscopic fascination. Beneath the trees under the window
large steamers came, and the busy traffic of smaller craft slipped
soundlessly to and fro. It was a scene of continual colour, movement,
and life, with its silent background of wooded hills.
Sydney, with the exception of two days of heavenly blue skies, was
unpropitious in its weather during our stay; when it wasn’t raining,
which it did intermittently with great violence, it was blowing up
clouds of dust, in preparation for the next shower, and no amount of
rain seemed really effective in laying its stinging, swirling clouds.
However, we set off after lunch to visit the University, and walked
down a steep lane to the little pier where the steamers call for the
Circular Quay, whence the different boats run to one and another point
in the harbour. It is a charming little journey from Kirribilli Point,
by which musical native name, with its characteristic reduplications
of the vowel sounds, our temporary home was called; Old Admiralty
House lies picturesquely among its high gardens, and on the opposite
shore, on a green mound with two sentinel trees stands the little
fortress-like building where the first governors of the colony lived.
A tram from the Circular Quay runs up the principal street of Sydney,
past the Town Hall and the Cathedral to the University grounds. We made
a dash through the pouring rain to the University buildings, which
stand on high ground, overlooking the town. The University was founded
in 1850, though its scope has since been greatly enlarged. It comprises
faculties of arts, law, medicine, and science. As at Melbourne,
denominational colleges, of which the principal ones are Church of
England and Presbyterian, have been established and incorporated with
it. A woman’s college, undenominational, has also been built within
the University grounds, as well as a hospital, where medical students
and nurses are trained. The fees for tuition are fifteen guineas a
year in the Faculty of Arts, and twenty-seven guineas a year in the
professorial schools; but though these fees are hardly more than
nominal, pupils from the Government High Schools or Registered Schools,
can be awarded exhibitions on the result of the Leaving Certificate
Examination of the Department of Public Instruction, which give the
privilege of free education during the University course. These
exhibitions are, however, limited in number.
The handsome University main building will eventually form the front
of a proposed quadrangle. There is a large hall for examinations
and public meetings, and lecture-rooms for general subjects; but
the Science and Medical Schools are separately housed. The general
educational system of New South Wales, primary and secondary, is
established on much the same lines as that already described in Western
Australia. Only those children are admitted to the secondary schools
who have obtained a qualifying certificate. Every precaution has been
taken to render the technical education of the colony as efficient
as possible. Conferences, attended by both employers and workpeople,
discussed and drew up a course of instruction. Trades schools were
established that should lead up to the technical colleges, and by a
wise provision, without which the whole fabric of technical education
is rendered nugatory, an “entrance qualification” for the trades
schools was made compulsory. In some trades, by arrangement with the
employers, apprentices attend a trades school during working hours.
Every precaution is taken that the children in scattered, outlying
districts shall not elude the benefits the state provides. Wherever
central schools are possible, children are taken to them free by
coach, or in the coastal districts by launch. “Bush” children have
“Provisional” or “Half-time” schools,[17] provided for them. “Caravan”
schools visit scattered families. “Flying Camp” schools accompany
railway construction.
[Illustration: CIRCULAR QUAY, SYDNEY.]
It is claimed that New South Wales exhibits the most perfect
existing system of centralised educational administration. All state
education is controlled by the Public Instruction Department,
and the whole cost is paid out of consolidated revenue. There is no
educational tax or local rate.
It seemed to us, as we assimilated all these facts, that first day in
Sydney, that our colonies were doing things while we talk about them;
but it must be remembered that they have to form, while we have to
reform, and the first is much the easier task.
We got back to Kirribilli Point, eluding the heavy showers as far as
possible, but Sydney looked as miserable as all towns on a thoroughly
wet day, producing a confused impression of chilly damp, streaming shop
windows, jostling umbrellas, and liquid mud. The next day was better,
fortunately, as the Governor of New South Wales was giving a garden
party.
Government House, itself an unimportant structure, is charmingly placed
on a point of the harbour, with gardens sloping down to the water.
Towards evening the sun shone out, and gave us the first impression
of the real Sydney, and our host seized the opportunity to show us
something of the place as it ought to look. We motored to South Head
along a road, where verandahed and balconied houses clustered in
gardens on the hills above the harbour, clinging, as it were, to the
rocks, which crop out everywhere among the short grass, smoothed and
weathered by time. Graceful grey pepper trees grow in many of the
gardens, drooping over the fences. The road, which ran up and down
hill, ended abruptly in a boulder. We got out, and walked along to the
edge of the South Head, the southern extremity of the entrance to the
harbour, where the purple Pacific booms in the cavities of the high
sandstone cliffs. This view from the South Head is one of the most
beautiful in Australia. The blue waters of the harbour are guarded by
sentinel cliffs, and misty range on range of low hills stretch away
inland.
Here we saw growing for the first time the lantana, a hardy shrub, not
unlike the “meal tree” of our hedges at home, but with pink and yellow
flowers. It is a very decorative thing, but is regarded in Australia,
and especially in Queensland, as a noxious weed.
We returned home by way of the Domain, or public park, adjoining the
Botanical Gardens, along a road lined by the stately Morton Bay Pine.
[Illustration: SOUTH COAST, NEW SOUTH WALES.]
One day in Sydney was devoted to an excursion by boat round the
harbour. It is a curious fact that Captain Cook, in his careful survey
of the east coast of Australia, should have missed Sydney Harbour.
When exploring the east coast of Australia in the “Endeavour,” a ship
of 368 tons, he spent some time in Botany Bay in the spring of 1770,
where he buried one of his men, took in wood and water, and made some
ineffectual attempts at friendly negotiation with the natives. He gave
the bay the name by which it was afterwards known because of the “great
quantity of plants, that Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander collected in this
place.” He then sailed away to the North, passing Sydney Harbour at
two or three miles’ distance; merely noting that “there was there a
good bay or harbour, in which there appeared to be good anchorage,”
which he called Port Jackson. Here, years later, after the revolt of
the American colonies; when the English Government was faced with the
difficulty of disposing of the convicts, who had been formerly shipped
to America; a scheme was set on foot, partly through the initiation of
Lord Sydney, for shipping them to Botany Bay, and founding a colony
there. An expedition was sent out under Captain Philip, the first
governor of the colony. The fleet sailed in May, seventeen years after
Captain Cook’s exploration of the coast of New South Wales, as he had
named it, and took thirty-six weeks to reach Botany Bay by way of
the Cape and Brazil; but on his arrival Governor Philip came to the
conclusion that Botany Bay was not suitable for a settlement, and,
coasting north, entered the opening between the north and south heads
of Port Jackson, and discovered the magnificent harbour inside.
He selected as a landing-place a bay four miles from the opening of the
harbour, where there was a good spring of fresh water, and excellent
anchorage for many of the largest ships of that day. He therefore
made this his landing-place, and called it Sydney Cove, after the
then Secretary of State for the Colonies. On January 26th, 1788,
the date now commemorated as the anniversary day of the Foundation
of the Colony, the rest of Captain Philip’s fleet sailed round from
Botany Bay, and anchored in Sydney Cove, near what is now known as the
Circular Quay, though at that time the cove ran a good deal farther
inland. It was Governor Philip who planned the principal streets of
the new township of Sydney with a width of 200 feet, which was instead
unfortunately, reduced to sixty feet by his successors, producing
a narrow, crowded effect, instead of the generous sense of space
characteristic of cities in the new world.
The quay was a process of slow development. As late as 1803 Governor
King issued a general order which stated that “The framing,
lengthening, and planking of the wharf on the eastern side is complete,
and the inhabitants are expected to cart material to fill it up and to
make a way to it.” An admirably simple method of accomplishing public
works; equally salutary with the measures then in vogue for dealing
with loafers: “All persons loitering about the wharves will be put to
hard labour for the rest of the day.” The wharves grew up, like the
city, in gradual response to the needs of the increasing population.
But in 1900 an outbreak of plague produced stringent reforms. In
order to prevent its recurrence the Government took over the whole
of the wharves, regardless of cost, placing the business of their
reconstruction in the hands of a Harbour Trust, who have swept away old
wharves, provided new ones, and had the foreshores made rat-proof.
Sydney Harbour baffles description; pages would give no idea of its
varied charm and beauty. It is difficult even to realise that its
shores occupy a length of 188 miles, made up of innumerable bays
and creeks running up among its wooded hills. Some of these, in the
neighbourhood of the main centres of traffic, are fringed with busy
wharves and lined with shipping. On the opposite side from them the
hills are thickly dotted with villas, but in the more remote arms of
the harbour the bush remains still untouched and primeval, hiding quiet
sandy beaches in its recesses.
Roughly speaking, one may say the harbour divides itself into two main
sections; that on the northern side of the entrance called Middle
Harbour, and the more extensive southern portion which, with all its
many ramifications, runs west and ends in the Parramatta River. It is
on the southern shores of this side of the harbour that the commercial
life of Sydney is centred, the great and busy city with all its
thronging wharves. On the northern shores are the picturesque houses of
the well-to-do residents; for Sydney is also a pleasure city, and the
land-locked waters of the upper reaches of the harbour are delightful
for sailing, rowing, fishing, and bathing, while in the immediate
neighbourhood are the popular surf-bathing beaches of Manly and Coogee.
We had already visited some of the northern shores of the harbour,
but we had not penetrated to the west. The day was fine, the weather
propitious. Our steamer started from Fort Macquarie, and we sailed
first to the outer harbour, gaining varied impressions of the serrated,
undulating shores; past the old Federal Government House, and the
beautiful Botanic Gardens, which adjoin the public park, known as
the Domain, and run down to the shore; past Macquarie Point and
Wooloomooloo; past Rushcutter’s Bay, and past the charming Rose Bay, to
the steep escarpment of the North and South Heads, where the Pacific
comes rolling up its breakers. On the return journey we went as far as
Cockatoo Island in the Parramatta River, one of the most westerly of
the many picturesque islands scattered within the harbour. Here are
the Government docks, originally constructed by convicts; for Cockatoo
Island was formerly a penal settlement. In the last year or two the
docks have been very much extended, and shipbuilding is now carried on
on a large scale.
At the colliery of Balmain coal-mining is carried on at a great
depth below the harbour. It was growing late when we returned to
our starting-point, but the evening light was loveliest of all on
Kirribilli Point above which a crescent moon was hanging.
CHAPTER XV
THE BLUE MOUNTAINS AND A BUSH PICNIC
We had heard much of the famous Blue Mountains during our progress
from West Australia to New South Wales and were anxious to visit them.
In the early days they formed an impenetrable barrier between Sydney
and the rich country beyond. Many vain and unsuccessful attempts were
made to cross these labyrinthine ranges. Each successive line of
heights is so like another, its eucalyptus-covered shoulders with the
deep, blind gorges between, for long baffled and defied all attempts
at exploration. The first of these efforts was undertaken as early as
1793–4 by three naval officers; but it was not till 1813, in the time
of Governor Macquarie, that some settlers interested in stock-breeding
won their way through. For a time, like all their predecessors, they
got entangled in the bewildering network of gorges that make travelling
here so difficult, but at last, chancing upon a dividing spur that ran
westward, they pursued its ridge till, arriving at the summit, they saw
below them a fairly open valley with a running stream and good pasture.
Governor Macquarie at once followed up the important discovery by
sending out another expedition, which led to the discovery of a river
flowing westward, the “Macquarie River,” and subsequently opened up the
country beyond. A road was constructed across the mountain in 1815.
Early inland exploration in Australia forms an interesting and often
tragic chapter in the history of the continent. Its story has been told
in detail in Favenc’s “Australian Exploration.”
We got up very early in the morning. How delightful it was to throw
open the shutters on to the green trees and lawns of the garden with
the busy blue waters of the harbour below, the big ships lading and
unlading their cargo on to tenders, the little local steamers bustling
to and fro, looking as if there was not room for them all. Breakfast,
including a very agreeable kind of marmalade jelly, made of sweet
oranges, was brought to us at seven o’clock, and we started shortly
afterwards. It was a still morning with a threat of rain, and heavy,
drifting clouds. The water round the little wooden landing-stage of
Kirribilli Point is so clear that small shoals of fish can be seen
distinctly swimming about the piles, and we watched for some time a
little speckled thing that looked like a mouse in shape.
[Illustration: NATIONAL PASS, BLUE MOUNTAINS.]
We passed out of the suburbs of Sydney, through the outlying red wooden
houses, with corrugated iron roofs, surrounded by greenery and standing
in cleared spaces. Then came green fields, sometimes with the dead
trees or their stumps still remaining. We noticed numerous orange trees
before we left the populated district. The hour was still very early;
we slept peacefully for the greater part of the journey. Unless the
faculty of sleeping in a train is cultivated, there is no enjoyment for
the Australian traveller, for he must always journey scores of miles
to get anywhere, and the country, generally speaking, varies little in
character. On this occasion we awoke to find ourselves in a sort of
Swiss scenery, with range on range of blue hills. This endless vista
of gum-covered hill after gum-covered hill made it easy to see why for
years the Blue Mountains were the despair of pioneers, who, surmounting
one range, found another in front of them exactly the same. The view
was only varied by red escarpments in places. The stopping-places, as
we slowly mounted higher, were entirely conventional. We might have
been looking out on a suburb of London--Sydenham, for instance,
as far as the aspect of the neat suburban houses was concerned. The
illusion was deepened by the appearance of “Springfield Ladies’
College,” very trim and sedate among its neighbours, only the gardens
bore camellia bushes for roses.
Leura, on the other hand, gives the illusion of a Swiss village, with
its background of high dark hills, large flourishing hotels, and rows
of fir trees. Our destination was Katoomba. These hill settlements are
on the way to becoming thriving towns. A large and excellent hotel
already dominated the one main street of shops. The Blue Mountains are
a popular week-end, or holiday resort for Sydney, whose residents can
easily attain the pure mountain air, after the steamy heat which is
said to be the normal condition of the city in summer. Katoomba could
only boast of one modest street, but it supported two chemists’ shops,
and a furnishing company, conducted by a man of unsurpassed initiative
and a sense of the dramatic. One would not have supposed that there
was scope for such a faculty in the furnishing trade. But in his shop
window was represented not mere specimens of his wares, not merely
pillow-slips and dining-tables to tempt the hardy pioneer from the
backwoods, but that hardy pioneer himself. The whole shop front had
been converted into a scene representing a sumptuously furnished hotel
bedroom, in which a young man, a wax figure, had retired for the night.
His clothes were thrown carelessly about the room, his boots and socks
kicked off by the bedside, his gun leant in one corner, the contents of
his small tin trunk were neatly arranged on the dressing-table. A small
table, on which were a pack of cards and an empty champagne bottle,
bore testimony to his gay bachelor habits, but before he went to bed
his last thought had been otherwise, for open upon the writing-table
was a letter written in a large bold hand to his “Dearest Henriette,”
lamenting his loneliness, and asking when the happy day would come
on which they should set up house together. The whole scene was so
realistic that the youth of Katoomba could not linger long unmoved in
contemplation of it.
We lunched at the large hotel of the little settlement, its verandah
overlooking a fine vista of misty hills that must have been superb on
a sunny day, but the rain clouds hung heavily over them, diffusing an
exquisitely soft light under the low grey sky. After lunch we started
on the top of a coach drawn by five horses to see some of the falls
for which the neighbourhood is famous. It took skilled driving over
the rough tracks that did duty for roads. We bumped up and down steep
ascents and descents, swung round impossible corners with glimpses
between the trees of range on range of misty blue mountains stretching
away illimitable, mysterious, aloof, with no sign of life on their soft
gum-clad slopes.
Occasionally the coach stopped, and we got down, while the guide
who accompanied us pointed out some famous views or some especially
beautiful fir-clad gully, with a little trickle of water falling from
the rocks and tinkling away unseen. There seemed to be no birds or
animals. The guide said that the foxes were killing off the small
native animals in these gorges, and that of the koala bears, which were
once numerous, there were very few left. A price is given for foxes’
skins in the hope of exterminating them. We were told in Melbourne that
they fetched 10s. On one of these occasions we heard a curious noise,
something like the gobbling of a turkey, made by a large brown bird,
which the guide affirmed to be a lyre bird.
The Katoomba Falls, which we visited last, were on a much more imposing
scale. The water comes down from a great height in a succession of
falls. As a matter of fact an extra supply of water was turned on for
the benefit of ourselves and some other visitors, so that altogether
our impression of Katoomba was that of a very sophisticated spot. The
excellent hotel and the soft sweet air, even in winter, though it is
3000 feet above sea level, would certainly make it an ideal place for
rest, with an endless variety of delightful walks, which would reveal
in their season all kinds of plants, animals, and insects, as well as
the magnificent mountain views. It was dark when we started on the
return journey, which seemed so interminable that we marvelled at the
hardihood of the people who actually live at such places as Katoomba
and go into Sydney for business, for such we were told there are. The
lights of Sydney and a very belated dinner were more than welcome.
It is difficult in a new country to think in large enough terms--to
realise, for instance, that New South Wales is more than two and a
half times as large as the whole British Isles. In this vast expanse
of country the climate varies greatly, from that of Mount Kosciusko in
the south, where ski-ing and other Alpine sports are carried on in the
winter, to the warm and humid districts of the north. There is thus
a correspondingly great variety of products; from wheat, barley, and
maize to sugar-canes and tobacco, cotton, and olives; from strawberries
to that much over-rated tropical fruit, the mango.
[Illustration: SHEARING TIME, BURRAWONG STATION, NEW SOUTH WALES.]
The state of New South Wales may be roughly divided, geographically,
into three areas. A coastal district; plateaux or tablelands, of
which the Blue Mountains form part; and the western or inland plains.
Agricultural and pastoral production varies according to the character
of these different areas.
Dairying is making rapid progress in the coastal districts of the
north; the tablelands afford admirable conditions for mixed farming, in
which the raising of sheep and cattle is combined with the growth of
cereals; the western slopes are the centre of the wheat industry; while
the vast area of level grass land in the far west give pasturage to
40,000,000 merino sheep.
For the chief contributing factor to the pastoral wealth of Australia
has been wool. By far the greater part is exported, for though local
woollen mills have been started they do not absorb much more than 1¼%
of the whole clip. It was the introduction of the merino sheep from
South Africa, through the agency of a Captain MacArthur in 1797, that
laid the foundation of the Australian wool trade, for the merino unites
the faculty of producing the finest wool with the capacity of seeking
its food over the most extended areas, and of resisting drought.
New South Wales is now the most important wool producing state in
Australia, and exported in 1912 44·4% of the total export of wool from
the continent. The Commonwealth Returns for 1911 show that Australia
exported 44% of the total value of all wool imported into the United
Kingdom alone, in round numbers more than fourteen million pounds’
worth, as compared with seven millions from New Zealand, and two from
Cape Colony.
By far the most important product after wool is wheat. In 1911–12
a little over 65% of the whole area under cultivation was devoted
to wheat. At present less than 2% of the land in the state is under
cultivation, though over 92% is occupied. “In the past New South Wales
has filled a most important place as the premier wool-producing country
in the world. But during later years the production of wheat and other
cereals has been steadily increasing.... The land is the great source
of wealth, and we cannot continue to let the great part of such wealth
lie idle.... Australia, and more particularly New South Wales, may
confidently accept “mixed farming” as the solution of the land problem.”
The days of enormous runs, at all events on land suitable for
agriculture, are numbered ... the big run, having served its turn, is
fated to undergo subdivision and closer settlement.[18] Under the
Closer Settlement Act large areas of good land have been repurchased by
the Government and disposed of at from 25s. to £5 an acre. The terms
are very easy; a small deposit has to be made, and the remainder is
paid off over a term of years. Many large private estates are being
periodically cut up, and under the Closer Settlement Promotion Act
three or more persons having agreed with the owners of land as to
price and area, may apply to the Crown to purchase the lands.[19] The
system of “Shares Farming” is being worked with great success in New
South Wales at present. The landowner supplies the land, the tenant
the labour, the produce of the combination is equally divided. By this
means the farm labourer without capital soon acquires land of his
own.[20]
[Illustration: “A FLOCK OF SHEEP,” KINROSS STATION, NEW SOUTH WALES.]
Among the many charms of Sydney and its neighbourhood are the flat
sandy beaches that have made surf bathing popular. Our host had
planned a delightful expedition by motor and motor-launch that was to
culminate in a real Australian picnic in the bush with “billy” tea and
damper, showing us on the way Manly Beach. The morning was drizzling
and heavy, but Australian weather at its worst always has lucid
intervals, and soon after our early start the rain had cleared off. Our
way led through the extensive suburbs of Mosman, past many arms of the
harbour, like lovely inland lakes with wooded banks, down to a narrow
point called the Spit, from which a ferry crosses to the eastern side.
Here we met many other motor-cars, all converging on the same point,
and after crossing on the ferry and climbing a steep hill, we had left
Sydney and its harbour behind, and presently began to have glimpses of
the Pacific. The drive was one of endless charm and novelty: sometimes
we passed what looked like a rushy inland lake, sometimes we were close
to the shore. Several miles of the coast land here have been bequeathed
to the Salvation Army, which has erected various buildings on this
beautiful site. At one point a sandy bar separated a reach of still
water from the great sunlit breakers beyond, and within it hundreds of
black swans were swimming.
There were numerous week-end cottages among the gum trees. The road
ended under a steep hill, its hedges covered with a sweet-scented
yellow flower. We had reached our destination of Pittwater, an arm
of Broken Bay, so named by Captain Cook. It looks like a great lake,
the low hilly shores covered with trees down to the water’s edge.
Our motor-boat was waiting at the end of a little jetty. The tide
was low, and in the mud alongside were myriads of little crabs that
disappeared with astonishing rapidity, scuttling into their holes. It
was a pretty little voyage across this smooth arm of the sea, in which
big yellowish-green jelly-fish floated beside us. At the landing on the
opposite side of the creek the shore was fringed with small oysters.
In the bush spring flowers were already beginning to appear. Ferns
and cotton palms grew among the gums, a yellow clematis was coming
into flower, and the lovely pink starlike Queensland rose, that is not
really a rose, but a kind of boronia. We lunched at one of the picnic
places provided by the forethought of a paternal government, with a
place to boil the billy all ready, and a wooden shelter with rough
benches and table. There is always plenty of dry wood in Australia;
a soft-water tank was part of the equipment, and the billy was soon
boiling; so we had our billy tea and damper, a kind of unleavened bread
that is very agreeable, and it was great fun, though the pioneer effect
of it was rather diminished by such accessories as hock and salmon
sandwiches. Then we gathered a bunch of the lovely unfamiliar flowers
and started on our return journey, which was varied by our running
along Manly Beach, crowded with Sunday pleasure-seekers even in these
early spring days.
Sydney is so split up and scattered over its hills that it takes some
time for a stranger to realise its extent. All these Australian towns
are so extraordinarily well-to-do; there is never anything like our
working-class suburbs. “Where do the poor people live?” we used to ask.
The obvious answer being that there are _no_ poor.
[Illustration: SURF BATHING, MANLY, NEAR SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES.]
For us Sydney will always mean Kirribilli Point, and the old house,
whose owner called it by the pretty native name of Wyreepi--“Come and
stay”--a name eloquent of the unfailing kindness and hospitality within
its portals--an old house shuttered and barred against the depredations
of the early lawless convict settlers who had helped to build it. The
name evokes a mental picture of its red gables and chocolate-coloured
walls, with the gravel paths to match; its hedge of grey, closely
clipped salt bush, its sloping lawns and tall trees, its beds of sweet
peas and stocks, sweetest of spring flowers, the coral-tree its bare
boughs hanging with scarlet flowers; and in front the grass sloping to
the water’s edge, and the endless panorama of the harbour.
* * * * *
Those who have unlimited time at their disposal can choose between
taking ship at Sydney and coasting up to Brisbane in preference to the
very long and exhausting railway journey of about thirty hours; though
by so doing they would miss the magnificent scenery of the Hawkesbury
River, and the smiling suburban country-side that the train passes
through after leaving Sydney, with the red iron-roofed houses scattered
among the gum trees. The Hawkesbury River runs into the northern
extremity of Broken Bay, bordered here by a national reserve of great
beauty called Kuring-gai-Chase. Formerly trains from Sydney were met on
the shores of the river by a steamer, which took passengers across to
the other side to continue their journey; a delightful experience on a
fine day, for every traveller on its shores must long to make a closer
acquaintance with this noble and mighty river. Now, however, it is
spanned by a bridge, which crosses to Long Island, where it resembles
an Italian lake. Along the shore the water showed through a fringe of
coral-trees. Farther north the country grew more tropical; we noticed
a tiny house flanked on either side by two tall brugmancias in flower.
And the undergrowth of the bush became more varied. We saw for the
first time a curious kind of white bulrush, growing like the “black
boys” of Western Australia. They looked just like very tall church
candles, their black spikes forming the wick. The bush is always the
same, that is, it is always a forest of gums; but it has nevertheless
an individual character from the undergrowth in the different states
and latitudes.
We stopped for some time at Newcastle, an inferno of smoking chimneys
and coal-dust. The coal deposits of New South Wales are its most
important source of mineral wealth, and her coalfields are greater
in area, and produce a better quality of coal than those of any
other state; it is hoped for that reason that New South Wales may
become the principal centre of manufacture in the continent. Coal was
first discovered in 1797 in the coalfield south of Sydney, and soon
after coal was found in the cliffs at Newcastle, which has become an
important centre of export.
After leaving Newcastle the line turns westward from the coast and
crosses the fertile Hunter River valley, where the soil is so rich that
it yields as many as eight crops in one year, averaging between three
and four tons to the acre. We stopped for dinner at what we supposed to
be in the dark a small wayside station called Singleton. It is actually
a town of considerable importance, with a population of 10,000, and
the neighbourhood is famous for its breed of horses. We dined in the
characteristic wooden, iron-roofed hall. An immense advertisement of
the local hairdresser at one end inquired, “Is your hair ringbarked?” A
selection of the population, boys in front and men behind, a serious,
rough-looking group, watched us at our meal with silent and rapt
attention from the open doorway.
Soon after passing Singleton the line ascends steeply, crosses the
Liverpool Range and runs through the Liverpool Plains, where some
of the best wheat is grown. We awoke next morning to find ourselves
passing through forest, and changed trains at Wallangarra, the border
station where the gauge changes from four feet eight and a half
inches to three feet six, so that all passengers and luggage must be
transferred.
PART V
QUEENSLAND
CHAPTER XVI
BANANA-LAND
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you--
Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring--
Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.
Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Those lines were written by an Australian in exile, for he was with
the Australian contingent in the war in South Africa. He is dead
now, and he did not long survive the brave soldiers whose epitaph he
wrote beginning with those words, which seem, to one who has known
Australia only a little, to sum up in a wonderful way the clinging
memories of the land. He spoke too of the “blue skies clear beyond the
mountain-tops,” and “the dear dun plains where we were bred,” and there
are no two sentences which more simply or clearly bring back Australia
to the mind. But it is the Australia of the west and the south. When
the Hawkesbury River is crossed eastwards, and the flats where the
first Cornstalks were raised have been left behind, a new country comes
into vision. It is tropic Queensland, whose inhabitants are called
Banana-landers, because the banana finds the climate very suitable to
its growth.[21]
Naturally the change is not immediately apparent in the long, long
journey by rail. The enchanting cool stretches of the Hawkesbury give
place to the ascending grades of the hills; then there are interminable
stretches of the dun plains, broken by lengths almost as long of gaunt
forest, sometimes dead wood. Then the plateau of fine pasture of the
Darling Downs, and the descent warmer and moister and greener as you go
into the land of the banana and the pine. It is also, if you strike far
enough north, the land of the prickly pear.
Railway journeying is not a bad way of seeing a country if you have
no better. One can gain an impression of China such as nothing can
obliterate by taking the North China Railway up to Harbin; and people
have written books of impressions of Java on the strength of the five
days’ journey which can be made from the port of Sourabaya, through
crumbling Djokjokarta and the wondrous Javanese highlands to Batavia.
So something of the nature of Queensland can be arrived at by that long
night and half-a-day journey by rail, though if we were asked what
was the chief impression which, at this distance of time, is left on
our minds, we should answer that it was one of wood and pasture lying
waiting for men and money--vast resources which need the spade and the
axe and the drill--and more railway.
Side by side would be quite another impression, one quite without
significance. It was that of the little township, one of many, where we
stopped for supper--a meal engulfed in all possible haste, and yet in
the midst of it there suddenly appeared on the platform of the hall,
which on ordinary occasions is probably used as a cinema theatre,
the Mayor. We were, as we should again explain, members of a large
travelling party, and the opportunity was one which the Mayor could not
resist. He bade us welcome to ---- (the name is forgotten), and added
what delight it was to see among us so many happy faces.... Then having
had our meal cut short by the oration, we hastened back to the waiting
special.
Queensland is full of townships like that--townships which are
springing into towns. Sometimes they seem to consist of a few boards
knocked together with telegraph wire; at a later stage they have added
a handsome Town Hall, a Catholic cathedral in red brick, a humbler
Church of England one ... but most of them retain the suburb of
wooden-frame houses. They do not spring out of the bush in the same way
that the towns of Western Australia do; perhaps because the clearings
have been made larger. But everywhere you seem to see right back to
the beginnings of the place, when a few people settled there and lived
there; and gradually added this and that to it, till Townsville, or
Maryborough, became to them the finest place in the world--because they
called it home. Even Brisbane, with its broad bank-building-fronted
Queen Street, retains something of the same aspect.
But Queensland is not its towns. Queensland, if you go but the smallest
distance away from them, is the unconquered wild; the land where the
blacks still signal with fires; where the forests smoulder and blaze
for days in the burning sun; a land where it is possible still to be
an explorer. Only a few days ago we were speaking to a professor in a
laboratory in London, who lived ten years in Australia, and mentioned
Queensland. His face lit up in a reminiscent gleam. “I once went for a
holiday on the Queensland coast,” said he, “and we had rare sport. We
used to go shark-spearing. It can only be done on a few nights in the
year. The season is when the sharks come in to the coast; and it must
be moonlight ... and you race along the beach with nothing on, and you
can see the sharks in the under curve of the big rollers as they break
on the beach. And if you are quick and have the knack you can stab
at them from underneath, and they can’t get you. I got two or three,
though I was only a learner ... the finest sport ...” His voice trailed
away into silence. Our friend the distinguished physiologist had gone
from dusty London to a place in a tropic land eleven thousand miles
away.
That is Queensland as it seemed to us: a place in which the towns
were still additions rather than a part of a land where enchantment
and adventure still linger. There is an island on the coast which is
quite near a thriving town of meat-packing warehouses, streets full
of sun and dust and flies, and it is called Magnetic Island. You can
reach the island by a steam launch, and the people of the town often
make the trip, and when they get there presumably they have lunch at
the boarding-house hotel. It is a wooden building with washing hanging
out in the backyard and a dissipated emu stalking among the fowls. A
melancholy bird which seems to have come unstuffed. So there is nothing
romantic at the outset of a journey to Magnetic Island.
But wait. Twenty paces away from the hotel is a stony path, and the
trees have closed in behind you. A hundred yards, and if you strayed
away from the path the way would be lost. Dense trees, rock cropping
out at times, and no way out. A strange bird calls somewhere in the
distance, but it is otherwise very still and stifling. There is a tree
covered with yellow flowers, but it has a poisonous look; and if you
venture to pluck it a regiment of stinging ants sallies out at you. So
you drop it and go on. And here is a tree covered with butterflies,
thousands upon thousands of them. And now you come to a mangrove swamp,
and if you look down at the roots of the mangroves you will find the
rare fish that live half in and half out of the water, and can hop
about in the mud. So suddenly you realise that this is an island such
as all the adventurers and pirates and wrecked sailors have been cast
upon in the romances. Here they would have sought long for water,
and perhaps have sought in vain. Here they would have had painful
experiences with poisonous berries, and would for many days have had
to live on shellfish. Perhaps one day they would have seen ascending
smoke behind that rocky ridge, and realised that hostile natives were
waiting to fall on them. Long, long they would have waited for help and
rescue, and perhaps have left only their whitening bones to tell other
mariners in other years that rescue came too late....
If you would add verisimilitude to these fancies you can find it, for
on a secluded beach of Magnetic Island lies the skeleton of a ship that
was wrecked there. It will lie there for many years to come, for it is
worth no one’s while to salve it. But to one who saw it a year ago it
was a priceless relic, for it proved to him that even now in Queensland
the old romance, the old adventure, and the spirit of them still linger
in the lands that lie within our reach beyond the seas.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BEGINNING OF THE TROPICS
Soon after crossing the Queensland border we entered a stony country
in which intrepid settlers had built themselves houses among granite
boulders. In spite of this the soil of the surrounding district is very
rich, and consists largely of decomposed granite, which stretches for
eight hundred miles round the township of Stanthorpe, and is specially
good for fruit-growing and vineyards. “There,” observes the guide-book
poetically, “roses bloom all the year round on the cheek of the young,
and vigour characterises the movements of the old.”
The line then crossed open country cleared of gums; on the pastures
numbers of horses were feeding. Mountain ranges stretched away to
the far distance with deep grassy gorges. At one point we passed a
large patch of prickly pear, one of the most terrible of Queensland
pests which has had to be dealt with by special legislation, both in
Queensland and new South Wales. Botanically it is known as a form of
_Opuntia inermis_. It resembles the cactus hedges common in Southern
Italy, and was introduced by Governor Philip in 1789, who brought
it from Rio de Janeiro as food for the cochineal insect. It is said
that the first plant was regarded as so great a curiosity that a
gardener was dismissed for neglecting to water it. This may be an
apocryphal story, but at any rate the prickly pear took so kindly to
the Australian soil, and climate, that vast areas have been overrun by
it to an entirely disastrous extent. No entirely successful measures
have been evolved for coping with its devastating increase. It is
a most serious anxiety to agriculturists, for it is estimated that
in Queensland alone thirty million acres have been affected by it,
and that it spreads at the rate of one million acres a year. It has
found its opportunity in the fact that the districts best suited to
it are sparsely populated. No economical means of eradication have
been devised. In New South Wales the cost of destroying this pest was
calculated a year or two ago at ten or twelve million pounds. Its
barbed spinules produce severe irritation in men and animals, and
besides its habit of entrenching itself in gullies, on hilltops, and
places difficult of access, it is propagated by birds and stock, which
eat the seeds; and every joint, or piece of one, forms a new plant.
The township of Warwick lies in the foot hills of the Darling Downs,
which the line now crosses. This is one of the most fertile areas in
the state. There are over four million acres of rich black soil, formed
of decomposed basalt and many feet in depth. It is well watered, has a
plentiful rainfall and a temperate climate. Toowoomba is the capital
of the district. It is a thriving, growing town, an important centre
of agricultural, and especially dairy, produce. The line now turns
sharply east, and descends again to the plains, where we saw fields of
Indian corn or maize, the stalks left standing after the crops had been
gathered.
Long before we arrived at Brisbane it was dark. The less said about
Brisbane hotels the better--in all respects. There seemed to be a
billiard-room somewhere below our uninviting quarters, for we heard
the click of balls, and a man’s voice thickly reproached a comrade for
having “given his girl a rosary and made her a Roman Catholic”--an
interesting sidelight on the ease with which conversion may be
effected. It was so pleasant to be out of the train, that after dinner
we strolled about the brightly lighted arcaded streets of the town,
and found our way to a broad, swiftly flowing river that reflected the
lights of the city.
[Illustration: THE BRISBANE RIVER.]
We had now left the mild Australian winter behind us, and were
in the height of an English summer, wearing the thinnest summer
clothes, though Brisbane counted it as early spring. Brisbane is a
most beautifully situated town, set among hills washed by the river,
which runs into the sea eighteen miles away. Its many handsome public
buildings are fronted by gardens full of tropical vegetation, its
broad arcaded streets, filled with people, prosperous-looking like all
Australians. In the charming suburbs on the slopes of the green hills,
the houses are all built high on piles, each capped by its inverted
saucer to ward off the depredations of white ants. The deep, verandahed
houses are screened from the sun by straw blinds.
Politically, Queensland is the youngest of all the Colonies. A convict
settlement was founded at Moreton Bay by Governor Brisbane in 1824, but
it languished and was soon afterwards abandoned. In 1842 Moreton Bay
was proclaimed a free settlement. Not till 1859 was state separated
from New South Wales by Letters Patent establishing Moreton Bay as
a new colony under the name of Queensland. The constitution of the
colony is modelled on that of New South Wales; that is to say, there
is an Assembly or Lower House, whose members are salaried and elected
by manhood and womanhood suffrage. The Legislative Council or Upper
Chamber has a continuous existence. It is interesting to note to
what extent the Australian Second Chambers have acted as a retarding
influence on the democratic legislation of the Assemblies. A well-known
Australian writer observes that: “Designed as Conservative bodies,
the Councils have certainly fulfilled the retarding function of a
Second Chamber. Nearly every measure which is claimed as democratic
and progressive has had to pass the ordeal of several rejections....
The resistance of the Councils to drastic schemes for breaking up the
large pastoral holdings, and to land taxation, and the brake they apply
to ‘Socialistic legislation,’ have driven many if not into the ranks,
at any rate to the support of the Labour Party, and have been the
main cause of the zeal of that Party for enlarging the powers of the
Commonwealth Government, in whose constitution a forward policy has to
encounter no such obstacle.”[22]
The promoters of the Colony in these early days had little idea how
rapid would be its growth or how great its material prosperity. Very
little was known of that vast area, and its resources were practically
undiscovered. As for the coastal waters, little more was known of them
than had been described by Captain Cook and Lieutenant Flinders. The
stretch of smooth water that forms a natural harbour for a thousand
miles inside the great barrier reef was unimagined. The northern coast
land was believed to be uninhabitable by white men; the interior was
supposed to be an almost waterless area of intolerable heat, while
experts affirmed that if sheep survived at all beneath the tropical
suns of Queensland, they would grow hair instead of wool.
Meanwhile the young Colony throve and prospered, and in 1909 held an
exhibition of her products to celebrate the completion of the first
half-century of her separate existence. Besides live stock, raised
on the rich, indigenous grass crops, which cost nothing except wire
fencing, Queensland products include cotton, sugar, butter, cheese,
bacon, wheat, maize, potatoes, oranges, pineapples, and other tropical
fruits. Her minerals consist of gold, copper, tin, coal, besides gems.
It is, however, Queensland’s pastoral industries that are the main
source of her wealth, and which form more than half the total value of
her exports. The great sheep district is in the “Western Interior,”
which occupies about half the area of the state. Here undulating downs
extend to the horizon, almost treeless, except above the watercourses.
In the summer season many of these become a mere series of water holes,
but the discovery of the great supply of underground water, over a
district reaching from the extreme north of Queensland into New South
Wales and South Australia, has made it possible to transform them into
running streams by means of artesian bores. It is a melancholy fact
that many of the pioneers in the industry got poor returns for their
hard and strenuous enterprise. In the early days labour was scarce and
dear, and in the absence of railways or good roads it took from six
to nine months to convey the wool to the coastal district by means
of bullock drays. It was many years before the great agricultural
possibilities of the Darling Downs were discovered and utilised, though
this rich district supplies more than 70% of all the oats, wheat, and
barley grown in Queensland. The Queensland farmer is at present in a
most fortunate position; he has good stock, cheap land, first-rate
pastures, and a climate which allows production to go on all the year
round. As immigrants from Great Britain are under normal conditions
admitted on payment of a nominal fee as passage money, there is an
unlimited scope for agricultural enterprise.
[Illustration: CHARLEVILLE BORE.]
The morning after our arrival at Brisbane we went out to gain our
first impression of the city and its immediate neighbourhood. The air
was soft and humid, as it is all along the north-eastern Australian
coast line, and our first walk left upon us a mingled impression of
brilliant sunshine, dust, and palm trees. In Brisbane there is tropical
vegetation everywhere; the charm of the tropics, their glorious
never-failing sunshine, and the picturesque and profuse vegetation is
first felt here. If it were not for the fine, all-pervading dust, it
would be Paradise. Here, too, we first encountered tropical fruits.
The pawpaw looks like a dark green elongated melon. Its firm yellow
fruit is rather tasteless, but eatable with sugar. On the whole, we
came to the conclusion that it was not worth while, and the same may
be said generally of all tropical fruits. The smell of a ripe mango
is sufficient to deter all but the hardiest vegetarian. The pawpaw
plant is handsome, tall, and palm-like in growth, closely resembling
the small greenhouse auralia. It is common in the gardens of Brisbane
suburbs.
All the public buildings are dignified and handsome, with white stone
fronts. The University buildings are adapted from a former Government
House, and stand in beautiful grounds which run down to the river.
The Botanical Gardens, which flank the drive, are also washed by the
broad, swiftly flowing river. They are enchanting to linger in more
so even than the world-famous tropical gardens of Buitenzorg in Java.
Perhaps it was the moisture and greenness after the arid look of most
of the rest of Australia at the end of the dry season, that seemed
to us so refreshing and delightful. At any rate, we never tired of
wandering in these gardens, where hedges of sweet peas and stocks
alternated with every kind of gorgeous tropical flowering shrub, now
just coming into bloom. Here were palms and sloping lawns; by the river
grew the curious bunya bunya trees, with their bare arms and mop-like
ends; here were greenery and quiet; and, most blessed of all, freedom
from dust. Above the river two large kingfishers often glanced to and
fro; they must have had a nest close at hand.
CHAPTER XVIII
A DAY IN THE QUEENSLAND BUSH
This was one of the most delightful of all the many crowded days we
spent in Australia, for it revealed to us the wonder and the beauty of
the Queensland Bush.
We started early for the station through the streets that leave on
one’s mind, looking back, an impression of sharply defined black and
white, from the contrasting sunlight and shadow in that brilliant
atmosphere. The three hours’ journey to Nambour, where we were to see
a sugar manufactory, was full of interest. The line passes quite near
the curious peaks, which Captain Cook called the Glass House mountains.
The origin of the name is conjectural, but it is supposed that the
conical shape of some of them resembled the glass-blowing factories
in the England of his boyish days. These bare, isolated peaks push
themselves up sharply and precipitately from the plain. They are formed
of trachyte or some kindred igneous rock, and geologists are not agreed
as to their origin among the surrounding sandstone. We saw again many
of the grass trees, as they call the Queensland variety of the West
Australian “black boy.” The tropical bush begins about fifty miles
from Brisbane, where a Government Reserve has been created on either
side of the line, which passes through a belt of forest with palms and
ferns and richly varied undergrowth. Now and then a little party of
men at work on the line would shout clamorously for “papers.” Their
only chance of getting news of the outside world is to attract the
attention of passengers in the passing trains, and get them to throw
out newspapers. The country round here is very rich and fertile, and
for the first time we saw pineapple farms. In a good year pineapples
can be bought in some parts of Queensland for threepence a dozen, so we
were told. They are very good and juicy, and they make a very pleasant
form of jam. The plants look like rows of low-growing rushes or very
coarse grass.
Towards twelve o’clock the train pulled up between a field of
sugar-canes and the Moreton Central Sugar Mill. Sugar is a very
handsome crop, when the canes are bearing their tall, feathery flowers.
The canes themselves are dark red, jointed like bamboo; the plant is
not unlike a very large maize in general effect. Nambour is a centre
of the sugar-growing industry, and there are plantations on the slopes
of the hills and the banks of the rivers. Two hundred and eighty tons
a day are crushed at the Moreton Sugar Mills just outside the town.
Its neighbourhood is pervaded by the peculiar sweet, thick, cloying
smell of the canes, a smell that can never be forgotten; we recognised
cargoes of raw sugar afar off on every wharf and landing-stage and
railway station on which we encountered it, during the remainder of our
stay in Australia.
The history of sugar-growing here is very interesting. It was started
originally on the system of large plantations worked by coloured
labour. No other system of working sugar plantations in the tropics was
known. Natives were imported from the Pacific Islands. Planters erected
their own mills, and conducted their business through managers and
overseers. In the early seventies the industry was rapidly developing,
but two circumstances intervened to hamper it. The price of cane sugar
fell owing to the great increase in the manufacture of beet sugar in
Europe; the Government prohibited the employment of coloured labour.
These circumstances revolutionised the industry. The large plantations
gave place to smaller farms worked by white labour; the farmers
received Government grants to enable them to erect co-operative
factories; further, a Government bounty was imposed as a compensation
for the withdrawal of coloured labour; this was subsequently abolished.
The Central Mill System by which groups of farmers control the
factories continues. The canes are crushed and the sugar sent to the
refiners. The work of manufacture is carried out under scientific
supervision, and state sugar experimental stations test the various
species of cane, and determine which are most productive, and most
immune from disease. Thus the Queensland Sugar Industry is specially
interesting, because it has solved the problem of carrying on a
tropical manufacture with white labour.
The Moreton Central Sugar Mill, which we visited, is close to the main
line of railway, but light railways run in all directions through the
district to bring the canes up on trucks to the mill. Masses of dark
red cane were lying about round the mill, and coming in on little
trucks. The raw cane tastes faintly sour. The sugar mill itself was
filled with the all-pervading sickly, thick, sweet smell of the raw
sugar, and streaming with moisture. The temperature is very high. We
climbed under and over moving machinery, were asphyxiated with steam,
nauseated with sweetness, and covered with molasses, all in the
pursuit of knowledge.
Still it was a very interesting experience. All processes of
manufacture are interesting. The canes are shot in from outside, and
crushed by a series of heavy rollers till a thick juice pours out. When
this is all extracted the exhausted fibre is burnt in the furnaces.
The juice of the cane is boiled in great vats. In its final stages of
boiling it is thick and black as tar. It is then run into revolving
cylinders, called centrifugalisers. These rotate at a very great rate,
and are fascinating to watch, for in a few minutes the dark, sticky
mass has disappeared, and the sides of the cylinder are coated with a
coarse yellow sugar very much sweeter than that which appears on our
tea tables.
We at last emerged from the mill, instructed, but very sticky, and
cast about for some spot in which it would be possible to obtain soap
and water. There were buildings of some kind close by, warehouses or
something of the sort, connected with the station, with two men sitting
on the verandah. We asked them if they could tell us the nearest way to
soap and water. One of them indicated with his pipe a large galvanised
iron tank with a tap in the bottom, and a broken tumbler, but they
shook their heads over the problem of soap. We turned on the tap
hopefully, but the Australian rainfall was quite inadequate to remove
molasses. So we went in search of the Nambour hotel. However new an
Australian town may be, it always has an hotel or two, and a sort of
communal hall. Nambour has in addition a few shops and some stray cows
and horses. We watched a cow eating sugar cane with every manifestation
of pleasure. It was not till we got to Queensland, by the way, that
we began to see horses everywhere, just as we had imagined them in
Australia, hitched up to gates by the bridle.
We made our way to the hotel, where everyone was very busy preparing
lunch. There was no hot water upstairs, but, penetrating into the
kitchen, where there was a great bustle, and anything extraneous was
very much in the way, we succeeded in getting a pudding basin full
of hot water and a teacloth, and attacked the molasses in the yard
outside, before an audience of poultry. Molasses, however, appears to
yield to nothing, not even chemical cleaning. It always re-emerges. So
relinquishing the vain attempt, we repaired to lunch.
[Illustration: NAMBOUR.]
Whatever you _don’t_ have for lunch in Australia, you always seem
to have turkey. It is like the inevitable _poulet_ in Continental
hotels. There must be enormous quantities of wild turkeys there;
at any rate, they are always succulent. We also always had very good
and elaborate trifles, and very weak tea, and, on this occasion,
strawberries and cream and pineapple. After lunch there was a long
interval, while we sat on a fence, and watched another ruminative cow
eating sugar cane. We were waiting for the “loco.” We were not very
clear what it was, and when it arrived, it turned out to be a little
engine drawing some trucks, across which rough planks had been thrown
for seats, like those at Big Brook; but whereas the engine on that
occasion was stoked with logs, and gave out a fragrant aromatic smoke,
this dilatory “loco” burnt some kind of soft coal, and had a very
short chimney, so that we were deluged with large and solid smuts, in
comparison with which the molasses were the merest trifle. However,
the country through which it took us was so beautiful and enchanting
that nothing else mattered. It was our first experience of tropical
bush. Elsewhere there had been little undergrowth, the tall gums soared
upwards unimpeded. Here the vast white eucalyptus trees were festooned
with thickly interlacing creepers hanging in great ropes. High up
on the trees grew masses of staghorn ferns and orchids. Far out of
reach the graceful, delicate “rock lily” hung its pendulum of pale
chablis-coloured bells, and still more exquisite were the fragile white
blooms of another orchid. In places were stretches of sugar plantation,
and banana fields, always with their background of hill and forest. The
fresh greenness of everything was delightful, for the district is well
watered.
The line, which was sometimes laid across rough logs thrown over a
small gorge, with a stream running through it, ended abruptly in the
Maroochy River, swift-flowing between low banks, with the tall trees
of the forest on one side, and a sugar plantation waving feathery
heads of bloom on the other. We walked back with two friends. It was
much more silent than an English forest. There was no pattering of the
small feet of birds on the dry, dead carpet of leaves, and no continual
twitter. A profusion of ferns grew along the track, and a quantity of
large scarlet raspberries. The gum trees were putting out their red
spring shoots. Sometimes the clear, sharp call of the peewit sounded,
or the infectious peal on peal of mocking giggles from the kookooburra,
sometimes the frogs were crying all together, as they cried in
Aristophanes’ time, “Breckkek kek kek--koax koax,” and now for the
first time we heard the Australian bull frog that clucks like a hen.
Here and there was a clearing with a homestead with high verandahs.
They made one long to spend a month in that lovely place, and feel
day by day the great peace of the forest, with only the frogs and the
trickle of a stream over its smooth, brown rocks to break the stillness.
We passed occasionally a little camp with a rough cooking place, but
there was never anyone in them. As we emerged from that charmed country
into the more prosaic, cultivated land, where pineapples were growing,
and bananas with their great purple bells, we saw a beautiful brown
bird with a long tail, silent and stately as the bush itself. It looked
down on us from the high fork of a gum tree, but did not condescend to
fly away. Hospitable Nambour had prepared tea for us on our return; not
what we mean by tea at home, but the Australian tea, a meal calculated
to stand a traveller in good stead till breakfast next morning. Of all
our sunny Australian days that walk in the bush was one of the most
charming episodes.
CHAPTER XIX
IN AND ABOUT BRISBANE
The Brisbane River, flowing gently between its green banks, is a
favourite resort of picnic parties, one of the most popular forms of
entertainment in Australia, where dry wood is abundant and the weather
can be depended upon; and the party pride themselves on their skill
in producing “billy” tea in the shortest possible space of time. One
sunny afternoon we started up the river in a motor launch. On either
shore were pretty suburban houses, each with its shady verandah, and
palm trees in the gardens. The river does not, however, always flow
softly and invite pleasure-seekers to embark upon it. Brisbane people
often allude in awestruck tones to “the Flood,” when the river rose and
swept away the peaceful bungalows on its banks and wrought much havoc.
After a pleasant little voyage we landed with some difficulty on a
rickety wooden pier, on the banks of an immense meadow of coarse rough
grass stretching away for many acres, with other scattered picnic
parties in the far distance; evidently a favourite spot. Our billy
was soon boiling, and when tea, which is on these occasions a sort
of sacrificial rite, reminiscent of the early settlers, was over, we
went up the bank to prospect, and heard for the first time the sound
which so many Australians had described to us, “the moaning” of the
shea-oak in a rising wind. We had heard it described as “weird” and
“depressing,” and it is certainly extraordinarily uncanny. The foliage
of the shea-oak is like a lot of knotted whip-cord, and when all its
strings are swept together by the wind it gives rise to a strange cry
that seems to come from far and near, shrill, insistent, and full of
foreboding. It is impossible to compare it to any other sound.
Among Queensland products are its precious stones, and Brisbane at
first seems to support a quite disproportionate number of jewellers’
shops. It is specially famous for its black opals, which are not black,
but a sort of peacock blue, with wonderful high green lights. These
beautiful stones are of infinite variety in depths of colouring, and
their very novelty makes them attractive, but all the same the visitor
should only make purchases in the presence of an expert adviser, for,
even in the case of jewellers of high repute, he will find that what
he pays for his stones in Brisbane may bear no relation to the value
attributed to them by a London firm. Almost every known precious stone
is found in Queensland, including diamonds. Opals occur in the upper
cretaceous rocks in the western districts of Queensland, and sapphire
mining is carried on to a considerable extent in the Anakie district
west of Rockhampton. The stones are blue, green, or yellow in colour.
They occur in an alluvial lead, and their original matrix is a basalt
found near the source of the alluvial deposit, the gems having been set
free by the weathering of the rock.
We saw some opal cutting in Brisbane. It is done in the jewellers’
workshops. They buy the rough-looking brown lumps from the miners, and
they are cut open and polished with emery to test their value.
One characteristic Australian sight we were unable to see, the “wool
sales.” The trade in this principal source of the continent’s wealth
was at the time practically at a standstill. Owing to the war the
annual wool sales could not be held. Before the war, the buyers,
chiefly German and French, attended the wool sales in the principal
Australian towns, so there was practically no market for the fine
merino wools. September ought to have been a busy month in Brisbane,
for that is the season of the wool sales. But if we could not see the
sales, we thought it would at least be interesting to see the wool, and
as in Australia you need only express a wish to have it gratified, an
acquaintance of our river picnic of the day before volunteered to show
us the principal Brisbane wool store.
It was a morning of dazzling Queensland sunshine, with a light
breeze off the sea, when we motored down to the wharf where the big
store-houses are built. Here the wool comes in on trucks in bales
of jute, and at first the visitor sees only endless rows of shelves
stacked with brown bales. These bales, or jute sacks, which are made
in India, are all marked with the name of the grower and the district
and quality of the wool, in a kind of shorthand unintelligible to the
layman. The “clips,” as they are called, are separated into the fleeces
proper and the other parts, packed in the jute sacks, labelled, and
sent straight to the storehouse. Our expert friend could tell, by
taking a handful of the wool out of any sack at random, the district
from which it came, explaining to us that this handful was stained with
the red earth peculiar to certain plains, while another contained the
characteristic “trefoil burr,” a little seed-vessel, which curls itself
tightly among the wool. In the sales samples of the wools of different
growers are taken from the bales and spread upon tables in an immense
upper room. The walls were painted a light blue, to soften the glare of
the light and throw a becoming tinge on the wool, as pink lamp-shades
are used for the complexion. Here the dealers inspect it, and it is
afterwards sold by auction, though the seller puts a reserve price
upon it. From the warehouse the bales can be run down a sort of shaft
directly on to the cargo boats for Europe; but the wool packs, as they
are called, are first squeezed in a press and bound with iron bands to
facilitate their shipment and storage. Some deterioration takes place
in the colour if it is kept longer than two years.
The most remarkable thing about the presence of this immense quantity
of wool was that, though the sheep are not washed before they are
sheared, the fleeces had none of the oily unpleasant smell of a flock
of sheep, but the warehouse only smelt of the jute bales. As we were
coming away we were shown some merino rams in a little pen yet in
possession of their deep silky fleeces. The breed of merinos has been
so greatly improved since its introduction in 1797 that merino rams
fetch as much as five hundred guineas, while in 1913 two rams actually
were sold for 1600 and 1700 guineas respectively. Merino sheep did
not, however, thrive on the coastal districts, and British sheep were
therefore imported for breeding purposes.
It was later the same day that to escape from the dust, which is
Brisbane’s besetting curse, we went by tram out into the suburbs.
Brisbane itself is on the sea level, but its suburbs climb the hills
behind it. The suburbs are only scattered bungalows dotted among
the green, with their flowers and paw-paw trees and palms. Patches
of eucalyptus scrub remain here and there, and rough roads connect
them with the main road, up which the tram climbs steeply. After its
terminus the road still climbs the hill and we climbed with it, till
we came to a green lane, where was a rare butterfly with wonderful
metallic blue wings fluttering above a yellow-berried duranta bush,
and where we heard a laughing jackass, and watched some untidy-looking
magpies. All Australian birds are rather untidy-looking, as if they had
lived so long in the bush by themselves, that their toilets could not
be regarded as of consequence.
From these innocent diversions we were driven by a smart shower to take
refuge in the nearest bungalow, which had an inviting verandah. The
house belonged to a Scotch settler, who welcomed us like old friends,
brought out cushions for the wicker chairs, and when the shower was
over begged us to prolong our visit--it was “so nice to see someone
from home.” Last summer, she told us, had been the hottest for thirty
years, but with that exception she had not felt the tropical heat
excessive. When we came away she gave us the handgrip of the exile.
The most beautiful point within easy reach of Brisbane, commanding
a magnificent bird’s-eye view of the city, the bay, and surrounding
country, is Mount Coot-tha Reserve, or One Tree Hill. It is only a few
miles out of the town, and a friend motored us up there one afternoon.
On the way we stopped to have tea at her house. In the drawing-room was
a heavily carved massive upright piano. We commented on its unusual
case, and our hostess told us it had been in “the Flood,” and the works
were ruined, but it was impossible to get them replaced in Australia.
Going on to talk of the drawbacks to life in Brisbane, she said that
before a storm the house would be filled with flying cockroaches and
other insects, and she showed us photograph frames and book bindings
riddled with small holes by the ravages of silver fish. Under her
carpets were quantities of crushed naphthaline to prevent their being
eaten, and a winter coat that was left hanging up by some oversight,
she said, was immediately ruined. We were considerably perturbed after
this on coming across a large whiskered silver fish among our clothes,
when we were packing, but his wicked intentions were frustrated
prematurely, and there were no ill-effects from his presence, though
we actually brought a silver fish home to London, where he was found
between a trunk and its cover, and instantly slaughtered as something
exotic and uncanny by the maids who were unpacking. He probably,
however, came from Java.
After tea we continued our journey to One Tree Hill, our hostess
actually was wearing a stole made of the skin of a platypus. The fur
was curiously wiry to the touch. Mount Coot-tha, like all reserves, is
the original untouched gum forest with carriage drives running through
it. At one point the trees had been cleared away to give a view of Lake
Enoggera, the reservoir of Brisbane, cradled in green hills some miles
away.
From the western extremity of the hill the view is very extensive and
extremely beautiful. Brisbane is spread out below nestling in greenery,
with its winding river, and Moreton Bay far off lying placid in the
sunshine. The view is bounded by distant hills.
There is generally some one feature of a town that stands out
afterwards more distinctly than the rest. In the mental picture
that the name of Brisbane evokes it will always be the Botanical
Gardens, cool and quiet with their banks sloping to the river, that
wake the pleasanter memories. Here we came often to escape from the
all-pervading dust, and here we came on our last evening in the brief
twilight that intervenes for some few minutes between sunset and the
fading of the afterglow. The level rays of the sun silhouetted the
grotesque bunya-bunya trees on the river-banks so that they looked like
bunches of crooked housemaids’ mops. The peace and calm of the quiet
place were intensified by the rapidly falling dusk. Except for the
scolding and chattering of a party of white Australian cockatoos in an
aviary, there was no sound but the swishing of the wind in a grove of
dry bamboos, and the little cropping noise of some kangaroos feeding
and skittering about in a paddock. In a small round pond fringed by
Cape lilies a bull-frog was beginning to cluck. Already the palm trees
were black against the fading orange afterglow. A too peremptory
custodian cut short the enchanting moment; it was closing time he
said. So we made our way back through the busy clangour of the crowded
streets, and for the last time sat out on the balcony after dinner in
the dusty half-light of the street lamps and the stars, and watched the
Southern Cross above the palms, and Venus shining with a lustre and
a brilliancy unknown to northern skies.
[Illustration: PALM AVENUE, BOTANIC GARDENS, BRISBANE.]
Our last morning came filled with the bustle of packing and departure.
And for the last time let us urge upon travellers to Australia to
take far less luggage than they can possibly imagine they will want.
Let them bear in mind, in the first place, the great inconvenience of
transferring small luggage, when there are no porters, the hideous
nuisance of packing and unpacking if they have to do it for themselves;
the very much simpler standard of dress that prevails in a new country,
where even in the capital people are contented to go out to dinners
and theatres by tram; well-to-do people dressed in elaborate cloaks
and satin shoes. The variation of climate compels a fairly large
assortment of clothes of different weight. But cut it down rigorously.
This digression is inspired by the recollection of the exhausting
nature of our packing in the heat. When it was done we had to charter
a cart and a man, and freightage in Australia is far from cheap, to
take it the half-mile to the station, where its mountainous bulk was
with difficulty packed into the very dusty little train that runs from
Brisbane to Pinkenbar, lower down the river, whence the steamers sail
for the Northern Territory.
We had already paid one visit to Pinkenbar to engage a porter, a lean,
tall, weather-beaten old man, selected on the wharf, to bring a truck
to the station and convey our luggage to the boat. When we arrived and
got out of the train with a litter of small baggage, the first thing
we saw was a large American trunk tightly jammed half in and half out
of the window of the guard’s van, the guard having got so much of our
luggage between himself and the door that he could not get it open.
Fortunately, however, our porter from the wharf was on the spot in
every sense of the word. He first shouted encouraging directions to the
guard, and then by the exercise of brute force thrust the trunk back
through the window without doing any serious damage to that perturbed
official. Eventually, with the help of another man, we got under way
and proceeded to the landing-stage. The rough intervening ground
was overgrown with tall blue thistles with flowers like pale yellow
anemones; they looked as incongruous as if someone had stuck them on.
After seeing our luggage over the ship’s side and consigning it to the
steward, we returned to Brisbane in search of lunch and recovered our
calm, for the boat did not sail till towards evening.
It was after lunch on this last day that we saw a thing we had always
wanted very much to see and despaired of doing so. It was the little
Australian tree bear, or koala bear, once very common, now becoming
rare. We heard from a French waiter that there was one in the hotel,
and presuming on our experience of Australian good nature, sent a
message to its unknown owner to ask if we might see it before we left.
He brought it down immediately, carried in the arms of his little girl,
and it really was an adorable little thing. It was about the same size
as the very largest child’s “Teddy Bear,” grey in colour. Its little
hand-like fore paws were holding on to the lace of the little girl’s
pinafore, one on each side of her neck, and it turned its head and
fixed a pair of wistful eyes upon us. She said it slept all day and
woke up at night, when it cried for milk like a cat. It only ate gum
leaves. “When we were boys,” said its owner, “we used to hunt them. It
took thirty or forty shots to bring one down, and then it would take
eight or ten dogs to finish one, they are so tough.” Even so, these
charming and harmless little animals, which live in the gum trees and
feed on their leaves, are becoming exterminated.
It was late afternoon when we made our third and last visit to
Pinkenbar. The scene in the neighbourhood of the station was so
typically Australian that we lingered regretfully to take a last look
at it. The rough dusty road that led away inland, the drove of horses
in an enclosure waiting to be entrained for the War, with another horse
hitched on to the fence by its bridle, the clear strong stereoscopic
light, a paddock of burnt grass, the scattered row of houses beyond,
with flat grey roofs, built high on piles, and beyond again gum trees
and more gum trees. We turned away towards the wharf with a certain
sadness, for this spacious country with its austere beauty and its
handful of warm-hearted inhabitants is wonderfully endearing in
spite of, or perhaps because of, all its crudeness. We distributed
our newspapers among the men loafing and smoking on the wharf, who
took them with that frank friendliness of a country, where class
distinctions are almost unfelt; and went on board the boat that lay
alongside, still busy with the bustle of departure.
PART VI
TO THE NORTHERN TERRITORY
CHAPTER XX
THE GREAT BARRIER REEF
We had already made acquaintance with the “Montoro” when she was
unlading in Sydney Harbour, her final port of call, and we now spent
on board three of the pleasantest weeks of our journey. There is
a great sense of peace and cleanliness on a ship after long dusty
travels. The “Montoro” was a small boat, less than 6000 tons, but
remarkably well-appointed and arranged, our airy bedstead cabin was
positively spacious, with the luxury of a large wardrobe and a full
length looking-glass in its door. The staff were Chinese, efficient,
ubiquitous, noiseless, and their gentle soft-voiced ways were
particularly restful after the rough and ready Australian servant. On
board we found awaiting us letters from home, the last we were to get
for two long months, for our Java mail, delayed by the war, followed us
to England. Presently we were slipping down to the sea between the low
banks of the green river, with a light breeze. Venus was rising and the
moon, and the shore lights began to glimmer.
Our first day out was choppy and rough, but a heavy shower smoothed out
the sea like oil, and the next day saw us inside the Barrier Reef, in
the Coral Sea that stretches away to the extreme north coast. Captain
Cook had made the same voyage that we were making in the summer of
1770 in a boat of 368 tons, and we thought our boat small! He noted
and named every headland and bay along “this dangerous coast, where
the sea in all parts conceals shoals that suddenly project from the
shore, and rocks that rise abruptly like a pyramid from the bottom,
for more than 1300 miles.” Even now, when every inch of the course has
been charted, the voyage is dangerous for the same reason, the low flat
islands are nearly indiscernible at night. The mountainous coast is
almost uninhabited, except by natives, unfriendly now as then; and is
almost entirely unlighted, as hitherto the Government has not been able
to incur the expense of erecting and maintaining lighthouses, except in
the neighbourhood of the few existing townships. No ship’s library on
this course should be without a copy of “Captain Cook’s Voyages,” or,
at any rate, no traveller should fail to provide himself with one, as
the record of this early navigator in these seas adds immensely to the
interest of the journey to-day.
The voyage within the Barrier Reef will always be one of the most
beautiful in the world. Once inside the Coral Sea, to awake in the
morning and go on deck is to dream an exquisite dream. Here is halcyon
weather, the heat of the sun tempered by light airs off the water,
and seas of an indescribable translucent turquoise green rippling
past among innumerable islands. One after another they appear in the
distance, shadowy and vague as clouds; slowly they take shape like
brown uncut opals; a nearer view discloses sandy coves, grassy slopes,
pine trees and forest. They grew more and more numerous, and, as the
day closed in beneath plum-coloured clouds, the soft light lay gently
and hazily upon them, till the sun sank in a sky of vivid orange.
The charm of this wonderful passage never palls, for its variety is
endless. Sometimes the austere, dark mountainous shore is visible, with
columns of smoke upon it, native fires as Captain Cook saw them two
hundred years ago, for they are still used as signals.
The sea is rich in all kinds of life for those who care to look for it,
and we were fortunate in having on board an accomplished naturalist,
who, in shirt-sleeves for coolness, and a large-brimmed hat, looking
like a sort of drawing-room pirate, sat all day in the bows searching
the clear blue water with a pair of field-glasses, and shouting to
all, who were interested, to come and see what he had found. It was
he who taught us how and where to look for, and what to call, the
unfamiliar birds and sea beasts that we saw.
On the June days two hundred years ago on which Captain Cook cautiously
essayed his dangerous journey in a rickety boat on uncharted seas, he
often named the islands and headlands after days of the week or month.
So it happens that one of the loveliest points on the voyage is known
as “Whit-Sunday Passage,” because it was on that day that Captain Cook
navigated it.
[Illustration: TOWNSVILLE.]
Our fourth day out we reached Townsville early in the morning. Its
absurd name is said to be due to the fact that the inhabitants wished
to commemorate the benefactions of a fellow-citizen called Town,
and did not know how to achieve their end less tautologically. We
woke early to find ourselves in a beautiful land-locked bay, called
Cleveland Bay by Captain Cook, who recorded that “the east point I
named Cape Cleveland, and the west, which had the appearance of an
island, Magnetical Isle, as we perceived that the compass did not
traverse well when we were near it.” “They are both high, and so is
the mainland within them, the whole forming a surface the most rugged,
rocky, and barren of any we had seen upon the coast.” He also
notes that they saw “several large smokes upon the main.” To-day a
picturesque little township lies under a sharply escarped granite hill,
with stately, misty coastal ranges in the background. Probably Captain
Cook, like ourselves, saw the beautiful yellow “white-headed eagles”
flying across the harbour. We took some time getting in because the
pilot ran on to a mud-bank, for the bay is very shallow. At last we
came alongside a wharf, and at once went on shore and started on the
long walk to the town. It was very, very hot on shore, and clouds of
grey dust met us all along the road from the landing-stage. We hoped to
reach the church on the hill, at all events before the Sunday service
was quite over.
Townsville is a picturesque little place, a mining port growing
continually in importance; and in that transitional stage, when rough
wooden corrugated iron buildings are giving place to brick. There
were some very showy hotels calculated to attract the miner with his
pockets full of money, when he comes to town to taste the sweets of
such civilisation as it affords, to spend all he has gained, and to
live riotously as long as it lasts. This at least is the popular
conception of the habits of miners, which was continually impressed
upon us. We were never able to verify these statements, because
though we occasionally conversed with miners, they looked anything but
dare-devils and spendthrifts, and it seemed scarcely delicate to ask
them if it was true that they periodically repaired to the nearest
town to paint it red as long as their money lasted. As for the shops
on either side of the broad, dusty, empty streets over which the
heat brooded, they seemed to consist principally of lettering. Every
minute shanty had above it vast boards proclaiming in letters as large
as itself the name of its owner and the superiority of its stock,
whether bicycles or tents, both essential articles of merchandise in
an outlying Australian town. The more ambitious shops had placards
inside. One enterprising draper called on the passer-by to observe the
rebuilding of his “palatial premises,” while another drew attention to
“Dame Fashion’s latest caprices.”
We passed a cotton tree with ripe pods, growing in a garden, and
several coco palms, the coconuts hanging in yellow bunches like a
cluster of immense bananas. After crossing a river bordered by mangrove
swamps, and passing through the main street, we struck off up a steep
hill in quest of the church. On climbing a granite mound we found
ourselves at its doors, with a beautiful view of the bay and its green
shores, but no service, for probably to suit the habits of the people
in a hot climate, it had ended about the time our churches at home are
beginning. Following an admirable plan, pursued elsewhere in Australia,
only a section of the church had been completed. There was an apse,
and enough space beyond it to seat a fairly large congregation. It was
very simply constructed, and had the dignity that simplicity gives to a
building. It was of red brick with an ambulatory and a kingbeam roof,
and had an air of being carefully tended. We lingered there a little
wistfully, for in a country very far from home there is a sense of
intimate nearness in hearing read that familiar liturgy, which contains
the noblest prose in the English language. Leaving the church behind
we wandered down towards the shore, and came to a wonderful tangled
garden. Tall palms grew there, and masses of feathery crimson grasses;
bananas drooped their immense purple bells, and the frangipani tree
was bursting into bloom, holding out to us over the fence bunches of
its dazzling, scented, creamy blossoms at the end of its bare, blunt
boughs. Returning, we faced the strong breeze off the sea, which had
been at our backs on the way up. We knew all about the dust on that
walk, and were very glad to attain once more the haven of the ship.
In the afternoon the whole population came down to the wharf in cars
and buggies to inspect the Australian hospital ship, which was lying
alongside ready to sail. We strolled on the shore, where a large
convolvulus with very succulent leaves grew profusely among the stones;
and watched a forest fire on a mountain at the farther end of the bay;
since the morning it had gradually worked its way right round the crest
and was crawling down one side. Our stay at Townsville should have been
a very brief one, but we were delayed there for three or four days by
the Customs officials, as we were carrying a contraband cargo of meat.
Nobody wanted to stay in Townsville, as there was nothing to be seen in
the neighbourhood, and it would mean cutting short the duration of the
ship’s visit to the Northern Territory.
The second day of our stay there, we climbed the granite peak that
rises behind the town, going across by a little ferry-boat that plies
between the wharf and the opposite side of the harbour. A strong wind
was blowing in from the sea, as we steamed across to Townsville, lying
deep in dust in the hot sun. We made our way up to the Castle Hill,
the red granite peak that dominates the town. A very steep path leads
up to it, and on the rocks above some goats and kids were silhouetted
against the clear blue sky like a scrap of Swiss scenery. The town from
this side is scattered along the shore, and the slopes above it half
hidden in tropical foliage. Below us were the Botanical Gardens, the
hospital embowered in trees, with the patients lying out on a shady
balcony. Everywhere was the heavy scent and glorious bouquets of gold
and white frangipani. We had been sent in the wrong direction, and
missed the path, so that the ascent was very steep and rough, but we
went on, slipping and scrambling up among falling stones, clinging on
where we could, among big butterflies and lizards, and large brown
grasshoppers with black spots. As we climbed higher Townsville spread
itself out beneath us charmingly. Bungalows nestled among vivid green
foliage, beyond were the blue bay, and its boats, ours amongst them,
riding gaily at anchor, with the dark green wooded mass of “Magnetic
Island” rising behind. Higher still we rested, while a fish hawk soared
far above in the clear blue, and on the southern side Townsville looked
like nothing but a vast mud flat with the river winding through it, and
houses dotted among the mangrove swamps. One fancied that one big wave
might submerge the whole.
On Wednesday we sailed early, keeping fairly near the coast, and
reaching Cairns the same night. Cairns is the port of Trinity Bay--“a
large and deep bay which I called Trinity Bay after the day on which
it was discovered,” says Captain Cook, who had spent the intervening
days in coasting up here from Whit-Sunday Passage. At Cairns we wished
profoundly that the stringent Australian labour laws would prohibit
night work, for our boat was lading or unlading with all the clangour
and shouting incidental to these operations till 3 a.m. We had to be
called early, because we were only to wait long enough in port to give
the passengers an opportunity of making the return journey to the
famous Barron Falls, about twenty miles inland from the coast, among
some of the most celebrated Australian scenery. From the porthole of
the ship’s corridor we looked straight into a mangrove swamp, beyond
was a background of misty dark hills with heavy clouds rolling down
them.
[Illustration: BARRON FALLS SCENERY AT CAIRNS.]
Cairns, apart from its fame for the beauty of its falls and mountain
scenery, is already an important place, and will become much more so,
for it is the port for the rich inland districts, with which it is
connected by railway. This fertile country is suitable for bananas,
maize, for dairying, as well as for the timber trade. In the
neighbourhood of Herberton, south-west of Cairns, fruit-growing is
carried on, and apples, plums, pears, peaches, and vines are all
successfully cultivated. The sugar industry is, besides, a most
important factor in the prosperity of Cairns. Not far from the railway
station of Redlynch, at the foot of the Barron Range, are the Kamerunga
State Nurseries for growing coffee, bread-fruit, coconut, and rubber,
and carrying out all kinds of experiments designed to solve the
problems of tropical agriculture.
The country is also rich in minerals. Herberton is the principal centre
for the production of tin, and the Herberton and Chillagoe districts
contain deposits of tin, copper, silver, lead, bismuth, gold, and coal.
Our time, however, did not admit of our penetrating far enough into
the interior to inspect the development of all these agricultural and
mineral sources of wealth, which have so great a future before them;
nor did it admit of our extending our journey far enough for even a
glimpse of the curious and beautiful volcanic Lake Eacham. We had to
content ourselves with the Barron Falls. We went ashore early, but
the boat was late, and the train had got tired of waiting and gone
away, so there was a long interval while it was fetched back and put
together again. We sat about on sacks on a high covered platform, and
conversed with some of the lean, long-limbed Australian workmen about
the Australian labour question.
Immediately in front three ibises were feeding on a sort of salt
marsh. The range of hills behind was half hidden in cloud. There was
an all-pervading smell of raw sugar from bales awaiting shipment,
and though it was not yet very warm the atmosphere was heavy with
moisture like that of a hothouse. There did not seem to be very much
of Cairns--one or two hotels and boarding-houses, a few wide grassy
streets. The scattered houses on high piles had a more than usually
unfinished air, with washing hanging out, kerosene tins lying about,
and bare-legged children playing among them. There were a great many
goats; two of them had discovered a bag of maize on the wharf and were
having a happy time. At last our train arrived, consisting of one
or two carriages, so arranged that the backs of the seats could be
reversed, and as they all turned sideways you faced the whole length
of the carriage, like a Pullman car, and we got the whole of the view
during the journey, for most of the time the train has one side against
the hill.
The line from the wharf runs among the houses to the station, where
the school children were just arriving from up country settlements.
After passing some tea gardens, which looked oddly sophisticated in
the bush, we found ourselves among banana fields and pineapples, but
everything was more or less obscured by fine driving rain. There was
still a fair number of scattered houses, built of wood and iron, with
a deplorably drenched air, and handfuls of draggled English flowers
in their little gardens among tropical fruits, paw-paws, and lemons.
When the ascent begins the line soon enters the wonderful tropical
forest--indescribable, unimaginable in the abounding luxuriance and the
variety of its tangled, matted growth. The stately soaring eucalyptus
is always the staple factor in Australian scenery, but here they are
linked together and festooned with heavy ropes of giant creeper,
“vines” they call them in the tropics.
In the thick undergrowth are ferns, paw-paw trees, bananas, mango
trees, with dark glossy leaves and feathery flowers, and the poisonous
“nettle tree,” or “stinging tree” (_Laportea gigas_). The leaves are
very large, of delicate pale green in colour, and covered with soft
hairs. The stinging hairs, though not large, are so virulent that
cattle have been known to die from the poison. An Australian botanist,
Mr. A. G. Hamilton, “once saw a cow which had rushed through a lot of
small plants. She had lost all her hair and looked like an india-rubber
cow.”[23]
[Illustration: BARRON, RIVER CAIRNS.]
The construction of the line must have involved a considerable feat
of engineering, for it winds up the hills like an Alpine railway.
Presently we began to have glimpses of deep dark gorges with a broad
green river flowing beneath us, then we crossed a waterfall slipping
down an almost perpendicular rock, and in flood covering the railroad.
The rain had ceased, and now the rolling clouds, soft loose masses
resting gently on the tops of the tallest gums, suddenly drifted away
and revealed a vast landscape of rare loveliness. Looking down the
opening gorge, we saw the valley of the Barron River, for almost its
whole course, winding to the sea, a pale streak below the dark slopes
of the mountains. The train stopped within sound of the thunder of
the Barron Falls. The swirling water takes its magnificent plunge
in tumultuous clouds of white froth to the gorge below, where rare
butterflies hover, and white cockatoos flutter among the tops of the
gum trees. Above all the tumult two swallows were darting to and fro,
they carried one’s thoughts home. Higher up the river there were
silent green backwaters, and soft sandy foreshores, where little pink
bivalve shells were lying. A big hotel dominated the neighbourhood
of the little station, and a young man and woman, faultlessly
attired in bathing costumes that would have done credit to a French
watering-place, were picking their way daintily down the steep slopes
to the river, giving the oddest note of incongruity to the wildness of
the place. We weighed anchor as soon as the tourist train brought us
back to the wharf.
We now entered on what proved to be the most interesting part of our
journey, for we kept farther inshore, and the coast became continually
more enchantingly beautiful and more full of interest. It was a time
of halcyon days and balmy nights. The ship’s company were very young
and gay and musical. In the starlit darkness of the tropical evenings
they sang and played charmingly. The Marconi-man was a violinist, the
supercargo had a fine baritone,--the very name of supercargo suggests
the atmosphere of Captain Marryat’s novels, an atmosphere of adventure.
The night we left Cairns the captain had some of the deck lights turned
out, because they made steering more difficult. He said that on a rainy
night he was obliged to anchor, for the coral sea is here often only
six or seven fathoms deep; but that on a clear night, even when there
was no moon, the officer on the watch could still “pick up the islands
with glasses.” The small coral islands are innumerable, and often quite
flat, so that only a practised eye could discern their neighbourhood at
night, even with glasses.
A great charm of travelling by sea is that it brings one into intimate
relationship with all sorts and conditions of men. People who stay at
home have a tendency to get into sets, to associate too exclusively
with people of their own kind, whose points of view, standards of life
and habits are all more or less the same as their own, and so they
settle into grooves and get dull, and their minds become inelastic. On
a ship, at sea, especially a small ship, the society may be as varied
as the world. One of the most interesting people we met on our travels
was a passenger on the “Montoro.” His business was shipping. He knew
all the islands that are scattered in enticing little groups from the
Torres Straits to beyond New Guinea. He could distinguish at a glance
the different types of natives--Kanaka boys from the Torres Straits
islands, pale-skinned, shock-headed Papuans, yellow Melanesians, or
sooty Cingalese. He knew every inch of the route we were travelling,
having often made the journey. Formerly boats of this line had gone
across to Port Moresby, in New Guinea; and our original intention had
been to visit the island and gain at least a passing glimpse of the
curious native life there. But the boats had been taken off, because,
as our fellow-passenger explained, the route was too dangerous and
expensive in ships and lives. Outside the Barrier Reef there is always
a swell, in which the small boats rolled heavily, and the passengers
grumbled proportionately. On the return journey the prevailing strong
winds heap up heavy seas, and are apt to drive a ship past the narrow
opening in the Reef. Small boats of about 800 tons now run directly
from Thursday Island to Port Moresby. But though we had all the
inclination, we had no time to make this most interesting journey.
Our fellow-passenger had an interest in the Pearl-fishing Industry
carried on in the neighbourhood of Thursday Island, by the “Island
boys.” These natives of the Torres Straits Islands, for that is what
the term means, have a Government inspector to look after them, and
see that they get a fair proportion of the profits of the trade.
Whatever those profits may be, they are sometimes hardly earned, for
there are many sharks. On one occasion a boy was diving and a shark
seized his head in its mouth. The boy dug his knees and nails into
its throat, forcing it to let go, and was rescued by his friends, his
whole chest horribly lacerated. He was taken ashore as quickly as
possible, and eventually recovered; but the doctor, who was summoned to
his aid, was so impressed with his marvellous escape from death, that
in the interests of science rather than of his patient, he sent for a
photographer and had the boy photographed as he was, before applying
his medical ministrations. One photographer had the photographs made
into picture post-cards. We could buy them, our informant said, when we
reached Thursday Island. The proofs of this story are, unfortunately,
incomplete. We hurried to the post-card shop, when we landed a few
days later, but the photographer, who also sold stamps and string,
sword-fish’s fins, coral, and newspapers, said the post-cards were
sold out. We asked to see the negative, but being busy with other
customers, he excused himself from finding it. We were unable to inform
the narrator of this missing link in his story, for he had left us to
embark for New Guinea on a little boat, in which he would sleep on
deck, and have his meals in the one cabin by the light of a swinging
lamp. We were sorry to lose his amusing company.
It was during the passage between Cairns and Thursday Island, that
Captain Cook, after having so far successfully navigated these
dangerous seas in his small sailing ship, “became,” by running on
to the Barrier Reef, “acquainted with misfortune.” The name Cape
Tribulation marks the headland to the north of the scene of his
disaster. His boat had passed safely over a shoal, while the ship’s
company was at dinner, though the sudden shallowing of the water
to eight fathoms had caused some temporary alarm. Nevertheless,
all seeming once more safe, “the gentlemen left the deck in great
tranquillity, and went to bed.” A few minutes before eleven, however,
they had struck upon the Barrier Reef, and remained immovable, except
by the heaving of the surge that beat her against the edges of the
rock upon which she lay. In a few minutes everyone was upon the deck,
“with countenances which sufficiently expressed the horrors of the
situation,” for “we had too much reason to conclude that we were upon a
rock of coral, which is more fatal than any other, because the points
of it are sharp, and every part of the surface so rough as to grind
away whatever is rubbed against it, even with the gentlest motion.” It
was not till a week after this disaster, a week of continual labour
and acute anxiety, that they succeeded in getting the ship ashore at
Endeavour Harbour. The place of Captain Cook’s landing is marked by
a low brownish green mound jutting out from the coast, which along
here has a most inhospitable air, the coastal ranges coming down to
the water’s edge. The days passed into weeks before the damage could
be sufficiently repaired to set sail again. As we passed near inshore
these same coastal ranges were deeply purple, with clouds rolling down
their sides. There was no sign of life, not even the smoke of a native
fire, the scene had great breadth and solemnity.
[Illustration: THURSDAY ISLAND. VIEW OF THE HARBOUR.]
It was on the same day that we too saw the Barrier Reef, at first
looking like a long sandy bar. Presently the coral itself showed with
some pelicans on it. Here, too, were the blue lagoons of fiction,
small coral islands, with little sandy coves, and pelicans, the only
inhabitants, walking under the trees. The warm water of the sea was
full of life. Yellow-banded snakes swam by, from two to four feet long.
We counted twenty of them in one day. Dampier, exploring the west coast
of Australia in 1699, notes these curious water snakes, which are
said to be very poisonous. He was sailing out of Shark’s Bay when he
observed some “serpents swimming about in the sea, of a yellow colour
spotted with dark brown spots. They were each about four feet long, and
about the bigness of a man’s wrist.” On several occasions we saw
turtles swimming just below the surface of the water. Sometimes the sea
was covered with a thick floating yellow substance not unlike the brown
“scum” which coats stagnant pools at home. Some of it was collected by
letting down a bath sponge on a string. The microscope revealed it as a
low form of animal life.
Frigate birds were not uncommon, and one night there came on board two
lovely bright green “bee-eaters.”
So the long sunny days slipped away, and towards sunset the misty
coastal ranges became dim and unsubstantial in the dove-coloured
evening light, while inshore one little white sail could be seen, that
might have been the ghostly vessel of Captain Cook himself. Wednesday
Island was passed the next morning. The islands here mark the days on
which Captain Cook sighted and named them, and we entered the narrow
Thursday Island Passage.
Thursday Island lies at the extreme northerly point of Australia, Cape
York Peninsula, that juts out, and narrows into a point forming the
eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. To the north of it are the
Torres Straits, to the south Prince of Wales and other islands, among
them that Possession Island on which Captain Cook landed, and formally
took possession of the whole eastern coast in the name of George III,
calling it “New South Wales.”[24] It is a centre for pearl-fishing, and
a Naval Base. It is a sort of native cosmopolis. Every shade and tone
of colour can be seen here, Chinese, Island boys, Papuans, and Malays.
We entered the harbour, where the water was again that wonderful
greenish blue turquoise, and the little fleet of pearling boats rode
at anchor, for the War had put a stop to the industry. Thursday
Island itself was a gay-looking little place, its shores covered
with scattered bungalows, and a tropical forest covering the hills
beyond. Moored near to our own boat was the little New Guinea steamer,
manned by native Papuans. They wore nothing, down to their waists
any way, which was as much as we could see of them, and were a pale
chocolate-au-lait colour, with great mops of black hair. They returned
our enraptured staring by grinning at us with all their white teeth,
aware that they were objects of interest and beauty. This was the first
time we had seen all kinds of natives, of different shades. They manned
the boats round the steamer, that brought on board plenipotentiaries of
the official visits which always precede and delay a landing. At last
we drew up alongside the jetty, and were allowed to go ashore.
On the shore were innumerable empty coconut shells, also all the
derelict kerosene tins that had not been utilised by Australia were
washed up on the beach. Many of the little shops sell pearls, but the
uninitiated will find that they will do a better bargain with their own
jeweller at home, though the blister pearls are extremely pretty, and
can be bought for a few shillings. We also bought for threepence a copy
of the Thursday Island daily paper, which measured a few inches, and
was only printed on one side. It contained war news of a bewildering
nature. All the shops had large printed notices up in the windows,
warning the inhabitants what to do in case of a raid by a German
cruiser, for the “Emden” and the “Scharnhorst” were then at large. At
the ringing of a bell the women and children were at once to repair
to certain specified places of refuge. The little native children are
extraordinarily tough, and must be nearly as difficult to finish off
as a koala bear. We saw a small black naked baby of about two years
old fall off a verandah. It rolled down a steep flight of steps like a
football. We were hurrying forward to pick it up, but it immediately
scrambled to its feet, whimpered a little, and trotted off, none the
worse.
The post office to which we went to see if there were any telegrams,
with news from home, had rows of private letter boxes with glass
windows, as it was the custom for people to fetch their own letters. A
notice warned the owners that they must do their own repairs to these
boxes, as their messengers were in the habit of smashing the glass to
extract the letters. Another notice proclaimed that a murderer was
wanted. He was eighteen years old, the son of a half-caste Chinese
mother and a Kanaka father, a parental combination which one could
imagine was fraught with dire possibilities. We walked about the
island in an almost intolerably hot sun, on loose cobbles, alternating
with deep, soft sand. It is an arid, stony place, and bristled with
khaki-clad men. Inside the provision stores, which stood wide open,
Japanese were mending sails.
Following the path above the little town through a sort of rough scrub,
the ground was overgrown with some strongly smelling aromatic herb,
burnt brown in the sun. We saw here one of the rare ornithoptera,
a gorgeous blue velvet butterfly, and numbers of grasshoppers with
yellow wings that made an odd noise like little castanets as they came
out of the dead herbage. There did not seem to be many living things
except coconut palms and the beautiful heavily scented blooms of the
frangipani. We met the gorgeous nuns belonging to some Roman Catholic
sisterhood, dressed in dazzling blue raiment, which would have put the
“lilies of the field” quite out of countenance; and we avoided the
tropical forest that clothed the farther side of the island, tempting
as it looked at a distance, and were glad that we had done so. Several
of the passengers, who had made an expedition to it in search of
entomological specimens, brought back more than they intended, as they
got badly stung by green ants and ticks. The green ants are very pretty
and interesting at a safe distance; they are green with bright red
legs, and make their nests by sewing together the leaves of a tree, so
as to form a sort of large bag, but their sting is very gainful. The
ticks are much more seriously unpleasant, as they burrow in the skin
to lay their eggs there, leaving their legs sticking out, and if the
victim fails to extract all portions of them they produce a sore and
painful scar.
Thursday Island has an interesting church--the “Quetta” Memorial
Church. It stands in a green enclosure, with a blooming frangipani
tree, and commemorates the loss of the S.S. “Quetta” of Glasgow, which
some years ago sank on an uncharted rock one moonlight night, with
the loss of nearly all hands. We went into the quiet and airy place.
Just inside the door hangs in a frame, what seems to be a collection
of coral and shells, but closer inspection showed it to be a porthole,
that sixteen years later had been recovered, after having “suffered a
sea change,” and become so encrusted with the beautiful growth of the
sea floor that it was hardly any longer recognisable.
Returning to the ship, glad to escape from the blinding heat, we found
an oil boat moored alongside. On her some Japanese were eating their
rice with chop sticks, while a brown boy of unknown nationality, and a
picturesque absence of clothes, cleaned cooking pots.
We now had to cross the wide mouth of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and
round the westerly headland, behind which is the bay, that shelters
Port Darwin in the Northern Territory, our last port of call in
Australia. We sighted two frigate birds and quantities of large white
jelly-fish. We often saw, too, bones of the cuttle-fish floating on
the water, like bits of white paper. They were noted also by Dampier
on approaching the Australian coast: “We began to see some scuttle
bones floating on the water,” he remarks, “and drawing still nearer we
saw quantities of them.” The voyage after getting free of the Barrier
Reef was less entirely pleasant, as all deck and cabin lights had to
be darkened, or left unlighted at night, to disguise or conceal the
ship from prowling German cruisers. The portholes were blackened and
kept shut, the windows of the dining saloon boarded up each evening, so
that dinner was a stifling affair, and our pleasant informal musical
evenings came to an end, for no one could endure the atmosphere of the
music-room. There was, however, compensation, for the darkened decks
were very restful in the evening, and the stars were brilliant as they
had never seemed before, Venus making a path along the water like
moonshine.
CHAPTER XXI
THE NORTHERN TERRITORY
The Northern Territory is one of Australia’s many problems. How can the
immense tract of rich and fertile country with its tropical northern
area be cultivated, and its great resources developed, without the
importation of coloured labour? The native black population, though
they are useful and efficient with stock, are found to be unadapted for
agriculture, and incapable of the steady methodical work essential to
its success. The immigration of Chinese, who formerly were the market
gardeners of the neighbourhood of Port Darwin, supplying the small
resident white population with fruit and vegetables, has now been
discouraged, and we saw the plantations they had cultivated falling
back into, and becoming merged with the wilderness of the bush. It is
still an open question whether white men can perform manual labour
under the tropical suns of the coastal belt. Yet the future of Port
Darwin must be assured if it is eventually to become our nearest and
most direct port of call in Australia. It will in time be connected
by railroad with the southern states, as it now is by the telegraph
service. In the interior nomadic tribes of blacks hunt and fish and
wander; hardy settlers have pitched their homesteads in a clearing
in the forest, and raise cattle there, with the nearest neighbour a
hundred miles away; the lonely buffalo hunter plies his lucrative trade
with the help of native hunters.
The Australians themselves do not seem to know very much more about the
Northern Territory than the average Englishman. They speak of it as an
arid wilderness, much in the same way as they regard Western Australia;
yet, to the visitor from home, it is the beauty and the wildness of
Western and Northern Australia, that make an appeal far more profound
than that of the busy, civilised, and comparatively populous southern
and eastern states. With all their differences they are still too much
like home to stir the imagination. What is popularly known about the
Northern Territory is largely learned from the writings of a clever
Australian woman,[25] who has lived the isolated yet stimulating life
of the settler’s wife in the interior. The part to be played by women
in the future of the Northern Territory is a very important one. It is
a hard thing for a man to go into exile with his cattle and his black
retainers, but if Australian or European women will consent to share
the hardships, and the rough life, and the loneliness, in order to
make a home for their men; bringing to it, as opportunity offers, the
atmosphere and the comforts of civilisation, the problem of opening up
the inland country is helped considerably on its way. That there are
compensations in the life no one can doubt, who has talked with those
who know it, or seen the lonely homesteads in the bush, that wonderful
primeval forest with its manifold beauty and mystery.
For those who stay at home, no better idea of it can be derived
than from reading Mrs. Gunn’s “We of the Never Never,” in which she
describes the daily life of a cattle station up-country, and all her
odd adventures with the native servants, honest warm-hearted creatures,
with the artless cunning, and the caprices of children. The residents
of Port Darwin talked of the light-hearted gaiety of their native
servants, and their happy irresponsibility. Yet they seem to work well
in their own erratic way; but from time to time they find the call
of the wild irresistible, then they obey it, and steal away to their
native island, or forest tribe, till the conditions of life there weary
them, and the whim seizes them to return.
[Illustration: VIEW NEAR DARWIN.]
Approaching Port Darwin from the east the navigation is difficult and
dangerous. All the day before, we had steamed very slowly in order to
avoid reaching the passage of the Vernon Isles after nightfall. The
islands are inhabited, and the smoke of bush fires was frequently to be
seen, either signal fires lighted by the natives, or by Europeans, to
burn off the dead grass at the end of the winter.
The approach to Port Darwin is charmingly pretty. The tropical
vegetation that comes down nearly to the water’s edge is a vivid green,
and the cliffs that fringe the shore a warm red. The tops of quite
important-looking houses were showing among the trees.
This was Port Darwin, where we had been told there was “nothing to
see,” for it was only “an arid wilderness.” There is no sensation
quite like that of steaming slowly into an unknown port, the future
is so fraught with delightful and unusual possibilities. The shores
take shape and colour, houses just descried with glasses become clear
and distinct, people are seen on the beach, the vegetation can now be
identified, and finally the ship draws up alongside of the wharf, or
the tender has come to fetch us, and we set foot on a strange shore in
quest of new adventure.
At Port Darwin adventure had come to us. It was the prettiest scene
imaginable. The coming in of a boat is a gala day for Port Darwin.
It brings letters, and newspapers, and butter, and contact with the
outside world. So the rough wooden pier wore an air of some gay
festival, for most of the European inhabitants had come down to
welcome us on our arrival, and to claim those among us, who had had
introductions to them from friends in the other states. The men were
all in sun helmets and white ducks, the women in white linen, and the
little pier, crowded with its throng of white figures in the strong
sunshine, had for background the brilliant red and green of the shore.
We were fortunate in falling to the share of an official who knew and
cared for the district, and could tell us all we wanted to know about
it. His wife was with him, and another lady, to whom we had had an
introduction, and whose husband was kept busy by the incoming mail.
They are great organisers at Port Darwin. We were to be taken to
a tea-party in the Botanical Gardens, and received there by the
Administrator, as the Governor of the Northern Territory is called,
and his wife; and an evening lecture was to be given by one of the
passengers. With Australians you become friends in a very short
space of time in their own country. Of their generous kindness and
hospitality too much cannot be said, and the very fact that you are
ignorant of all they know is a bond. At home it is different. They
are often a little on the defensive, because they have an idea that
we shall assume superior airs and consider them “colonial”--a vague
term of opprobrium. Then, too, our ways chill them; their open-handed,
open-hearted hospitality is the natural thing there. In a country,
where there is a perennial shortage of servants, nobody minds or
regards it, if the hostess and daughter of the house change the plates,
except in the richest and most sophisticated circles. We should put off
a dinner-party if our servants were ill, because we are so hampered by
hard-and-fast conventions, not so much because we are inhospitable, but
because we must maintain an accepted standard--it must be impossible
for an Australian quite to understand this.
A little stuffy lumbering train takes passengers and merchandise from
the wharf to the foot of a steep hill that leads up to Darwin. But it
was too beautiful to immure ourselves in it, so we walked to the shore,
where a Government horse and cart had been commandeered on our behalf.
Its reins were held by “Tommy,” also in white ducks and all smiles.
Tommy was the native servant who, with his “lubra” and a Chinese cook,
ran our friend’s house. We got in and began the ascent of the steep
red hill. The Government horse was tough but deliberate, and crawled
leisurely through the thick red dust. The air was heavy with the sweet
strong scent of a curiously twisted Japanese-looking tree, not unlike
an olive. It was covered with small white flowers, and was called
a milkwood tree. The natives say that the milky juice of the wood
produces blindness.
At the entrance to Darwin is the Chinese quarter, all tumble-down tin
shanties, unsightly and comfortless, and very poverty-stricken looking,
with shrill children screaming and playing in the dust. Its appearance
gave one an inkling why Australians would rather dispense with the
cheap and efficient Chinese labour than leaven the population of their
great clean land with people who could thrive contentedly in a little
colony of pigsties. Here suddenly was a bullock cart laden with wood,
the little Chinese driver in his immense flat hat, looking exactly as
if he had just stepped off a valuable old tea-tray. It was the very
soul of all Oriental picturesqueness. Leaving behind the comfortable
verandahed houses of the European residents, we struck into a soft red
road that led through the bush to the Botanical Gardens. It seems
incongruous to talk of Botanical Gardens in a place that is yet hardly
a town, but in a new country foresight is essential, and the Government
has set apart here as elsewhere a reserve for the future, when Port
Darwin shall be a great busy port crowded with shipping, and its lonely
shores thronged with houses.
[Illustration: COCONUT GROVE, DARWIN.]
It was just at the end of the dry season when we were there, and as
we drove along between eucalyptus and coco palms, and all kinds of
unfamiliar tropical plants, their vivid green contrasted oddly with the
absolutely bare red soil--there was not a blade of grass or green upon
it. This is its normal condition in the dry season, which occurs with
perfect regularity from May to October. The rains are ushered in by
violent thunderstorms and hurricanes, increasing in frequency till the
end of November, when about an inch of rain falls nearly every day. In
January the wet season has penetrated to the heart of the continent.
Of course, these climatic conditions do not exactly apply to the whole
of a tract of country, which covers more than 500,000 square miles.
From north to south the Territory extends for about 900 miles, and
it is roughly divided into three areas, according to its climatic
conditions. The northern coastal belt is well watered by numerous
rivers, many of them navigable for some distance inland; the district
is very fertile, especially in the neighbourhood of the rivers. It is
described as “luxuriantly grassed” and well adapted for dairying, for
intensive farming, which is, however, at present non-existent, and for
the growth of many subtropical products.
Farther from the rivers the land is held to be suitable for agriculture
and grazing. This tract of country stretches inland to the tablelands,
where different conditions prevail, and which form the second climatic
zone. The rainfall here is less than half that of the coastal area. The
land rises to some fifteen hundred feet above the sea, and the sharp
distinction between the wet and dry seasons is less strongly marked.
In these tablelands, though there is a poor supply of surface water,
subartesian water is available by shallow boring. The conditions here
are admirable for stock raising. The third area stretches into the
temperate latitudes of the South Australian border, where the rainfall
is variable, but on the average low. Here are the McDonell Ranges,
including fine tracts of country that compare favourably with any part
of Southern Australia. But when all this has been said there remains at
present the question of transport. The great transcontinental railway
has now been extended from Pine Creek to Katherine River, and the
Government has decided to construct another section from Katherine to
Bitter Springs.
Till lately, settlement has not progressed rapidly on the land in the
immediate neighbourhood of the railway. It is hoped that the Northern
Territory lands will be better developed as the trade in frozen beef
develops. At present the mainstay of the state is beef-production. In
an article on the Northern Territory in “Australia To-day,” December,
1914, Mr. W. H. Clarke, late Director of Agriculture, states it as his
opinion that: “The possibilities in this direction are not far behind
those of Queensland, where the meat export industry is taxing already
to the utmost the output of cattle.” He goes on to say, however, “That
many holdings have been stocked and abandoned, hundreds of leases have
been taken up and forfeited. Men of sound experience and substantial
means have tried the industry in different parts of the Territory, and
given it up in despair. To-day some of the foremost cattlemen condemn
the country outright, yet there are many stations carrying between
them about half a million head of cattle.” He explains the causes of
this anomalous state of affairs by the distance from markets, “the
waste and anxiety of inadequately watered stock routes, an industry
in most cases on lines of crudest pioneering,” a lack of fences or
musterers, and, in the dry season, drinking-places that become “boggy
death-traps,” which hundreds, sometimes thousands of cattle frequent,
“till their numbers are decimated.” The opening of the Freezing Works
at Darwin, and the extension of the railway are the first steps towards
making it worth the while of the Territory pastoralist to remedy these
defects. Freezing Works are being erected.
Agricultural lands are granted in the Territory on perpetual leases
as long as the holder complies with certain conditions, such as the
erection of a house within two years on his lands, and residence there
for a certain number of months in each year. Pastoral leases are
granted on still more easy terms, and advances are made to settlers for
the purchase of building materials, plant, fencing, and stock.
The mineral wealth of the Northern Territory is as yet unexplored,
and is still awaiting a more complete geological survey, before it
can be estimated accurately. Gold, tin, and copper have been found in
considerable quantities, but have not as yet been adequately worked.
When we visited Port Darwin the rains were expected. In about another
week, said our host, they would begin, and in less than a week from
that time the bare red soil would be covered with springing vegetation,
three or four feet high. Here the mango trees, that we had seen in
flower at Cairns, were already bearing the yellow globes of their
fruit. Among a grove of coco palms we saw the picturesque corkscrew
palm, with its odd spiral stem, but we saw no animal life, except a
few peeweets of the smaller kind, though our host said the flocks of
wild geese, that herald the coming of the rain, had already begun to
pass overhead. He also pointed out a spot on the road, in which a short
time before, a large kangaroo had run out of the bush and, startled at
seeing him, cleared his horse’s head at one bound.
At the entrance to the Botanical Gardens we saw our first banyan
tree, bare of leaves, and showing the curious formation of the
branches. Later we passed one that had already burst into leaf.
The drive afforded lovely glimpses of the harbour, its bright blue
waters lapping the green, wooded shores. In the Botanical Gardens
there were as yet few flowers. The scarlet coral-tree was there, and
another scarlet flowering tree, and some waxy, red hibiscus. The
Administrator and his wife received their guests upon a lawn, that
had somehow retained its grass, and we then sat about at little
tables, and were waited on by the young daughters of the residents;
and anyone seeing their pretty bright faces and healthy colour, would
feel that the much-abused climate of Port Darwin had been greatly
vilified. The scent of a wood fire was wafted over to us, from where
the billy tea was boiling on some logs. The air was delicious; but we
had not started till the heat of the day was over, for, owing to the
unfortunate detention at Townsville, our stay at Darwin, a place of a
hundredfold its interest, had been lamentably curtailed. We had hoped
to see something of the native life. Here the native population has
retained its primitive simplicity. The natives of the interior do not
come into contact with other races. They are, unfortunately, dying out,
like the native Australian animals, for what reason is not definitely
known. The Commonwealth Year Book for 1912 gives the total number of
the native population of the Northern Territory as 20,000, and adds
that it is believed they are rapidly dying out. Of these, 1223 were
semi-civilised, through coming into contact with, or being in the
employment of, European residents.
The Australian native has always been in a different position from
other primitive peoples. He has not had to contend either with races
superior to himself in intelligence, or with savage wild animals.
Consequently he has had nothing to sharpen his wits, and remains the
most backward race now existing. Professor Baldwin Spencer, the most
recent authority on this subject, points out that though the natives
make use habitually of numerous kinds of grass seed, which they grind,
and make into cakes, it has never occurred to them to sow these seeds
and secure a regular crop. And he adds: “In many tribes, at least, this
is because he knows nothing of the relation between the seed and the
adult plant, and thinks that the latter grows because he makes it so do
by magic.” The habits and character, the strange customs and ingenious
superstitions of these interesting people have been charmingly
delineated in a series of unpretending sketches called “The Little
Black Princess,” by Mrs. Gunn. It is a sort of popular Fraser’s “Golden
Bough,” and is valuable as preserving a record of the everyday life of
the Europeans in the Northern Territory under conditions that must of
necessity soon pass away.
We could not hope to see the “myals,” or wild blacks, and it was
already drawing towards nightfall. Our host, with delightful
resourcefulness, proposed to take us to the local gaol, as it afforded
the only opportunity of our making acquaintance with the natives.
It was a question whether we could get there before it was dark. A
Government motor-car had just driven up, arrived back from the Daly
River. Its driver was having a hurried sandwich, which he must have
badly wanted, but he at once consented to take us. It was a powerfully
built car, covered with dust, and with no doors, so that we had to
scramble in over the sides, which we did with great alacrity. As we
were starting one of the ladies who had taken charge of us said, “Of
course you will dine with us to-night. Our servants have gone off, and
we have got workmen in the house, but that will make no difference, if
you will come.” There was the typical Australian hospitality, which
is so unlike what we mean by the word. If we had accepted, we should
no doubt have had an excellent dinner served on the verandah; but we
declined, as we had to dress for the evening lecture, and accepted
instead an invitation to supper afterwards.
This point satisfactorily settled, we proceeded to the gaol. The gaol
looked very clean and new and official. Its gates were closed, and some
scarlet hibiscus was in flower by the fence. On a look-out station
a sooty black man was keeping watch with a telescope for incoming
vessels. The prisoners had all gone to bed for the night, but they
were fetched out to make our acquaintance, and lined up in the grounds.
Inside it was cool and airy, with black cement floors, to match the
inmates. Out they came, the poor gaol-birds, wild things of the woods,
with the limitless forest to roam over, cooped up in a cell for
following the natural bent of any wild animal to fight and kill. They
have little sense of time, and their sentences are not for long; they
spend nearly all their day in the open air. They stood in a pathetic
little row in their dark blue prison dress, with their sooty, shaven
heads. One was in chains, as being held to be dangerous and likely to
give trouble. There seemed to be different types, some of them were
much flatter-nosed than others. Most of them were in for murder; in two
cases it had been provoked by cruelty. In one of these a white man had
justly earned the hatred of his black neighbours. The case, said our
friend, had been very well got up.[26] It was proved that the dead man
was fishing for bêche-de-mer[27] one moonlight night; the natives whom
he had injured lay in wait for him, and speared him to death. Morally
they were justified by their own code, but the forces of order were
obliged to assert themselves.
Life sentences are imposed for murder, but the prisoners are always
released, the period of their detention depending on their good
behaviour, for often they pine away in captivity.
Looking at these simple, childlike, confiding creatures, who play
marbles for amusement, one felt that any white who could treat them
cruelly deserved all he got. Only one of them looked at us with the
gloomy, smouldering eyes of a caged animal. The others all greeted
our host with beaming confidence. One man’s skull was deeply cleft
horizontally for about two inches. “By a black fellow,” he remarked
without resentment. Another from Pine Creek was asked what he was in
for. “Longa fight Chinaman,” he responded with a reminiscent chuckle
of satisfaction. It was the last amusing thing the poor fellow had
done. Another was in “longa kill Chinaman,” as he unconcernedly
explained. Our friend with the cleft skull had committed a very cruel
murder. After acting as guide to a white man in the bush, he followed
him secretly for days, and finally murdered him in his sleep for the
little food he had got left, and he was almost starving at the time.
We had come from England and must return, our host told them. “No
savvy,” they replied vaguely. So we said good-bye to our poor little
dusky brothers, and turned back to the Botanical Gardens to recover the
Government cart and horse. At parting, our driver took out of a native
basket a little collar of coloured beads made by the natives up the
Daly River, and gave it to us as a memento of our brief acquaintance.
[Illustration: ANT-HILLS.]
There were only three cars in Darwin, and the snorting noise made
by the one in which we returned awoke our horse to such terrified
and mettlesome curvetting, that we could only remount the seat with
considerable difficulty. We drove back through the gathering dusk with
flying foxes soundlessly flitting across our path. By the time we
reached the jetty darkness had come on. We had to make a hasty change,
and after a hurried dinner, we started back again in the heavy, moist,
scented darkness to find the hall in which the evening’s lecture was
to be delivered. It was very funny to find that early closing was
compulsory in Darwin. Chinatown must hate it. The little shops were
half lighted, and in the dusk seated figures like small Buddhas were
dimly discernible outside. A strong, Oriental smell hung over it all.
We shall always remember the scene of the lecture in the Town Hall. The
moist heat, the little red ants that swarmed on the floor, above the
voice of the lecturer, the frail rattle of the grasshoppers outside
insistent and unceasing; and the white-clad rows of men, gravely,
unwaveringly attentive.
After the lecture the kindly lady, who is the wife of the
Administrator, proposed a delightful scheme of giving us an early
breakfast at seven, and driving us out to the nearest native compound.
How exquisite the freshness of morning would have been in that tropical
country, and how full of interest and novelty the whole expedition. We
were only too eager to go, but there were depressing rumours of our
departure at dawn. We were now to visit our hostess of the afternoon,
and, guided by our host, we stumbled across what they called a paddock,
which seemed to be full of tussocks of some dead weed that smelt like
horehound.
The stars were brilliant, the Southern Cross pointing our way as it
hung just above the dark roof of the house. At the entrance to the
garden was a banyan tree, and there were green ants’ nests among the
leaves of the other trees, neatly sewn up like long, narrow bags,
and green ants with red legs were running about everywhere, even on
the window-sills. We sat on the verandah, and were given buffalo
tongue sandwiches, which have an agreeable, esoteric flavour, quite
incomparable to anything else. It was all very pretty and comfortable,
despite the absence of servants. The Port Darwin housewife has to wage
an active and unceasing warfare against insect pests. Food cannot
be left on the table for a short time without ants swarming on it.
Large cockroaches three or four inches long lurk behind furniture;
the destructive silver fish conceal themselves in unopened drawers,
and mosquitoes make life a continual irritation, unless ceaseless
precautions are taken. Still, active vigilance will reduce all these
pests to a minimum.
The pleasant evening slipped away too soon. It was time to return to
the port. We strolled back through the mysterious night, moist and warm
and scented by flowering frangipani in the gardens of the dimly seen
bungalows. Our boat lying below in the harbour was a blazing patch of
light; the glow of a distant bush fire lit up the opposite coast; and
that was all--all that we saw of the Northern Territory, mysterious
fascinating, and beautiful, with its vast and intricate problems
of labour and climate waiting solution. For with early morning we
slipped away from its red and green shores, just as the rising sun had
crimsoned all the glassy sea. That is our last memory of Australia,
and of all the places we visited it was Port Darwin that we were most
loth to leave, for we somehow felt that Australia had kept her best
till last.
PRINTED BY
WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
FOOTNOTES
[1] A genus named after a nurseryman who introduced these Australian
plants into London.
[2] On the goldfields the grant is £8 10s. per each child and the
teacher’s income £40.
[3] A summary of the history of Western Australian Educational
Development will be found in the State Handbook, contributed by the
Hon. Walter Kingsmill, formerly Minister for Education.
[4] From the Federal Handbook to Australia, p. 204.
[5] “Ringbarking” is effected by cutting away an encircling strip or
ring of bark round the trunk and so slowly killing the tree.
[6] See Federal Handbook for this question, pp. 171, 414.
[7] Federal Handbook, pp. 445–53.
[8] Federal Handbook, p. 173.
[9] “Army Review,” Vol. IV., January, 1913.
[10] “Times,” January 28, 1915.
[11] Ladies are not admitted to the Melbourne Club.
[12] Dr. J. W. Barrett, C.M.G., M.D., in the “Handbook to Victoria.”
[13] See Mr. H. M. Murphy, Chief Inspector of Factories, on the
“Victorian Labour Laws,” “Handbook to Victoria,” p. 203.
[14] H. M. Murphy.
[15] “Handbook to Victoria,” p. 40.
[16] “Handbook to Victoria,” p. 42.
[17] In the “Half-time” school the teacher divides his time between two
centres.
[18] See “Sheep and Wool for the Farmer,” Part I., J. Wrenford
Matthews. Published by the Department of Agriculture, N.S. Wales.
[19] For details of this system see “Wheat in New South Wales,” by G.
L. Sutton, Tourist Bureau, Sydney.
[20] “Farming on the Shares System,” Government Tourist Bureau, Sydney.
[21] In reference to the vast amount of sand in West Australia, the
West Australians are called “Sand-gropers.” Life was hard in early
South Australia, and hence the South Australians remain “Crow-eaters”:
Victorians, proud of their giant gum trees in Gippsland, are called
“Gum-suckers,” and only the New South Wales people are genuine
“Cornstalks.”
[22] W. Harrison Moore, Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne.
[23] “Flora of the South Coast,” “Handbook to New South Wales,” p. 395.
[24] There has been considerable difference of opinion among writers
on the early history of Australia, as to whether Captain Cook did or
did not name the whole of this district New South Wales. It is true
that the name New South Wales does not appear in Cook’s journals, and
Bladen, editor of the “Historical Record of New South Wales,” says that
“the name appears to have originated with Hawkesworth,” who edited
“Cook’s Voyages.” Kitson, however, cites a letter written by Cook, 1771
(“Life of Cook,” p. 149), in which the words occur, “The east coast of
New Holland, or what I call ‘New South Wales.’” Hawkesworth therefore
did obtain the name from Cook.
[25] Mrs. Æneas Gunn, “We of the Never Never.”
[26] An account of this interesting trial has been brilliantly given in
“An Untamed Territory,” Macmillan and Co., by Miss Elsie Masson.
[27] In Malay called tripang.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unpaired quotation
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unpaired.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations.
The List of Illustrations refers to an illustration on the cover, but
the source of this eBook did not include that illustration.
Footnotes originally were at the bottoms of pages; in this eBook, they
have been sequentially renumbered and placed at the end of the book.
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