The Project Gutenberg eBook, On the Wallaby, by E. M. Clowes This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: On the Wallaby through Victoria Author: E. M. Clowes Release Date: August 15, 2016 [eBook #52813] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE WALLABY*** This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler ON THE WALLABY THROUGH VICTORIA BY E. M. CLOWES ILLUSTRATED LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1911 Copyright, London, 1911, by William Heinemann INTRODUCTION This is not supposed to be a national or political history of Victoria. When I was asked to write something about the country which has extended its hospitality to me, and given me bread and cheese—sometimes no cheese, it is true, and more often than not no butter, but still always bread, and an ever-increasing appetite—I must confess I felt frankly scared. There is a very good, if somewhat vulgar, expression in use out here, which speaks of anyone who attempts p. iv p. v what is beyond them as “biting off more than they can chew.” And the thought frightened me. There seemed to be so many people who had lived all their life in the country, and were therefore much more capable of writing about it than I could ever possibly hope to be. However, I found that other “fools rushed in,” who had been here for even a shorter period than myself; who had never participated in any way in the true life of the country, or depended on it for their own life, which after all teaches one more than anything else ever can about a place. I may not be an “angel,” I thought, still I know it, which is one point in my favour; and, after all, eight years can scarcely be described as a “rush.” Besides, every proverb and popular saying seems to be balanced by another which is completely contradictory—and while it may be true that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” it is also true “that lookers-on see most of the game,” and perhaps score somewhat in the freshness of their impressions and in their facilities for comparison. As it is I can only write about Victoria as I know it. There are many mistakes that I may have made through my inability to see all sides of a question; but they are at least honest mistakes, and not the deliberate misstatement of facts, from which Australia has so often suffered. Of course, there are numberless phases of life out here which I have never even touched: my nose has been too close to the grindstone, while life has resolved itself for the most part into a mere struggle for existence. Still, that very struggle has brought me into touch with real people, and with the many grades of society which are to be found here as elsewhere, in spite of all the theories of democracy. I have edited a woman’s fashion paper, of sorts, and was dismissed because—I confess it—the compositors were quite incapable of reading my writing. I have written short stories and articles; I have decorated houses, painted friezes, made blouses for tea-room girls, designed embroideries for the elect of Toorak, even for the sacred denizens of Government House. I have housekept, washed, ironed, cooked. Once I made a garden, drew out the estimates, engaged the men, bought soil and manure, shrubs and plants, laid out a croquet-lawn, delved, sowed and planted shrubs which, now threatening to become trees, perhaps represent the best result of all these years of continuous labour. Palpable results, I mean, for the other results, the enlarged outlook, the humanity, the pathos, and the friendship, with which the memory of them is crammed, form, after all, an asset which is by no means to be despised. Still, when I recollect that I have been here for more than eight years; and that even now less than ten times that number of years has actually passed since the natives ceded to Batman, for knives, and beads, and looking-glasses, the present site of Melbourne, and much of the surrounding country, I am filled with the most abject shame at my own achievements and unlimited admiration for these people, so often dismissed by the ignorant at home and abroad as only “colonials,” who have built up such a town as Melbourne and such a country as Victoria is to-day. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Introduction v I. Early days in Victoria 1 II. Some first impressions of Melbourne 12 III. Mostly concerning “Sauce for the Goose and Sauce for the Gander” 40 IV. The working-man and the work-a-day world 71 V. The working-women of Melbourne, and in particular the char-lady 117 VI. Victorian youth 146 VII. Alien life 173 VIII. The amusements and the arts 199 IX. Rural life, mountain, and forest 229 X. Of the country and climate, and of Melbourne gardens 253 XI. Primitive Victoria 276 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS p. vi p. vii p. ix p. xi Despatching the wool-packs from a Victoria station Frontispiece A bird’s-eye view of Melbourne and on the Yarra Between 34 and 35 Dairy herd and silo Facing 46 Bringing wheat to station ,, 60 Milking-time on a dairy farm ,, 64 Buck-scraping ,, 88 Homestead and bullock team ,, 92 Wool-presses ,, 102 Cup day at Flemington racecourse, Melbourne ,, 208 Loading fruit on the Murray at Mildura ,, 234 Ring-barked trees and maize ,, 240 A bush giant ,, 242 A Haelesville gully ,, 248 Excavating an irrigation channel ,, 264 An aboriginal climbing a tree ,, 300 CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS IN VICTORIA The first landing in Victoria was purely involuntary, a vessel having been wrecked in 1797 on Furneaux Island, in Bass Strait, the supercargo, a man named Clarke, and two sailors—the only people saved out of a total of seventeen— making the Victorian shores, and by some incredible means reaching Sydney. Six years later an attempt was made to colonize what was then known as Port Phillip, by means of a convict colony, and a penal expedition of nearly 400 persons, 300 of whom were convicts, were sent out under the charge of Captain Collins. But water was scarce, the weather in the bay was stormy, and the blacks distinctly hostile; the whole outlook seemed so gloomy that Collins, who must have been pretty well distracted between the blacks on shore and the seething discontent of the convicts on his ships, applied for—and at last, after three months of unutterable misery in Port Phillip, received—permission to remove to Van Dieman’s Land, one of the very few children who accompanied this wretched party being John Pascoe Fawkner, who, thirty-two years later, assisted in the foundation of Melbourne. Among old Victoria celebrities John Batman was one of the best known. Batman landed at Geelong in 1835—the site of the present town having been first discovered by Mr. Hamilton Hume and Captain Hovell, who, with a servant and six convicts, had, in 1824, set out overland from New South Wales with the intention of reaching Westernport. After having by some means ingratiated himself with the natives, Batman proceeded up the bay to what is now known as Williamstown, where, again conciliating the blacks, he induced them to consent to a treaty, under which he received some 600,000 acres of fine pasture-land in return for beads, knives, blankets, and looking-glasses; after which, having explored the river, he entered in his diary the Yarra Falls as being the most likely place for a village. Soon, however, Batman’s sovereignty was to be disputed by Fawkner, who entered Port Phillip Heads a little later during the same year, with the Enterprise and a handful of prospective settlers. At the Indented Head Fawkner and his party were met by some of Batman’s men, who informed them that their master was owner alike of the bay and of the rivers, Batman, it appears, taking his part well as one of the first of Australian braggadocios. Still, this high-handed attitude appeared likely for awhile to succeed, for Fawkner obediently sailed northward, touching at the places which are now known as St. Kilda, Brighton, Mordialloc, and Dromana; finally, finding no satisfactory landing-place, he anchored in Hobson’s Bay, whence the Yarra was entered in a boat, and the present site of the Customs House determined on as a settlement. Next day the Enterprise herself was towed up the river; the settlers, with ploughs, grain, fruit-trees, building materials, and provisions, landed, and the city of Melbourne was founded in 1835. Only seventy-six years ago, and yet there are people who, having seen Melbourne as it is now, find their chief cause of complaint against the Australians in their lack of enterprise and general slackness. To people such as these the present Victorian town of Wonthaggi, beside the State Coal-Mine, must have seemed to have sprung up with the astounding, challenging air of a “Jack-in-the-box.” At the time I write this infant prodigy is five months old, and boasts some 3,000 inhabitants, streets, shops, three newspapers, four churches, a skating-rink, and a theatre, though as yet no hotel. There is what is called a “Hostel,” which may procure a licence or may not—it depends on the powers of the Wowsers. Meanwhile, the only obvious way of obtaining a drink is from a beer-cart, with a two- gallon licence. Needless to say, there are other less obvious ways, many and devious, to judge by the fact that five p. 1 p. 2 p. 3 p. 4 keepers of sly “grog-shops” or “Pigs,” as they are popularly called—who were lately hauled up by the police, despatched a circular letter to all the business people in the township, asking that a fund should be organized for their defence—this being, I suppose, what the philanthropists call “an appeal to our common humanity”; though what response it met with I do not know. In its first beginnings Melbourne was slower certainly than Wonthaggi. Materials and tools for every sort of work were more difficult to obtain, while it was pretty well a year before any goods ordered from England could arrive—four months each way being a good average passage by the old “wind-jammers,” with a further delay for preparing and packing ready for shipment. After a little while Batman’s party of settlers from Indented Head also moved northward, and encamped at the back of Fawkner’s settlement, where St. James’s Church and the huge rabbit-warren known as St. James’s Chambers have long stood. Two years later Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, visited the new colony of Port Phillip, and planned out more definitely the towns of Melbourne, Geelong, and Williamstown. A resident magistrate was appointed, and in 1851 the colony was declared to have a separate and independent existence under the name of Victoria, the certainty that one can have nothing without paying for it being exemplified by the fact that, with separation, came also the birth of public debt in the new colony. In 1840 took place the only really organized attempt made by the blacks, round Melbourne, to rescue their country from the whites, an abortive enough attempt, beginning with a large corroboree about nine o’clock one evening, and an over-liberal allowance of rum. Two hundred black fellows were taken prisoners, and marched to Batman’s Hill, where there was a rough prison in the form of a stockade, where they were placed, with a strong patrol guard all round them; these were packed off next day in boats, and let loose in the dense scrub where St. Kilda and Prahan now stand, as it would have been no joke to support 200 prisoners in those days, when flour was selling at £80 the ton, and meat at 1s. 6d. the pound—the white population, which in 1836 consisted of 143 men and 35 women, having by that time risen to 10,291 persons, and constituting a great drain on the resources of the new colony. Soon, however, as the stock began to increase by leaps and bounds, meat became cheaper and living less difficult. The early settlers, however, used to have to work day and night to evolve some sort of order on their holdings, to live themselves, to clear their land, and at the same time to increase their flocks. An old lady told me once of the struggles she and her husband had in the early days, before they could get any proper bush shelter up on their run, when the ewes lambed too early in the season, while the nights were yet damp and cold. Her husband or the shepherd used to go round at night and collect armfuls of what they called “green-bobs”—freshly born lambs—and, after roughly cleansing them, insist on their being taken into bed, under the blankets, with herself and her children. Not—as she declared—that she ever raised any real objection; for she had the sense to know that all their lives hung on the existence of these poor little weaklings, and was only too proud to find, a few months later, when the flock came to be ear-marked, that it had more than doubled—partly, no doubt, as the result of her mothering. And yet no one has ever thought of canonizing women such as this! Can you picture it—the one-roomed house, with rough log walls, mud-plastered, and roofed with bark; the log fire on the open hearth, with the kettle slung above it, ready to warm milk for the young lambs, who lay on sacking before the fire, or shared the bed—where the mother and children lay together, heads and tails? The wild Australian wind outside—and what a wind, gathering in its gallop across miles of open country, and pushing and blustering in at the door, as the farmer thrust it open with his foot, his arms full of the tiny, trembling creatures, on whom his future depended. And all around the endless stretch of the unknown land. Something of the dangers and the loneliness being possible to gather from the matter-of-fact recital, by “A Pioneer,” of the finding of the body of a dead man who had been “bushed,” and died of thirst, to which he adds this statement: “I buried him where he had been found, as I had previously buried others who had perished under similar circumstances, crossing these plains from one station to another in the middle of the dry season.” Gradually the old identities, people who remember days such as these, are dying out in Victoria; while so few personal histories have been written, and so few letters preserved, that the life and characteristics of the gallant early settlers seem more than likely to sink into oblivion. Mr. Joseph Tuckwell, who died in Melbourne only a very few months ago, could tell some fine yarns when the spirit moved him. As far back as 1851 he was Inspector of Police in Hobart—a position that was by no means a sinecure in those days. Later, when the gold rush in Victoria started, he joined the police force there; then, in 1860, went to Dunedin; and a little later became Governor of Auckland Gaol—his reminiscences dating back to the times before he had sailed for Australia, when he had witnessed the burial of George IV. in St. George’s Chapel. Another link also with the early days passed away, only a month or so back, in the person of one of the last of the convict chaplains of the old Port Arthur Settlement; his wife, who is still living, being the daughter of John Price, the Inspector-General of Convicts, who was murdered in 1857, and niece of the great John Franklin. It is interesting to remember that in those early days Victoria was a country with no old people. Lately I was talking with some old maiden ladies, who told me that, as children, they had never seen an old man or woman; and that when they first went home with their parents, in 1876, they were terror-stricken by the aspect of their old Scotch grandmother in her white mutch, whom they could not dissociate in their bewildered little minds from the wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” They had lived in those days just beneath the Dandenong Range, fifteen miles out of Melbourne, and speak now of the terror the escaped and liberated prisoners—of course, there were no real convicts in Victoria—used to be to them and their mother; the Botanical Gardens being then in the making, with gangs of prisoners p. 4 p. 5 p. 6 p. 7 p. 8 employed upon them and upon the roads, working in small groups, watched over by officials with muskets. It seems curious that, though Portland was settled at much the same time as Port Phillip, no one ever seemed to have thought of installing the new capital there, in spite of its truly magnificent bay. In 1836 Major Mitchell, who was the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, with a party of convicts, having followed the course of the Lachlan and Lower Murrumbidgee, crossed the Murray, climbed to the summit of Mount Hope, and saw stretched out before him a sweep of wide and promising pasture. Moving onwards to the south by south-west, he crossed this green and pleasant land, passed another range of mountains, which he named the Grampians, and thus reached the south coast of Discovery Bay, meeting at Portland with the famous Henty family, who two years earlier had established themselves there, with servants, sheep, horses, and cattle, that they had brought over with them from Tasmania. These they used to good purpose in trade with the whalers and scalers, who, indeed, were the first white inhabitants of Victoria, having run up rough temporary stores and other buildings at intervals along the coast, the principal traders, before the coming of the pastoral Hentys, being William Dutton—Dutton being now a well-known name in South Australia, though whether the family is the same I do not know—John Griffiths, and two brothers named Mills. Portland suffers from no natural defects, and is simply prevented from taking its place as one of the best and busiest seaports by the fact that Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, in which it is situated. Equally ridiculous sentiments or regulations, I do not know which, ordaining that all goods from South Australia—Mount Gambia, the centre of one of the richest portions of that state, being only 73 miles from Portland—shall be transferred over 300 miles to Port Adelaide for shipment. Here is something, one would imagine, where Federation might be of real use, and the Montague and Capulet sort of feeling, which makes such a state of affairs possible, be mitigated, if not completely squashed. I have never been to Portland, but am always hoping to go, for I am told that it is one of the most charming and old- world spots in Victoria. Moreover, it possesses one of the most beautiful and natural harbours possible—the finest in all Victoria, Westernport coming second, and Melbourne nowhere at all, for it is only by constant dredging, deepening, and general tinkering that the Melbourne Harbour is a harbour at all, and not a hill. As it is the harbour charges are necessarily so exorbitant in Melbourne that Tasmanians are already congratulating themselves on the fact that it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good; and that when ships get larger, as they seem likely to do, Hobart will be the only port where they can lie, the depth of water, right up to the quay, being some 72 or 73 feet, sufficient for any ship ever likely to be launched to float in at ease; so that Hobart may really become in time the distributing centre for the whole of the Commonwealth. And there all the time is Portland, of which Victoria can make no use, simply because it is not her capital, and she is not far-seeing enough to cultivate a second string to her bow; while South Australia can make no use of it either, because she would rather that her produce should be hopelessly depreciated in value by miles of useless haulage, than risk parting with one iota of trade to a sister State. Truly it is like the trivial etiquette of a provincial English town, where the butcher’s wife is not on calling terms with the baker’s wife—or that immortal ballad of the two men on a desert island, who would die of hunger and thirst rather than speak when they had not been introduced. Oddly enough, it is not only in regard to its own affairs that Victoria seems incapable of realizing more than one town to each State or county; for, in spite of many protests, it still ships—with very few exceptions—its entire frozen produce to London, completely ignoring the other large and important English ports, and necessitating a most unnecessary amount of handling and extra freight charges in the distribution of its exports. Surely there is nothing so completely conservative as a democratic country can prove itself to be in some matters; a reversion to the original type, I suppose for, after all, the progenitors of the greater number of these Australians left England at a time when Toryism was at its height. CHAPTER II SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE From the moment that the ship touches this shore—no, rather from the moment that the pilot boards her—a whiff of something, at once strange and stimulating, seems to fill one’s lungs and quicken one’s brain. The Australian pilots are a notably fine race—the younger men, those who have been born in the country—the finest type, perhaps, that it has as yet produced, with a breezy optimism, an immense faith in the land of their birth, and true affection for the Old Country, their very love for and dependence on the connecting seas helping, perchance, to annul any petty differences or jealousies; so that it is indeed well for all that they should be the very first to greet us in the new world to which we are come. From Colombo one sails eastwards to Australia, so far east that one almost reaches the west in more senses than one. There are Trade Winds, and there are counter Trades, as we know; and if Australia owes her climate and her fertility to the warm, teeming East, mentally, in the tastes and outlook of her people, she is still altogether Western; so markedly so, indeed, that, in Melbourne in particular, one is at times seized with the whimsical idea that it has something to do with the roll of the earth, and that we may yet be slid into the very lap of America, ending by being far more completely akin to that democratic country than to the slow-moving, monarchical methods of England. One must look back to one’s first clear-cut, vivid impression of a new country to realize how unnumbered are the p. 9 p. 10 p. 11 p. 12 p. 13 differences, even under the many apparent likenesses, to which after a little while one becomes so used. In Melbourne the stevedores and dock-hands, who throng the ship and quay the moment she is docked, are almost as incredibly different from the same class in England as they are from the swarming blacks of Colombo. They are for the most part bigger and broader-shouldered; they look far better fed. They walk with a vigour and spring—indeed, with a sort of swagger—moving more from the hip than the English dock-hand, and less with that weary lurch of the shoulders which marks him as a creature of infinite labour and privation; while, above all, they are extraordinarily clean. I shall never forget my first impression of these men—the brilliant blue sky, the blazing sun, the great swinging cranes, and the dexterity with which they handled the enormous masses of iron-rails, etc., which we carried, apparently with so little exertion, and absolutely no bullocking; while many of them were in spotless white overalls, delightful to look upon. I had arrived out from England in a sailing-ship, long overdue, owing to a succession of adverse winds, and in consequence water had run very short, so that washing with anything but sea-water was a quite impossible luxury. Our ship was clean, for our crew had toiled nobly with paint and varnish and holystone; and the sails were washed and bleached white by the sunshine and storm of many months on the open sea, far from smoke or dust. Still, I believe that we all felt horribly grimy as the tug towed us to our place at the quay; while I, for one, was longing for a Turkish bath; and that as soon as possible, for no ordinary amount of washing as I felt would, or could, be of any use. So that perhaps, on the whole, there was a double reason for the extraordinary cleanliness of the Melbourne dock-hands striking me as it did at the time. Still, that first impression has never faded, and, to this day, I regard the Australian working man—the worker, not the waster, I mean—as the cleanest in the whole world. Some people, as I am well aware, are minutely clean in their persons, making it, indeed, a matter of religion, while some are clean in their raiment, but seldom both. Certainly the more completely a man is clothed, the more likely is it that he —or his clothes—are incompletely cleansed; his own mind, which I presume governs the washing of his body, and his wife’s mind, which governs the washing of his garments, seeming unable to work in unison. But, though the Australian labourer is quite completely clothed, and so white as to show dirt as easily as anybody—I mention this fact for the benefit of those who persistently regard him as black and naked—he and his wife appear to have somehow solved this question between them. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that he is better paid, and his wife is better fed than most wives of working men in the Old Country. And, then, the pipes do not freeze; while in even the tiniest three- roomed house there is usually a bath and a shower—though sometimes only in the scullery or back kitchen—with water laid on. And, after all, in a hot country cleanliness is not that affair of infinite toil that it is in a cold one; there is usually a day or so each week, even in the wettest weather, when there is enough sunshine to dry the clothes out of doors, so that one is saved the necessity of slinging them in lines across the kitchen, to drip on to the children’s heads, and lie in sullen grey pools on the floor. Yet there is the dust, which is beyond all words, and the flies, so that it is not all quite plain sailing, after all. Still, though the Australian workman has many little ways which at first rub every atom of your fur up in the wrong direction—he is bumptious, he is cock-sure, he is condescending; “I don’t mind if I do” is his one form of accepting any proffered favour, while a shrug of the shoulders and the “My troubles” are his response to any advice or sympathy you may offer—he is also essentially clean, in other ways apart from those that I have mentioned. Besides this, he does not cadge for tips; indeed, he more often than not resents the offer of money. “What’s that for?” he will ask, with a glance at the proffered coin that makes you blush to your very boots. I’ve had a hard-worked lodging-house servant refuse a well-earned tip more than once. “Lord bless you, I ain’t going ter take yer money; you’ve enough to do with it!” has been said. Not long before I left the country I took lodgings down at the sea, to recoup from a long illness, with a carpenter and his wife and family of small bairns. When I left, the man walked to the station, carrying my bag for me, and as we shook hands on the platform, entreated me, in his wife’s name as well as his own, to come down and stay with them, if I was hard up or ill, for as long as ever I liked, and not to worry about the money. “For if there’s enough for us, there’s enough for you, providing you don’t mind our rough ways,” he added; “and don’t you go on working again till you’re fair worn out; for as long as we’ve a bit or a sup, or a roof over our heads, you’re welcome to a share.” On the other hand, these people will be merciless to the humbug, to anyone who is mean or idle. They know their own value; “Business is business,” as they say. They will give freely enough, but they will not submit to be haggled with or underpaid; and why should they? I have worked shoulder to shoulder with them for eight years, and I never wish to work with better people. Their absolute indifference, except where they really like or respect a person, their crudity, their common sense, their shrewdness, is like a tonic. And thus, in spite of Mr. Foster Fraser’s assertion that the Australians can only exist by the constant effusion of fresh and virile blood from the Old Country, I must still believe that, for any elaborate ideals and ethics of over-civilization which we take with us to this new country, we receive in return very much more, certainly individually, than we have ever given; while in respect to the question of virility, Mr. Fraser must, I feel, have very largely judged Australians from the towns, and the undergrown shop-boys and factory- girls that he has seen there. After all, if we stay a little to ponder over what he regards as the degeneracy of these people—and it can only be the town people of whom he speaks—I think we shall realize that it is all only part of the natural order of things; that the more completely a plant belongs to the outdoor world, to the wilds and open places, the more it will suffer by transplantation to the vitiated air, the smoke and dust, of the city. Some day Australia may produce two types, as England does—the city type, with, in spite of its anæmic appearance, a quite immense vitality, and the country type, heavier, slower, and more robust. In the meantime, all these narrow-chested boys and precocious, over-developed girls who at night line the pavement of Swanston Street are really the inevitable result of a period of transition. Most likely when their parents were born there were no streets at all, as we now see them; while their fathers and mothers were such people as Walt Whitman must have had in mind when he wrote, saying: “I see the p. 14 p. 15 p. 16 p. 17 p. 18 makings of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.” The parents of these weedy boys and girls—who seem, like Jonah’s gourd, to spring to an untimely maturity—were, maybe, conceived and born in the open air, and toiled for their daily bread under conditions of hardship and danger such as we can scarcely realize. A people who lived in vast open spaces, the immensity and loneliness of which very few European minds can grasp, and yet who were dowered with such an abundance of air and sunshine that it is little to be wondered at that their progeny wilt as they do in the towns. And, after all, there is one persistent and saving quality about them: they hark back again to the open; their hearts are never really at one with the cities. The young boys and girls flock there, and love it for a while; but as they mature they begin to long beyond words for the country. Every little shopman, every successful artisan and his wife, cherishes, with few exceptions, the one ambition—to have a tiny place in the country, to farm a little, keep poultry, grow fruit, and live in the open. People settled for life, as one might imagine, in comfortable homes in Melbourne will give up everything—in what can but seem the most surprising fashion to those who have not got that touch of the wild, or the patriarchal, in their blood—and start afresh. Sometimes they are well over fifty years of age before they can feel free to please themselves. But even then, confident in the knowledge that all the youngsters are out in the world doing well for themselves, they will fly to the country and begin all over again in a little two-roomed iron-roofed shanty, where the bush still remains to be stubbled up, growing as it does to the veranda step, and the water has to be carried half a mile, while the only possible chance visitor is an occasional opossum on the roof, or black snake in the bed. Yet for all this the Bush, which somewhere deep in their hearts has been calling to them all their lives, draws them at last irresistibly to its bosom; so that they will dare anything to be near it, to hear the laughing-kachass at their very door, and see the wild wattle-bloom in flower. To us who have grown used, through many generations, to the life of the cities, such behaviour seems incredibly mad. We forget how very, very new the whole country still is; how it was won and watered by sheer sweat, and how the people love it all the more because of the life and youth that were lost in its making—love it because it is so near to them, so completely in their blood that the glint of stars through the weather-boards of a bush shanty is a better sight to weary eyes than any wall-paper that even the genius of Morris has evolved. But I have wandered far from the ship with her furled sails and my first impressions of the new country: the coming and going of Custom-House and Health Officers, the bustle, the sunshine on the quay, and, above all, the curiously homelike Cockney drawl, which is so marked a characteristic of the Australian of to-day, all of which has amalgamated together in my mind, into a vivid and clear-cut picture. It is all very well to write as if I precipitated myself bodily and instantaneously into the hearts and homes of the people, for I did not. I liked them as little as they liked me. And that was very little, for it was a long time before I could be brought to realize that any relation of England could find any possible virtue to be proud of excepting that relationship. That the whole country, indeed, was not a sort of benevolent, though ignorant, country cousin, touchingly anxious to hear all about the head of the family, and be taught the true value of life by any of its scions. As a matter of fact, I had conceived a very clear mental picture of Australia as a burly, farmer-like person, with one hand outstretched in welcome, the other filled with desirable billets of all sorts, which awaited some new-comer, with that wide outlook possible only to one who has rubbed shoulders with the oldest civilization, the completest culture. It took me, indeed, months to realize that what is old, and to our minds completely well established, may be suspected of blue mould. Also that the only relation, likely to be of any use to the impecunious newcomer, is that “Uncle” whom I have discovered to be as outwardly ubiquitous and inwardly suspicious and grudging as in England. Finding, therefore, that everything was going on much the same as though nothing very exciting was expected; and that Australia, as a nation, did not seem to be awaiting me on the quay with open arms, I hustled my few belongings through the Customs, took a cab—the most medieval institution in Melbourne, a sort of closed waggonette, and incredibly rackety—and drove up to a Coffee Palace, which had been recommended to me as cheaper than an hotel. These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer, the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers and his felt hat well at the back of his head. “That there,” he responded, jerking his thumb in the direction of a gallery, where a few of the languidly select were draping themselves over the rail—“that there’s where the toffs grub, and there aren’t nothing served there not under two bob; but that there”—and he moved his thumb in the direction of a door to the right, from whence was streaming an endless succession of people, still chewing or, one stage later, picking their teeth—“that there’s where the blokes go: two courses fur a bob.” He was very polite, and he delayed his pressing business with his teeth to give me the fullest information possible, even to the affair of the “serviette,” as he called it; but he did not take off his hat. The Australian is an inwardly chivalrous person—most wonderfully so, considering how his female belongings have elbowed him off the pavement. He never speaks of—or to—us with that sort of tolerant sneer with which the Englishman tries to pass off the humiliating fact that p. 19 p. 20 p. 21 p. 22 p. 23 he was born of woman—that for him a woman’s hands had performed the first, and in all probability will perform the last, offices. But he does not part easily with his head-gear. The first day, as I went down from my room in the lift, I remember distinctly a man getting in with a big lighted cigar in his mouth and his hat on his head. As he did not attempt to remove either, I fixed my eye on him with a stare that was meant to be significant. I was a snob in those days, though I did not realize it, till later on a working man asked me why I was so fond of talking of “common people.” “It’s the one thing I don’t rightly like about you,” he added, quite candidly and without malice. I have, I hope, been better since; anyhow, I have never forgotten what he said, or the aspect of affairs which his words opened to me. Well, all that the man with the hat and cigar did was to smile and make some remark about the weather, perfectly undaunted by my freezing glances. Then, as I still glared, his face dropped in a curiously hurt and childlike manner. At last, evidently realizing where my gaze was directed, he took off his hat, examined it thoughtfully, and, seeing nothing wrong, put it on again. Then he took out his cigar, looked at it curiously, replaced it in his mouth, and gave it a reassuring puff, as if to say it was certainly all right—so what could there be for me to stare at? Then suddenly I remembered the chambermaid and the pearls and all the other differences, and nodded and smiled my thanks as he stood aside to let me step first out of the lift; for they will always do that, if possible—it is one of the odd contradictions of them. As to the chambermaid and the pearls, which, to start with, reminds me of a story I heard of a girl up at a way-back hotel, whose name was Pearl. Some rowdy young larrikin, drinking among a crowd of associates, inquired if she was “the pearl of great price”; to which effort of wit she responded, with the greatest composure, that, on the contrary, she was “the pearl that was cast before swine”; for the progenitor of the untaught Australian brought a goodly share of mother-wit with him from London, in addition to his indelible accent. I was curled well up under the bedclothes on that first morning, with the sheet over my head, to try and keep out the glare. All the beds in Melbourne seem to be placed facing the light, and blinds are regarded apparently as a mere useless luxury. But I sat bolt upright in sheer amazement when the chambermaid first addressed me, with some palpable, but quite good-tempered jealousy in her voice:— “My word, but you do look comfy!” As there were no blinds to be drawn and no tea had been ordered, she just stood there and smiled into my astonished face, with her hands on her hips, swinging easily from toe to heel and back again. She wore a neat black dress and apron, with a minute suggestion of a cap, all quite orthodox, but, in addition, she also wore a pearl necklace, formed of several rows of imposingly large and artlessly artificial pearls. As I caught sight of this, my feelings changed, for she was clean and smiling, while the necklace appeared to my eyes as a symbol and sign of all the extraordinary differences for which I must be prepared in the new world. “You told me to call you at seven sharp,” she remarked, a note of aggression creeping into her voice, “so you needn’t be looking shirty at being woke. An’ you didn’t order no tea nor nothing.” “Indeed, you were quite right to call me. Thanks very much. And I don’t want any tea, thank you; only a little hot water.” “What! ter drink?” “No, for washing.” The girl gave a wholly surprised stare, then jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. “Bath-room, third turn to the left, first to the right.” For a moment I stared back stonily; then I remembered the pearls, and thanked her, adding: “It is only just seven, isn’t it?” “The very tick when I opened that door. My word, but you’ve got nice ’air when it’s down like that. I like dark ’air, I do. The worst of light ’air”—and she strolled to the looking-glass and examined her own elaborately dressed amber locks complacently—“it’s toney enough, I do allow; but you do ’ave to keep it clean, and no mistake. Now, then, if you wants a bath, you’d best look nippy, for there’s a run on ’em this time o’ morning. Look ’ere! I tell you what do,” she went on, with sudden friendliness; “I’ll pop along and turn it on for you while you get into your wrapper. My word, but that’s pretty, ain’t it? I like them delainey stuffs. Now, don’t you be long. I’ve twenty rooms to see to, I ’ave. But it must be awkward like in a new country. Different from England, ain’t it? A bit more go-ahead, eh?” “How did you know?” I asked in amazement, conscious of having removed every scrap of label from my luggage. “Know?” echoed the chambermaid scornfully. “Why, any kid ’ud know that—it’s sticking out a mile!” There are, of course, hotels in Melbourne, two moderately good and immoderately expensive, ones, and several smaller fry. But it is in the Coffee Palaces that the ordinary people congregate, and it is from the ordinary people, after all, that one can best judge of a nation; the highly educated—I will not say intellectual—and leisured classes being much the same anywhere. Therefore it is in one of the Coffee Palaces that I would advise anyone to stay who really wishes to p. 24 p. 25 p. 26 p. 27 study the life and character of the Australians. There comes the shrewd commercial traveller, who, in such a scattered country as this, is a person of wide experience, with by no means the safe and easy road before him that is trodden by his English compeers; while from him you are often able to draw some of the clearest and best-balanced judgments of the whole trend of the country and people that it is possible to obtain. Here, also, are the visitors from other States, with, perhaps, not too much money to spend, and the New Zealander and the Tasmanian, the country cousin, the cocky farmer, and the small squatter, gathering most thickly at the time of the Agricultural or Sheep Show, or during that great week when the race for the Melbourne Cup is run. The places are, of course, as their name implies, teetotal. If you want anything stronger than tea or coffee, or a soft drink, you give the money to the waitress, who sends out for it. But it is a lengthy progress, and one which all your neighbours seem to regard with such an intense suspicion that usually you content yourself with the truly national drink— tea. In the days of one’s youth one used to be told that tea and meat combined would inevitably turn to leather in one’s tummy. In Melbourne I feel that it must be the internal organs themselves which have turned to leather, so that there can be nothing more left to be feared, and one can even, after a while, drink tea and eat oysters at one fell meal with impunity. Of course, a good many children have succumbed to the united effects of boiled beef and tea, which is really the national food. But, then, it all conduces to the survival of the fittest, and until people will condescend to learn the art of vegetable growing, especially in drought-stricken districts, from the despised John Chinaman, it is as well to be prepared for the worst. The tea is usually drunk very strong and sweet, and most often without milk, many Australians having a deep-rooted suspicion of any fluid, even remotely appertaining to that cow which made their young lives such an intolerable burden to them. The workman, the artisan, the labourer, and dock-hands carry their tin billies, and a portion of tea twisted up in a piece of paper, out to their day’s work with them; and in the towns there is always a gas- jet or a fire to be found at which someone will let them boil the water. The swaggies and the wandering army of station hands, the shearer and harvester, they, too, carry their billies in one hand, as inevitably as they carry their swag—their blanket and store of flour, and mackintosh sheet or bit of oilcloth. And for them there are dry, fragrant eucalyptus leaves and twigs—inflammable as tinder to the least spark from flint and steel—to boil their water over; the very fact of its having to be boiled, and therefore insuring some measure of safety from typhoid germs, being one of the best possible excuses for the universal popularity of tea, particularly among such wanderers, and dwellers in country districts. One of the first difficulties that confronts the new arrival in Melbourne is that of suitable lodgings, when he shall have tired of hotel and Coffee Palace. I know I walked innumerable streets and answered innumerable advertisements, before I began to realize that those lodgings with one or two bedrooms, a sitting-room, and privately served meals— probably presided over by an ubiquitous ex-butler and cook—which we regard so completely as a matter of course in England, are almost unknown in Australia, and so scarce and expensive as to be an impossibility, excepting for the very wealthy. Either a place was frankly a boarding-house, or one was termed a guest, and expected to have meals with the landlady, her family, and occasional friends; once I remember at an up-country lodging the “friend” being an Assyrian pedlar—certainly the most interesting person I ever met there—while someone who could play the piano or recite, and was generally of a friendly turn of mind, was greatly to be preferred. I shall never forget my first bewildering day in search for lodgings. As each front-door was opened I was met by the same mingled whiff of cabbage and linoleum, the same complete indifference as to whether I took the rooms or left them; the same superb air of merely letting rooms at all out of charity, or as a sort of careless hobby; also, incidentally, because, by some odd chance, the house happened to be too big for its occupants. Indeed, this reason was so inevitably offered to me that in time I found myself receiving the odd impression that all the lodging-houses had sprung up, gourdlike, to their present proportions the very night after the lease had been signed. The question of attendance, too, seemed to be always a vexed one, and, in most cases, even by extra payment, quite out of the question; while the very idea of separate meals was received with a sort of horror, as if anyone who wished to feed alone must contemplate awful orgies of an unutterable description. For the most part the beds were big, the charges bigger; the washing-basin and the slaveys who opened the door incredibly small—that is, with the professional boarding-house keeper. There seemed no possible reconciliation between the small maid and the small basin, for there the question of attendance came in—though one landlady did vouchsafe the information that her maid “slopped the room” every morning. But it seemed as if the relations between the big bed and the big rent might, and indeed were, expected to be equalized if I did not mind “sharing my room with another young lady,” in one case my possible hostess’s daughter. I shall never forget my horror when this idea was first mooted to me, nor how, in my confusion, I protested that I “had never slept with another woman in my life.” On which the horror was transferred to the face of the prospective landlady, who retorted that—“if I was that sort, I might go elsewhere.” These are the people who flood the daily papers with glowing advertisements—perhaps that landlady would say: “And these are the people who answer them.” But still I would have you beware, for they are false as their fringes—luckily, almost as palpably so. Once, I suppose, they held any temporary dweller in Melbourne irrevocably in their clutches, but since the Land Boom—“the Boom,” as it is always called—which, in spite of all its horrors, had a most potentially humanizing effect on the people, a few capable gentlewomen have taken the work of the landladies into their own hands, and comfortable, well-ordered, truly home-like boarding-houses are springing up, which threaten to oust these pre-historic harpies from their lairs. The streets of Melbourne are, to my mind, the most tiring I have ever known. They are so straight, so uncompromising; Collins Street alone presents such an endless vista as one gazes up it that I remember, in those first days, feeling as if I p. 28 p. 29 p. 30 p. 31 p. 32 would like to take it up in my hands and twist it into some unrecognizable form—warp it and bend it. Straight from west to east, side by side, run several such streets, the principal ones of the city, crossed again at right angles by others every bit as straight—all without a single saving grace of curve, of sheltering crescent, or tree-shaded square, so that when a hot north wind blows it rushes across the interstices of these streets like a hot blast from a furnace, eddying thick clouds of yellow dust—filled with the unutterable debris of the streets—furiously round each corner. The...