THE GOVERNMENT STROKE.
"The Government Stroke" is a term often used in the colonies, and indicates a lazy and inefficient manner of performing any kind of labour. It originated with the convicts. When a man is forced to work through fear of the lash, and receives no wages, it is quite natural and reasonable that he should exert himself as little as possible. If you were to reason with him, and urge him to work harder at, for instance, breaking road metal, in order that the public might have good roads to travel on, and show him what a great satisfaction it should be to know that his labours would confer a lasting benefit on his fellow creatures; that, though it might appear a little hard on him individually, he should raise his thoughts to a higher level, and labour for the good of humanity in general, he would very likely say, "Do you take me for a fool?" But if you gave him three dozen lashes for his laziness he will see, or at least feel, that your argument has some force in it. As a matter of fact men work for some present or future benefit for themselves. The saint who sells all he has to give to the poor, does so with the hope of obtaining a reward exceedingly great in the life to come. And even if there were no life to come, his present life is happier far than that of the man who grabs at all the wealth he can get until he drops into the grave. The man who works "all for love and nothing for reward" is a being incomprehensible to us ordinary mortals; he is an angel, and if ever he was a candidate for a seat in Parliament he was not elected. Even love--"which rules the court, the camp, the grove"--is given only with the hope of a return of love; for hopeless love is nothing but hopeless misery.
I once hired an old convict as gardener at five shillings a day. He began to work in the morning with a great show of diligence while I was looking on. But on my return home in the evening it was wonderful to find how little work he had contrived to get through during the day; so I began to watch him. His systematic way of doing nothing would have been very amusing if it cost nothing. He pressed his spade into the ground with his boot as slowly as possible, lifted the sod very gently, and turned it over. Then he straightened his back, looked at the ground to the right, then to the left, then in front of him, and then cast his eyes along the garden fence. Having satisfied himself that nothing particular was happening anywhere within view, he gazed awhile at the sod he had turned over, and then shaved the top off with his spade. Having straightened his back once more, he began a survey of the superficial area of the next sod, and at length proceeded to cut it in the same deliberate manner, performing the same succeeding ceremonies. If he saw me, or heard me approaching, he became at once very alert and diligent until I spoke to him, then he stopped work at once. It was quite impossible for him both to labour and to listen; nobody can do two things well at the same time. But his greatest relief was in talking; he would talk with anybody all day long if possible, and do nothing else; his wages, of course, still running on. There is very little talk worth paying for. I would rather give some of my best friends a fee to be silent, than pay for anything they have to tell me. My gardener was a most unprofitable servant; the only good I got out of him was a clear knowledge of what the Government stroke meant, and the knowledge was not worth the expense. He was in other respects harmless and useless, and, although he had been transported for stealing, I could never find that he stole anything from me. The disease of larceny seemed somehow to have been worked out of his system; though he used to describe with great pleasure how his misfortunes began by stealing wall-fruit when he was a boy; and although it was to him like the fruit
"Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe."
it was so sweet that, while telling me about it sixty years afterwards, he smiled and smacked his lips, renewing as it were the delight of its delicious taste.
He always avoided, as much as possible, the danger of dying of hard work, so he is living yet, and is eighty-six years old. Whenever I see him he gives me his blessing, and says he never worked for any man he liked so well. A great philosopher says, in order to be happy it is necessary to be beloved, but in order to be beloved we must know how to please, and we can only please by ministering to the happiness of others. I ministered to the old convict's happiness by letting him work so lazily, and so I was beloved and happy.
He had formerly been an assigned servant to Mr. Gellibrand, Attorney-General of Tasmania, before that gentleman went with Mr. Hesse on that voyage to Australia Felix from which he never returned. Some portions of a skeleton were found on the banks of a river, which were supposed to belong to the lost explorer, and that river, and Mount Gellibrand, on which he and Hesse parted company, were named after him.
There was a blackfellow living for many years afterwards in the Colac district who was said to have killed and eaten the lost white man; the first settlers therefore call him Gellibrand, as they considered he had made out a good claim to the name by devouring the flesh. This blackfellow's face was made up of hollows and protuberances ugly beyond all aboriginal ugliness. I was present at an interview between him and senior-constable Hooley, who nearly rivalled the savage in lack of beauty. Hooley had been a soldier in the Fifth Fusiliers, and had been convicted of the crime of manslaughter, having killed a coloured man near Port Louis, in the Mauritius. He was sentenced to penal servitude for the offence, and had passed two years of his time in Tasmania. This incident had produced in his mind an interest in blackfellows generally, and on seeing Gellibrand outside the Colac courthouse, he walked up to him, and looked him steadily in the face, without saying a word or moving a muscle of his countenance. I never saw a more lovely pair. The black fellow returned the gaze unflinchingly, his deep-set eyes fixed fiercely on those of the Irishman, his nostrils dilated, and his frowning forehead wrinkled and hard, as if cast in iron. The two men looked like two wild beasts preparing for a deadly fight. At length, Hooley moved his face nearer to that of the savage, until their noses almost met, and between his teeth he slowly ejaculated: "You eat white man? You eat me? Eh?" Then the deep frown on Gellibrand's face began slowly to relax, his thick lips parted by degrees, and displayed, ready for business, his sharp and shining teeth, white as snow and hard as steel. A smile, which might be likened to that of a humorous tiger, spread over his spacious features, and so the interview ended without a fight. I was very much disappointed, as I hoped the two man-slayers were going to eat each other for the public good, and I was ready to back both of them without fear, favour, or affection.
There is no doubt that the blacks ate human flesh, not as an article of regular diet, but occasionally, when the fortune of war, or accident, favoured them with a supply. When Mr. Hugh Murray set out from Geelong to look for country to the westward, he took with him several natives belonging to the Barrabool tribe. When they arrived near Lake Colac they found the banks of the Barongarook Creek covered with scrub, and on approaching the spot where the bridge now spans the watercourse, they saw a blackfellow with his lubra and a little boy, running towards the scrub. The Barrabool blacks gave chase, and the little boy was caught by one of them before he could find shelter, and was instantly killed with a club. That night the picaninny was roasted at the camp fire, and eaten.
And yet these blacks had human feelings and affections. I once saw a tribe travelling from one part of the district to another in search of food, as was their custom. One of the men was dying of consumption, and was too weak to follow the rest. He looked like a living skeleton, but he was not left behind to die. He was sitting on the shoulders of his brother, his hands grasping for support the hair on the head, and his wasted legs dangling in front of the other's ribs. These people were sometimes hunted as if they were wolves, but two brother wolves would not have been so kind to each other.
Before the white men came the blacks never buried their dead; they had no spades and could not dig graves. Sometimes their dead were dropped into the hollow trunks of trees, and sometimes they were burned. There was once a knoll on the banks of the Barongarook Creek, below the court-house, the soil of which looked black and rich. When I was trenching the ground near my house for vines and fruit trees, making another garden of paradise in lieu of the one I had lost, I obtained cart loads of bones from the slaughter yards and other places, and placed them in trenches; and in order to fertilize one corner of the garden, I spread over it several loads of the rich-looking black loam taken from the knoll near the creek. After a few years the vines and trees yielded great quantities of grapes and fruit, and I made wine from my vineyard. But the land on which I had spread the black loam was almost barren, and yet I had seen fragments of bones mixed with it, and amongst them a lower jaw with perfect teeth, most likely the jaw of a young lubra. On mentioning the circumstance to one of the early settlers, he said my loam had been taken from the spot on which the blacks used to burn their dead. Soon after he arrived at Colac he saw there a solitary blackfellow crouching before a fire in which bones were visible. So, pointing to them, he asked what was in the fire, and the blackfellow replied with one word "lubra." He was consuming the remains of his dead wife, and large tears were coursing down his cheeks. Day and night he sat there until the bones had been nearly all burned and covered with ashes. This accounted for the fragments of bones in my black loam; why it was not fertile, I know, but I don't know how to express the reason well.
While the trenching of my vineyard was going on, Billy Nicholls looked over the fence, and gave his opinion about it. He held his pipe between his thumb and forefinger, and stopped smoking in stupid astonishment. He said--"That ground is ruined, never will grow nothing no more; all the good soil is buried; nothing but gravel and stuff on top; born fool."
Old Billy was a bullock driver, my neighbour and enemy, and lived, with his numerous progeny, in a hut in the paddock next to mine. In the rainy seasons the water flowed through my ground on to his, and he had dug a drain which led the water past his hut, instead of allowing it to go by the natural fall across his paddock. The floods washed his drain into a deep gully near his hut, which was sometimes nearly surrounded with the roaring waters. He then tried to dam the water back on to my ground, but I made a gap in his dam with a long-handled shovel, and let the flood go through. Nature and the shovel were too much for Billy. He came out of his hut, and stood watching the torrent, holding his dirty old pipe a few inches from his mouth, and uttered a loud soliloquy:--"Here I am--on a miserable island--fenced in with water--going to be washed away --by that Lord Donahoo, son of a barber's clerk--wants to drown me and my kids--don't he--I'll break his head wi' a paling--blowed if I don't." He then put his pipe in his mouth, and gazed in silence on the rushing waters.
I planted my ground with vines of fourteen different varieties, but, in a few years, finding that the climate was unsuitable for most of them, I reduced the number to about five. These yielded an unfailing abundance of grapes every year, and as there was no profitable market, I made wine. I pruned and disbudded the vines myself, and also crushed and pressed the grapes. The digging and hoeing of the ground cost about 10 pounds each year. When the wine had been in the casks about twelve months I bottled it; in two years more it was fit for consumption, and I was very proud of the article. But I cannot boast that I ever made much profit out of it--that is, in cash-- as I found that the public taste for wine required to be educated, and it took so long to do it that I had to drink most of the wine myself. The best testimony to its excellence is the fact that I am still alive.
The colonial taste for good liquor was spoiled from the very beginning, first by black strap and rum, condensed from the steam of hell, then by Old Tom and British brandy, fortified with tobacco-- this liquor was the nectar with which the ambrosial station hands were lambed down by the publicans--and in these latter days by colonial beer, the washiest drink a nation was ever drenched with. the origin of bad beer dates from the repeal of the sugar duty in England; before that time beer was brewed from malt and hops, and that we had "jolly good ale and old," and sour pie.
A great festival was impending at Colac, to consist of a regatta on the lake, the first we ever celebrated, and a picnic on its banks. All the people far and near invited themselves to the feast, from the most extensive of squatters to the oldest of old hands. The blackfellows were there, too--what was left of them. Billy Leura walked all the way from Camperdown, and on the day before the regatta came to my house with a couple of black ducks in his hand. Sissy, six years old, was present; she inspected the blackfellow and the ducks, and listened. Leura said he wanted to sell me the ducks, but not for money; he would take old clothes for them. He was wearing nothing but a shirt and trousers, both badly out of repair, and was anxious to adorn his person with gay attire on the morrow. So I traded off a pair of old cords and took the ducks.
Next day we had two guests, a Miss Sheppard, from Geelong, and another lady, and as my house was near the lake, we did our picnicking inside. We put on as much style as possible to suit the occasion, including, of course, my best native wine, and the two ducks roasted. Sissy sat at the table next to Miss Sheppard, and felt it her duty to lead the conversation in the best society style. She said:
"You see dose two ducks, Miss Sheppard?"
"Yes, dear; very fine ones."
"Well, papa bought 'em from a black man yesterday. De man said dey was black ducks, but dey was'nt black, dey was brown. De fedders are in de yard, and dey are brown fedders."
"Yes, I know, dear; they call them black ducks, but they are brown-- dark brown."
"Well, you see, de blackfellow want to sell de ducks to papa, but papa has no money, so he went into de house and bring out a pair of his old lowsers, and de blackfellow give him de ducks for de lowsers, and dems de ducks you see."
"Yes, dear; I see," said Miss Sheppard, blushing terribly.
We all blushed.
"You naughty girl," said mamma; "hold your tongue, or I'll send you to the kitchen."
"But mamma, you know its quite true," said Sissy. "Didn't I show you de black man just now, Miss Sheppard, when he was going to de lake? I said dere's de blackfellow, and he's got papa's lowsers on, didn't I now?"
The times seemed prosperous with us, but it was only a deceptive gleam of sunshine before the coming storm of adversity. I built an addition to my dwelling; and when it was completed I employed a paperhanger from London named Taylor, to beautify the old rooms. He was of a talkative disposition; when he had nobody else to listen he talked to himself, and when he was tired of that he began singing. The weather was hot, and the heat, together with his talking and singing, made him thirsty; so one day he complained to me that his work was very dry. I saw at once an opportunity of obtaining an independent and reliable judgment on the quality of my wine; so I went for a bottle, drew the cork, and offered him a tumblerful, telling him it was wine which I had made from my own grapes. As Taylor was a native of London, the greatest city in the world, he must have had a wide experience in many things, was certain to know the difference between good and bad liquor, and I was anxious to obtain a favourable verdict on my Australian product. He held up the glass to the light, and eyed the contents critically; then he tasted a small quantity, and paused awhile to feel the effect. He then took another taste, and remarked, "It's sourish." He put the tumbler to his mouth a third time, and emptied it quickly. Then he placed one hand on his stomach, said "Oh, my," and ran away to the water tap outside to rinse his mouth and get rid of the unpleasant flavour. His verdict was adverse, and very unflattering.
Next day, while I was inspecting his work, he gave me to understand that he felt dry again. I asked him what he would like, a drink of water or a cup of tea? He said, "Well, I think I'll just try another glass of that wine of yours." He seemed very irrational in the matter of drink, but I fetched another bottle. This time he emptied the first tumbler without hesitation, regardless of consequences. He puckered his lips and curled his nose, and said it was rather sourish; but in hot weather it was not so bad as cold water, and was safer for the stomach. He then drew the back of his hand across his mouth, looked at the paper which he had been putting on the wall, and said, "I don't like that pattern a bit; too many crosses on it."
"Indeed," I said, "I never observed the crosses before, but I don't see any harm in them. Why don't you like them?"
"Oh, it looks too like the Catholics, don't you see? too popish. I hate them crosses."
"Really," I replied. "I am sorry to hear that. I am a Catholic myself."
"Oh, lor! Are you, indeed? I always thought you were a Scotchman."
Taylor finished that bottle of wine during the afternoon, and next day he wanted another. He wanted more every day, until he rose to be a three-bottle man. He became reconciled to the crosses on the wall-paper, forgave me for not being a Scotchman, and I believe the run of my cellar would have made him a sincere convert to popery-- as long as the wine lasted.
Soon after this memorable incident, the Minister and Secretary made an official pleasure excursion through the Western District. They visited the court and inspected it, and me, and the books, and the furniture. They found everything correct, and were afterwards so sociable that I expected they would, on returning to Melbourne, speedily promote me, probably to the Bench. But they forgot me, and promoted themselves instead. I have seen them since sitting nearly as high as Haman in those expensive Law courts in Lonsdale Street, while I was a despicable jury-man serving the Crown for ten shillings a day. That is the way of this world; the wicked are well-paid and exalted, while the virtuous are ill-paid and trodden down. At a week's notice I was ordered to leave my Garden of Eden, and I let it to a tenant, the very child of the Evil One. He pruned the vines with goats and fed his cattle on the fruit trees. Then he wrote to inquire why the vines bore no grapes and the fruit trees no fruit, and wanted me to lower the rent, to repair the vineyard and the house, and to move the front gate to the corner of the fence. That man deserved nothing but death, and he died.
In the summer of 1853, the last survivor of the Barrabool tribe came to Colac, and joined the remnant of the Colac blacks, but one night he was killed by them at their camp, near the site of the present hospital. A shallow hole was dug about forty or fifty yards from the south-east corner of the allotment on which the Presbyterian manse was built, and the Colac tribe buried his body there, and stuck branches of trees around his grave. About six months afterwards a Government officer, the head of a department, arrived at Colac, and I rode with him about the township and neighbouring country showing him the antiquities and the monuments, among others the mausoleum of the last of the Barrabools. The leaves had by this time fallen from the dead branches around the sepulchre, and the small twigs on them were decaying. The cattle and goats would soon tread them down and scatter them, and the very site of the grave would soon be unknown.
The officer was a man of culture and of scientific tendencies, and he asked me to dig up the skull of the murdered blackfellow, and sent it to his address in Melbourne. He was desirous of exercising his culture on it, and wished to ascertain whether the skull was bracchy-cephalous, dolichophalous, or polycephalous. I think that was the way he expressed it. I said there was very likely a hole in it, and it would be spoiled; but he said the hole would make no difference. I would do almost anything for science and money, but he did not offer me any, and I did not think a six months' mummy was old enough to steal; it was too fresh. If that scientist would borrow a spade and dig up the corpse himself, I would go away to a sufficient distance and close my eyes and nose until he had deposited the relic in his carpet bag. But I was too conscientious to be accessory to the crime of body-snatching, and he had not courage enough to do the foul deed. That land is now fenced in, and people dwell there. The bones of the last of the Barrabools still rest under somebody's house, or fertilise a few feet of a garden plot.