VII PLANTING THE BRITON
'I always got what I wanted in life,' Sir George Grey made arch comment on himself, 'and many things, also, that I did not want.'
His appointment as Governor of South Australia, with the steps leading up to it, he could group under the first head. His explorations had shown that no great river, no second Murray, drained the North-West area of Australia. This was information for geographers, and he had more, since, to quote his own words, 'We learned as much about the region, in a general way, as was necessary.' Next, he acted for a while as Government Resident at King George's Sound, and he investigated the country thereabout.
'The settlement of King George's Sound,' he said, 'was quite small, and I discharged all the duties of the State. I don't remember that I fined anybody; just decreeing: "Oh, you must make up your disputes yourselves." Perth, now so grown, was at that date a mere townlet. It had few people, ships called rarely, and practically it was shut off from the world.'
This was the brand-new Australia. Beside it, there is a glimpse of olden England, in the manner Sir George Grey was bid to be Pro-Consul. A special messenger pelted down to Bodiam, where, after his return to England, he had been staying for a month, the hero of his relatives. The messenger brought the other London, news that the guns of the Tower had been firing, to announce the birth of the Queen's first child, the Princess Royal. Therefore his arrival caused a double commotion in the family circle, two notes of joy and gratulation. Sir George posted express to London, changing horses at short stages in order to make the better speed.
It was his supreme wish to serve the Colonies, and he had a glimmering notion that the chance would come. Still, he was at one of the crossings in a young man's life, when it is hard to know what the road is to be. He had always his commission in the army, but was that his definite signpost? He sighed for a wider door of usefulness, and behold it opened! That it should be open so soon, was, perhaps, remarkable, only the word was to be his constant accomplice.
'I had never met Lord John Russell, who made me the offer,' Sir George explained. 'He was going upon what little I had done, in regard to Australian affairs, especially a kind of despatch by me on native administration. After adequate thought, and acting upon good advice, I confirmed my first resolve to accept the Governor-ship of South Australia. It was, apparently, to be an onerous post.'
To Adelaide went this Queen's Governor, not yet thirty, his mission the undoing of a tangle; for South Australia was on the verge of bankruptcy, almost before it had entered into business. Hardly an acre of land was in cultivation, and most of the people were in Adelaide with nothing to do, clamouring for food. Sir George perceived at once that they must be got on to the land. To have the settlers securely there, from the first, meant that they were to grow into a nation, not to amass temporary riches, and then return to an already overcrowded world.
Again, in South Australia, as elsewhere, he endeavoured to carry out what he regarded as a cardinal principle in the making of a new country. This was to draw capital direct from the soil, not by the raising of too heavy loans. How to rear a nation? Keep its conditions of life natural, even simple; make it self-creative and self-reliant, train it as if it were an individual. Let it build its national homestead, as a man might lay out his own little stance of ground. Then, the community would have the parents' love and pride towards all that had been created. Sir George put his shoulder to the wheel of the settlers' cart in South Australia, and shoved until the harvest drove home.
'I ascertained,' he spoke of those efforts, 'that the soil was very suitable for wheat, and we sowed widely. The crop, vital to the Colony; depended upon the weather. Would there be enough rain? I often crawled out of bed in the morning, while it was half-dawn, to ascertain if there was any promise of rain for that day. The wheat was at the critical stage, and if I had made the weather, it could not have proved more suited in its conditions.
'It was the first extensive wheat crop of South Australia; the first harvest-home of the bunch of people, who had there been shaken on to the sea-beach. When the wheat had ripened, everybody—including, I am glad to say, the Governor—turned to the harvesting of it. Riots had threatened earlier, the result of the state of affairs in the Colony, and the measures which I deemed it necessary to introduce. As a precaution, I had some soldiers, about a hundred and fifty, I think, sent to me from New South Wales. That was a step on which I was entitled to congratulate myself. At the pruning hook, in getting in that harvest, they were of vast assistance, and not often have soldiers been more nobly occupied.'
Yet the pruning hook, which Sir George associated with the historic harvest, and with Ridley, an early Australian colonist, was hardly of the Scriptural pattern. It was a subtle machine, invented for a harvest where the wheat-ears were needed, not the straw. The former were chopped off, collected in a sort of trough; and the straw was burned for manure. Here was waste, only there was no avoiding it, and, moreover, the meaning of 'waste' is defined by circumstances. The South Australian soil was so fruitful that it only needed to be thrown seed. Sir George satisfied himself that it contained gypsum, such as belongs to the fertile parts of Egypt. Thus gypsum reared wheat, under the foot-print of the black man, who shod his spear in obsidian. Things that began before history, were meeting from very different sides. Nature extended one hand to the inflow of civilisation, another to the rude holding of it back. There was a point of contact in the adventure of a settler, Turner by name, whom Sir George Grey met near the Murray River. It fell out comedy, but might have been tragedy; and how often those two flirt with each other round a corner!
The fact, upon which the affair hinged, was that Turner wore a wig, no doubt for sufficient reason. He was making a journey across country, and with him were a few natives, guides and packmen. Perhaps his head grew hot; anyhow, at some stage he took a penknife from his pocket, and ran the blade under the edge of the wig. The native nearest to him, suspicious of witchcraft, stared at this act, terror written on every feature. With a deft lift of the knife, Turner had the wig clear of his head. The native stayed no longer to consider 'Is this a sorcerer?' He whipped off, to what he considered a safe distance. The innocent Turner followed his retreat with laughing eye, amused at the effect produced. For acknowledgment, a spear cracked through the satchel on his back, and wounded him slightly. His load had saved his life, and he warily resumed the wig.
The quality of the early settlers in South Australia, gave Sir George Grey great trust in the new Anglo-Saxondom to be built up in the south. Many of them were Nonconformists, which suggested to him the Puritan founding of New England. As a body they had a worth, a sincerity, a true ring which could not fail of fine records. That knowledge helped him, in the difficult task of setting South Australia on its feet. His policy of severe economy made shoes pinch, but he held on, ever ready with the courteous word for those who most assailed him.
He could contrast Adelaide, when town sites went at auction for about five pounds an acre, with the Adelaide of our day. 'If you had yourself,' somebody put it to him, 'invested in a few of these sites, you would be rich instead of poor?' The remark bore partly upon the enormously enhanced value of city lands all over Australia, partly upon Sir George's simple unconcern for wealth, his disregard of mere money. He was almost inclined to pity millionaires, as being among the afflicted. The tinkle of gold was never in his golden dreams.
'Yes,' he answered, 'the land which sold for five pounds in Adelaide, might, at the present moment, be worth nearer five thousand. Throughout my career, I followed a very strict rule in those matters. I never had any dealings in land, or other property, except as Governor, charged with the interests of the whole community. My despatches were my sole title- deeds.'
'There is no virtue,' he laid down, 'in honest duty, such as we claim from every public servant. Our lofty ideal in that regard is true British wisdom. Moreover, need a man, estimating wealth on its merits, care to be rich? What private means I inherited, I have spent largely on public ends. I mean, in particular, those libraries at Cape Town and Auckland, which I was enabled to help. Why, the bargain is all mine; I am the debtor for the opportunity.'
To Sir George Grey, Oceana had seemed a fertile land, crying across the depths, 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' His mission was to pass that invitation freely to the shores of the Old World, and to be vigilant on the spot, keeping a clear ring. He did not want folks to come, only to find a path strewn with the obstacles and ills they thought to have left behind. His purpose was to make life as generous, as unfettered as possible. Keep the Old World out of the New! It became a passion with him; and he counted on making the New World an influence towards regenerating the Old. The line, in respect of both aims, was to retain the control of the New World for the Anglo- Saxon. That meant freedom, because the non-intrusion of arrayed nations, which would hinder it.
When Greece needed a king, Sir George Grey was mentioned as one with likely parts for the post. 'I should think,' wrote Freeman the historian, 'he would be just the man to deal with any unruly elements in the country.' The absolute offer of the crown of Greece would not have tempted Sir George for an hour.
As he said seriously, while joking on the point, 'In the far south there was literally nobody to lead, whereas Greece had men sufficient to mould her destinies. Anyhow, one given the administration of Greece, would not have had a work more honourable than the development of Australasia, a larger business altogether. 'Here was a region where several kingdoms were in the raising, where the pattern could take something from yourself. What drew me to the far south, as a fairy-tale might, was that charm, "Yes, it's all new. Hardly anything has yet been done. It's mine to do with as I will."'
There was the white man's history to fashion, and the black man's history to discover. Sir George did not neglect the second inquiry, because the other was the more important. His explorations had given him the idea that Australia was of a volcanic origin. He judged it to have been, at some period, a series of islands, each with its own volcano. These islands had risen from the sea, been licked into shape probably by earthquakes, and coming gradually together, had formed a continent. During his Governorship of South Australia, Sir George fell upon a piece of evidence which materially supported this belief. The skeleton of a whale, as Sir Richard Owen certified the specimen, was discovered quite inland, beyond the first mountain range. If Sir George had arrived at some view, after long deliberation, he liked it to be accepted, as we all do. Therefore he welcomed the discovery of that whale.
'I was laughed at,' he commented, 'when I insisted that the natives of Australia must have come from a race more civilised than themselves. A variety of reasons supported my estimate of their origin; as that, all over native Australia, there appeared to prevail a rigorous law governing marriage.
'It demonstrated that the natives understood the effect which blood kinship would exercise upon the stamina of a race. There was no single great tribe in Australia, but a series of tribes; yet this law was general among them. No conqueror could have imposed it; instead, it must have sprung from a family coming in, and bringing it with them. Where did that family come from? I cannot tell. But we see, among the Aborigines of Australia, customs resembling those of the African continent.'
Studying those customs, Sir George had been witness of the ancient rite of circumcision, which also argued a higher civilisation. The blacks built themselves, layer upon layer, into a human altar, and on it the sacrifice was performed. Meanwhile a grunting noise, 'Ha-ha-ha,' sonorous, even solemn, a savage mass, arose from the heap. Sir George imagined that he was almost the first Englishman to behold this ceremony, on the part of the Aborigines of Australia. To them it was religion; whence did they get it? Their common rule Sir George found expressed as an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but they had their lighter moments. He discovered, in a lady savage, a humorous link between the vanity of all womankind. There had been a native dance, and he was leaving, when the chieftainess approached him with the request, 'Oh, don't go away until you have seen my son dance; he will be beautiful!'
'I waited, of course,' Sir George consented, ever gallant, 'and the son presented himself, daubed over with dirt of divers colours, and began to hop about. He was well built, he danced cleverly, he cackled in his finery, and his mother was hugely proud of him. She might have been an English duchess, introducing a pretty daughter to a first ball. It was seeing the parent in the child, the most marked form of self-flattery. Actually, tears of joy ran down those black, wizened cheeks. I wouldn't have had it otherwise, and I was glad I stayed for the young buck.'
Wherever Sir George Grey went in Australia, he found the natives living from hand to mouth, on roots and the reward of the chase. They were equally primitive, in a system of punishment, which stood an offender up as a mark for spears. But they were sportsmen, for it was prescribed that the quarry must only be chastened in the legs. The tribes also reached out to civilisation, in that each had its ground marked off, with the accuracy of a European estate.
'I believe'—Sir George carried this subject wider—'that the cardinal trouble in the settlement of new countries, has lain in the desire of the white man to possess the lands of the black man. Perhaps it has been inevitable, but the thing should be done on a proper method, and that has not always obtained.'
Sir John Franklin, at Van Diemen's Land, was a brother Australian Governor to Sir George Grey, but they never met. 'I had correspondence with him,' Sir George observed, 'and from all I heard he was a most interesting personality. Subsequently, I did meet Lady Franklin, who had much character, allied to womanly gentleness. Everybody admired her laving persistence to unravel the fate which had overtaken her husband in the Arctic regions.'
It was almost a discovery to Sir George, with his wide knowledge of Australasia, that he had never set foot in Tasmania. He passed it variously, on board ship, yet had not been ashore. How was that? 'Maybe,' he replied, 'because all my life I made it a rule, not to let anything turn me aside from what I had immediately in hand. If you set out for a place, with some definite object in view, your road should be the most direct one. Don't branch off, because there is something elsewhere which might gratify your curiosity.'
Sir George disciplined the hours, holding himself accountable for them to his fellow-men and to the Great Accountant.