VIII PICTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE
There had been a reception in London, by Gladstone, following the usual dinners which ministers of the Queen give in honour of her birthday.
To Sir George Grey, who was in the splendid crowd, came the wife of an eminent member of the Government, carrying to an old friend a woman's eager news of her own dinner. 'Oh,' she whispered in that still small voice which rises a clarion note above a general buzz, 'oh, everything went off admirably, and Bob's delighted. But the soup was just a little cold.'
The soup often got cold at the Governor's board in Adelaide, the while he was laying the foundations of the Colony. This implied study of the problem, 'How are we to utilise the natives for the civilisation which has begun to invade them in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa?' Already, in Western Australia, Sir George had devoted earnest study to the subject, and method ripened with him. He felt, perhaps, that he had been given a unique work, in the sense of moulding raw human materials to higher ends. He was a master craftsman, and as he contrived, so there might be issues near and remote. The future dwelt with Sir George when to others, lacking the seer's eye, it was still below the farthest horizon. Call it the second-sight of statesmanship—something which is born with a person rather than acquired. He had simple words for the ideas that underlay his life's labour, in bringing barbarous races under the harrow of cultivation.
'It is quite evident that man's great line of exertion, is towards getting more food for himself and his family. This truth applies to him in all his states; only the more he advances in material welfare, the more he needs to satisfy him. With a savage, mere food is enough, but in the centres of civilisation beautiful clothes, fine horses and carriages, marble palaces, all form the prize. Ever, it is the same impelling desire.
'Well, the way to adopt with natives, was to show them how to obtain more food. Benefit them in that manner, and they would regard you as their friend, and you would have influence over them. I always paid a native, doing unskilled work, the wage a white would have received for the same effort. It was mere justice. Yet, so small a thing had immense results, for manhood was cultivated in the black. Self-respect infected him. He discovered himself, with proud surprise, to be a man instead of a chattel.
'The mystery of managing native races, resolves itself into a few natural laws. My hardest trouble was the witchcraft, which held in bonds, the savage peoples whom I had to govern. It might differ, here or there, in its characteristics; the evil was there all the same. Not merely did the natives believe in witch-craft, having been swathed in it for ages, but their chiefs made a profit therefrom, and were staunch for its maintenance. My antidote was the introduction of medical aid, so that in the cures wrought, those children of the dark, might see what surpassed their own magic. They were discomfited, as it were, on their own ground.
'Superstition, which I distinguish from witchcraft, though the greater evil flourished on the less, had its best treatment in the spread of the Christian religion. Surely, a wonderful witness of its divine origin, lies in the fact that it applies to the elevation and happiness of all the world's races—is understandable to all. Farther, native schools made advances upon sheer ignorance, as hospitals did in respect to witchcraft; and it was possible, in some measure, to eradicate native indolence by affording youths a training in a trade, or grown men work on public improvements: Here we return to where we began—food as the primitive impulse driving mankind.'
No trait of human nature was neglected by Sir George Grey, in his exertions to plant the better ideas of living. He detected that the Kaffirs of South Africa were sharp to humour, owners of a lively sense of the ridiculous. On that hung an incident, which brought out the value of the personal equation in dealing with natives, whether in South Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. It was an item of Sir George Grey's whole native policy. An old witch doctor, he mentioned, had been inciting unrest among the dark masses of Kaffraria. Sir George had him put comfortably in prison, where he could be certain of medical attendance and rest. That was the least office, demanded towards a human being evidently in a disturbed state of health.
It confounded the witch doctor. Never was such a father to his people as Sir George Grey, and the tribes of a hemisphere acclaimed it. The witch doctor had his doubts, took his physic wryly, and begged piteously to be set free. He was released, on the strict promise that he would cease being a firebrand. Not that alone, for he publicly recanted among the Kaffirs, gathered on a market morning, to their huge amusement and derision. He made no more trouble, and could not, had he tried, his fame being ruined.
'A joust of fun like that,' was Sir George Grey's moral from the incident, 'had a wonderful effect upon natives. It was much better than shooting the witch doctor, and quite as effective. Even among whites, ridicule may be a very serious punishment.'
But the Pro-Consul was not always warranted to win, in his encounters of wit and wisdom. He put to the debit account, a dialogue he had with a batch of Kaffir chiefs, on the proper employment of their moneys. He wondered if the wages, earned from native work on the roads, and in cultivating the lands, were always wisely spent. The broad inquiry was well enough, as the chiefs took it, but unfortunately Sir George went on to state a case in proof.
'For instance,' he innocently pleaded, 'is it necessary that so much should be expended on the jewellery and ornaments of the women? Would they not really look more handsome, without all those gew-gaws of brass and metal, which they wear round their arms and ankles?' An aged chief rose and gravely replied, 'You are a great chief, Governor, and you have done marvellous things. You have persuaded us to labour, yea, to make roads which we knew would lead to the conquest of our country. But you had better rest and be content, not allowing success in other things to induce you to enter upon what no man can accomplish. If you attempt, O Governor, to wage war with woman and her love of ornament, you will assuredly fail.'
'The assembled chiefs,' Sir George wound up the tale, 'roared with delight at this answer, which really left me without a word to say.'
In South Australia he established one of his first schools, and the lessons obtained from it were widely useful. They suggested the difficulties that had to be overcome, wherever the alphabet was spread before the Aborigine. Children made bright pupils, but, as they grew up, were apt to go back on what they had learned. The reason was not far to seek. An educated native found himself out of touch with his uneducated fellows; education made a barrier. He was not the equal of the Europeans, and could form no friendships with them. Neither was he happy with his own people, whom he had passed in civilisation. He swung between two poles, and very frequently was dragged back into the volume of native life.
'You see the difficulty,' Sir George pointed out, 'as one that is necessarily present with regard to all savage races. But it has its cure, which I put into practice, namely, to provide males and females with an equally good education. Especially, I mean a technical education, the learning of some trade or art, for that was all important. Natives, on leaving school, could then make a living by plying among the Europeans the industry they had learned. Should a native learn shoemaking, he could find a wife in a girl trained to domestic service. Such a couple were not compelled to return to their own people, and they were independent of the Europeans. It was lifting a race by its two halves, these being essential to each other, not leaving one of them behind.'
Next, a picture in black and white. It wandered into the gallery of Sir George's Pro-Consulship in South Australia. At the entrance to Spencer's Gulf lies an island, on which a fortuitous little colony had established itself. The colonists were mostly escaped convicts, from the penal settlements of Australia and Van Diemen's Land, or sailors who had deserted their ships. The men killed the seals which frequented the island, trading in their skins with vessels that now and then called for the purpose.
'I had never judged it my business,' Sir George spoke of this matter, 'to interfere with those sealers. They kept the peace among themselves, and did not come into contact with the settlement at Adelaide. Indeed, they had some form of justice, under which a member who did anything wrong, was transported for a time to a smaller neighbouring island. There he could live on oysters of a sort, and on fish caught with lines supplied to him. It was being sent to Coventry, new style, including oysters, which, like all delicacies, will, I suppose, cause surfeit.
'The chief of this settlement, as he might be termed, had brought a native woman with him from Van Diemen's Land. He was fairly educated, not without considerable power of reasoning, and I had repeated talks with him. Most of his companions had Australian black women living with them, and there was a story that these had been taken by force from the mainland. The natives of Van Diemen's Land were entirely distinct from the natives of Australia, and the differences have been much debated. The hair of a Van Diemen's Land woman was curly and woolly, Kaffir like; that of the Australian woman long and straight.
'Very well, I was anxious to obtain a genuine specimen of the Tasmanian female's hair. It would, I believed, be valuable to posterity, as bearing upon the divergencies of two neighbouring races. Of course, the Tasmanians have now been extinct for years, and their disappearance was then rapidly approaching. It was best, to prevent any doubt, that I should myself cut the tress of hair from the woman's head. The chief of the colony, in response to my request, said he was quite willing that she should visit Adelaide for this purpose. She was agreeable herself; curious as to the scenes, strange to her, which she might witness in Adelaide. As we are all born hungry, so we are all born curious; merely we differ in degree. In due time she arrived, and I secured the necessary sample of her hair, which remains, probably, in the Auckland Museum.
'Delighted with a new stock of clothes, the woman left Adelaide on her return to the island, this also having been arranged. She was to light a fire on a crag of the mainland, at which signal her lord and master would put over with his boat to fetch her. Now recur my conversations with him, which included the question, "Is it not rather bad that you should all be living here with these native women?"
'His answer, coming from such a quarter, surprised me, and proved him a regular controversialist. "It does nobody harm," he argued, "and we are much more comfortable than we should otherwise be. There was nothing hasty in what we did; every step was taken deliberately. Knowing we could not re-enter the world, and there being no settlers, then, in these parts, we considered: Could we not found a small nation ourselves? The greatest nation of ancient times, cast in very similar circumstances, did not feel it wrong to carry off, by force, the females of another people. Thus, they acquired women to look after their homes, while otherwise they would have been living in a pitiable state, with no ties. What that nation did, we have done." Such was the word of the island chief, and no appeal, in justification, to history, could ever have been made in stranger circumstances.
'Was it not,' Sir George felt, 'extraordinary to hear the case of the Romans and the Sabine women, pleaded in defence of a tiny outlawed community, situate on the wild Australian coast, where another empire, more magnificent even than that of Rome, was just planting itself? The thing almost swept one's mind from the question itself—a difficult one to answer as submitted.' Then, in this odd affair, the untutored far south was springing to the support of Sir George's views as to cause and effect. Imitators of ancient Rome, on an island of Spencer's Gulf, Australia, many centuries later! The theory of the universe, expressed as 'cause and effect,' had been borne in upon Sir George from the moment he turned thinker. It was a favourite text between him and Babbage, into whose ear he poured his reasonings.
'Subjects occurred to me,' he said, 'which I believed had not been given sufficient prominence, and this was one of them. I fancy Babbage wrote about it.'
Every motion, every word spoken, they agreed, abode an eternal influence in the world. Nothing, either in action or in reasoning, was lost; the unborn ages made response. If we could go back far enough we should be able to trace, by the influence it had wrought, that red streak, the murder of Abel. Had we a divine intellect, we could see the whole universe, a complete machine, at work. Sir George would marvel at the splendour of that creation, asking himself, 'Might it, if fully revealed, not be all too dazzling for human eyes?'
The Aborigine—Australian, Maori, and Kaffir—was to him a guarantee, by physical evidence, of the same law of the universe. They three had passed intimately before him, and he had mapped the intertwine of their paths. These were noteworthy, being a fruit of Sir George's observation on the human race in primitive lands. First, consider the women, who, among barbarians, not having animals of burden, had always been pack horses.
'In New Zealand,' he said, 'with its forests, the females had to carry their loads along narrow paths. The proper way to carry a pack is on the head, but the trees made that impossible. Hills, too, had often to be climbed, and to ease the ascent a bending posture must be taken. Add that fact to the load on the back, and it was a consequence that Maori women should evolve clumsy figures.
'In Australia there was more open ground, and in many parts the method was to carry a load on the head. Thus, the native women were better of figure, though quite unequal to their 116 THE ROMANCE OF A PRO-CONSUL. lithe, graceful Kaffir sisters of South Africa. Here the country was free and open, and the carrying of a weight on the head naturally followed.' Second, the men of those races.
'The Australians,' Sir George went on, 'were hunters, and had to climb trees in search of opossums. They drove holes into the trunks with their stone axes, dug in their big toes, and ascended. Such efforts provided them with long legs, while, again, they walked with turned-in toes. Why? Having scrub to penetrate, they must cut roads through it—a tiresome labour, not pursued more than was necessary. If they turned in their toes, they could sidle along a mere bee-line of clearing.
'The Maoris were very short in the limbs, this arising from the amount of time they spent in their canoes. Peculiarities of environment equally distinguish the Kaffirs, who were the most agile of the three races. Set against any of the others, all in the primitive state, the Kaffirs might have prevailed, though who could say? Neither the Maoris, nor the Australians, worked in iron weapons, while the Kaffirs did, and that circumstance would have told, in the clash of prevailing or going down.'
Contrasts were sharp in Oceana when she was young, which entitles you to pass quickly from Sir George Grey's careful estimate of the native races he ruled, to a little romance of South Australia. A Highland settler, with the Highland name McFarland, lived in a cottage some twenty miles from Adelaide. He was an informed and interesting Scot, and when the Governor was tired, he would ride over to his shieling and stay a day or two.
'A number of German colonists,' Sir George's narrative on this proceeded, 'had come to South Australia, seeking to improve their condition. Labour being scarce and highly paid, the German girls went out and did shearing. They moved from farm to farm, accompanied by some of the older women, and at night they would be housed by the settler who happened to be employing them.
'Among the shearers was a girl who had a great reputation for beauty. She was quite a belle, and so winning that everybody liked her. One morning old McFarland rushed in upon me at Adelaide, in a state of high excitement. His nephew, a genuine McFarland also, had, the previous night, eloped with the German beauty. The uncle was indignant that the nephew should run away with a foreigner—yes, a foreigner! He implored me to send the police to search for them, but I replied that I could do nothing. He must go to the Justices of the Peace and petition, if he wished to take action, on which point I offered no advice.
'Scarcely had he left, when the relatives of the girl, escorted by the German pastor, invaded me, full of an equal indignation and also demanding the police. I could only repeat the answer I had given to McFarland, even when it was pleaded that the girl, like other members of the German community, had pledged herself not to marry outside it. It was urged that anything she might do to the contrary would not count, but that argument would not hold. We heard, by the evening, of the marriage of the runaways.
'They had been united by some Justice of the Peace, a frequent occurrence then, there being few ministers, and the match proved a happy one in every respect. How the bold young McFarland managed to carry off his bride from her custodians I never learned, and I suppose I did not inquire.'
Only in a South Australia, rescued from the chasms, grown stalwart under the hand of Sir George Grey, could there have been such a romance. It needed a stout heart and a trustful, loving one, and these are the characteristics of a healthy community.