At Samarai I found some money remitted to me from New Zealand, sufficient to pay off my New Guinea boys and allow me a holiday to that country; so to New Zealand I accordingly went viâ Port Moresby, Yule and Thursday Islands.
CHAPTER VIII
I made a portion of my return voyage to New Zealand in the Myrtle; and her first place of call was at Yule Island, where she stopped to load a cargo of sandalwood. Large quantities of this timber were at that time exported to China by a man named Hunter, who was then commonly known as “The Sandalwood King”; he was making thousands of pounds a year, counted his employees by hundreds, owned several small vessels and many mule and horse teams. The miles of roads he made through the forest—in order to bring out his timber—would have been regarded as a credit to any ordinary civil engineer; as a matter of fact, they were then the only roads worth calling such in New Guinea.
Hunter had as a rival in his timber business—if a man could be called a rival who got in a year about as much sandalwood as Hunter got in a day—a Frenchman known as “Brother John,” a jovial fat person looking like the typical old friar. Brother John had been a lay brother attached to the Sacred Heart Mission at Mekeo, and he had, I regret to say, been smiled upon by the Papuan girl who did his washing, and, sadder still, he returned the smile. Time went on, until one day the girl’s parents appeared at the Mission, hauling along their erring daughter; they presented her to a scandalized monastery, drew particular attention to her figure, and asked what the Mission was going to do about it. Brother John was immediately expelled from the lay brotherhood of the order and commanded to marry the girl, which he did at once. Over this little incident some little time afterwards he scored rather badly off the Governor or Chief Justice, one of whom met him and, shaking his head, said reprovingly, “I am sorry to hear of your fall, Brother John.” “Fall, Monseigneur,” said Brother John, “fall! Why, before I was only ze bruzzer, now I am ze fazzer!”
From Yule Island the Myrtle sailed with every available foot of space crammed full of the pleasant-smelling wood, as it seemed to me at first; even her deck had a great pile stacked on it. For a day or so one continued to like the scent, then it got into one’s hair, into the ship’s water, into one’s clothes and food, in fact into everywhere and in everything; until one fairly loathed it, and rushed to poke one’s head to windward for a few minutes’ sniff of the clean salt sea. A guano vessel stinks, a ship loaded with copra smells of rancid oil, but a boat laden with sandalwood cloys and sickens the senses more than either. I was told that the greater part of the sandalwood imported into China is used in the manufacture of joss sticks and incense, and for making sandalwood oil; whether this is true or not I do not know.
At Thursday Island I bade farewell to the schooner Myrtle; for she, having transhipped her cargo to a China steamer, returned to New Guinea, and I took up my quarters in one of the hotels, to wait with what patience I possessed for a south-bound steamer. Thursday Island is—or rather was—the centre of the pearling industry, and is one of the most God-forsaken holes I know of; there is absolutely nothing to do in the place to kill time. With the exception of a few soldiers, Government officials, professional and business men, and pearl vessel owners, the population consists of a miscellaneous collection of Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Kanakas, Queensland aborigines, and general crossbreds and mongrels from the Lord knows where.
There has been for some years past considerable discussion in the Australian Parliament and the Press as to whether Northern Australia can, or ever will, be fully occupied by Australian or European people. One has only to give a glance at the white women, or purely white children, dwelling in Thursday Island, Cairns, or northward from there, to see the question answered; women and children alike—pale, listless, and anæmic—show plainly the need for constant change to a cool and bracing climate. It is sheer inhumanity to expect a child-bearing woman in the tropics to perform any but the lightest of domestic duties, and if these duties cannot be done by the women, then they must be performed by native domestic servants. Australia, however, does not possess an indigenous native population sufficient for the supply of this want—or suitable, if sufficient—and as the Government has closed its doors to the admission of Papuans or Melanesians—both highly suitable races for the purpose—it naturally follows that a fitting class of white men will never settle or take their families there. No country has, as yet, been populated by men married to women of native races or half-breeds. I have frequently heard the argument used in Australia, that the white man is as good a worker as the native anywhere, and under any conditions. I do not agree with this; but even accepting it as true, the fact remains that, in the tropics, the white woman is not capable of hard work and should not be asked to do it. Shortly, therefore, my contention is this: if Northern Australia is to be populated by a white race, the men must take their white wives with them; and they can only do that if allowed to make especially favourable conditions for them by the aid of native servants. No law—not even one made by an Australian Labour Government—can alter the natural laws governing the distribution of the climates of the earth, or the disabilities of sex.
The Australasian Parliament suffers from a chronic state of nervous dread of the East; and it is likely to continue to do so, as long as it pursues the dog-in-the-manger policy of keeping a vast country unoccupied. The best thing Australia can do with the Northern Territory is to combine its administration with that of New Guinea, under the Crown Colony system of Government, and permit the introduction of native labour from New Guinea—at any rate for domestic service or work on the plantations.
Upon the arrival of the China steamer Changsha, I gladly shook the dust of Thursday Island from my boots, sailing in her for the South.