In Melbourne and Sydney and on “stations” it was different. Hospitality was prodigal, and there was a disposition to regard with charity one’s shortcomings from the Colonial point of view, and to accept with sympathy the fact that one had distinguished oneself elsewhere. The Australian man is very manly, and very hearty; the Australian woman is apt to be very pretty, and to have a strong personality—to be full of character as a lover.
The climate of Australia I found absolutely delightful. It is a land of eternal summer: its winters are only cooler summers. The unchanging blue of its skies is appalling to those whose prosperity depends on the rainfall.
When I went out to Australia, just after leaving Oxford, I was enough of a prig to profit very greatly by being suddenly thrown into an absolutely democratic community. I was saved from finding things difficult by the fact that I was born a Bohemian, in spite of my very conventional parentage, and really did delight in roughing it. The free and easy Colonial life was a great relief to me after the prim life in my English home; and staying about on the great stations in the western district of Victoria, which belonged to various connections of my family, furnished the finest experience of my early life. I spent most of my first year in Australia in that way, returning, in between, to pay visits to my uncle at Geelong. Being in the saddle every day never lost its thrill for me, because I had hardly ever been on a horse before I went to Australia; and wandering about the big paddocks and the adjoining stretches of forest, gun in hand—I hardly ever went out without a gun—had something of the excitement of the books about the American backwoods which I read in my boyhood. It is true that I would rather have shot grizzly bears than the native bears of Australia, mere sloths, and lions and tigers than kangaroos, but a big “forester” is not to be sneezed at, and Australia has an extraordinary wealth of strange birds—the cockatoos and parrots and parakeets alone give a sort of tropical aspect to the forest, and the snakes give an unpleasantly tropical aspect, though, fortunately, in Australia, they shrink from human habitations.
When I married I went to live in Melbourne, close to public gardens of extraordinary beauty and almost tropical luxuriance, and soon became absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing and playing tennis, and watching first-class cricket and racing.
When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excursions to the marvellous gorges of the Blue Mountains, which are among the grandest valley scenery in the world.
Everything was large, and free, and sparsely inhabited—most expanding to the mind, and the glimpse of the tropical glories of Oriental Ceylon, which I enjoyed for four days on my voyage home, made me hear the “East a callin’” for ever afterwards.
I found London desperately dull when we returned to it in 1884. I had no literary friends, except at Oxford, where we took a house for three months to get some colour into life again. It was on the banks of the Cherwell, facing the most beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the Gothic glories of Oxford were manna to my hungry soul.
The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and Scotland, was well enough, and in the winter, which we spent at Torquay, we had grand scenery and beautiful ancient buildings, but the climate seemed treacherous and cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia.
I must not forget that I came very near not going to Australia at all. I felt the parting with my father extremely, and he was quite prostrated by it. I had, a few days before starting, been introduced to the captain of the old Orient liner Lusitania, in which I made the voyage—a hard, reckless sea-dog—and he did me good service on that occasion. Two letters came on board for me when we put in at Plymouth to pick up the last mails and passengers. One of these letters contained a letter from my father to the effect that if I wished to give up the passage and return home I might do so. The captain, for some reason or other, whether from having had a conversation with my father, or what, suspected that the letter might have some message of that kind—he may have had the same thing occurring in his experience before—so he did not give me the letter till the next day, when I had no possible chance of communicating with England until I got to the Cape de Verde Islands. By that time, of course, I had thoroughly settled down to the enjoyments of the voyage, and looked at the matter in a different light.