Rambles in Australia

by Edwin Sharpe Grew; Marion Sharpe Grew

When, however, the picture was hung at Adelaide, the people gasped. Then they wrote to the newspapers. Then artists wrote to the newspapers. Some of them sympathised with the public bewilderment. One of them, the best of Australian water-colourists, bludgeoned the public for their ignorance in not appreciating the colour and drawing of the masterpiece; but he did not insult the picture by saying what it meant, and that was what the public wanted to know.... Probably the discussion would be going on yet, but the War put an end to it, and the picture in 1915 still adorned the Art Gallery; and we hope it may continue to do so, though it was rumoured that Mr. Orpen had offered to substitute something less recondite. However, this anecdote will perhaps illustrate the vividness of the interest which Adelaide takes in artistic and intellectual movements. It is an interest which may be perceived in its active University, a University that has contributed several first-class men to English Universities, and is no less perceptible in its society which reproduces very closely the social atmosphere of an English University town such as Cambridge. The resemblance becomes closer still if the comparison is made between Adelaide’s flowering and tree-shaded suburbs and the residential environs which stretch away from the University town at home.

Such is Adelaide. Beyond and outside it, and on the farther side of the tree-covered barrier of hills is rural South Australia, which, if one were to indicate on a map, one might shade off to the northward as the population grew less dense and the region of widely separated sheep stations became more prevalent. As the herbage grows more scanty and the water supply more precarious, the sheep stations themselves become larger and fewer, till they give place to desert. Perhaps the greatest surprise to a European visitor is the kind of land which in the more distant stations, where the rainfall sinks very close to the margin of double figures per annum, is called pasture land. It is khaki-coloured and scanty, and one would imagine that only a persevering sheep could find anything on it to eat. Industry is certainly demanded of the sheep, for the phrase of three acres and a cow is altered in Australia to five acres to a sheep. When the rainfall sinks the sheep has still farther to travel for its daily meal; when it fails, the back block sheep farmers see their sheep die by the thousand and ruin approaching.

Nowhere does the rainfall become a factor that can be neglected, and South Australia was suffering from drought in the year 1914, when we visited the state; but though the extremity of scarcity had not been reached, there seemed to eyes accustomed to English well-watered pastures, hardly any water at all. From the summit of Mount Lofty, whence one could so easily see the vast shield of the sea, there were also pointed out to us nearer patches of water shining like dull steel in the hollows of low hills. These were the reservoirs, basins filled by streams which we called brooks. These storage reservoirs are the device which South Australia is developing to counteract drought; and we visited a new one in course of construction among the hills to the north-west of Adelaide.

That was the day on which we visited Mr. Murray’s sheep farm, a mere trifle of forty miles from Adelaide. Before leaving the subject of the reservoir, which was interesting from the engineering design of its dam, then being thrown across the gap of two hills—a difficult and masterly piece of work—one may give some idea of the size of the basin by remarking that Mr. Murray, who lived some ten miles away, had protested against the first plans. The reason was that when the reservoir became filled it would have come flooding up to his front door. A very pleasant front door it was too, belonging to something that was part manor-house, part farm, and the counterpart of which might have been found in many an English county. A long, low house with windows meant to shade large, cool rooms, a wide hall, with pictures and polo sticks and photographs—photographs of famous sheep—and a side table gleaming with silver—the cups won as prizes. In front of the house roses and flowering borders and a lawn—on it playing a collie and a tame kangaroo. Beyond, the orchard garden. And not a sheep in sight.

Far better as a picture, our host and his tall sons on the stone steps to welcome us; and in the pretty drawing-room—the drawing-room of a Victorian house at home—the hostess and her daughter. You might see them both any summer’s day at Hurlingham, or Henley, or at Lord’s when the Oxford and Cambridge match is being played.

However, our purpose was to see sheep. Could this be a sheep farm? Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the landscape—as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a flock of wild cockatoos—and though that may seem nothing to you who read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild anything that one has never before beheld except captive. There were flocks of green and red and blue parrots too, and the laughing jackass perched on the tree-stumps. But about the sheep?

They are there; no doubt about that. An Anglo-Australian whom we know at home once confessed to us that the only blot on life in that southern continent of free air and sunshine was that there was too much sheep in the sheep-rearing districts—there was nothing else to talk about. And at this point we recall an anecdote told to us by Dr. E. S. Cunningham, the editor of “The Melbourne Argus.” There was a Colonial Conference in England some years ago, and he and some of the others who came to it, Mr. Deakin among them, went back to Australia across the United States. One night in the Far West their train was held up by accident, and they stopped at the hotel of some wayside station. After supper, as they sat round the red-hot stove of the hotel parlour, some of the citizens of the township blew in for their evening conversazione, and hailed the opportunity of conversation with strangers.

They quickly found that the strangers were Australians, and as quickly turned the conversation on to the comparative advantages of the two continents.

“I suppose now,” said one of them, “that you reckon to have a few sheep in your country. We have sheep here too. Some. Now what size holdings do you put up down there?”

Mr. Deakin, to whom the question was addressed, paused reflectively and said: “Well, I don’t know that I’m well posted about sheep; but I believe my friend has some knowledge of the subject. Cunningham, what was the size of that farm that Colonel Burns got rid of last autumn?”