On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

That some of the Chambers were neutral is not to be wondered at. Already Preference rates are extended to 294 items of British goods, coming under the Preferential tariff and paying on an average 24 per cent. less duty than foreign goods of the same kind; the total rebate on British goods in Australia in 1908 reaching the sum of £828,000. Foreign exporters are not blind to what the Australians are doing for their fellows, and in one instance a special discount was offered, equivalent to the amount of Preference given to British-made goods, while every sort of effort has been made to undervalue or dump foreign goods at less than their market value. And yet it is the British manufacturers who have most persistently tried to hoodwink the Australians, English cotton materials having been actually sent to the Continent to be printed and dyed, then back to England to be packed and shipped off as Preferential goods.

Now the stipulation has been made that goods commanding Preference must have not less than 25 per cent. of their value represented by English labour, the tolerance and moderation of the rule speaking well for the patience of Australia, though it certainly does not speak well for English manufacturers that there should need to be any such regulation. It is like having to compel a man, to whom you are paying ten pounds a week, to contribute ten shillings for the support of the wife, who keeps his house in order, cooks his food, and rears his children.

But this is not the only grievance that Australia has against English manufacturers; an even more fatal one is that they simply cannot get what they want. For some years I was working in Melbourne at house-decorating and fitting. My business took me among wholesale and retail tradesmen and importers of furniture, hardware, draperies, carpets, tiles, and the hundred and one items that are needed for the fitting up of a modern dwelling, and from one and all came the same complaint. They could not get what they wanted from the English manufacturers. Goods were not true to sample; there were not a sufficiency of one sort, and, when more was applied for, the buyers were either frankly told that they could not have it, or a different class of goods was sent in its place. Mr. Hamilton Wicks, the British Trade Commissioner, has spoken pretty plainly about the difficulties which Australian houses find in getting their orders properly attended to in England, however much they may wish to be loyal to the Empire. Often it is a case of:—“Oh, anything is good enough for the Colonies; they are used to roughing it out there!” or, perhaps, less flagrant, but none the less irritating, there is an absolute lack of knowledge as to the requirements in Australia; a pig-headed refusal to see that many articles needed here—particularly agricultural implements—are of a necessity quite different from those in use in England. “Give Grandam kingdom, and thy Grandam will give you a pear or apple or a plum,” says England, “and do not be impertinent enough to quibble about its being a trifle overripe or blighted.”

To the people at home who assert—as I have often heard them do—that Australia is a completely self-seeking country, I would recommend a short study of Australian commerce—even of Victorian commerce alone—and of the statistics showing the imports of the last few years, a very brief perusal of which will be sufficient to prove that an infinitely larger amount of Australian money is spent in England, and other parts of the Empire, than in any foreign country. In 1908 Australia spent in imports from British Possessions, including India, £36,319,781, as against £13,479,492 in those from all other countries, including the United States.

In 1904–1908 the proportion of goods imported from England and other British Possessions averaged 72.93 per cent., and from all other countries, including America, 27.7 per cent.—could England itself show as fair a record?

Again, though in 1908, £1,305,602 were spent on German imports by Victoria alone, the value of Victorian goods exported to Germany reached £2,015,536, so that the obligation was by no manner of means all on one side.

Mr. Foster Fraser has two great faults to find with Australians—they are slack, and they are few. Oddly enough, while continually reverting to the thinness of the population in the country districts, he finds fault—to take only one of the many instances—with the fact that the output of butter is nowhere near as great in Australia as it is in Denmark. Denmark, a made country! A country that has been perfecting its dairying industry for years! Why, I remember when I was quite a small child—and that was a long while ago—that the cooking butter used to be brought in little kegs from Denmark—to a pastoral country like England, too! Little Denmark, which, including Iceland, has a population of 2,708,470, with a density of 49^.94, as against the immense continent of Australia, with its population, according to the last census, of 4,275,306. Why, Denmark, including Iceland, covers an area of but 55,306 square miles, and Victoria, the smallest state in Australia, 87,884. Put 2,708,470 people—the population of Denmark—into it to start dairy-farming, and then comparisons may become merely odious, and not, in addition, ludicrous. As it is, Victoria alone exported to the United Kingdom, in 1908, butter to the value of £868,068, and that’s “none so dusty,” as her own people would say; while the amount of butter actually consumed there was valued at £1,250,000, and cheese, both consumed and exported, at £100,000.

It seems as if I was “barracking” for Australia as against England, but very far from that. Though I have lived in Australia for years, and though it has helped me to a wider, fuller life than I ever knew before, England is my own country, and still holds my heart. And yet, when one hears, as one so often does, sweeping and wholesale condemnations and criticism—or, perhaps worse, faint praise—given without any realization of what a country really is, and how it has reached the position it now holds, it seems only honest that those who have gained their living through that country, to whom it has afforded friendship, shelter, and consideration, should speak of it as they have found it. A sort of friction seems inevitable between parents and their grown-up children, but the fault is not always and altogether on the children’s side—and, in any case, the friction is only intensified either by interference or well-meant attempts at rearrangement. Australians hate alike interference and pity. If you sympathize with a man or woman out here, it is ten to one that they will inform you that they can do their “own lying awake at night.” Once when a miner died up West his mates put up above his grave these words as a text—and, in truth, there are many worse:—“He did his damndest; angels could do no more.” But, then, the world in general is much like the ultra-tidy housewife of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes writes “that if the Angel Gabriel did come down from heaven, she would be complaining of him, that he dropped his feathers about the house.”

Australia is so much overgoverned that it is really a wonder the broth is not spoilt between the multitude of cooks. It seemed bad enough before Federation, but it was nothing to what it is now, and one wonders that there is anyone left to govern. How long the state of affairs will go on which permits the expense of two Government Houses, and a superfluity of officials, I do not know. It seems, indeed, as if everybody must have been too busy to bother about it, and that the State Governorship remains, like many another archaic institution, simply because so many more intricate complications engage the attention of the people.