On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

People are always travelling in Victoria, seldom staying at home for even a single day’s holiday, while they think no more of going to Sydney for the inside of a week than the average Londoner would of going to Brighton; and it is amusing to remark that the number of passengers carried over the lines in the year 1908 represented sixty journeys a year for each man, woman, and child in the State—though, of course, there are many people who will take three or four different journeys to separate suburbs in one day, to balance the lonely dwellers in the back blocks who have never been in a train in their lives. Still, the average of 150,000 passengers coming and going at Flinders Street Station alone, in one single day, seems to me a very large one.

For the purpose of administering the Land Act, Victoria—and it must be remembered here that I am speaking of State, and not of Federal, affairs—is divided into seventeen districts, in each of which is a land office and officer. These districts include 3,316,727 acres of pastoral Crown land, exclusive of 6,412,500 acres of Mallee land—the entire Mallee covering 11,000,999 acres. This spare land is graded into first, second, and third class land, auriferous and pastoral land; the greater part of the first-class land, with sheltered valleys, suitable for vineyards and orchards, being in the Buln-Buln area, the soil of which is mostly volcanic, and of a warm chocolate brown.

A great many of the large estates in Victoria are being subdivided into farms, the squatters being under compulsion to sell a certain proportion of their property. The Land Branch has now acquired forty-nine properties, which it has subdivided into 1,203 farms, and 589 allotments for workmen’s houses—the question as to who the workmen are to work for apparently not having been very seriously considered—while shortly the Werribee Park Estate of 23,214 acres will also be available.

One knows, of course, that Victoria must be more thickly populated. But one cannot wonder that squatters whose fathers have acquired vast areas of land, who have built dwelling-houses, fenced and planted, invested money in stock, and, in fact, devoted the whole of their life to the care and the improvement of their properties, should feel aggrieved at seeing them taken away from them, chopped up into small holdings, and allotted to men who have never done anything towards the furtherance of the export and import trade, or the gain and credit of their country. Still far above this, it must be most galling of all to have shipload after shipload of emigrants brought out to occupy land which the squatters feel belongs to them—morally, as well as actually, if land ever did belong to anybody, wrested from the wilds as it has so often been by incredible labour and risk of life.

Progress seems always to involve a trampling underfoot. It is a Moloch whose chariot-wheels spurt blood at every turn. Many of the Victorian landowners are not only indignant, they are genuinely aghast; heart-sick at the deprivations of the Land Board, their grievance being aggravated by the undoubted fact that there is still a great quantity of land which is literally no man’s ground, as far as settlers are concerned. I heard one story of a very well-known family in the Western district, the founders of whom, a Scotchman and his wife and two children, journeyed up from Melbourne by waggon, in the days when the whole country was infested with dangerous blacks, and, finding a pleasant, fertile pastureland in the Western country, with rich volcanic soil, well watered, determined to settle there.

It was necessary, however, for the man to go back to Melbourne for implements, provisions, and stock, and all the other necessities of life. If they all went someone might come and snap up the land; in any case, it would be a long and weary journey with the bullocks, and he could get there more quickly and easily alone on horseback. So the waggon was made into a temporary house, and, with ammunition and food enough to last till her husband’s return—which at the quickest would not be before a month were well passed—the woman, an English gentlewoman, with her two tiny children, settled down to hold the land against the possible encroachments of other white settlers; above all, to hold her own life and that of her children against the more than probable onslaught of the blacks, and all the horrors of which they were capable. Some day, for the good of Australia and the Australians, the history of such people ought to be written. Yet it is to land so won and so held that every casual “rouse-about” or street loafer feels that he has a perfect right.

One can in some ways understand the feeling against large landowners better in England, where space is so limited; where people literally heat into anarchy with being packed so closely together; where land was acquired, for the most part, centuries ago, and the proprietors are nice and clean, alike of blood or sweat. But out here it is different. Old men remember the hand-to-hand fight with the desert; the danger, the almost incredible difficulties of transport; and, above all, the self-sacrifice and privation of the women whose sons now hold the land.

It is not the Land Board that one condemns; they are doing what they feel is best for the country, and perhaps will be best for the new settlers, when they have shaken down into their places, though one can but believe that, in the end, the man who is industrious and far-seeing will inevitably acquire more and yet more of the land which the thriftless muddler finds himself unable to manage, when large estates will gather again like snowballs. But it is the average man in the street who talks as if the squatters had done nothing but wallow in luxury for centuries that makes one so mad.

In many of the dairying districts owners of large estates have voluntarily sub-let a great part of their land, and set up butter factories, to which their tenants bring their milk. In the old days all the butter not required by a farmer’s own household would be bartered at the local store for groceries and clothing, the farmers’ wives getting a poor return indeed for it during the spring, when it was a drug in the market; and to such as these the central butter factories have proved a veritable boon, adding enormously to their comfort, and minimizing their labour. In some instances the farms are leased, and the tenant pays rent, but in others the landlord stocks the farm and provides all the implements, while the tenant supplies the labour, and proceeds are divided; one great advantage accruing to the small farm being that the factories pay for the milk either weekly or monthly, while the market is absolutely sure. Every day the tenant-farmer drives up with his milk-cart to the factory door; the milk is taken in and weighed; it is then analyzed, and the value, according to the percentage of cream, is credited to his account; while he drives off with the separated milk—due to from the day before for his poddy-calves—all his responsibility as regards the milk being at an end. Do they use the term “poddy-calves” in England? For the life of me, I cannot remember. Anyhow, it means a calf fed on the same system as a modern baby, this bottle-feeding of young calves being a serious item in the manifold work of a dairy farm.