A Victorian butter factory is a delightful sight. The scrupulous cleanliness, the huge tanks of cream, the vast churns at work, and, above all, the great swiftly-revolving disc of wood upon which the butter is worked. Delicious stuff it is, too, a rich, deep, natural yellow colour, and fresh flavour; infinitely superior to the ordinary home-made product, where the cream is often kept too long, in the effort to collect enough to be worth the churning. Already Victorian butter has reached Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Corea, Arabia, Cape Colony, Natal, Portuguese East Africa, German East Africa, Dutch East Indies, Malay States, Philippines, Reunion, Hawaii, Fiji, and Mauritius—and when I think of the butter we used to have, some ten years ago, when I was in the last-named island, I feel that it and many hundred similar places, have something to thank Australia for. I will not venture to name the country that the tinned abomination, which was sold there under the name of butter, came from, but it was like nothing so much as what the old Oxfordshire ploughmen used to call “dodments,” to “sloime with dodments” being, in their vernacular, the equivalent to “greasing a cart-wheel.”
Oddly enough, Victorian farmers do not take kindly to breeding pigs. I believe, if I ever became an agriculturalist, that would be the one line I should take up, though, as far as I know, I never heard of a woman pig-farmer. However, the assertion that Gilbert White makes in his “Natural History of Selborne” that the progeny of one sow amounted to 300 has always fascinated me, and it seems strange that, with the large increase of all other industries in Victoria—particularly of dairy and fruit farms—the number of pigs has actually fallen, though the prices they fetch are higher than they ever were before. Here, at least, should be a chance for the Irish emigrant further than that of “sitting on the gate.”
A friend of mine once told me that he was driving through a country district with the parish priest, when they passed an old Irishman engaged in this historical occupation. The priest, drawing rein, mentioned some wedding, at which he had lately officiated, expressing his regrets that he had been obliged to leave directly the ceremony was over, and inquired of the old man whether they had a good supper, and plenty of fun after it.
“Sure, yer Reverence,” answered Paddy, his face wreathed in smiles—“we did that. And lashins and lavins ther wur. Buther on bacon!” Lashins and lavins! And so there ought to be for the pigs in the dairy districts, judging from the statistics, which assert that the output of separated milk in the State is 1,385,000,000 pounds, leaving sufficient after every calf in Victoria has been fed to produce 40,000,000 pounds of pork. There’s “buther on bacon fur yez!”
In the early days, apart from gold, wool was one of the chief productions in Victoria, as in New South Wales. During later years, however, it has been surpassed by the combined industries of dairy produce and grain. Still, there are 14,000,000 sheep in the State, mostly merinoes, producing some of the finest wool in the world, particularly the sheep from the bounteous Western district, where the family of Macarthurs—Captain John Macarthur, nearly a hundred years ago, having introduced the first merino sheep from Spain and Great Britain—still flourish, or did flourish when I was last in that part of the world, before the craze for chopping up estates became the vogue. I remember being shown little samples of wool by an old squatter and told the different sort of sheep from which they were cut, then made to shut my eyes, and learn to name the varieties from the feel alone. I would have made a good wool-sorter, he said; and, honestly, I believe it would be a fine trade for women, with their delicate sense of touch.
That special station had been magnificently fenced and guarded from the wind by acre upon acre of gum-tree plantations. There had been a great bush fire just before I was last there, which swept for miles across the open country, destroying or injuring many of the old man’s treasured plantations, and even scorching the creepers off the solid, square-built stone homestead. Every man, woman, and child on the place had worked like fury to stamp it out, and just saved the home; but, beside the fencing and younger plantations, any number of sheep were destroyed, and, I believe, the wool-shed also. Then, a year or so later, just as the shearing was finished, there came a sudden late spell of hard frost and killed 10,000 of the sheep. So a station-owner’s life, even in these days, is not all beer and skittles, as the man at the street corner thinks; and who will make fences and plant trees when the country districts are all a patchwork of small holdings, each owner trying to get a fortune out of his own special little lot? It’s a vexed question all round, but somehow it seems there ought to be enough to pay Paul without robbing Peter.
What a dry chapter! The Bulletin would say it was written by a “Wowser”—a Wowser being an advocate of everything dry, of temperance and all the virtues, who expresses his opinions in such a manner that the good he advocates appears as offensive as he is himself. The Wowser is quite a common species in Victoria, and has even been known to crop up among the highest dignitaries of the Anglican Church.
CHAPTER IV
THE WORKING-MAN AND THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD
The working-man in Australia is being made a demigod of, with all sorts of frills added, so that the fact of his possessing feet of clay, like the rest of us, may be hidden, even from himself. He does not really care about it all. He wants—if he is a real working-man—to do his job, and smoke his pipe in peace, while all he asks for is fair play, or all he has asked for in the past; because now, like all spoilt children, he has come to a state of mind when he really does not know what he wants. He is like a boy, naturally brim full of the spirit of adventure, of pluck and endurance, who has been kept at home and pampered by an over-fond mother. It is not his fault that he has missed the bracing atmosphere of that greatest of all schools—the adverse world.
The wonder really is that the Australian working-man has kept his head as he has done and gone on with his job at all; that trees are being felled, bricks laid, roads made, and mines worked by these men, who—from the way their supporters talk—ought to be living on the unearned increment of the landowners; ought to be seething in revolt at the inequalities of life, “protesting and demanding,” and doing little else, instead of going plodding off to work each morning; with their lunch done up in a red pocket-handkerchief, that might be so much more effectively contrived into a cap of freedom. Luckily, the working-man, for the most part, regards his political supporters as any normal John Bull regards his womenkind. They are all very well in their way, but they are not, for a single moment, to be taken seriously—and so he refuses to be made a fool of. After all, what is there for him to fuss about? Usually he has grandparents, or ancient relatives or friends, who remember what the life of the working-man in England was like in their young days; at the present time he has newspapers, and probably knows as well as you or I do of the number of out-of-works and paupers, and deaths from starvation in England—125 dying from sheer want of food alone in 1909. Of course, he is sometimes out of work himself, and masters are mean, or wages low. I remember one case brought against a manufacturer of food-stuffs—porridge, oats, flour, pickles, etc.—where the awful fact came to light that the wives of some of the employés could not afford to spend more than 5s. a week on meat, this—with the best chops at 5d. per pound, and good joints at 3d. or 4d., and commoner sorts at 2d.—being equal to at least 10s. in England, where, in the country districts, meat more than once a week is very rarely seen on a workman’s table. Melbourne was terribly shaken over the disclosure; but still the workmen went on working for that particular manufacturer just as they did for any other. There was no bloodshed, no real boycott, no particular agitation—there seldom is among the bona fide workpeople; they know when they are well off. It is the agitators who agitate for them, who insist on treating them like enfants gântés.