Hundreds of carts and tented waggons wait in the road which divides the two sides of the great roofed-in market-place, many of them with a child or two, or a half-grown lad, placidly asleep on the pile of sacking inside. The noise is indescribable, the crowd is immense. Everyone seems to be eating bananas or sucking oranges; all save the mothers of families, who push their perambulators—laden high with fruit and meat, babies, and vegetables—up and down the narrow alley-ways between the stalls, driving them ruthlessly in upon the legs of the crowd, with a decision which suggests that an army of women with “prams” should be added to the Australian Defence Forces. The large buyers from the shops have usually all finished by six; then come the housewives, and a sprinkling of dainty, delicate-looking maidens, who at first puzzled me, but who, I found later, were mostly tea-room girls, out to buy fruit and flowers to decorate their tables. What fruit, too! Peaches, 2d. a pound; pineapples, 2d. each; oranges, 2d. a dozen; grapes, 1d., 2d., and 3d. a pound; bananas, 2d. a dozen; huge water-melons, with slices cut out of them to show their beautiful pulp, like “the King’s daughter, all glorious within.”
In the summer—if one goes early enough—the market is a sheer joy. In the winter it is almost more fascinating as a sight, lit with its flaring petrol torches, but it is not so nice getting there. I remember one cold winter’s morning, at five o’clock, half running, shivering, up the long hill in Queen Street, meeting only one policeman, who flashed his lantern at me suspiciously. I even remember what I bought—chops and a bunch of rhubarb, and six eggs, and six pounds of potatoes, and some gingerbread—two large hunks for a penny. I was going to buy butter, but I bought a bunch of early narcissi instead, and ate my bread dry for a week.
Later on the metal-work, which I had discussed with Mr. Holt, came to be the most paying of my many endeavours, and brought me some amusing adventures in my search for a work-shop—after having been politely requested to leave several buildings—where there was nobody to be disturbed by my incessant hammering, the tang, tang, tang being little short of maddening to anyone who was not actually doing it themselves; while, in addition to myself, and the girls whom I had taught to help with the more mechanical work, as often as not I had two or three pupils, all plying their iron tools and hammers at once.
After a long search I found a young motor engineer, who was willing to sub-let me a corner of a large upper workshop for the merest trifle; and here I established myself for some six months, till the craze for metal-work slackened. Here also came my pupils with praiseworthy zeal, picking their way daintily over the gritty and littered floor and up the most awful stairs I have ever encountered.
It was a grand place to work in, for we were allowed to use the bellows and blow-pipes for heating our metal and vices for shaping it, all far bigger than I could afford to obtain for myself; besides which we could get any broken tool replaced on the spot. At first the men at the far side of the room could hardly get on with their jobs for watching us. The hammering out of the pattern they could understand—that struck them as a sort of fancy job—but the shaping of the larger pieces of metal, and riveting and brazing seemed, I suppose, quite an extraordinary phase of women’s work; however, they soon got quite used to us—though never to the hats and costumes of my pupils—and what a good-tempered crew they were! The place was, at times, frightfully hot, with the sun blazing down through the skylight and the blow-pipes going; but they always seemed to be contented, laughing and joking, and I never heard a word of bad language—not real bad language—all the time I was there.
These engineers and metal-workers seemed, on the whole, a much more cheerful set than the painters and cabinet-makers. Several times I did jobs for a large drapery and furniture-making establishment, mostly painting white furniture with little garlands and wreaths in Louis Seize style, or cupboards and boxes with pictures from nursery rhymes. I found the cabinet-makers—apart from the carpenters who work in larger and more airy premises—and the French polishers on the whole a rather anæmic and melancholy class of men; though among them, as among all other Australian workmen, I, an alien, and—in their sense of the word—a mere amateur, met with the greatest possible courtesy and kindness, finding them always ready to give me a helping hand, lend me materials, or pass on any small trade secrets that might benefit me; while, somehow or other, someone inevitably conjured up a cup of tea to help me through the long afternoon hours. They did seem long, too, for, though I worked far longer than eight hours a day in my own rooms, at most times twelve, and for one awful week, I remember, fifteen, I went from one thing to another, and moved about directing or teaching, or doing little homely odd jobs in between. Still, I liked the working in the shops or factories best, and certainly all my happiest days in Australia have been spent among other workpeople; while to this special firm—Messrs. Buckly and Nunn—I owe a special tribute of thanks for unfailing fairness and consideration.
Before the great Women’s Exhibition I worked for some time with another firm, who gave me an equally free hand, paying me at the same rate, £1 a day, better than many a really skilful artist in London gets, and enabling me to live in clover while it lasted. Indeed, from only one firm in Melbourne did I meet with anything like unfairness. This was for one of the biggest pieces of decorative work I ever did—a frieze—for which the architect of the building for which it was intended arranged to pay £37, out of which, of course quite unknown to him, I got only £5 for my work, and £1 for the paint.
In the cabinet-making trade, wood carvers and turners get on an average 54s. to 56s. a week, as do all other skilled cabinet-makers. Bricklayers average 10s. a day, and carpenters the same. Unskilled labourers are paid 6s. a day; quarrymen, 45s. to 54s. a week; electric-light fitters, 54s. a week; farriers, 48s.; compositors, 56s.; blacksmiths, 54s. to 72s.; smiths, 45s. to 52s.; fitters and turners in engineering works, 60s. to 66s.; nail-makers, 50s. to 70s.—rather different to the 2d. an hour the Lancashire women have been agitating for; but women do not make nails in Melbourne, nor do they make chains—or wear them either.
It is little wonder that, with wages like these, in a country where food is so cheap as in Victoria—Mr. Coghlan estimates that only 37.5 per cent. of the earnings of the people is spent in food and drink as against 42.2 in Great Britain and 49.1 in Germany—with a climate in which fires are seldom a real necessity, certainly not for more than three months in the year, where the means of transit, of change and amusement are cheap and inexpensive, that the Australian workman, when it is impressed on him that he must show a proper twentieth-century spirit of revolt, is—being by nature a peaceful and good-tempered person—rather puzzled to know where to begin; and this is in spite of the fact that more than twice as much meat is consumed annually per inhabitant in Australia than in England, and more than four times as much as in Germany, and that a meat diet is supposed to give rise to a passion for revolt, crime, murder, and rapine in the heart of any man.
There is, I believe, only one vegetarian restaurant in Melbourne, and that is in the basement of a building in Collins Street, originally intended for a cellar. I would not like to say anything unkind about it or its habitués, but certainly they do not look as if they had been grown there; while I certainly prefer the appearance and colouring of the people who—cheerfully and persistently in the face of all food faddists—still consume their three meat meals a day, though there is, of course, moderation in everything.