On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

There are no workhouses in Australia, and there is no Poor Law; on one side there is the State, and on the other benevolent asylums—the former instituting more or less spasmodic relief works in the time of any great depression; the latter helping lame dogs over stiles when needs be. But, except for the physically and mentally unfit, the Victorian does not need charity; there is nearly always work of some sort for the man who really desires it; while up-country the sun-downer, or bona fide worker in search for a job, will find “tucker” for the asking at any farm or station. For the people who habitually refuse to work there are the prisons, to which a man or woman may be sent for “possessing no visible means of employment,” which is considered paramount to battening on their fellow-creatures in some fashion or other. Farm colonies for incompetents have long been thought of, and certainly they are a very necessary movement in the face of the large class of men who are willing and able to do a set task, but quite incapable of tackling any job on their own initiative.

There is, of course, the Labour Colony of Leongatha, which, since it was established first, in 1893, has cost the State the large sum of £36,812 15s. 6d. The last four years, however, it has been more nearly self-supporting, under a new system of management, than it ever was before, and hopes are entertained that it may in time become entirely self-supporting. The colonists are instructed in all branches of farm-work, and mostly stay in the colony for some two or three months, after which employment of some sort is found for them. Up to 1907, 7,232 destitute men had been afforded relief—and £36,812 15s. spent on it! No one can say that Victoria shows a mean spirit towards her derelicts, though perhaps she is scarcely so generous toward her ratepayers; but, after all, one colony can scarcely grapple adequately with all the different types for which such places—even if regarded as mere sorting and grading centres—are needed, and Leongatha has suffered—and still suffers—from the indiscriminate types with which it is expected to deal.

However, the bona fide working-man who is out of a job, for any length of time, in Melbourne is very rare; and the other sorts one must class together as more or less invalids, even if only afflicted with the microbe of idleness or incapacity. It is not, then, charity or more work that the artisan or the town labourer wants. Indeed, he wants nothing. Really and truly that is why the strikes here, which are mostly for the bettering of what is already good, lack the passion and sincerity of strikes in England, agitating, as they usually do, for the remedying of what is intolerably bad. In this may be found the reason why Australian strikes are, for the most part, a failure, as were—among others—the railway strike of 1903, the New South Wales Tramways employés’ strike, and the great trade strike of 1890.

In country districts, however, though the wages may be good and the cost of living low, men often exist under conditions compared with which a prison life might be considered gay, and it is to these conditions that the Victorian Government will have to turn its attention more fully if they wish to count on all the emigrants, whom Messrs. M’Kenzie and Mead have been drawing into their net, not only settling upon the land, but writing home such accounts of their life there as may lead more of their fellows, in the Old Country, to follow their example. More irrigation centres, more railways, cheaper freight and railway accommodation for passengers in the far country districts are all needed, and, I believe, for the thinking man or woman, a better sort of encouragement for putting money and labour into the land than that afforded by the mere fact of taking it away from the old settlers and their descendants, who, on the whole, have worked as consistently for it and paid as honestly as any new emigrants are ever likely to do. “They have robbed others that we may have the land,” the new-comers might well say. “Let us make haste and get all we possibly can out of it, for what has happened once may happen again.”

Poverty at home is truly terrible, but I doubt if any poverty has ever been as unbearable as the utter loneliness and strangeness of this country and its ways will seem to many a new immigrant—used, as he has been, to the close community of village life—on finding himself twenty or thirty, or even fifty, miles from a doctor, beyond all reach of church or school, facing droughts which descend upon him like the incomprehensible, awful vengeance of some unknown God; day after day of blazing sun, of incredible toil, no leaf or blade of grass even reminding him of home. The best—the very best—the ablest, the strongest, above all, the least imaginative, will fight through; they will grow to love the gum-trees, the sunshine, and the silence of the Bush, but the first few years will prove a hard fight against home-sickness and hopelessness. It is a fight worth waging, a country worth living in. All the same, I only hope that the hundreds of people, the families of 2,206 persons—including 1,591 women and children—concerning whom M’Kenzie and Mead are so jubilant, and over whom the Argus has almost shed inky tears of sheer joy—do realize that, if they are to take their intended place on the land, it is to a real fight, and not to beer and skittles that they are coming.

Lately one of the members of the Victorian House of Representatives declared that he could, within twenty-four hours, bring to Parliament House a hundred young men—with plant, capital, health, and industry—who for months had been vainly seeking for land on which to establish themselves. In answer to this, two squatters near Camperdown, where the pick of the Western District country is to be seen, have each offered to find good land at a reasonable rental, and under a liberal lease for ten out of these hundred men. They would get entry for fallowing from July to December, 1912, and not be asked to pay any rent till March 1, 1913, when they would have been able to gather in their first crops. Such terms, it has been declared, have been offered for years, and the twenty men are not yet forthcoming, let alone a hundred. It still remains to be seen whether the English and Scotch farmers among the prospective emigrants will take a better advantage of the offer.

I was once talking to an Irishman, who was working on the railway-line out here, about his own country, for which he professed the most passionate affection, bringing tears to my eyes by the description of all the horrors that had attended the eviction of himself, his young wife, and children—the barbarous disregard of sentiment and feeling. “But why?” I exclaimed at last, when I did manage to get in a word—“why? Were you very much behind with your rent?”

“I was that—sure I’d niver paid it at all, at all, nor me feyther before me.”

“But if they knew you could not pay?”