On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

The Australian—both child and adult—devours enormous quantities of jam, particularly up in the back blocks, where butter is almost an unknown luxury; so much so that the cattle-men, shearers, and shepherds get their internal machinery completely ruined in time by the quantity of inferior boiled sugar and fruit that they consume, and which they have inelegantly christened “rot-gut.” But, still, one cannot live on boiled beef and damper alone, and as tomato sauce and jam are the cheapest relishes obtainable, every camping-place and hut is littered round with an inevitable medley of sauce-bottles and tins.

Everyone loves “lollies”—as they are called out here, the word “sweets” only being applied to what we generally call “puddings,”—and Melbourne and Sydney are the only towns where I have ever seen grown-up people gathered in absorbed and wistful groups round the windows of the confectioners’ shops, both men and women, discussing the good things on show there as engrossedly as they would stocks and shares—or hats; this characteristic being so marked that I was actually told to observe it by the captain of the ship I travelled out on, who himself hailed from “the land o’ cakes,” while a young man here very rarely goes to call on a girl without an offering of a box of lollies, apparently not being so overweighted with a sense of his own sufficiency as he is at home.

It is extraordinarily difficult to rid oneself of old ideas that one has imbibed in one’s bread-and-milk days: to lose that inherent English faculty of taking “short views,” which Sydney Smith recommends as a virtue, and look forward sufficiently far to realize what does really matter; what is, and what is not, of lasting importance.

At the best the independence of the Australian child—or “kid,” as it is inevitably called—is piquant and rather charming; at the worst it is intensely irritating. Still, unless it resolves into rudeness, which in a child or adult is always repulsive, the idea of the deference due to age, merely as age, is after all only the result of our own idea of our own self-importance. If there ever was a youth that wanted to see “the wheels go round” it is the Australian youth, who must know the why and wherefore of everything. There must be a distinct reason, beyond mere years, to persuade him to show any deference to anybody, and some reason, beyond that of youth, for humility on his own side. The man who has kicked the greatest number of goals that year at football, or made the most runs at cricket, or ridden the Cup winner; who is palpably successful in business or pleasure—that they can understand, but little else; he is “a bit of all right,” but the merely fictitious value of age they “have no time for,” as they would say.

All this tends, no doubt, to an ugly, offhand manner, a disregard of the claims of mere intellectual superiority and spiritual beauty, and a crudity of outlook. Opinions formed by the young on those of more mature and well-informed people than themselves, and handed down to them mellow with age and honour, tend without doubt to a greater refinement, but hardly, after all, to a greater vitality. Gradually I am growing to believe that to form even erroneous opinions of one’s own is better in the end for one’s character than to take them obediently like pap from a spoon; and the Australian child, gay and light-hearted, quick in resource, independent and self-assertive, is certainly more suited to the needs of the young country in which its lines have been cast than the more “set” product of the English nursery. “We” do this or that, says the Australian child, reckoning itself as part of a double commonwealth of home and State.

“Mummy and me, we are the boss of this place,” I once heard a young man of five—who kept house with his widowed mother—declare, no trace of arrogance in his voice, simply making the assertion. “I think we had better marry again,” he remarked once, deeply concerned over the fact of his mother having to go out to work at one time when she was ill, and—even to his childish eye—manifestly unfit.

Somehow, in spite of all their crudeness, their irrepressible larkiness, and their precocious love-affairs, there is something essentially sound and wholesome at the bottom of the Australian youth, omitting, of course, the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom which are much the same everywhere. Certainly, the boys, if they pass safely through the almost inevitable trip West and attendant gold-fever, make most excellent husbands, steady-going, hard-working, and considerate; while the girls settle down into good wives and devoted—often too devoted—mothers.

In Australia the child’s future is generally very carefully considered, and the better class of parents will make immense sacrifices to fit it for some definite trade or profession. I believe a very large percentage of the girls marry; the amount of marriages in Victoria in 1908 being the largest total ever recorded—a sign apparently of prosperity, for between 1891 and 1894, which was a period of commercial depression, the number of marriages fell 20 per cent.—5,650 more persons having been married, allowing for the increase in population, in the last five years than between 1899 and 1903, despite universal suffrage. Naturally, though, now that there are so many more women than men in Victoria, the girls’ chances are fewer than in the old days, when very much the reverse was the case, yet, in spite of all the talk here, as elsewhere, of the hopeless superfluity of women, there, somehow, seems to be a sweetheart for every girl.

Still marriage is not regarded as a profession—though, on the whole, the girls are better equipped for it than at home, knowing far more of the value of money, cooking, and general house-work—and the daughters equally with the sons are prepared for some other and more certain mode of life. Men and women can be trained in Melbourne for almost any profession for which they show a bent, though there is no doubt that a year or so in England, Germany, or France is of immense advantage to them, particularly in medicine.

One would imagine that in a country still so largely in the making there would be ample room for any engineers, both electrical and mechanical, that it could produce, and ample facilities for training them. But people complain that their sons can reach a certain point in their engineering training, and find no one to carry them on any further; while even for those who are most thoroughly trained and capable the openings are very few, and a number of the most promising young Australian engineers are yearly passing out of this country to America.