Mr. Joseph Tuckwell, who died in Melbourne only a very few months ago, could tell some fine yarns when the spirit moved him. As far back as 1851 he was Inspector of Police in Hobart—a position that was by no means a sinecure in those days. Later, when the gold rush in Victoria started, he joined the police force there; then, in 1860, went to Dunedin; and a little later became Governor of Auckland Gaol—his reminiscences dating back to the times before he had sailed for Australia, when he had witnessed the burial of George IV. in St. George’s Chapel. Another link also with the early days passed away, only a month or so back, in the person of one of the last of the convict chaplains of the old Port Arthur Settlement; his wife, who is still living, being the daughter of John Price, the Inspector-General of Convicts, who was murdered in 1857, and niece of the great John Franklin.
It is interesting to remember that in those early days Victoria was a country with no old people. Lately I was talking with some old maiden ladies, who told me that, as children, they had never seen an old man or woman; and that when they first went home with their parents, in 1876, they were terror-stricken by the aspect of their old Scotch grandmother in her white mutch, whom they could not dissociate in their bewildered little minds from the wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” They had lived in those days just beneath the Dandenong Range, fifteen miles out of Melbourne, and speak now of the terror the escaped and liberated prisoners—of course, there were no real convicts in Victoria—used to be to them and their mother; the Botanical Gardens being then in the making, with gangs of prisoners employed upon them and upon the roads, working in small groups, watched over by officials with muskets.
It seems curious that, though Portland was settled at much the same time as Port Phillip, no one ever seemed to have thought of installing the new capital there, in spite of its truly magnificent bay. In 1836 Major Mitchell, who was the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, with a party of convicts, having followed the course of the Lachlan and Lower Murrumbidgee, crossed the Murray, climbed to the summit of Mount Hope, and saw stretched out before him a sweep of wide and promising pasture. Moving onwards to the south by south-west, he crossed this green and pleasant land, passed another range of mountains, which he named the Grampians, and thus reached the south coast of Discovery Bay, meeting at Portland with the famous Henty family, who two years earlier had established themselves there, with servants, sheep, horses, and cattle, that they had brought over with them from Tasmania. These they used to good purpose in trade with the whalers and scalers, who, indeed, were the first white inhabitants of Victoria, having run up rough temporary stores and other buildings at intervals along the coast, the principal traders, before the coming of the pastoral Hentys, being William Dutton—Dutton being now a well-known name in South Australia, though whether the family is the same I do not know—John Griffiths, and two brothers named Mills.
Portland suffers from no natural defects, and is simply prevented from taking its place as one of the best and busiest seaports by the fact that Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, in which it is situated. Equally ridiculous sentiments or regulations, I do not know which, ordaining that all goods from South Australia—Mount Gambia, the centre of one of the richest portions of that state, being only 73 miles from Portland—shall be transferred over 300 miles to Port Adelaide for shipment. Here is something, one would imagine, where Federation might be of real use, and the Montague and Capulet sort of feeling, which makes such a state of affairs possible, be mitigated, if not completely squashed.
I have never been to Portland, but am always hoping to go, for I am told that it is one of the most charming and old-world spots in Victoria. Moreover, it possesses one of the most beautiful and natural harbours possible—the finest in all Victoria, Westernport coming second, and Melbourne nowhere at all, for it is only by constant dredging, deepening, and general tinkering that the Melbourne Harbour is a harbour at all, and not a hill. As it is the harbour charges are necessarily so exorbitant in Melbourne that Tasmanians are already congratulating themselves on the fact that it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good; and that when ships get larger, as they seem likely to do, Hobart will be the only port where they can lie, the depth of water, right up to the quay, being some 72 or 73 feet, sufficient for any ship ever likely to be launched to float in at ease; so that Hobart may really become in time the distributing centre for the whole of the Commonwealth. And there all the time is Portland, of which Victoria can make no use, simply because it is not her capital, and she is not far-seeing enough to cultivate a second string to her bow; while South Australia can make no use of it either, because she would rather that her produce should be hopelessly depreciated in value by miles of useless haulage, than risk parting with one iota of trade to a sister State. Truly it is like the trivial etiquette of a provincial English town, where the butcher’s wife is not on calling terms with the baker’s wife—or that immortal ballad of the two men on a desert island, who would die of hunger and thirst rather than speak when they had not been introduced.
Oddly enough, it is not only in regard to its own affairs that Victoria seems incapable of realizing more than one town to each State or county; for, in spite of many protests, it still ships—with very few exceptions—its entire frozen produce to London, completely ignoring the other large and important English ports, and necessitating a most unnecessary amount of handling and extra freight charges in the distribution of its exports. Surely there is nothing so completely conservative as a democratic country can prove itself to be in some matters; a reversion to the original type, I suppose for, after all, the progenitors of the greater number of these Australians left England at a time when Toryism was at its height.
CHAPTER II
SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE
From the moment that the ship touches this shore—no, rather from the moment that the pilot boards her—a whiff of something, at once strange and stimulating, seems to fill one’s lungs and quicken one’s brain. The Australian pilots are a notably fine race—the younger men, those who have been born in the country—the finest type, perhaps, that it has as yet produced, with a breezy optimism, an immense faith in the land of their birth, and true affection for the Old Country, their very love for and dependence on the connecting seas helping, perchance, to annul any petty differences or jealousies; so that it is indeed well for all that they should be the very first to greet us in the new world to which we are come.
From Colombo one sails eastwards to Australia, so far east that one almost reaches the west in more senses than one. There are Trade Winds, and there are counter Trades, as we know; and if Australia owes her climate and her fertility to the warm, teeming East, mentally, in the tastes and outlook of her people, she is still altogether Western; so markedly so, indeed, that, in Melbourne in particular, one is at times seized with the whimsical idea that it has something to do with the roll of the earth, and that we may yet be slid into the very lap of America, ending by being far more completely akin to that democratic country than to the slow-moving, monarchical methods of England.
One must look back to one’s first clear-cut, vivid impression of a new country to realize how unnumbered are the differences, even under the many apparent likenesses, to which after a little while one becomes so used. In Melbourne the stevedores and dock-hands, who throng the ship and quay the moment she is docked, are almost as incredibly different from the same class in England as they are from the swarming blacks of Colombo. They are for the most part bigger and broader-shouldered; they look far better fed. They walk with a vigour and spring—indeed, with a sort of swagger—moving more from the hip than the English dock-hand, and less with that weary lurch of the shoulders which marks him as a creature of infinite labour and privation; while, above all, they are extraordinarily clean.