Mr. Marshall Hall, who was formerly Professor of Music at Ormonde College and the head of the Conservatorium, is the ruling spirit of the musical world in Melbourne, in spite of having completely shocked the Nonconformist conscience of the town by his somewhat erotic writings and the liberty he took in managing his private affairs for himself—the difficulty always being that nobody is supposed to have any private affairs out here. Still, in the end, people’s love for the beautiful music that Mr. Hall made for them triumphed; and at his fortnightly concerts, held during the winter months, the Town Hall is usually crammed, for it is not only what he does himself that is so wonderful, but what he manœuvres his supernumeraries into doing. Here for a shilling—the highest-priced seats are only three shillings—one can slip off the cares of the world for three hours on a Saturday afternoon, and, freed from all the petty obligations of life, listen to some of the best music in the world. All honour to those who have found the best and held to it, and even imbued the rich people in Melbourne with the idea that there is something higher in life than racing and football-matches; or, at least, that it is “the correct thing” for them to “patronize” such concerts and help on the expenses by taking the dearest seats. The money is the same; while for the encouragement of the performers there are always the rows and rows of ardent, enthralled listeners in the shilling seats.
CHAPTER IX
RURAL LIFE, MOUNTAIN, AND FOREST
People at home do not know the true meaning of the word “loneliness,” and we often hear English labourers and their wives talking of isolation, when there is a church and village only a couple of miles off, or other cottages and farms, at any rate, within walking distance of them. Indeed, we are, in general, so used to living closely huddled together that we get scared when we are alone in any large open space, with no single sign of humanity, fenced and cultivated land or smoking chimney within sight. The less educated people are the more awful this loneliness seems, till the wild cliffs of Cornwall and the moors of Yorkshire and Devonshire become to their distorted fancy fearful and pixie-haunted places. And yet even the loneliest of all these lonely spots is densely populated in comparison with the country districts in Australia where one meets with people who have lived all their lives as much as 200 miles away from any town or railway-station, and with children, and even grown-up men and women, who have never seen any white person outside their own families. If you can imagine that,—imagine that there are women who have never seen how other women dress or do their hair, and young men who have met not a single person of the opposite sex beyond their own mother and sisters; whose stores are brought to them by bullock-waggon or team from a far-distant town, having themselves never even seen a shop-window; who receive no letters because there is nobody to write them; who would not know if the whole of Europe were convulsed with war because they see no papers; who have no knowledge, no aspirations, no hope, simply because they see no outside person whose life they may compare with their own—if you can imagine this, I say, and all that it means, then you may realize a little what true loneliness is.
To be able to ride mile after mile, day after day, and see no living soul; to know that nothing can happen beyond birth and death, rain or drought; to live only with animals, and with two or three of your own kind, whose every vice and virtue, expression and thought you know as well as you know the nature of your own sheep and cows; to be a man or woman, with all the strong passions and instincts of your sex—all the stronger from the fact of living so perpetually among animals—and yet with no chance of honourable marriage before you; no games, no society, no diversion, no possibility of any change: if you could only realize it all—you women gossiping over your gates through the long summer evenings in England, with your children playing before you in the road; you men gathered round your village club or public-house fires, on cold winter nights, grumbling about the weather, discussing the news of the day together, walking home through the village, flinging a “goodnight” on this side and on that; all of you living your human, homely lives; every boy and girl with a sweetheart to walk out with on Sundays; and the squire and the parson at hand if you are in trouble, and a club doctor within reach if you are ill.—If you could only realize what it means, this awful loneliness of the far places of the Empire, you might be a little more contented with your own lot, and have more respect for the men and women who have fought through such frightful conditions, who have kept themselves and their children clean and sane, and with it all, helped to the making of a new nation.
The question of eugenics is a difficult one for a mere scribbler to touch upon, but it seems strange that a people which is endeavouring so strenuously to keep itself entirely white—realizing fully the danger of mixed marriages—has not also realized more completely the grave danger arising from intermarriage—and worse—among these isolated families, [232] and the appalling percentage of lunatics which it produces.
All this is but part of the crying need for closer settlement; it is also a proof of what I mentioned in my last chapter regarding the accommodation needed for agricultural labourers; the irrigation which will make closer settlement a possibility, and—conversely—the closer settlement which will make irrigation practicable. Still, I believe that married men with families, and not stray bachelors, are the people needed in the agricultural districts, or, to go even farther than this, little colonies of people from the same country, county, or village; while, on the whole, it is more in Southern France, Italy, and Spain, than in England that suitable families, with some knowledge of working in hot, dry climates and of the possibilities of irrigated land, are most likely to be found.
People, at home, attempt to judge Australia as they judge some people. “Oh, all the Smiths have tempers!” they will say, and imagine that thereby they have disposed in half a dozen words of twice as many individualities, and root and branch of the entire Smith family, whose characters may be as divergent as the points of the compass; and:—“Awful place for drought, isn’t it?” is the almost inevitable question asked when I have mentioned Australia; usually followed by the remark, “Awfully hot, too.” Size means nothing whatever to such people; if they have any idea of any variety of climate in Australia, they think that it must be “cooler up north,” quite ignoring all that they have ever heard of Queensland and the Northern Territory, which alone covers 523,620 square miles. Victoria is the smallest state in Australia; still, it contains, roughly speaking, 87,884 square miles and an extraordinary diversity of climates.
About eight years ago I met a Victorian schoolmaster whose little boy of seven had never seen rain; and shortly after that another who lived in a district that was under snow during the greater part of the year. There are dense forests—notably those in the Western districts, where the trees grow so closely together that the people spend their lives in a sort of semi-twilight: while the mud is so deep along the forest tracks that they have to do all their travelling on horseback; and their carting by means of sledges, the runners of which will slide along over the top of the mud instead of sinking and sticking in it as wheels would do. Once I was staying with some people near Camperdown whose parlour-maid hailed from the depths of the forest, some thirty miles away. An afternoon a week off to see her parents was out of the question, but occasionally she had a couple of days’ holiday, and then thought nothing of the thirty miles or so on horseback each way. Though to my English mind it seemed an odd way for a parlour-maid to take an outing. And such an immaculate parlour-maid, too! waiting at table in such a neat black frock, with such snowy apron and cap, that it was difficult to realize her rising at dawn and riding off cross-legged on the wiry little steed, which the servants had for their special use, into the mysterious twilight of the forest.
In sharp contrast to such places as this is to be found the bare, sun-baked, torrid region of Mildura, a place where at one time there were more aristocrats to be found than in the whole of Australia; Englishmen of good families having flocked there, some for the sake of health, some attracted by the wonderful fruit-growing capacities of the place. I remember one beautiful young man “batching” there for years—cooking his own dinner, doing the house-work, such as it was, washing up the dishes and working meanwhile like a fury on his little fruit farm—who would come down to Melbourne for the Cup looking as if absolutely fresh from Bond Street. He went home for a trip not long ago, and when he came back amused me very much by a description of a dinner which his people had given by way of welcoming him back. He was a gay person; he had been interested, and amused, and stimulated to talk by the evident interest everyone showed in his adventures, and still talking and laughing, not thinking what he was doing, as the ladies rose to leave the table, from the long force of habit he began to collect the dishes and plates, to scrape them, and pile them one on the top of the other, under the very eyes of the amazed butler and his minions.
