On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

The first settlement of Mildura, which is on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, was in 1884, the settlement being run and the first irrigation scheme inaugurated by the famous Chaffey Brothers. In 1887 the Chaffey Brothers Company, Limited, was formed, and recognized as supreme until 1895, when the place was taken over by the Mildura Irrigation Trust. The population, which, when the first census was taken in 1891, was 2,321, has now increased by another 5,000, and may well go on increasing, for Mildura is in a thriving condition. Very nearly all the dried fruits which come from Victoria, and the greater part of the canned fruits also, have been grown in Mildura, which is very certainly the garden of the garden State. In 1908 the value of the fruit exports of Victoria—nearly all of them from there—amounted to £153,062, the dried raisins and apricots alone being worth £84,627; Mildura’s one rival in this respect being Renmark, in South Australia, Mildura heading the lists with sultanas and other raisins, and Renmark with currants and other dried fruits. Still, in 1908, dried fruits were imported from overseas to the value of £99,518, and fresh fruit to the value of £107,666, so there is still an opening for “noblemen’s sons and others” in Australia. Among these, men with the right sort of wives will certainly prove of the most value to the country; though I would not wish to be as invidious as the lady whose advertisement I once read in the Melbourne Age, and who proffered herself as prepared to fill the post of housekeeper to a “bachelor or gentleman.”

Australian scenery has earned for itself the title of “melancholy,” and in places this can scarcely be wondered at. One can well realize the feeling of depression and foreboding that is produced by the wide stretch of unhumanized country—covered for the most part with a short khaki-coloured grass, and rendered spectral and unreal by the white ring-barked trees that dot it—in the mind of people fresh from the lush greenness of Devonshire, or the closely cultivated land of the English Midlands; crossed and recrossed as it is with flower-decked hedges; cut up into little compact, sheltered fields; having nothing in common at all with those vast paddocks, the stretch of which is scarcely broken by the wooden posts and wire which separate them from each other at the distance of many acres.

That there are numerous districts such as these in Australia I must confess, though far fewer in Victoria than in other States; while it seems to me that the very last adjective to be applied to the landscape around Melbourne is that of “melancholy”; if one must use a hackneyed phrase, “smiling” would be far more to the purpose.

Take the train from Melbourne and drive out to St. Kilda, the Brighton of Melbourne; there is nothing to depress one there—plenty of trees, blue sea and sky, crowds of well-dressed, cheerful people: Jews—Jews in plenty—yet not the Jews of the poorer quarters of London or other European towns, but prosperous, well-dressed Jews that are a credit to any country.

Then change from the cable to the electric tram, and go on to the bona-fide Brighton and Middle Brighton. There is the remains of a swamp at one side of the line, it is true, but that is being drained and made habitable as quickly as the work can be done, and already there is a fringe of houses among the trees at the edge of it nearest to the sea, while at the other side rises a soft green mass of tree-decked undulations, dotted with clusters of pleasant villas.

Once Middle Brighton is reached there are trees either side and prosperous houses standing in wide gardens; the brilliant blue sea to the right, a couple of hundred yards from the line.

Then, again, take the train and go farther along the coast, to Hampton, where the Ti-trees are a study in themselves and the grass above the cliffs sheeted with yellow Cape-weed during the spring months.

Then take another short train-ride, or walk to Sandringham, with its fine club-house and beautiful undulating golf-course; to Mentone; to Frankston; to a dozen other places, all within an hour’s journey—or but little more—from Melbourne. Or stay a week at Mordialloc, with its exquisitely appointed little hostel, reminiscent of all the best in our old village inns at home—a peaceful, shady place this, with a long arm of the sea winding for miles inland, dotted with white-sailed pleasure-boats, or bright green tubs, in which misanthropic fishermen sit smoking, day after day, as they watch their float—the only melancholy note in the cheerful scene.

Or break away inland on to the high, bracing, open country around Oakleigh, with the blue Dandenong Ranges in the distance, and many acres of market-gardens, from which a long procession of carts trail down to the Victoria market three times a week—at an hour when all the lights of the town are still burning, to be met returning again as the inhabitants of the suburbs flock in to their work—laden high with manure from the city stables, on the top of which, more than likely, the wearied-out husbandman is sleeping peacefully, while the horses make their decorous way homeward, with a wise air too dependable to be described as human. Where there are no market-gardens on the heights there is rough common land, white with heath and kindred shrubby plants, while across the open country there blows such an air—clean, and clear, and invigorating. Still farther on the line runs right up into Gippsland, the black, luscious soil of which grows the finest grass in Victoria, a paradise of a place, where drought is hardly known—a district showing, indeed, only one blot on its scutcheon, and that—shared by almost every other dairying centre, and the work of man and not of Nature, who has, indeed, been bountiful to Gippsland—the terrible overworking of the children by their parents, in the greed for quick gain and dislike of paying out any money in wages, which is such a crying disgrace to the country.

Children, who often have three miles or more to walk to school, are expected to be up at four in the summer, and but little later in the winter, and milk ten or twelve cows before they start off on the long tramp to their legitimate day’s work. To the young Gippslanders the cow seems indeed an awful and all-devouring Moloch, eating up alike their youth, their hours for play, their strength, and vitality. I once had a most charming girl, the daughter of a prosperous Gippsland dairy farmer, as a sort of general household help. She could not touch milk—she could not bear the sight of it. If she brought me a glass of it on a salver, I have seen her throat swell and the tears come into her eyes in her effort to keep from retching. She was very pretty and refined, and her people were well off; but every day, almost ever since she had been able to reach the cow’s udder, she had milked from ten to fifteen cows, morning and evening, till—luckily for her—body and soul had alike rebelled. Her parents considered it most derogatory that she should be working with a stranger for a fixed wage; but she declared that she would do anything rather than go back to the farm, where her two little brothers of ten and twelve were already doing their share of the milking, each morning before they went to school and each evening after they returned. That the brains of children so overworked cannot be of much use to them during their school-hours is beyond a doubt; and that their physique suffers equally with their intelligence is clearly shown by the stunted and jaded little old men and women who fill the benches of the preparatory schools in the dairying districts.