On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

Some writers on Australia complain that because most of the completely native trees do not shed their leaves, Australians do not know what a true spring is like. Perhaps they are right in one way; the longer a man has been starved the more completely will he appreciate a good meal when he gets it; and there is no such length of colourless winter days to struggle through in Australia—living only by this one hope, that the spring must come at last, however tardily—as there is in England, and therefore relief must be felt far less ardently. But against this let us weigh the thousand and one subtle surprises of Nature in such a country. Autumn, indeed, comes sobbing through the land, sweeping her heavy rain-drenched garments over lawn and border, till the flowers drop to earth, flattened, brown, and bedraggled; while “envious, sneaping” frosts nip the dahlias, and flush the roses with hectic tints. It is nonsense to say that the leaves do not fall, for they do, even from the native trees, not in a mass, it is true, but even more sadly, one at a time, as if the tree were with infinite reluctance slowly parting from each emblem of her youth, the tattered bark hanging in ribbons round her, the sport of every breeze; while everywhere in the cities and gardens there are English trees of all sorts to be seen, with leaves that fall in a fashion almost cheerful compared with the slow agony of their Australian compeers.

Then suddenly the sun breaks through the clouds. Brilliant patches of blue spread over the sky till they join in one unbroken sea of cobalt. One forgets to put fresh logs on the fire, which the sun is laughing out of countenance, flings open doors and windows, orders tea in the veranda, and fares forth with little packets of seeds and bits of sticks, to grub in the sweet teeming earth. What matter that in a couple more days winter may be back again? Anyhow, it is only a matter of three months, and that with innumerable such breaks.

The dahlias and the cosmos may have been all uprooted and the chrysanthemums have blackened in the borders; but by that time the narcissi are out, and the forget-me-not beds are alive with colour. There are violas, too, and grape hyacinths, and what in England we call “summer snowdrops,” and wallflowers, and periwinkles, while the japonica is jewelled with bloom, and the lawns are a glory of green. If the curtain of winter does slip down again, it does not matter much, for all these are sturdy people, and not easily discouraged; while when it lifts once more, the daffodils are ready to break into bloom, and the tulips and irises; while the wattle is a veritable masque of spring in itself.

With such a climate it seems extraordinary that the private gardens in Melbourne are not more of a success than they are. One reason, I believe, is that the people are too busy to trouble, another that they are too restless: they are always moving house—sometimes literally so, for it is no uncommon thing to meet a fair-sized wooden edifice coming along the road drawn upon wheels, by a long train of horses, and looking like a gigantic snail. I really believe the idea of settling down in one house for life would be—to use an Irishism—the death of any Australian. The servants in Melbourne will inform you, almost at the moment they enter your door, that they have “not come to stay”; and a man takes a new house in much the same spirit. I believe it is all owing to the lack of tradition. In England many of us have been born in the same house where our progenitors have lived for centuries, and where, perhaps, the descendants of our eldest brother may be expected to live for centuries longer; while we ourselves fare out in the world with the hope of founding some such enduring dwelling-place for ourselves, the need of a permanent home being inherent in our blood.

But though the Australian’s great-grandfather may have lived in some such fashion, it is more than probable that his actual grandfather lived in a waggon or a tent, and that both he and his son were, from the exigencies of the New Country, for ever moving on, seeking fresh pastures as the country became more open and settlers began to thicken.

The discovery of gold alone was enough to instil this restless drop into the blood of a people whose very presence in the country was indeed first proof of such a tendency. In the wholesale rush which followed the first discovery of gold in Bendigo and Ballarat, it must have seemed to onlookers as if the merely agricultural and commercial Australia would cease to exist. Vessels lay in the docks, rotting for the want of men to repair them and hands to work them; for the sailors and the dock hands, the Government clerks, the policemen, the shopkeepers and their employees, even the very domestic servants, all joined in the stampede to that delectable land, where a casual miner could earn from thirty to forty pounds a day; while the Governor, like a modern Alexander Selkirk, was left “monarch of all he surveyed,” with no one to dispute his rights, certainly, but equally with no one to obey his orders. In the year following the discoveries at Bendigo—1851—ten tons of gold were said to have been taken from Victoria, gold then being worth £4 an ounce, while a quarter of a million of presumably adventurous spirits landed in Melbourne, all eagerly confident of making their fortunes. When this lure was sufficient to induce people to risk the discomfort and peril of the long voyage in a sailing-ship, and all the dangers of an unknown land, it was not to be wondered at that the earlier settlers, who were already on the spot, relinquished their ideas of a pastoral life in favour of the enthralling possibilities of mining, and, forsaking their farms, joined in the general rush to the gold countries.

You will say that all this has very little to do with Melbourne gardens. But really it has a great deal to do with them, in that it has produced a people with very little of the real home-making spirit; while if a man will not trouble to make a home, it is certain sure that he will not trouble to make a garden. There was one man in Melbourne—I except, of course, the curator of the Botanical Gardens, whose work is too well known to need any comment—who veritably created a garden out of a rubbish-heap—a garden such as Australia needs, full of shade and greenery, and massed flower and foliage that helped to conserve the moisture of the ground. But there did not seem much money to be made out of it, and so one of the endless succession of Ministers for Agriculture—with that eternal craze to be up and doing which makes Australian officialdom so galling to the real worker—decided to change the garden into a dairy farm. It had not been in any way a useless appendage, for it was a public place, and thronged with people on Sundays and holidays; moreover, it had a horticultural school attached to it, where boys and girls whose parents lived near, and who could not afford to send their sons to some distant and costly agricultural college—for their daughters no other possible training-ground existed—could be taught fruit-growing and horticulture. At the time the place was started the then Minister for Agriculture was interested in fruit-growing; and by some good chance the next Minister happened to be the same, judging, rightly enough, that it was likely to be one of the most profitable minor industries of Victoria. But after them arose yet another Minister, whose interests were all on the side of dairy-farming, and the garden—to many a veritable oasis in the desert—was, as such, condemned. What has ultimately happened I do not know, but I believe that one flower-bed, some six half-starved cows, and as many boys, instructed after the methods of Mr. Squeers, somehow fight it out together, though certainly when I last saw it all the beauty and repose of the place had vanished for ever. Yet this is but a single example of the restlessness with which the country is infected, and the difficulty of producing and maintaining anything really staple under such constantly-shifting conditions.

The suburbs of Melbourne are beautifully wooded. If you climb to any eminence of the city, such as the fire-station, and look down and around, it seems as if it were indeed built in a veritable forest of trees, while you imagine the most beautiful gardens luxuriating beneath their shade. But, on the whole, you are doomed to disappointment.

The owners or tenants of the small villas seem to do the best with the scrap of ground that is at their disposal. But the cottagers make little or no effort to beautify their houses even when they are their own possessions; while the gardens of the wealthy people—say at Toorak, which is supposedly the most select suburb—are certainly very disappointing. One sees hideous corrugated iron fences round really fine houses, with gardens out of all proportion to their size; Gothic mansions, in a setting worthy only of a little villa at twenty pounds a year, looking like nothing so much as a very big joint on a very small dish; gardens where there is no shade nor retirement possible, and with the aggressive fence visible from every point; while the parsimony in the matter of water is almost beyond belief, fine shrubs that may have cost pounds, rare plants, and well-laid lawns, all being reduced to a khaki-coloured waste for the want of a few pounds spent in watering them. Really, I believe that if the gardens had to be watered with champagne the wealthy Melbournian would not hesitate; it is spending his money on mere water which he dislikes: that is the clouds’ job, and not his, and he spends his life waiting for them to do their duty, though he ought to know them better by now.

All over the country it is the same, in the great as well as the small. People seem to resent money being spent on any form of irrigation. They will plough and sow, they will reap when the crop is ready, and in any well-conducted climate that ought to be enough. But the Australian climate, like all beauties, has its very distinct failings, and in the matter of rain it is, to say the least of it, capricious. In most countries a caprice such as this, when once fully known, is provided against. In time, perhaps, the Australians also will grow to realize their country’s shortcoming, and a vast system of irrigation be carried out that will make a veritable Paradise of Victoria; but until that is accomplished, one can only say that its agricultural qualities are, like the curate’s egg, “good in parts.”