On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

I shall never forget my first impression of these men—the brilliant blue sky, the blazing sun, the great swinging cranes, and the dexterity with which they handled the enormous masses of iron-rails, etc., which we carried, apparently with so little exertion, and absolutely no bullocking; while many of them were in spotless white overalls, delightful to look upon. I had arrived out from England in a sailing-ship, long overdue, owing to a succession of adverse winds, and in consequence water had run very short, so that washing with anything but sea-water was a quite impossible luxury. Our ship was clean, for our crew had toiled nobly with paint and varnish and holystone; and the sails were washed and bleached white by the sunshine and storm of many months on the open sea, far from smoke or dust. Still, I believe that we all felt horribly grimy as the tug towed us to our place at the quay; while I, for one, was longing for a Turkish bath; and that as soon as possible, for no ordinary amount of washing as I felt would, or could, be of any use. So that perhaps, on the whole, there was a double reason for the extraordinary cleanliness of the Melbourne dock-hands striking me as it did at the time. Still, that first impression has never faded, and, to this day, I regard the Australian working man—the worker, not the waster, I mean—as the cleanest in the whole world.

Some people, as I am well aware, are minutely clean in their persons, making it, indeed, a matter of religion, while some are clean in their raiment, but seldom both. Certainly the more completely a man is clothed, the more likely is it that he—or his clothes—are incompletely cleansed; his own mind, which I presume governs the washing of his body, and his wife’s mind, which governs the washing of his garments, seeming unable to work in unison. But, though the Australian labourer is quite completely clothed, and so white as to show dirt as easily as anybody—I mention this fact for the benefit of those who persistently regard him as black and naked—he and his wife appear to have somehow solved this question between them. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that he is better paid, and his wife is better fed than most wives of working men in the Old Country. And, then, the pipes do not freeze; while in even the tiniest three-roomed house there is usually a bath and a shower—though sometimes only in the scullery or back kitchen—with water laid on. And, after all, in a hot country cleanliness is not that affair of infinite toil that it is in a cold one; there is usually a day or so each week, even in the wettest weather, when there is enough sunshine to dry the clothes out of doors, so that one is saved the necessity of slinging them in lines across the kitchen, to drip on to the children’s heads, and lie in sullen grey pools on the floor. Yet there is the dust, which is beyond all words, and the flies, so that it is not all quite plain sailing, after all. Still, though the Australian workman has many little ways which at first rub every atom of your fur up in the wrong direction—he is bumptious, he is cock-sure, he is condescending; “I don’t mind if I do” is his one form of accepting any proffered favour, while a shrug of the shoulders and the “My troubles” are his response to any advice or sympathy you may offer—he is also essentially clean, in other ways apart from those that I have mentioned. Besides this, he does not cadge for tips; indeed, he more often than not resents the offer of money. “What’s that for?” he will ask, with a glance at the proffered coin that makes you blush to your very boots.

I’ve had a hard-worked lodging-house servant refuse a well-earned tip more than once. “Lord bless you, I ain’t going ter take yer money; you’ve enough to do with it!” has been said. Not long before I left the country I took lodgings down at the sea, to recoup from a long illness, with a carpenter and his wife and family of small bairns. When I left, the man walked to the station, carrying my bag for me, and as we shook hands on the platform, entreated me, in his wife’s name as well as his own, to come down and stay with them, if I was hard up or ill, for as long as ever I liked, and not to worry about the money. “For if there’s enough for us, there’s enough for you, providing you don’t mind our rough ways,” he added; “and don’t you go on working again till you’re fair worn out; for as long as we’ve a bit or a sup, or a roof over our heads, you’re welcome to a share.”

On the other hand, these people will be merciless to the humbug, to anyone who is mean or idle. They know their own value; “Business is business,” as they say. They will give freely enough, but they will not submit to be haggled with or underpaid; and why should they? I have worked shoulder to shoulder with them for eight years, and I never wish to work with better people. Their absolute indifference, except where they really like or respect a person, their crudity, their common sense, their shrewdness, is like a tonic. And thus, in spite of Mr. Foster Fraser’s assertion that the Australians can only exist by the constant effusion of fresh and virile blood from the Old Country, I must still believe that, for any elaborate ideals and ethics of over-civilization which we take with us to this new country, we receive in return very much more, certainly individually, than we have ever given; while in respect to the question of virility, Mr. Fraser must, I feel, have very largely judged Australians from the towns, and the undergrown shop-boys and factory-girls that he has seen there. After all, if we stay a little to ponder over what he regards as the degeneracy of these people—and it can only be the town people of whom he speaks—I think we shall realize that it is all only part of the natural order of things; that the more completely a plant belongs to the outdoor world, to the wilds and open places, the more it will suffer by transplantation to the vitiated air, the smoke and dust, of the city. Some day Australia may produce two types, as England does—the city type, with, in spite of its anæmic appearance, a quite immense vitality, and the country type, heavier, slower, and more robust. In the meantime, all these narrow-chested boys and precocious, over-developed girls who at night line the pavement of Swanston Street are really the inevitable result of a period of transition. Most likely when their parents were born there were no streets at all, as we now see them; while their fathers and mothers were such people as Walt Whitman must have had in mind when he wrote, saying: “I see the makings of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

The parents of these weedy boys and girls—who seem, like Jonah’s gourd, to spring to an untimely maturity—were, maybe, conceived and born in the open air, and toiled for their daily bread under conditions of hardship and danger such as we can scarcely realize. A people who lived in vast open spaces, the immensity and loneliness of which very few European minds can grasp, and yet who were dowered with such an abundance of air and sunshine that it is little to be wondered at that their progeny wilt as they do in the towns. And, after all, there is one persistent and saving quality about them: they hark back again to the open; their hearts are never really at one with the cities. The young boys and girls flock there, and love it for a while; but as they mature they begin to long beyond words for the country. Every little shopman, every successful artisan and his wife, cherishes, with few exceptions, the one ambition—to have a tiny place in the country, to farm a little, keep poultry, grow fruit, and live in the open. People settled for life, as one might imagine, in comfortable homes in Melbourne will give up everything—in what can but seem the most surprising fashion to those who have not got that touch of the wild, or the patriarchal, in their blood—and start afresh. Sometimes they are well over fifty years of age before they can feel free to please themselves. But even then, confident in the knowledge that all the youngsters are out in the world doing well for themselves, they will fly to the country and begin all over again in a little two-roomed iron-roofed shanty, where the bush still remains to be stubbled up, growing as it does to the veranda step, and the water has to be carried half a mile, while the only possible chance visitor is an occasional opossum on the roof, or black snake in the bed.

Yet for all this the Bush, which somewhere deep in their hearts has been calling to them all their lives, draws them at last irresistibly to its bosom; so that they will dare anything to be near it, to hear the laughing-kachass at their very door, and see the wild wattle-bloom in flower.

To us who have grown used, through many generations, to the life of the cities, such behaviour seems incredibly mad. We forget how very, very new the whole country still is; how it was won and watered by sheer sweat, and how the people love it all the more because of the life and youth that were lost in its making—love it because it is so near to them, so completely in their blood that the glint of stars through the weather-boards of a bush shanty is a better sight to weary eyes than any wall-paper that even the genius of Morris has evolved.

But I have wandered far from the ship with her furled sails and my first impressions of the new country: the coming and going of Custom-House and Health Officers, the bustle, the sunshine on the quay, and, above all, the curiously homelike Cockney drawl, which is so marked a characteristic of the Australian of to-day, all of which has amalgamated together in my mind, into a vivid and clear-cut picture. It is all very well to write as if I precipitated myself bodily and instantaneously into the hearts and homes of the people, for I did not. I liked them as little as they liked me. And that was very little, for it was a long time before I could be brought to realize that any relation of England could find any possible virtue to be proud of excepting that relationship. That the whole country, indeed, was not a sort of benevolent, though ignorant, country cousin, touchingly anxious to hear all about the head of the family, and be taught the true value of life by any of its scions. As a matter of fact, I had conceived a very clear mental picture of Australia as a burly, farmer-like person, with one hand outstretched in welcome, the other filled with desirable billets of all sorts, which awaited some new-comer, with that wide outlook possible only to one who has rubbed shoulders with the oldest civilization, the completest culture. It took me, indeed, months to realize that what is old, and to our minds completely well established, may be suspected of blue mould. Also that the only relation, likely to be of any use to the impecunious newcomer, is that “Uncle” whom I have discovered to be as outwardly ubiquitous and inwardly suspicious and grudging as in England. Finding, therefore, that everything was going on much the same as though nothing very exciting was expected; and that Australia, as a nation, did not seem to be awaiting me on the quay with open arms, I hustled my few belongings through the Customs, took a cab—the most medieval institution in Melbourne, a sort of closed waggonette, and incredibly rackety—and drove up to a Coffee Palace, which had been recommended to me as cheaper than an hotel.

These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer, the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers and his felt hat well at the back of his head.

“That there,” he responded, jerking his thumb in the direction of a gallery, where a few of the languidly select were draping themselves over the rail—“that there’s where the toffs grub, and there aren’t nothing served there not under two bob; but that there”—and he moved his thumb in the direction of a door to the right, from whence was streaming an endless succession of people, still chewing or, one stage later, picking their teeth—“that there’s where the blokes go: two courses fur a bob.”