Besides the Botanical Gardens, ‘Melbourne boasts, among others, the Exhibition Gardens, famous for their roses, and the Treasury Gardens, windswept, and dirty, and desolate, their ragged garments incongruously patched by a Japanese garden, railed all round with spiked iron rails, into which no one but the gardener can ever penetrate, though city urchins sit on a mangy bank near and toss stones into it. Just beyond these gardens, separated from them, indeed, only by a road, lie the Fitzroy Gardens, which come first and foremost in the affections of many people. They have not the grandeur of the Botanical Gardens, though they display an even more perennial greenness and a certain wild charm of their own, and the lawns are not so smoothly kept, while in places the grass grows deliciously lush and high. There are more English trees there, too, and in the autumn the ground is all golden with fallen leaves, while there are fewer precisely-set flower-beds and more borders—a far more artistic arrangement, to my mind.
They are, indeed, lovely gardens—gardens where old Andrew Marvell might well have brought to life his all exquisite conception of “A green thought in a green shade,” if—and, alas! that there should be such an “if”—if only it had not been that—by some impish freak of, God knows what, Mayor, Corporation, or City Council—these sylvan lawns and glades are decorated, the horrible word stands well here, with a redundancy of statues, beside which some of Madame Tussaud’s figures might well be considered as works of art. I have often wondered that the puritanical City fathers have not raised objections to these figures on account of their classic want of drapery—the only classical thing about them—but perhaps it has been realized that they are too utterly hideous to arouse any feeling but aversion, even in the most ardent and youthful breast. However it may be, there they remain, and are likely to remain, till that golden age when education has been digested into something at least resembling cultivation.
CHAPTER XI
PRIMITIVE VICTORIA
Charles Dickens has created characters which will assuredly live for ever. If he had invented real animals instead of imaginary people—who are much more real than many real people, because more clearly drawn—I would attribute to him all the strange beasts of Australia which, for the most part, are absurdly Pickwickian. They are so clumsily and curiously formed, their expressions are so alert and inquisitive, their limbs are so oddly proportioned. Indeed, I could never see a kangaroo without thinking of a picture by Cruikshank of the Artful Dodger, with his long trousers, huge feet, and look of cocksure cunning; or a native-companion, without reviving at the same time a mental picture of the fascinating Jingle. Besides, though, like the characters of Dickens, the Australian animals are so odd as to be almost unbelievable; they are yet intensely human. They have not the expression of animals. They know really too much. Of course, they were like that long, long before the days of Dickens, but Nature has odd freaks of humour, and perhaps they were the outcome of one such freak and the novelist’s imagination of another. I know one has no business to propound theories like this in a book that is trying hard to be matter of fact, but it is no use blinking the fact that the Australian animals are pure farce, save only, and above all, in their management of that greatest of all affairs—maternity.
What an extraordinary thing it does seem that Nature should have invented anything so absolutely perfect as the pouch, and then, apparently, forgotten about it. To see a woman—a mere woman—her baby, with its pathetically nodding head, clasped in one arm, which, in addition, is, as often as not, further weighted with string bags and baskets, while the other hand clutches skirt, and umbrella, and the wrist of a toddling two-year-old—to see this, I say, and then to think of the safe babies of the Australian forests, gives one pause. The lubra does her best, in spite of Nature’s stinginess, and slings her baby across her hip or over her back in a shawl or length of calico, or at the worst a strip of gum-fibre. But the European mother, even in Australia, for the most part sits it upright on the crook of her arm, or clasps it with agonizing firmness round its middle, at an age when the little marsupial, swinging at ease in its mother’s pouch, learns to know the look of the world, while it sniffs the fresh air and crops the daintiest fronds of grass; all in perfect safety, with no risk, even, of damp feet.
At times I have literally haunted the Melbourne Zoo just for the fun of watching the kangaroos and seeing the tiny little heads peering out from the mother’s pouch, and particularly remember one snow-white mother-kangaroo I once saw, a rare and beautiful creature.
I do not quite know the difference that exists between the kangaroos and wallabies, excepting in point of size, the wallabies being a good deal the smaller. There is a walking club in Melbourne to which a good many professional men belong, calling itself “the Wallaby Club,” the members of which walk—every other Sunday, I believe it is—mostly from somewhere where they have had lunch on to somewhere else where they have tea, and then stay and dine; also indulging in periodical dinners in town, with punning menus and toast-cards, often exceedingly witty. Then, again, an expression used for what in England we call “tramping,” is “going on the wallaby,” otherwise “humping the swag,” or “the bluey,” or “sun-downing.”
Smaller still than the wallabies are the kangaroo rats, which are about the size of a large cat. I do not know if they are ever seen in Victoria; but my only acquaintance with them was in New South Wales, at a little farm where they used to come in any number on to the veranda at night, after the house was shut up; seeking for crumbs and scraps, I expect, as we had many of our meals there. The sound of their jumping feet on the bare boards used to make such a noise that I would often get up to “shoo” them away; then stand quite fascinated watching their antics in the bright moonlight. I believe they are quite easy to tame, if only they can be caught young enough, like all the kangaroo tribe; but as yet I have never had the chance of trying, though for a long time I had a tiny tame opossum, who used to love to creep up my coat sleeve, and sleep comfortably against my shoulder, in the little pent house formed by the fulness at the top.
In Victoria kangaroos and wallabies are still to be found in the woods and on the wide, open plains, though each year they become more and more scarce; while among the forest trees, if you are very quiet and patient, you may yet meet with a wombat—particularly in the eastern part of the state—or a lumbering native bear, like nothing on earth so much as a child’s woolly toy, really the most ingratiating creature. Standing about two feet high, and covered with soft, thick fur, it has an odd, blunt, wistful sort of a nose, with little round eyes like boot-buttons, and makes one of the most charming of pets, if it can only be caught young enough. The native bear carries its baby on its back—the two little paws clasped tightly round its neck and buried deep in its fur—and climbs, thus encumbered, up the highest gum-trees, and from bough to bough, nibbling at the tender young leaves; the mildest person in the world, the very turn outwards of its toes giving it an almost absurdly apologetic air. “I have been left behind,” it seems to say; “but do, please, let me go on in my own way—I and these wise old woods; we understand one another, and life and leisure are pleasant things.” The wombat is heavier and clumsier, and its fur darker in hue, but it, too, is slow and peaceful in all its ways, the opossum, indeed, being the gadabout of the forest.
There is now a national park at William’s Promontory, which is the most southern point of Victoria—indeed, of the whole of Australia—where it is hoped that many of the rapidly-decreasing and unique wild animals of the continent may be induced to breed and otherwise make themselves at home, though, oddly enough, the kangaroos—true kangaroos, for there are any number of wallabies—have been found the most difficult to procure of all the animals. Still, there are koalas, and wombats, bower-birds, lyre-birds, and many others—though whether there is or is not a platypus I am unable to say; but the scarcity of kangaroos is appalling to all lovers of Nature-life, who remember how Flinders, in his book, tells of the huge flocks of those animals abounding along the shores of the new colony, so numerous and so tame that they could easily be killed with clubs or the butt-end of the men’s guns.