Every principal street in Melbourne seems to be possessed of a poor relation—meagre, dreary, and more or less unpresentable. There is Collins Street, for instance, wide and majestic, and—may I say?—awful in its unbroken length, leading straight up to the Houses of Parliament, and yet not emblematical, I hope, of that other wide and straight path that leadeth to destruction. Keeping step with it all the way, dim and narrow, noisy and bustling, in the shadow of its skirts runs Little Collins Street. Then there is to the right, still looking upwards towards the seats of the mighty, Flinders Street and Little Flinders Street; to the left, Burke Street and Little Burke Street—the haunt of John Chinaman—Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street, and so on; the transverse streets that cross them alone being free of these poor relations. “The most irrelevant things in Nature,” as Charles Lamb calls them. Indeed, I wish that more of the streets were without them, or that, at least, they did not run in such unbroken continuity—that one might tear the middle out of them in places, as one does out of a French roll, and form a hollow, instead of a block. Even in the place of a single warehouse, here and there, to have a little open space, a few trees—the city-loving plane or large-leaved maple—and a seat or two, so that the unnumbered city clerks and warehousemen might have some little open place and some greenery in sight of which to eat their lunch.
Melbourne is rich in public gardens of rare beauty, while in the Botanical and Fitzroy Gardens there are kiosks where one may get a meal served in the open. But they are all too far from the centre of the city to be of much use during the short hour or half-hour allowed for lunch; while for all the tiny people whose fathers are caretakers, or whose mothers are charwomen, in the very heart of the town, they are indeed a far journey, fraught with untold dangers.
For many years I lived and worked in a great mass of buildings, offices, single rooms, and chambers, rather to the west of the town, starving for the breath of a tree, the sight of a little greenery within easy reach; even the Flag-Staff Gardens, the nearest in that direction, being a good twenty minutes’ walk away. Then, to my joy, I discovered the little Old Cathedral, packed away among warehouses and offices, with its tiny garden, its patch of green sward, its few shady trees, and its herbaceous borders, where there grew a blue flower, whose name I do not know but which I imagine belonged to the borage tribe, of the intensest blue I have ever seen. There were other flowers, of course—geraniums and nasturtiums and dahlias, I believe—but it is the blue alone that lives in my memory, for, like Thoreau, I feel that there is something intensely exhilarating “even in the very memory of blue flowers growing in patches.”
After a while this little garden came to make a real difference in my workaday world—to represent such a true oasis in a desert, which was sometimes all despair, that I can but wish there were more such breathing-places in the midst of the bustling city world. St. James, of course, added very considerably to the glamour of the garden in this case; impressing me, as it always did, with a curious air of antiquity, breathing out more of the atmosphere of the old world than any other building in Melbourne. I use the word “curious” because, after all, it is only some seventy-four years old, though it has taken upon itself an air of reverent age, enwrapping itself about with an atmosphere of brooding peace, quite unviolated by all the fury of getting and spending which goes on around it. Perhaps it is the fact of its being surrounded, as it is, by such a medley of youth and vigour that gives it this precocious air of venerable age; like the eldest of a large growing family it has reached a sedate maturity very early in life, as one counts the lives of churches. Indeed, it is more than mature, and English nostrils sniff up greedily from within its portals the only possible odour of mould and mustiness to be found in Melbourne. Dear old church! The services are orderly and reverent, but in the high tide of work days, when it is empty, but—all praise to its Rector!—never shut during business hours, it and its little garden preach to us the best possible sermon on that one text which, English and Australian alike, we all want reminding of in these busy days, bidding us “study to be quiet.”
CHAPTER III
MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE FOR THE GANDER”
When I was a girl I remember many times hearing my father say that he would rather mount a lady on a young, well-broken horse than on an old hunter; that they knew too much, that they had mastered the art of falling soft, and preferred their own way to that of their rider. As a housekeeper, I know I would rather have an absolutely untaught young girl as a domestic than one who held her own views as to how everything was to be done; equally fearing and disliking any new innovation which might possibly mean extra work. For the same reason, if I was a politician, I would rather have my lines cast in a new country, not yet pot-bound by traditions. England seems at times to hover, literally paralyzed, between the devil of:—“They say” and the deep sea of:—“Has been.” I recollect that in the old days at home a ploughman was ordered to run his furrow along a special field from east to west. I can see now the odd, clouded look of bewilderment which came into his face as the order was given to him; then the drawing down of the long upper lip, the set of the obstinate chin, when his protestation that it “wur allus ploughed t’other way” were received merely by a smiling repetition of the command. Finally, his utter bewilderment when the—to his mind—unanswerable argument that it had “allus been ploughed that way, when ferther wur a lad, an’ gran’ferther wur a lad, an’ the owd meyster wur alive,” was met in the same manner.
The merest yokel in Australia could see no reason at all in an argument such as this. Here the people revel in change. They are ready to try anything, and, if one plan fails, another is at once experimented with. Sometimes it may be rather like the progress of a bull in a china-shop, but still it is progress, and the people here find it very difficult to realize the mind of a country which takes up the attitude of a man refusing to change his shirt for fear that he should suffer some chill or discomfort in the process. In the article on the Sydney Congress in the Times of May 24, 1910, the difference between the two countries in many political matters is very plainly stated:—“There is nothing more extraordinary in Free Trade propaganda than the lame contention that we must continue upon a ruinous course because a new policy will involve initial difficulties. That argument is laughed to scorn in Australia. The Australian fears no difficulties. The spirit which leads men to face and overcome obstacles is in his blood. His history and condition are one long record of triumphing over difficulties, and he cannot understand why the complexity of framing a tariff should be urged for a moment in England. He thinks, like many Englishmen, that the historian of the future will contemplate with amazement the spectacle of the Dominions seeking closer unity, while the Mother Country remains coldly repelling their advances.”
A question one very often hears asked in Australia, usually as a joke or sort of catch-phrase, is:—“Where do I come in?” But there is no joke at all about the state of mind which such a question implies. I have often heard new chums say very nasty things about what they call the “self-seeking nature of the people”; and they will point out—when the distinction between the old and new country are being discussed—all that Australia owes to England, how she depends on her for naval protection and for her very life as a nation. But, still, something more is expected from the modern mother than merely boxing the ears of all the other children who interfere with her progeny, and, after all, the obligation is not entirely one-sided. Even if we forget the ready help which was given in the time of the Boer War, we ought not to forget that in Australia many thousands of people, that England confessedly could do nothing with, have been remade into men and women, who—with their children—have gone to the making of a very fine people.
In many ways Australia is more loyal to England than she is to herself. Among private people there always seems very little preference given to Australian-made goods alone, but a very great deal to all goods made by English-speaking people, though naturally those in authority intend to protect their own manufacturers first. Out here Imperial Preference is not a party matter, and in these days to come across even one important question in politics, where the good of the entire country alone is considered, seems like opening a window and letting into a stuffy, gas-heated atmosphere a stream of pure air; while it is for this reason that the defeat of Mr. Deakin—during the last election—has not upset the whole apple-cart, as such a Labour victory would inevitably have done in England.
There is no doubt, I believe, that Australia, as a whole, is in favour of Imperial Preference. At the Sydney Congress, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart were frankly for it, and though the three great Chambers of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide remained neutral, none of the State capitals voted against it, while most of the smaller Chambers were most openly in its favour.