Advance Australasia: A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia. / Second Edition.

by Frank Thomas Bullen

XX SOME POLITICAL REFLECTIONS

Here, as elsewhere in New Zealand, I am astounded at the paucity of the population when looking around upon what has been done. It seems impossible that this beautiful city with its environs has less than 60,000 inhabitants. According to appearance it should have been 200,000; but there are the figures, and no amount of manipulation can alter them. I am told that the bulk of the trade of Wellington is carried on by Dunedin merchants, and certainly, judging by the names I saw over the principal mercantile buildings in Wellington, there would appear to be much truth in the assertion. That, however, will not explain why this wonderful little city still deserves the diminutive. It is, as I have elsewhere noted, the headquarters of the most compact and go-ahead coasting Steamship Company in the world—a Company, too, that is launching out now in directions that will make it anything but a coasting concern. Of course everybody (to use a colloquialism) knows that Otago is preeminently a Scotch Colony, but if the visitor did not know that, and had been an observant globe-trotter, he would at once perceive on arrival here that the Scotch passion for solidity and permanence of buildings so manifest in all Scotch towns, is abundantly in evidence here.

But perhaps I have said enough to show that the small southern city of Dunedin, hidden away in the far, mysterious South, has no need, as far as her experience and institutions are concerned, to be ashamed of her origin. She has indeed kept the flag flying. There is, however, one matter that is of great importance and may, indeed, have had considerable influence in delaying her growth. She possesses a splendid harbour in appearance, but its navigability is of a very low order. The entrance at Taiaroa Heads is so tortuous and narrow that it is an exceedingly difficult matter to get these modern big steamships in or out. Also the channels available for such vessels within the harbour are so restricted, and have such sharp curves, that the risk of taking huge ships through them are exceedingly great even up to Port Chalmers, one-half the distance from the city. The enterprise of the citizens has succeeded in so deepening the remaining portion of the harbour up to the city from Port Chalmers that vessels of 8,000 tons may and do get up there, but it is an arduous task, and when they do arrive they see confronting them a low beach separating that part of the harbour from the Pacific; which leads even the most casual observer to the conclusion that a very short cutting, far less expensive than the incessant dredging of the present channel, should suffice to admit the largest ships to the city wharves direct from the sea without danger or delay.

Here, again, we see the disabling, deterrent effects of a small population upon such improvements as this would be. Engineers make light of difficulties, which only exist in order to be overcome, but money in abundance must be had, and a small community must be taxed beyond bearing for a local improvement, which, when carried out, does not show an adequate return for so many years that the generation which achieved it may as well look upon it as money lost. You see it all comes back to the same starting-point—want of population. It is the crux of all questions out here, and to all appearance will still remain so. Very well; if the Colonists still are content to have it so, if the working class, which undoubtedly rules New Zealand now, is convinced that this condition is the best for them, I suppose it will so remain, and as to that they would probably say it is nobody's business but theirs. And there the visitor is compelled to leave it as long as he can; but it is ever present with him.

There is another aspect of these thriving Colonies that will not be thrust aside. How utterly, abjectly, defenceless they are, if the protection of the Imperial Navy is withdrawn. Here we see a city as beautiful as a dream. Her foreshores are crowded with stately buildings of stone which would do credit to any country, however old. The romantic heights which embosom the city are dotted with pretty homes to which the citizens ascend by means of the cable-cars, and right away down to the verge of the Pacific on the level ground cast up for ages by the sea lie in hundreds the comfortable dwellings of the workers. It gives a patriot a thrill of horror to contemplate the fate of such communities as this in the easily imaginable event of the Motherland being so hardly bestead as to need every warship she possesses for, not merely the defence of her own shores, but the safe convoy of food to Great Britain. Should one swift cruiser of the enemy succeed in eluding the pursuit of the home defending squadrons, and get out here, it would be an easy and, alas! a congenial task, judging from what we are compelled to read in the organs of public opinion in Germany, for such a vessel to reduce these smiling centres of industry to heaps of smoking ruins without incurring the slightest risk. In the face of this awful and, I am bound to believe, imminent danger, what are the Colonies doing? Paying a subsidy to the support of the Imperial Navy which is nothing less than a puerile insult—£240,000 all told, of which amount New Zealand, with her amazing prosperity, contributes £40,000. It does not seem to occur to these Labour members, these devisers of Socialistic plans for the benefit of their own class, that it is of little use to make a list of ideal conditions of life if they take no steps to protect the people who enjoy that life. The plain fact is that the whole of the Australasian Colonies are living in a fool's paradise in regard to this matter, and pay no heed whatever to the spectacle of the anticipating Teuton licking his lips as he thinks of the fat prizes that will presently fall to his prowess and the results of his forethought. As I have ventured to point out to them again, if only they would tax themselves in the same measure as we at home do, say at the rate of £1 5s. per head per annum towards the acquirement and upkeep of a Navy it would mean a sum of at least £5,000,000 per annum, or in three years enough to account satisfactorily for any hostile European squadron that should dare to venture into these waters on piratical purposes intent.

I do not care whether they acquire a purely Australasian Navy or subsidise a sufficiently powerful squadron of the Imperial Navy for Australasian defence. The thing is to prepare for the defence of this wonderful group of cities set on the borders of the Southern Seas, reared by men of our own race, Anglo-Saxon to the core, without more than a trace of that extraordinary mixture of breeds which is seen in the United States, making it the most polyglot population on earth, and filling the mind of the observer with intensest amazement at the interested cry of "hands across the sea" or of blood being thicker than water.

There is something about Dunedin that appeals very strongly to the visitor fresh from home, and I think that something may be summed up in the word "weather." During the winter at any rate Dunedin can compete successfully with us in Britain in the matter of atmospheric uncertainty of conditions and disagreeableness. It is no uncommon thing to get five or six different samples of weather in almost the same number of hours, each vieing with the other which shall be most unpleasant. It is a strenuous climate, and it breeds strenuous folk as it always did, and therefore it is that Dunedin strikes the visitors from Britain as being homely. And when you take a trip by train, as I did, across the level plains of the Taieri bounded by snow-crowned hills, and watch the sheep standing in the sodden turnip rows stolidly munching away with their backs to the bitter blast and driving snow, you find it hard to realise that you are not journeying North from Euston or King's Cross to Scotland in midwinter, until you come upon a farmsteading and note that it is built of wood, or miss the hedgerows and walls that bound the tiny fields of home.

There is another thing which I am bound to note in these impressions, and that is the apparent absence of rabbits in this country, which I have always been led to believe suffered from a veritable plague of these voracious prolific rodents. I pride myself upon missing nothing of consequence that passes within view as the train flits by, but I hereby solemnly declare that I have not yet seen a whole rabbit in this country. By which I mean that I have often eaten rabbit but have never seen a living one. I could not travel one-tenth of the distance in England that I have travelled here without seeing many rabbits and hares scampering across the well-tilled fields, and I have naturally felt very curious. Questioning such folks as I thought might know, I have received various answers such as that "You won't see them near the railway line" (why?) and "They don't show much in the daytime" (again why?); but the substance of it all seems to be that the rabbit-catching and exporting industries have been able to cope with what once was a pest so successfully that there is now a fear among a certain section of the up-country population that "rabbiting" will soon cease to be a lucrative employment. At any rate it appears certain that, without the importation of snakes or the inoculation by disease or any of the quaint schemes which were mooted in the legislative assemblies out here, the rabbit problem has been solved and does not now stand in the way of the South Island farmer raising lucrative crops.

Here (between Christchurch and Invercargill) may be seen a wonderful stretch of agricultural land almost as level as a table, in many places forty miles wide, two or three hundred miles long. Often it extends to the sea from the snow-capped ranges of mountains which decorate the sky-line inland many miles away, again it assumes the nature of a wide valley bounded on either side by ranges of hills. It is beautiful land, and in many places it is well cultivated, but an enormous amount of it is still only used for feeding sheep, which seems a waste when the uncultivable ranges are so eminently fitted for that purpose. In other places the rivers which seek the sea from the mountains having so large a space of perfectly flat country to pass over have meandered sluggishly over very wide areas, creating deltas of barrenness by reason of the detritus they bring down with them. These great spaces, over which the railway passes on low trestles, just present a perfectly desert surface of grey gravel and pebbles where not a blade of anything green is growing, which seems unnatural, remembering the extremely fertile character of most riverine country. And I could not help thinking that if some steps were taken to confine these wandering streams to a single deep channel for each, that many great benefits would result to the land itself, which would soon become cultivable, and also a means of communication with the interior by water would be created. Such an improvement, however, seems as yet a very long way off.

I am debarred at this present time from writing of Invercargill, the southernmost city of all British possessions, for I have not been able to get farther south than Gore, which, with a population of a small village, or about 2,000 souls, gives itself, with a sublime air of importance, the proud title of the "Chicago of the South." It would be ludicrous if it were not said in such deadly earnest, and yet when the visitor sees the energy and the up-to-date methods manifested by this tiny community, he is bound to take off his hat to its citizens. It is most brilliantly illuminated by electric light on tall standards, which would not shame any city in the world; nearly every house is also lit electrically and has its telephone; the streets are generously wide and mathematically straight; and the houses, although mainly of wood, are beautifully designed and most substantially built. Moreover Gore, like several other similar towns in the South Island, has decided by a majority of its citizens that it will not allow the sale of any intoxicant, and consequently there are no liquor saloons. Whoever feels that he needs stimulant of this kind may import it and keep it in his house, or give it away, but he may not sell it under a first penalty of £50, and on a second offence, three months' imprisonment without the option of a fine. Gore has just entered upon a second period of three years of "no licence," so presumably the citizens find it works satisfactorily, and undoubtedly the system is spreading. The visitor will be wise to offer no opinion upon the subject, seeing that it is a matter of purely local concern to a self-governing community.