The final work of conciliation was effected by a Mr. Robinson, a Methodist, who did what the Government alone could not have done. This man, a bricklayer, touched with the sorrows of the blacks, opened his house to them and became their friend. He learned their language, and then, aided by the Government, went out into the wilds to preach glad tidings to the natives. In a few years he succeeded in bringing into Hobart the entire native population, to be protected. Some of the horrible savages became Christians, and, according to Mr. Bonwick, died with words upon their lips of which no white Christian need be ashamed. The rest—it is a sordid story—fell into civilised ways and took to drinking spirits. That hastened the end—the race speedily died out. In 1869 one male aboriginal alone survived. In 1864 he had appeared, of all places, at a ball given at Government House. He was the last man of his race—a curiosity exhibited at a dance. From this his decline was rapid. He was seldom sober, and in 1869, after a drunken bout, he perished. Trucanini, the last aboriginal woman, died in 1876. The race is now extinct. Our people have no cause to pride themselves upon some of their history in Tasmania. But a new generation has come, and it is for them to maintain Tasmania at that moral, as well as commercial and social height, which it is the glory of Britain now to maintain.
CHAPTER XXXI
A PARADISE OF FRUIT
Who in England does not know the Tasmanian apple—rosy, juicy, and expensive—appearing about Easter, and continuing until the English orchards yield their own annual output? A foreign and delectable fruit is this apple, welcome enough in the off season “at home.”
I am writing in the very heart of Tasmania, in the midst of a wonderful valley, covered with huge crops of hops and apples. We have done two days of motoring, and in the aggregate have covered many thousands of acres, yet never have we lost the view of immense orchards and hop gardens. From a score of heights we have gazed upon plains and valleys unsurpassed for loveliness and fertility. We are in the true home of the apple.
The house in which we are now staying is a roomy, old-fashioned farm-house, built after the English pattern, with certain Tasmanian features added, the whole being surrounded by an old-world garden, such as is seen in small English country towns or large English villages. We are playing at an English holiday, and cheating ourselves with the sweet illusion that the railway yonder really goes to London. Everything here is so English that it would occasion no surprise to discover that this old-fashioned railway is the branch of an English trunk line to London.
To this place we came from Glenorchy, where Dr. Benjafield, the Medical Officer of Health, has one of the finest pear orchards in the southern hemisphere. Two better centres of the apple and pear industry than Glenorchy and Bushy Park it would be impossible to find. All that can be known about the cultivation of the apple and the pear we learn here, from the very beginning of the process when the bush is cleared and fruit saplings are planted until the moment of packing for the English market. Roaming over these enormous expanses of cultivated land, it appears almost incredible that this fertility is the work of a comparatively few years. In the Old Land orchards very frequently have a history. Here there has been no time for making history. A few years ago this country was covered with a stubborn scrub, surmounted with the giant eucalyptus. To-day it has been brought under the dominion of man, to whom it yields a marvellous profit. A system of almost perfect irrigation has converted land which aforetime was worth ten shillings an acre into fertile orchards which to-day could not be bought for two or three hundred times that amount.
No fewer than 200 varieties of apples are grown in Tasmania, including all the best English fruit, such as Ribstons, Cox’s Orange, and the like. As to pears, one grower alone cultivates seventy varieties, and he boasts, with pardonable pride, that his fruit has graced the table of King George. An afternoon spent on his estate was a perfect revelation of the possibilities of the soil. We stood in the centre of one of the largest orchards I have ever seen, and gazed along avenues of fruit trees extending half a mile in length. Pear and apple trees occupied the ground, the former predominating. The fruit was so plentiful that in scores of cases it completely hid the wood of the branches from view. Enormous branches, bending under their healthful weight, literally touched the ground, and here and there was the spectacle of branches broken in twain by reason of the excess of fruit they bore. Some of the pears weigh eighteen ounces when fully ripe, and Dr. Benjafield assured me that they fetched as much as a shilling each, wholesale, in Covent Garden Market. In this orchard, one of five owned by him, were no fewer than 5,000 pear trees. Had the camera been able faithfully to depict the fruit-laden trees, I would have sent some photographs home; but, unfortunately, the protruding fruit is not so distinct from the leaf in a photograph as to give the desired impression.
Orcharding means fortune for the majority of growers if they will attend to their business, cleaning their ground, pruning the trees, and spraying against the dreaded codling-moth. One grower openly admitted that, as a professional man, he had earned nearly £2,000 a year, but the fruit industry paid him better. Year by year the output increases. One estate of 290 acres that I visited is only five years old, and yet in that short time it has yielded 80,000 cases of apples, each case containing from forty to fifty pounds weight of fruit. The ambition of Tasmania is to become the chief fruit-producing area of the southern hemisphere. This year it is likely that a million cases will be shipped from Hobart to Great Britain, South America, and Europe.
These facts and figures show what a change is passing over an island which a century ago was the haunt of the most degraded aboriginal known. And how easily it might have been Dutch or French instead of British! Pride of the flag is most naturally engendered at the view of these wonderful conquests of Britain’s mind and toil.