III
A COSMOPOLITAN COLONY
It must not be gathered from what I have said in the last two chapters that it is all play and no work in Australia. There is a great deal too much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of making real wealth; but still Australia boasts of splendid industries which she is working to real and lasting profit.
While I was in Adelaide I renewed my acquaintance with a lady and gentleman with whom I had come into contact by a lucky chance during a coaching trip through the Blue Mountains and New South Wales, while I was waiting for the steamer from Sydney to Noumea. During that trip which, by the way, is one of the most delightful that you can take in any of the Five Continents, I made the interesting discovery that they not only knew me much better than I knew them, but that they had even named their house after their favourite character in one of my stories. It was through their kindness that I had an opportunity of realising by personal experience the wonderful development of what bids fair to be Australia’s greatest and, in the best sense, most profitable industry. The commercial fabric of Australia rests upon wool, wine, wheat, and gold, and not the least of these is wine.
One day I received an invitation to go and spend three days at Seppeltsfield, which is the centre of one of the largest and most flourishing wine districts in Australia. Here I became the guest of Mr. Benno Seppelt, whose father was the pioneer of wine-growing in South Australia. It was here, too, that I found the most brilliant triumph in cosmopolitan colonisation that I had seen in the course of many wanderings.
We went partly by train and partly by a coach, which landed us after dark on a desperately wet night at a little township about eight miles from the vineyard. Here, owing to a telegraphic mistake, we found no conveyance to take us on to Seppeltsfield, so we put up at just such a bush hotel as I had been wont to sleep at twenty years before when I happened to have the money for bed and breakfast. The principal attraction of the hostelry was a bagatelle-table on which Shem, Ham, and Japheth might have practised. The bagatelle-room was evidently the favourite lounge of the youth of the township, and the Accidental American and I passed a most enjoyable hour playing under the instruction of these gentle youths who would have been considerably astonished if they had seen some of my friend’s performances on a billiard-table. Everybody’s business in Australia is also everybody else’s, wherein Australia does not differ very much from other parts of the world, and the interest that our audience took in us was almost as flattering as their absolutely unrestrained remarks on our play were occasionally the reverse. We began as novices, and gratefully accepted the very freely given hints as to our shortcomings and the way to improve our game. No game, played on that ancient gambling machine, ever improved so quickly, and the talk among our instructors, when they realised that we had been fooling them, gave me the impression that they really regarded us as a couple of sharps who had come down from Adelaide with the intention of cleaning the country-side out.
The next morning the wagonette came over from Seppeltsfield and I began to have my object-lesson in colonisation. The country here was very different to what I had seen in the bush at other times and other places. In fact the bush was bush no longer; all was rolling farmland, cleanly cleared and well fenced, arable land alternating with orchards, vegetable-gardens, and tree-belts disposed so as to give due protection to the young crops and fruit-trees. Everything was trim, neat, and prosperous-looking. The white houses, surrounded by their broad verandahs, were very different to the selectors’ cabins which I had seen up country on my last visit to Australia, and their surroundings were rather those of an English country house hundreds of years old, than of a country which forty years ago was uninhabited scrub.
Then came the vineyards. There are between two and three thousand acres of them round Seppeltsfield, and every acre seemed to me to be as well kept as an English nursery garden.
This is the history of them, and incidentally of the other wine-growing districts in South Australia.