Sanitary officials seem to have the same kind of ideas all over the world. In Noumea they burnt down the house of the first white man who died of the plague, but they allowed his furniture to be sold by auction and spread over the town. At Freemantle they fumigated your steamer trunk and your Gladstone-bag, but they allowed steerage passengers to walk off with swags and bundles which might have held any number of millions of microbes for all they knew.
Western Australia is a very wonderful young country, and when it settles down to real business and discovers that it is better to get gold than to gamble in gold shares, it will do great things. It will also be the better for the abolition of its ridiculous system of protection. Some parts of it will one day be great fruit-growing districts and by way of developing these the government impose a big duty on fruit from other colonies, for instance, Tasmanian apples were selling in Perth and Freemantle at a shilling a pound, although they can be brought across the world and sold in London for fivepence. Meanwhile, the Westralian sells his fruit at artificial prices, having no competition to worry about. While the import duty enables him to put his prices up fifty per cent. he is quite content to produce half what he could have done. In fact it was this problem of protection which kept Western Australia aloof from federation for such a long time. Some day, when intercolonial free trade follows after federation, the Westralian will find his new conditions not quite so pleasant, but a good deal more healthily stimulating.
Westralia is popularly described in other colonies as the land of sin, sand, sore eyes, sorrow, and Sir John Forrest. Sir John Forrest was one of the men who discovered it. He is now its premier. He also discovered the gold-fields; and he has the loudest voice I ever heard even on a politician. What his connection with his other alliterative titles of his adopted land have been I could not discover. They are most probably creations of the luxuriant fancy of other politicians who would be very glad to have made as much out of the country as he has done.
Westralians are called by other colonials “sand-gropers,” and to this they reply with fine irony by describing all other Australians as, “T’other-Siders,” or “dwellers on the other side of Nowhere.” Young nations are after all very like young children, they all possess the finest countries on earth and it is only right that they should do so, if they didn’t think so they would go somewhere else, and so new nations would never get made.
On the whole I am afraid I must say that the new Australia did not quite come up to the expectations that I had based on my memories of the old; but I don’t suppose that fact will trouble Australia any more than the lack of appreciation of a once distinguished poet and dramatist troubled the Atlantic Ocean. One thing is certain, no country which breeds such men and women as you find from Brisbane to Freemantle can help being great some day; and when Miss Australia settles down a little more seriously to work she will begin to grow very great indeed.
At Albany I found the long, white, graceful shape of the Messagerie liner Australien lying on the smooth waters of St. George’s Sound, and in her I made as pleasant a homeward trip as the most fastidious of globe-trotters could wish for. I have often been amused by the pathetic appeals of untravelled Englishmen on behalf of British steamer lines. Such an appeal usually ends with reflections on the patriotism of British travellers who patronise foreign ships. The fact is that the boot is on the other leg. Why are not the British companies patriotic enough to make their boats as pleasant to travel in as French, and German, and American boats are? Travellers whose journeys are counted by tens of thousands of miles want to do their travelling as pleasantly as possible, and the pleasantest ship to journey in, is the one that has the fewest regulations. On the Messagerie boats you will find none that are not absolutely essential to the proper discipline of the ship and the comfort of your fellow-passengers. While you are on board you are treated as a welcome guest, and not as an intruder whose presence is tolerated because your passage money is necessary to make dividends. You are also looked upon as a reasonable being, capable of taking care of yourself and ordering your comings and goings within decent limits, not as a child who mustn’t sit up playing cards after a certain hour, and who is not to be trusted with the management of an electric light in the small hours of the tropical night when you can’t sleep and want to read. In short, the principal reason why experienced travellers prefer foreign lines to British is simply the fact that they like to be treated as grown men and women, and not as children or irresponsible lunatics. It is not a question of patriotism at all, it is one of commercial consideration on the one side and comfort and convenience on the other.
The first thing we heard when we reached Marseilles was the welcome news that the tide of war had turned, and Mafeking was relieved.
Our company in the saloon was about half French and half English and Australian, and a more friendly crowd it would have been difficult to find afloat. We had had the usual concert the night before, and wound up with the Marseillaise and God Save the Queen, and when we set up the champagne for the last time in the smoking-room and drank to B.P. and his merry men, the only man who declined to join in was, I regret to say, an Irishman. He was as jolly a compagnon de voyage and as good-hearted a man as you would wish to meet in a ten-thousand-mile trip; but on that particular subject he was a trifle eccentric.
When I left the Australien I looked upon Yellow Jack, as I hope, for the last time, for it ever a man was heart-sick of the sight of a piece of bunting I was of that miserable little yellow oblong.