In due time we reached Bathurst, where I was met by a joyous party of youngsters, who bundled me into a carriage drawn by a couple of handsome horses, and in a little while I found myself seated in the charming country residence of the Hon. E. Webb, a member of the Upper House, who came from Saltash, and who has certainly gained here both fame and fortune. Bathurst, I take it, may be considered a fair specimen of an Australian county town, and the Bathurst people are certainly more devoted to its welfare than are people at home to that of the localities in which they reside. The place is laid out with an eye to the future, and the streets are a great deal broader than our Portland Place. The houses and shops are rather mixed, some of them being built of brick, lofty and commodious, while others are wooden shanties which would not be tolerated at home. The public buildings are fine. The town is governed by a mayor and corporation. It has a very handsome court-house, a magnificent hospital, which is not in debt, and has—how unlike our English ones!—£3,000 to its credit in the treasurer’s hands. Its churches of all kinds are good; and even the little churches in which the Baptists and Independents meet are clean and comfortable. Out here one would have thought the Baptists and Independents might have worshipped together; but no, they must meet in separate bodies, as at home. The Presbyterians have a fine church, which must have cost a good deal of money, but when I looked in on Sunday evening the worshippers were a mere handful. Surely some of these churches might unite, and be all the stronger for so doing.
The only drawback here is the heat, which does terrible mischief. We are 2,000 feet above the level of the sea, and the people call it cool because the thermometer is something under a hundred in the shade. The clouds come up, but they bring no rain. At night we have a cool breeze, but, unfortunately, just as one feels comfortable, and that life is worth living, everyone goes to bed. Soon after my arrival I had a country drive. There had been a bush fire, and my host sent me and one of his nephews to see what amount of mischief had been done. Away we dashed merrily, drawn by a pair of young horses that scarcely turned a hair, along the sandy road, over the rolling downs. Leaving Bathurst behind, we were soon in what in England we should call a waste, howling wilderness, and yet a few days of rain would make all that plain a monster park, where the sheep could graze, and everyone would rejoice. For miles we saw no living thing, and no sign of civilization save the fences—of rails, very high, as the cattle have a bad habit of jumping them. We met a young lady riding into Bathurst, holding the horse’s reins in one hand and her parasol in the other, a waggon drawn by ten oxen coming into the town with wood, and a cart or two—that was all. We passed over a fine bridge, but the bed of the river was dry. Far ahead of us was a cloud of smoke from a bush-fire, a calamity of constant occurrence in such warm weather. Soon we were in a forest ourselves, ghastly with the withered grass and the stumps of old trees not yet decayed, with the white trunks and grotesque branches twisted in all directions, but leafless, and gum-trees that are ring-barked—the common mode of destroying trees in this part of the country. Now and then I saw an unfortunate cow, vainly seeking green grass, or cool water, or the grateful shade, and half-starved all the while; or a hare, as big again as that of England, and breeding much more rapidly in this precocious clime. Presently a couple of magpies passed us, and they are much larger than at home. But life of any kind is rare, and we got on to the hillside where the fire had been, and saw everything black and charred, trees fallen down, fences only a black line of charcoal. One could fancy that everything living had fallen a prey to the devouring flame. Up in the bush, on a hill on our left, there were kangaroos, but they unfortunately did not put in an appearance; and if I saw three emus in the course of my ride, candour compels me to own that they were tame, in a gentleman’s grounds, and not in their native state. The great pests of this part of the world are the flies. I don’t mind them on the table, if they do make the white sugar apparently a heap of black, or if they do darken the snow-white tablecloth; it is only when they proceed to attack the company around that I think they carry their jokes too far. They are a special torment to the bald-headed, but they disdain not the fairest of the fair. The New South Wales flies are smaller than those of the mother country, and twice as mischievous. To them there is nothing sacred; and as to the forty winks grateful to many of us after luncheon or dinner, they are quite out of the question.
The English fruit-grower complains of the wet and cold, the Australian of the heat and drought. The Ex-Mayor of Sydney tells me he has lost £10,000 worth of sheep this season in consequence of the heat; and the charming daughter of my host, who resides with her husband at a station a hundred and fifty miles further north—and in Australia the further you go north the hotter it becomes—has been driven away from her husband, and has to come here with her children because they have no water nearer than eight miles. As I write I see the signs of a water famine everywhere, in the dusty road, in the parched fields, in the distant hills far away. The only exception is the garden, consisting of many acres beautifully laid out and well shaded with trees of all kinds. Mr. Webb, my host, has a tank which conveys the water everywhere, and even the lawn-tennis ground beyond, to which the young men and maidens seem as devoted as they are at home, abounds with verdure. The mansion, for such it is, rises out of a garden of roses and dahlias, and luxurious flowers, blooming and bright to look on; while behind are apple and plum and pear and greengage and mulberry trees laden with luscious fruit to any amount. Some of the flowers, the stocks, for instance, take far brighter colours than they do at home; the greengages, too, are finer than ours, owing to the same reason—the abundance of sun, a sun which makes the Australian hornet, with its blue gauze wings, as black as a coal-heaver.
As to the servants in this house, I dare not say what wages they are getting. All I know is, that if I were a lady-help, or even a servant of all-work, it would not be long ere I booked my passage for New South Wales. The coachman has a hundred a year and his house, and the gardener not much less. It is needless to add that I find it good to be here: it is hard that I must take up my bed and walk. Here no iron horse screams as he urges on his wild career, no noisy screw perpetually churns up the troubled sea; I hear no hoarse watchman, as the hour strikes, proclaiming in the midnight air, ‘All’s well’: here no newsboy makes the land hideous with his noise, nor does the gin-drinking tramp interfere with my peaceful digestion. Most weary seems the sea—
‘Weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of foam.’
Yes, like the mild-eyed, melancholy Lotos Eaters, I feel it is sweet to sit me down upon the yellow sand and
‘Dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave.’
But I am back in Sydney, and seek to study its ways. We hold the Church of Rome, in all ages and in all countries, to be the foe of freedom, civil and religious, the great obstacle in the way of progress, and the worst enemy of God and man; it is but natural that its growth in New South Wales and all Australia gives one alarm. It fights with an immense advantage over its opponents by reason of its wealth, its effective organization, and its Irish allies, who are banded together for its support in every colony, and, I may add, in every land. The only priest I have as yet met with was a model of good-temper and good-humour, and had an enormous advantage in every way over his ritualistic ally, who does his work unconsciously, and burns his fingers by pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for him. In New South Wales it is understood that the Romanists are discontented with the existing Education Act, which is undenominational, and they have supported the Protectionists, not out of love for them, but with the hope to get some of the public money for their schools, or, at any rate, modifications, in the school system which may be favourable to themselves. As it is, they do not fare badly. The other day it was discovered that a school teacher had, in spite of his duty to be neutral, gone out of his way to teach Romanist doctrines to his pupils. A fuss was made about it, but he was only removed to another school, that was all. Again, at a place called Waratah, it has been decided that there shall be no intramural burials. The principal of the monastery there writes to the Municipal Council for the privilege to bury members of the monastery in their own grounds. The Council are divided, and the Mayor gives the casting vote in favour of the monastery, that is, in favour of breaking the laws of his borough. Now, it is very evident that if any Protestant parson, any Baptist or Wesleyan or Presbyterian, had pleaded for anything of the kind, that is, for power to break the sanitary laws of the borough, and to have a private burying-ground of their own, they would have pleaded in vain. In Victoria, four or five years ago, there was such an uprising that there has since been no Catholic party in the House of any size whatever. It is well to note here that in the eyes of the State, all over Australia, religions are on an equality. Under Sir Richard Bourke all religions received State aid; but in 1862 this was put a stop to, and all that the State now does is to pension off the survivors under the old régime. In this way last year, in New South Wales, was divided between the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, the Presbyterians and the Methodists, about £10,000, the Church of England, as was to be expected, taking the lion’s share. When the sparseness of the population is considered, the church attendance will appear very large; and, though apparently less than found in the colony of Victoria, it is, proportionately, much larger than in England. In the Bush, the Church of England parsons seem to be somewhat remiss in the performance of their duties. A lady residing in the interior tells me that she went to the Church of England preaching station frequently, but the parson never turned up, and she had to return unblessed.
Yesterday I took the tramcar—a Government institution, by-the-bye—and had a look at Botany Bay, a place of many evil memories, and whose associations reach very far, even now that it has no terrors for the criminal or reprobate. In reality, Botany Bay was not the penal settlement; that was at Sydney; but the popular mind believed all the convicts were sent to Botany Bay, and hence my use of the term. In a recently published correspondence, a distinguished Victorian judge asserts: ‘An uneasy and uninformed feeling of suspicious dislike of England and her Government, which is not without a justifying cause, undoubtedly exists, and is growing, in these communities. Its extent is not ascertainable, but it may safely be affirmed that it will depend largely upon the relations which yet remain to be acknowledged and to be established between the Imperial and Colonial Governments of her Majesty in the immediate future, whether this feeling will not soon expand among native Australians into one of profound and general alienation.’ I think the judge is right, and that this feeling is growing stronger, finding expression, not in the old-established papers of the colony, such as The Melbourne Argus or The Sydney Morning Herald, papers of great wealth and influence, but among their younger and less fortunate rivals. ‘It was England,’ writes one of them, ‘that first seamed the white shoulder of Australia with the livid mark of the lash. It is the people who wielded that instrument of degradation, and their descendants, who wish to draw the bonds of Empire closer to-day. The Imperial connection is, therefore, a shameful one.’ Poor Captain Cook had a good deal to answer for when, in an evil moment, he first dropped his anchor in Botany Bay. It was quite a mistake to send out our criminals there; they should have been allowed, says young Australia, to die of gaol-fever at home. But, says young Australia, England in her wickedness did more—it colonized a continent where the English spirit of the time was to be perpetuated by the transmitted influence of the gaolers of these convicts long after a new Liberalism had entered into British politics, and long after the narrow spirit of a hundred years ago, with convictism itself, had passed away. The contention of a growing class in Australia is that the enduring effect of the convict system on the public spirit of the older Australian colonies is traceable, not so much to the convicts themselves, as to their gaolers. These are the mercenary wretches to be gibbeted for the scorn of every honest man. These are the gods whom the Australians ignorantly worship, whose spirit is still strong to deprive the horny-handed of his rights; who were the founders of the vile system which actually gives property an influence in making laws, and in determining the political character of the country; men who made colossal fortunes by the illegitimate sale of rum. The chief constable of Sydney had actually a license to sell rum; and, as Dr. Laing puts it, ‘the chief gaoler, though not exactly permitted to convert the gaol into a grog shop, had a licensed house in which he sold rum publicly on his own behalf right opposite the gaol door.’ The convicts, it is admitted, for the sake of argument, were some of them bad; but as to their gaolers—the gallant men of the New South Wales Corps, for instance—they were all rascals; and they were the founders of Australia, and their spirit lives and dominates in the political institutions of the country to this day. It seems to me that this is a foul libel on the country, though it is the indictment put forth by an Australian writer in an Australian newspaper. Australians are not much given to the study of history, and perhaps it is well. History is of little avail when it is treated in this way. Australia was not all Botany Bay, and its leaders are men whose fathers, by their character and enterprise and industry, distinguished themselves in the fair land to which they had come penetrated with English ideas, with English habits, with the English Bible, with Milton, and Shakespeare, and Burns; and it is to them, rather than to Botany Bay, that Australia owes its greatness and its power, its present flourishing state, its capabilities—when its mines are developed, when its vast continent has been opened up by settlement, and a general system of irrigation—of a greater future. It is true, I read in some of the weekly papers, that Australia is tyrannized over by wealthy imbeciles, while the high-souled horny-handed is left out in the cold; that the present state of things is infamous, and must be put an end to. So far as I can see, the horny-handed is master of the situation. I admit that he is not a bad fellow. I wish that he were a little more civil, a little more patriotic, and that his women-folk were not so egregiously over-dressed. For his own sake, also, I own that I wish his better-half knew how to cook a steak and boil a potato. What I maintain—and what his admirers will not admit—is that the capitalist, the successful working-man, who has improved himself out of his original poverty, who has acquired wealth, and all the good it brings with it, is at any rate his equal. To talk of the taint of Botany Bay is the silliest of bunkum in the world. There is no trace of it now. Young Australia knows nothing of transportation. In Australia you face a new world, a world as new to the writers filled with tales of the horrors of transportation and gaoler officialism, and the cringing subservience which it engendered, as was Botany Bay to Captain Cook, whose monument I see placed in the park opposite the Sydney Museum. It could not but be so, when the gold discoveries overran the country with a population at the rate of 90,000 arrivals in a year—a mixed population if you like, but mostly free, and many of them as manly a set of fellows as any to be met with anywhere. It is an ill bird that defiles its own nest, and the Australian who endeavours to make political capital by dwelling on the blunders of the old country in its efforts to colonize, and thereby creates an antagonistic feeling to England, does injustice alike to his own colony and the Fatherland.
But, after all, I have said little of Botany Bay itself, which remains much the same in its natural features as when Cook landed there a century ago. The tramway plants you on the shore—all white sand and dead seaweed. Afar you see the narrow entrance into the Pacific, along which Cook cautiously steered his ship, and opposite, on the wooded shore on the other side, is a small black monument to denote where the great circumnavigator landed. It is a peaceful spot: woods are all round, the jerry-builder has neglected the spot altogether, and the Sydneyite comes here, with his wife and family, for an occasional mouthful of sea air. On one side of you is a pier, and in another spot I see an intimation that boats are to be had for hire, but no boat disturbs the tranquil bay as I wander alone by the sad sea-shore. To me, meditating, there comes a vision of the old world, when George III. was living. I see the black man watching sullenly the new arrivals, frightened by neither their appearance nor their bullets—which they fire just to awaken the native, who returns a shower of arrows. It is curious how the black has disappeared, how firmly the white man has planted himself in his seat, and with what bitterness he has come to regard as an interloper the heathen Chinee—who seems to muster pretty strongly in the busy, half-built territory that stretches from the bay to the capital. As I get into the train I am sandwiched between two celestials, so I dream visions. Is the world for the future to be given up to the Mongolian? Is the Caucasian played out? Not exactly, I fancy; at any rate, as far as Australia is concerned.