Why Adelaide, from which I now write, can claim to be called ‘the Holy,’ is one of these things no ‘fellah’ can understand. It may be because it is near Paradise, to which, I see, there is a daily service of trains, but which I have not yet visited, partly because I have a conviction that it is a place for which I am not yet ripe, and partly because at present my time is better occupied. Through the kindness of Chief Justice Way, the Acting-Governor of South Australia pro tem., I am an honorary member of the Adelaide Club, and what with the English magazines and newspapers—long denied me—and the members of the club to talk to, I am perfectly contented to forego the joys of Paradise awhile. Chief Justice Way deserves a chapter to himself as the Mecænas of South Australia—the best of good company, as a host unsurpassed. It is said that he would have been Sir Samuel had he been a Churchman; but one can scarce believe that, in a land where religions are equal. Adelaide is a beautiful city, laid out with broad streets and public parks to the best advantage. It seemed to me, as I landed from the Austral and took the train at the end of the pier in Largs Bay, that I had got into as stale and sandy a bit of country as ever I saw in my life. However, appearances improved as I passed through the busy port and entered the city, which I like better the more I see of it. As you may imagine by the name, the place is of recent origin. It was founded in 1834, and in 1836 it became the residence of a governor, and then the site of the present city was fixed on. ‘It is situated,’ wrote one of the officials, ‘on gently rising ground on both banks of a pretty stream, reaching down to the sea, over which south-west breezes blow nine months out of the twelve with invigorating freshness. At the back is a beautifully-wooded country, which extends for about six miles, to the first range of hills. The hills seem to surround the town, except where they melt, as it were, into the sand of the seashore.’ The then existing woods, however, have been cut down, and all along the plain are the homes of the citizens. You see few fine houses—mostly they are small—one story—with iron roofs and little gardens, where the inhabitants grow a few flowers and spend their evenings under the veranda, smoking or reading, as it seems good in their eyes. In one of them I found an old friend whom I had not seen for forty-five years. ‘Do you remember me?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ was the reply, as he mentioned my name. The fact is, he had seen that I was in Australia by the newspapers, and he fully expected I would call. Alas! his wife was less quick in recognising my manly form. In Adelaide you see little of the rush and excitement which make Melbourne and Sydney famous. It has a university and educational endowments, and newspapers in abundance. Where I am located, I look out on the palm-trees which decorate the Governor’s residence, and a little further on are the fine buildings known as the Public Library and Museum, and beyond them are the Botanical Gardens, well worthy of a visit, though less beautifully situated than those of Sydney. On my left is the railway-station and the new Houses of Parliament, and the road which leads down to the Torrens Lake, across which a handsome bridge has been thrown, and where the young athletes of the city spend their summer evenings. I walk up King William Street, with its Town Hall and Post-office, all white, as are most of the houses and grand offices in the wide streets, and pass Victoria Square, on the other side of which are the Law Courts. The buildings devoted to religious purposes are many, and in one of them preaches the Rev. R. Fletcher, a powerful-looking man intellectually, in the prime of life, and the principal of the new college the Congregationalists are about to establish. He gathers around him an influential and very respectable congregation (about a dozen of his hearers are Members of Parliament), but, like all the rest of the city-pastors, both at home and in Australia, Mr. Fletcher finds yearly he loses old hearers, who move into the suburbs, and their vacant seats are left unoccupied. The Bishop of the city, Dr. Kennion, is highly spoken of. Here, as at home, and all over Australia, there are Christians of all sorts, nor are the members of the Salvation Army conspicuous by their absence. The dream of Christian unity seems in Australia as far off realization as at home. One Church parson with whom I have come in contact is a fine specimen of the muscular Christian. He is a canon of the Church, and is immensely popular as a preacher and a man. The following anecdote is characteristic: Once upon a time he was troubled at finding his stack of firewood rapidly diminishing. As it was not burnt in the house, he concluded it was taken off by a thief. To detect him was the proper thing, and the worthy canon sat for a night or two to wait for the enemy. Nor had he long to wait, as he appeared in the shape of a sailor. ‘Now,’ said the divine, ‘we’ll fight for it. If you beat me, I will let you off; if I beat you, I will give you in charge.’ They did fight, and the sailor got such a licking as he never had before. ‘Is the story true?’ I said to the canon. He shook his head, and exclaimed, ‘Ah, that’s a sad tale!’ Evidently in his heart he was proud of his pluck, and well he may be; many a one goes to hear him preach who would have kept away had he not been as ready with his fists as eloquent of tongue.
As I pass up King William Street, I see what is called the Royal Exchange. I enter, and behold an eager and excited mob. They are all men—most of them are smoking, in spite of an announcement to the effect that smoking is strictly forbidden. I point out the notice to one of the smokers, and he only smiles. What are they about? Buying and selling mining shares. This seems to be the leading industry of the place, and they buy and sell hereto the extent of £300,000 or £400,000 a year. A broker explains to me that it is a safe way of making money if you are not frightened, but keep your shares, and if you deal with a broker who has no shares of his own to sell. ‘If you do,’ adds my informant, ‘there is no telling what a mess you may be drawn into.’ I thank him, and leave him, regretting that I have no money to invest, as I am certain to win if I take his kindly and disinterested advice. In the evening I find the business still in full swing. It is eight o’clock, and the Exchange is shut up, but my friend the broker is still playing his little game. He has changed the venue, that is all. I pass through a long passage at the end of an hotel; I descend a few steps, and am in a large room. On one side my friend stands in a Lilliputian rostrum, with his hammer in his hand. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ he says, ‘now is your time—ten Junction Shares, buyer at eleven and three—seller at eleven and six—come on, gentlemen but the gentlemen don’t seem much inclined to come on. They are a sleepy lot—leaning or sitting all round the room. At length says one of the crowd, ‘I’ll take that,’ and the auctioneer’s hammer rings sharply on the desk. And thus the evening wears away, till the lot is gone through. No one is excited—no large fortunes are here lost or won. Everything is on a small scale, and it is to be hoped that the buyers know what they are about. The auctioneer, a little man with a diamond ring glittering on his finger, evidently does. As to mines, all Adelaide is interested in them. In almost every shop you see specimens of ore displayed of some kind or other, no matter what the business of the shop may be. But, oh! the loveliness of the night as I reascend the steps, and leave the little knot of speculators behind. The shops are closed. The streets are almost deserted. There are no crowds of loafers and larrikins as in Melbourne or Sydney. There is scarce a living being at the bars besides the keeper or his girl. The shadows of the trees fall on the broad pavement. On the other side the white houses glisten in the moonlight, for the moon pours out a silvery flood of glory, almost hiding the stars of the blue sky above. It must be some such night as this that suggested the idea to the man who first ventured to speak of Holy Adelaide. Even the hills far away seem to live anew as they revive the silence and the splendour of a long-forgotten past.
In general intelligence, according to an interesting report just published by the Inspector-General of Victorian Schools—in general intelligence, the children of the large towns in the three colonies are very much alike. In New South Wales a higher standard is aimed at than in the other colonies. Victoria spends a considerable amount of money in establishing scholarships, so as to enable the most promising of State scholars to pass through the secondary schools; but in the senior colony Euclid, Algebra, and Latin or French form part of the ordinary course of instruction in the fifth class of the elementary public schools. The attempt is to do much—too much in too little time. In South Australia an opposite policy prevails. The teachers of the three colonies display on the whole equal industry and care. In the large city schools children over fourteen years of age show nearly equal proficiency in Victoria and South Australia in the ordinary subjects of primary instruction, and rather less in New South Wales. Children about thirteen are about equal in the three colonies. Children between eleven and twelve are the most proficient in South Australia, and the least in Victoria. If attainments in Algebra, Euclid, Latin, and French are taken into account, New South Wales has the best results to show. In New South Wales the teachers are paid a fixed salary. In Victoria the system of payment by results is wholly, in South Australia partially, adopted. Observations tend to show that the bad effect of payment by results is quite as conspicuous where the system prevails as where it does not.
In 1829 England was taking rather a rosy view of the unfortunate Swan River Settlement. It ended, as most of us know, in disastrous failure. But it was put before the public in an attractive form, or we should not find the great Dr. Arnold writing from Rugby to his friend the Rev. I. Tucker: ‘If we are alive fifteen years hence I think I would go gladly to Swan River if they will make me schoolmaster there, and lay my bones in the land of kangaroos and opossums. My notion is that no missionizing is half so beneficial as to try to pour sound and healthy blood into a young civilized society, to make one colony, if possible, like the ancient colonies in New England—a living sucker from the mother country, bearing the same blossoms and the same fruits; not a reproduction of its vilest excrescences, its ignorance, while all the good qualities are left behind in the process. No words can tell the evil of such colonies as we have hitherto planted, where the best parts of the new society have been men too poor to carry with them or to gain much of the higher branches of knowledge, or else mere official functionaries from England, whose hearts and minds have been always half at home, and who have never identified themselves with the land in which they were working.’ Arnold did well to remain where he was. In the Swan Colony immense blocks of land were freely granted to settlers, regardless of their means to profitably occupy such holdings. As a consequence, the farmers had no labourers to till the soil, and many of the large estates lay waste, or only supported a few head of cattle. It was in South Australia, if anywhere, an attempt was made to realize Dr. Arnold’s ideal. It was started on the Wakefield system, which worked well for a time, and attracted the right men into the land. It was resolved that it should be free from the taint of felony, and it was resolved that it should have no State Church; and the spirit of the founders still permeates the land. At any rate, in Adelaide I found better society than I did anywhere else.
Leaving Adelaide on my way home, I must speak of a few of the blots of Australian life. When Paul tells us he fought with beasts at Ephesus, we feel inclined to pity the unfortunate saint; but when people talk of mosquitoes that is quite another matter, and yet I know not whether it is worst to fight with beasts at Ephesus than to wrestle with mosquitoes all through the watches of the night, as I did at Melbourne. At Sydney I was told they would worry me to death, but there they left me unharmed. At Melbourne I was informed, on unexceptionable authority, that the mosquitoes would not annoy me at all, and it was with a light heart that I went to bed, little dreaming that I should rise a sadder and a wiser man on the morrow—a spectacle for gods and men—with all the blood sucked out of my body, and prematurely gray. I know that I am a sinner; I know that I have done the things which I ought not to have done, and left undone the things which I should have done; I know (as Shakespeare tells us) if we all had our deserts there would be none of us who would escape whipping; I have written, I own, a good deal of indifferent prose and poetry, have kept late hours, and have seen a good deal of the wicked world—a moderate amount of punishment I am prepared for. ‘What a man soweth that shall he also reap,’ is a law that runs through life, and for wise and salutary ends. But it was hard, nevertheless, to have to fight with such paltry, insignificant creatures as mosquitoes—mere stings on Lilliputian wings, too ridiculous to be considered as enemies—yet I own they kept me awake all one night, as they tortured me from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, and made me tremble and perspire as I heard them trumpeting previous to a general attack as I never had done before. I never felt so savage; I never saw my poor body so cut up with scars. I was to dine next day with one of the handsomest ladies in Melbourne, a fine specimen of an Irish beauty, to whom I was anxious to present myself in as respectable a plight as possible; but all was of no avail. Mercifully, however, the brutes so gorged themselves that I was enabled to take a righteous revenge; but it was an awful night, and I felt how David must have had them in his eye when he longed, in one of his grand psalms, for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at rest.
Alas, alas! if we have the mosquitoes by night, there are also flies which are a real terror by day, especially in places of worship, where they seriously interfere alike with the inattentive or the attentive hearer. They don’t seem to interest themselves much in the preliminary part of the service—they are conspicuous by their absence in singing and chanting, and there is a good deal of both in Australia—but immediately the text is announced and you have settled yourself down in an attitude of repose the attack commences. At first you heed it not—it seems too ridiculous to be bothered by a fly. At last your blood boils, and you can stand it no longer. The tiny tormentor flies into your mouth, should it perchance be open, settles on the most sensitive part of your nose, assails your forehead, attacks your ears, and every other vulnerable point. You give a bang, but you have missed your mark; your enemy is beyond your reach, only to return with fresh vigour to the attack. Not a moment does he leave you at rest; not a moment can you listen in peace and comfort; not a moment, while the sermon lasts, are you in a proper, Christian frame of mind. When I went to hear Dr. Strong, the great Australian heretic, the fly—for providentially, as a rule, it is only one fly that attacks you at a time—was especially active. That fly must have belonged to the ranks of the orthodox, and thought I deserved little mercy for once in my lifetime straying from the fold. At any rate, little mercy he showed to me. A minor nuisance is the Australian cricket, which commences to make an extraordinary row as the sun goes down. Another nuisance are the song-birds, as they call them. Sitting one day in the Sydney Botanical Gardens—very beautiful, but not so fine as those of Melbourne—I was startled as if all the grinding machinery in the colony had been put in motion to set my teeth on edge. ‘What’s that?’ I asked in alarm. ‘Only the birds singing,’ was the somewhat unsatisfactory reply.
An interesting table has been published which purports to give the Drink Bill of Australasia for 1887. The statement has been prepared by the Victorian Alliance, and although it is not easy to conjecture how some of the information has been obtained, it may at least be assumed from its authorship that the amount of the Bill has not been kept unreasonably low. Assuming it to be correct, we find that the several colonies spent £15,582,485 on their liquor in 1887, representing an outlay of £4 8s. 6d. for each man, woman, and child alive in that year. Western Australia spent more in proportion to her population than any of her sister colonies, her bill amounting to £6 10s. per head. Next comes Queensland at a respectable distance, with £5 9s. 4d. per head, closely followed by Victoria with £5 5s. New South Wales pays £4 10s. 3d., Tasmania, £3 6s. 7d., and New Zealand, £3 5s. South Australia modestly brings up the rear with an average payment per head of only £2 19s.
Sunday in Adelaide is the beau ideal of the Puritan Sabbath. The other Australian cities attempt something of the kind, but in Adelaide the thing has been achieved, and except for Christian workers in the pulpit or the Sunday-school the day is emphatically one of rest. Somehow or other the Sunday seems in keeping with the place. At no time does Adelaide strike you as a city of business. The air is too pure, the sky too lovely, the streets too clean. About lunch time there seems to be a little pressure in the streets, and a little business in the shops; at the club we are quite full at that sacred hour, and under the veranda in the tiny square behind, where we boast a couple of fern palms, a fountain, and one gold fish, the smokers congregate, while the click of the balls indicates the presence of company in the billiard-room adjoining. But to-day the only people about are the church-goers. I followed the crowd to the Stowe Memorial Church, in Flinders Street. The Rev. Thomas Quinton Stowe, who was born at Hadleigh, in Suffolk, must have had much to do with the building up of the Adelaide of to-day. The church of which he was the pastor was established at a meeting held in a tent, provided by the Colonial Missionary Society, in December, 1837, with Mr. Stowe for its first pastor. The next building was a sanctuary of pine and reeds, erected in North Terrace. The church grew with the growth of the colony, and in 1840 removed to a large square building in Freeman Street. There Mr. Stowe remained till advancing age hinted retirement. In 1862 he died, leaving behind him the useful memory of a devoted life. No name is more connected with the religious history of the colony. He was trusted by all for his sincerity, honoured for his wisdom, respected for his talents, and beloved for his piety. The Church, wishing to commemorate his name, and being in need of a new and larger place of assembly, built the Stowe Memorial Church, the foundation-stone of which was laid in 1865 by the Hon. Alexander Hay, and which was opened for public worship in 1867. It is a large and handsome building, erected in Flinders Street, where the Presbyterians and Baptists also have places of worship. It was a relief to turn into it, when I was there, out of the scorching sun. There is no gallery, but the area is very large, and the buildings in connection with the place are numerous, and ornamental as well as useful. They consist of a lecture-hall, a schoolroom, and attendant class-rooms. In 1876 the Rev. Wm. Roby Fletcher, of Richmond, Melbourne, accepted the call of the people and became pastor. It was at his handsome home, a little way out of town—surrounded by books and curios—that I supped after the evening service. His wife is an Australian lady. He is specially learned in Indian subjects, where he was sent by the Government to study its educational system, and from which he has not long returned. In Adelaide Mr. Fletcher occupies high rank.
One thing that may be said of him is that he is ready to utilise passing events. In the week there had been a tragedy in Adelaide of a very painful character. There had been a fire in a temperance coffee-palace, and of the guests a Mr. Taplin had been burnt to death. Mr. Taplin was a fine, stalwart man, of imposing presence, and well-known to the public as the head of the Point Macleay Mission to the Blacks, which was founded by his father, the Rev. G. Taplin. The father was one of the first arrivals in the colony, and meeting a black-fellow as he stepped ashore, he conceived the idea that with religious and industrial training something might be done with the aborigines. He lost no time or opportunity in giving practical effect to his convictions, and in due time he found himself superintendent of the Aboriginal Farm and Mission Station, where he toiled till his death in 1879, having in the meantime wrought a wonderful improvement in the condition of the blacks, and exhibited many proofs of the controverted point that the aborigines are capable of receiving and understanding a higher form of spiritual knowledge than that in which they were bred. The blacks loved him with their whole hearts, and admired him as a sort of demigod. One of them, when questioned by a carping critic as to the existence of a Deity, replied, ‘You know Massa Taplin, and then you no fear plenty believe’n God.’
The senior Mr. Taplin was not only a practical agriculturist, architect, and jack-of-all-trades, as it were, but he was as well a man of much learning and piety. His acquaintance with the art of healing was only equalled by his deep knowledge of Australian philology. When the father died he was succeeded by his son William, who, though he dropped the title of reverend, followed in his father’s steps. He was a Catholic Christian, excelling in preaching as much as in the physical exercises of the natives. He was recognised as public vaccinator of the district. In the harder manual work he kept abreast of the times, and only recently the Mission Committee undertook, under his direction, to carry out some much-needed irrigation work on the reserve. He had come to Adelaide to discuss with the committee the concerns of the mission, and he gave a lecture before the Australian Natives Association, on ‘Our Aboriginals: Their Manners and Customs; or, a Native Fifty Years Ago.’ He overslept himself, and that necessitated another night in Adelaide; and then came the tragic end, all the more tragical as he was the only one of the guests who knew the way of escape, which leads to the supposition that he must have lost his own life in saving the lives of others. It was on his death that Mr. Fletcher based his discourse. It was listened to by a congregation attentive and highly respectable as regards appearance. As to the church itself: inside it is very spacious, and, not being disfigured by galleries, presents almost a cathedral-like appearance. In the evening I heard from afar the band of the Salvation Army. They are in Adelaide as everywhere else. I should have thought that the Army might have been more usefully employed elsewhere. ‘You can’t go far in Adelaide,’ said a man in the street to me, ‘without seeing a church. There are about four in every street.’ Perhaps this explains the fact why Adelaide is called ‘holy.’ Alas! in England we often say, ‘the nearer the church the further from God!’