The larrikin is the natural foe of the heathen Chinee; not that he dislikes his imputed vices, but his real virtues. A friend of mine was walking near the suburbs of Melbourne, and he came across a Chinaman working in his garden, where only parsley was growing. ‘How is this?’ said my friend. ‘Why don’t you grow vegetables and flowers? I should have thought they would have paid you better.’ ‘Ah, sir,’ replied the heathen, ‘if I were to grow vegetables and flowers, the larrikins would come and pull them all up; so I can only grow parsley.’ And thus the people of Melbourne suffer, for those of them who have no gardens of their own have to depend for their supplies on the ever civil and industrious Chinamen. Since I have returned home, I see a Melbourne judge declared that it was unsafe to walk the streets of Melbourne by night or by day, and that that is so is, I take it, mainly due to the larrikins, who exist in such numbers as to defy the power of the police. When a larrikin gets drunk and quarrelsome he naturally goes in for the Chinese; they are few, and he and his friends are many. They are fond of fighting, and a Chinaman is a man of peace. It is fine sport for the larrikin to trample down and devastate the well-kept garden of the heathen Chinee, to get into his little shop and spoil his goods, to knock about and ill-treat the son of the Celestial Empire; nor does he object to murder one if he has the chance, as probably by means of perjury and hard swearing he will be able to escape the punishment due to his crime. By night the larrikins sleep in the parks, which are the glory of all the Australian cities, and the scenes there, so I was informed, are disgraceful. It is not safe for a respectable person to walk across the parks alone of a night. As in London, almost all respectable people live out of town, and they have but a faint idea of what goes on in their absence. The climate allows anyone, at any rate during the summer months, to sleep in the open air, and the rascals of the community for the time being may each one say for himself:
‘I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.’
It is one of the drawbacks of the Australian climate that it gives the larrikin a chance such as he has nowhere else. Walking one evening with a friend in one of the parks which adorn Adelaide, we came to a young tree which had the bark cut off in a circle round the trunk—in other words, it was ring-barked. My friend indignantly exclaimed: ‘See what the larrikins have been up to!’ That tree was doomed to die. It was a valuable one. It had been planted for a special purpose—to add to the attractions of the park, and to be, when fully grown, a benefit to the entire community. It had leaves on. It did not seem to have suffered much damage; but it was doomed to die, nevertheless. As a resident in Adelaide, my friend was very much provoked at the sight; and no wonder.
Wherever you go you meet the detestable larrikin, but it is in Melbourne that he chiefly abounds. Fathers and mothers are much to be blamed on his account. There is an old commandment about honouring thy father and mother, to which, if I were a Melbourne parson, I should devote many sermons; but, alas! in a young community, with many questionable emigrants, where the fever of gold-getting in any way rages fiercely, it is not always that a young man can honour his father and mother. At any rate, the evil exists, and Church and State between them will have hard work to put it down. The larrikin delights in mischief for mischief’s sake. He is not necessarily very poor or wretched. Perhaps he gets too much flesh meat, and a vegetarian diet would suit him better. Dr. Dale tells us a good deal of the high spirits of the Australian youth—a phase of Australian life which did not strike me at all. Was he thinking of the Australian larrikin? Such high spirits are not to my taste. In one respect the larrikin reminds one of the days of Tom and Jerry as depicted in the vivid caricatures of the late George Cruikshank, but Tom and Jerry were gentlemen, and that makes a great difference. Rather I should take him to be a son of Belial, and thus give him a more ancient origin. His delight is to join himself to a gang of twenty or thirty to break street lamps, to wrench off knockers, tear down fences, mob and maltreat policemen, hustle respectable people at all hours by day and by night, and to assault some poor pedestrian, especially when a little the worse for liquor, and rob him. ‘Scarce a week passes,’ says a writer in the Colonies, ‘without some larrikin outbreak.’ It was even with difficulty that I could steer clear of him at times. I fear we have too much of the larrikin at home, but that is no reason why he should be allowed to taint the virgin soil of a new world. Our colonies ought to be an improvement on the old country. What is wrong at home they should avoid. Let them imitate our virtues. On a new soil they have a better chance.
CHAPTER XI.
IN AN AUSTRALIAN VINEYARD.
Fruit Supply—Tintarra Wine—Mr. Thomas Hardy—The Temperance Question.
One of the charms of South Australia is the fruit, which, in the shape of grapes, and pears, and peaches, and apples, you see everywhere displayed, and at astonishingly low prices. Grapes are sold at five pounds for sixpence in the retail shops, and I have seen magnificent grapes three pounds for sixpence, which in London would be held cheap at half-a-crown. If the colony is ever to be very rich, its fruit trade will be no inconsiderable factor in the consummation so devoutly to be wished. The farmer and the squatter have to contend with difficulties which often end in bankruptcy, owing to the terrible droughts common in this part of the world. But if the merchants of Adelaide will send us their spare fruit, we in London can take any amount and at very remunerative prices. I saw during my tour the vineyards of Mr. Thomas Hardy, within a short distance of Adelaide, and I must own that the place is well worth a visit. Though of small extent (the area is only 60 acres), Bankside, as the vineyard is called, yields a more varied produce, and furnishes a better illustration of the capabilities of the soil and climate of the district in which it is situated, than any other estate in Australia. Mr. Hardy is a fine specimen of a horticulturist, and well deserves the splendid silver trophy which ornaments his drawing-room—and of which he is justly proud—given him as one who has done more than anyone in the colony to develop its resources. He has made good use of his grapes. We are not all teetotalers, and he grows more grapes on his various estates than the Australians can eat, whether as grapes for dessert, or in the shape of raisins and currants. With the rest he makes wine. He is proud of his wine—proud of the fact that even at Bordeaux, in the heart of the enemy’s country, as it were, he won a gold medal for its excellence; proud of the fact that his celebrated Tintara wine has found a good place in the London market. As I have seen it manufactured I can testify as to its purity. He was sending this year 45,000 gallons to London. He would prefer to keep it longer in his cellars, but the Londoners want it, and he cannot keep them waiting. Why not sell the original grapes? asks the teetotaler. I reply, He grows more grapes than the community can devour with a decent regard to its health, and as people exist who are mistaken enough to think Paul was right when he recommended Timothy a little wine for his stomach’s sake and his often infirmities, Mr. Hardy thinks he is a public benefactor if he supplies the public with a genuine wine, the produce of the grape and of the grape alone.
Mr. Hardy is no ignoramus; he is a much-travelled man, and has studied the vineyards of France and Spain and California. In his establishment he uses the best machinery—which of course is French—for the distillation of the purest and strongest spirits of wine, to which purpose such grapes are devoted as are not good enough for the production of wine of the best quality. As to the manufacture of wine, that is a very simple affair. The grapes are picked and placed in carts, and carried to the mill, where they lie fermenting in a mass; the juice is then pressed off into slate vats, a brown and by no means attractive-looking fluid. The red wines take longer to ferment, as the outside skin contains the colouring matter. In the case of the white grapes, the stalks are cut away by a machine invented for the purpose, otherwise the astringency of the wine would be too great. After a time the juice is put into casks, where it lies stored in cool and capacious cellars till it is required by the outside public. In some of the casks I saw the wine had been kept ten or twelve years. Last year Mr. Hardy made in this way 160,000 gallons of wine. He began life as a gold-digger. He commenced growing grapes for wine in 1853, and has been at it ever since. Another charming vineyard is that of Sir Samuel Davenport, to which Thomas Binney, when in Australia, was always ready to retreat. It is very interesting, this original vineyard of Mr. Hardy’s. Since 1853 he has purchased several vineyards in various districts, the most important one being Tintara, about 25 miles to the South of Adelaide, where he has 150 acres under vines. It is in the town cellars that most of the blending is accomplished. A good deal of wine is bottled off at Bankside, but the main bulk of the generous fluid, to be poetical, is carted away in casks, on waggons which are as un-romantic as the horses which draw them or the men who drive. There is little of the picturesque in the manufacture of Australian wine.
But as to the grounds, no words can describe their exuberance. Some of the pears Mr. Hardy exhibited at the London Exhibition weighed three pounds each, and were afterwards, I believe, eaten by Royalty. The Bankside property consists of a very deep chocolate soil, resting on a strong clay. Irrigation is easily practised over this small area. Water is raised from the bed of the Torrens River to the top of the bank, and, that being higher than the surrounding country, is easily distributed. It is curious what good a little water can accomplish. In one part the ground rises, and as water will not run uphill—at any rate, in Australia—the trees have to do without, and it is astonishing to note the difference between the trees and the fruit they bear, compared with the others, although but a few feet from each other. Everywhere around me were oranges ripening for the home market. ‘An acre of oranges is a fortune, is it not?’ I asked, with my head full of what I had read. ‘Ah,’ replied Mr. Hardy, with a smile, ‘those books are written by men who have land to sell.’ Then we came to the lemons. What a wonderful plant is the lemon tree! You may see the ripe fruit growing side-by-side with the blossom. It is productive all the year round, like—I will not say whose; let the reader fill up the blank—like Mr. —’s great mind. As to the quinces, I never saw anything like them, and though I intimated that in England we did not make much of them, Mr. Hardy assured me that in his opinion quince jam was the finest in the world. The citrons, however, were still finer than the quinces. We had also quite a show of olives; they grow in rows, and, like the almonds on the estate, they are made to do duty as fencing-posts. A vine in the open air over the house attracted my notice; it had spread over a surface of many yards, and was a good illustration of what may be done on Australian soil. Surely every Australian ought to grow his own grapes; and then as to making them into raisins and currants, nothing seems easier under such a sun. The grapes at Bankside are gathered and laid on boards to dry. Those for raisins for the table are laid on gravel—a custom Mr. Hardy borrowed from the Spaniards. It is not found necessary to turn them, the under grapes drying as well as the top ones, from the heat of the gravel floor. The turning of grapes into raisins is a more complicated process than merely growing them for the market. The bunches of ripe fruit are placed in oblong sieves and plunged for twenty seconds into a tank of boiling lye made from ashes, which are got from the vine prunings. The dipping takes the bloom off the fruit, but causes it to dry in one-third the time it would otherwise take. They are then spread evenly on wooden trays and exposed to the sun. When the grapes are about three-parts dried, they are removed to kilns, heated with hot-air pipes, and the drying is completed in from twelve to twenty-four hours, when they are taken out and rubbed partly free of most of the stalks. The next process is to run them through a winnowing machine which still further strips them of their stalk. They are then packed up in boxes by girls and pressed with a handy screw-press, six at a time. Currants are treated in a similar manner, minus the dipping. The raisins intended for the table, I may mention, are also not dipped, as that would spoil their appearance by removing the bloom. In the grounds a good many sultanas are also grown; quite equal to the fruit imported. Altogether, at Bankside, they turn out about twenty tons of dried fruit every year.
Australia, Mr. Hardy anticipates, will be able to equal the best wine districts in the world. A similar remark may apply to its almonds and raisins and currants. Adelaide rejoices in a trade which bids fair to become greater every year. As the Select Committee upon Vegetable Produce reported at the end of 1887: ‘If the whole area of our colony now devoted to the growth of wheat were one vast vineyard, the yield would not be equal to the deficiency in the wine production of France through the devastation of the phylloxera.’ Hence South Australia, to the disgust of Dr. Hannay, calculates much on her growing wine trade. Statistics furnished by Mr. Hayter, the Government Statist of Victoria, give evidence of the way in which wine in South Australia is superseding the consumption of spirits. This may account for the sobriety which seems to characterise South Australia as compared with the rest of the colonies. Altogether, Adelaide may claim to be the fairest city of Australia, and to contain the kindest and best-mannered people—so far as they may be judged by the passing stranger at their gates, and if I was in search of an ideal life I should say it would be that of one who sits under his own vine and fig-tree, as the South Australian grape-grower does.