While writing of wine, it may be as well to sum up here what I have to say on intemperance in Australia. No little excitement was produced in Adelaide when the writer was there by a telegraphic report of a speech by Dr. Hannay on his return from Australia, as to the amount of drinking in Adelaide, certainly the most sober of all the prosperous cities on the Australian Continent. As usual, the telegraphic report was wrong, and Dr. Hannay assures me that what he did say was that he regretted to find that so many gentlemen in Adelaide looked to the increase of the Australian wine trade as a source of colonial revenue and colonial prosperity. As a devoted temperance reformer, it is clear Dr. Hannay could not have said less. It was an opinion which he was quite at liberty to utter, and with which no one could find fault. Had the telegraphic abridgment been correct, he would certainly have been to blame, as, undoubtedly, Adelaide is a sober city—that is, sober as compared with Sydney and Melbourne. In the older cities there are yet traces of the times when, as during the madness created by the discovery of alluvial gold, miners, who in England had been content with beer and porter, would drink twenty pounds’ worth of champagne at a sitting, pouring it all into a pail, and asking every passer-by to have a drink; but that awful time of extravagance is past; however, the taint of it remains, and there is still a startling amount of drunkenness, especially among that part of the population who can least afford it—the wage-earning class, who, in Australia, if they are sober and industrious, have advantages in the way of investment which assuredly they lack at home. Workmen as a rule are paid high wages, and, when they receive a large amount at a time, as they often do, do not know what to do with it. In too many cases, in the interior more especially, they still adhere to the custom of knocking a cheque down, as they call it. The workman repairs to the nearest public-house, gives his cheque into the publican’s hands, and then begins a drunken orgie in which everyone is asked to join, till the landlord tells him his money is all gone, gives him a bottle of rum, and then kicks him out of the house, often to perish by the road-side, thus once more illustrating the old remark, ‘that the tender mercies of the wicked are very cruel.’ One publican is said to have made £40,000 a year at one time in this way. The temperance reformers in Australia have, it is very evident, a wide field of usefulness before them. Many of the Australians spend enormous sums of money in drink. I travelled with an Australian, who seemed to me never what is vulgarly called the worse for liquor, yet whose weekly bill on board the steamer amounted to between four and five pounds, a sum of money which assuredly might have been better employed. In one respect Australia sets us a good example. It has taken to building temperance coffee hotels, or palaces, as they term them, on the grandest scale. As the meals are all served up without intoxicating drinks, these places must have a good effect, as the guest, however fond of drink he may be, is compelled for the time to be an abstainer. Adelaide unfortunately has no good temperance hotels worthy of the name.
It is a great question in Australia as to which is the finer city—Melbourne or Sydney—and the inhabitants of each are wonderfully jealous of each other. You offend a Melbourne man if you have anything to say in favour of Sydney, and at the latter city you hear little in favour of Melbourne. Both cities show too many public-houses, and both cities contain far too many drunkards; but in Sydney they are an especial nuisance, as every house has, as a rule, two rooms on each side the principal entrance which are used as bars, and which all day long, very much to the annoyance of the traveller, who is compelled to use them, are filled by a disreputable crowd, boozing from morning till night. It is the same as regards the theatre—the bar is as conspicuous, and quite as well filled, as the theatre itself. In many cases the bar is hired and carried on as a separate speculation, independently of the hotel proprietor. Two or three showy barmaids are engaged, a screen is put before the door to shield it from public gaze, and inside there is a license of which few people have an idea. The girls sell the drink, and they drink themselves. As the evening advances the hilarity is of a somewhat boisterous character. Now and then a girl comes from behind the bar and waltzes round the room with some admirer—while she leers over his shoulder at another. The utmost freedom is permitted, and hundreds of idiots thus waste their time and spend their money, and injure their health, and learn how easy and how pleasant is the road to destruction. Fortunately, the bars are closed at eleven, and they are shut up on a Sunday, or they would be a great deal more mischievous than they really are; but the mischief they do is very great. In Australia the population is of an exceedingly shifting character; men are always on the move from one place to another, and of an evening, as they are strangers in the city and have no friends, and time hangs heavy on their hands, they have recourse to the nearest bar. It is there the sharper always takes his victim. In every case, and I heard of several, in which inexperienced travellers had been fleeced, I always found that the dupe had first been taken to the bar and treated to a drink. As I came back I fell in with a poor steerage passenger who had been done out of £20, a sum he could ill afford to lose, by a repetition of the confidence trick. He made the acquaintance of the sharper by means of the latter offering him a drink. Hundreds and thousands of pounds have been lost in this way. There is no place so dangerous to a ‘new chum,’ as the emigrant to Australia is called, as the bar of a public-house. Alas! in Sydney these pitfalls are on every side; I think that there is only one hotel in the town without its bar.
It was the old custom to sell lots of land by auction at which a good deal of wine was drunk, under the excitement produced by which many a purchaser bought his whistle at a dearer price. ‘If such lunches cost £40,’ writes one of the oldest of the Melbourne colonists, Mr. Westgarth, ‘which was given to me as a moderate average, who suffered? argued their justifiers; the exhilaration they produced gave £400 more to the net proceeds.’ The brisk liquor appreciably blew up the prices, as the same lots, cut up and rearranged, would come again and yet again under the hammer; and no doubt many a poor speculator burnt his fingers in that way, especially when we remember how at one time there came such a wonderful depreciation of property in what its admirers still love to term ‘Marvellous Melbourne.’ It may be that there is less drinking now, and that people go to business and to sales with less muddled brains. But no one can walk in the shipping quarter of Melbourne on a Saturday afternoon, or stop at a Sydney hotel for a day or two, without feeling that in either town there is vast room for improvement in the matter of drink. In both places there is a fearful amount of gambling and betting and wild speculation, and undoubtedly a good deal of that goes on under the influence of the drink. Many of the suicides which, as I told the people of Adelaide, were such a matter of wonderment to me, are to be attributed to drink, or the depression caused by it when the excitement is over, and the poor shattered drinker is, indeed, a cup too low and quite unable in his dazed condition to face the stern realities of life. Travelling one day from Brisbane to Sydney, the writer met a gentleman, of whom he asked if Mr. Blank was known to him.
‘Yes, well,’ was the reply.
‘I am going to see him.’
‘Why,’ said the gentleman, ‘he committed suicide only a little while ago; and the Western Australian papers are full of the details.’
There was no need to say any more. The poor fellow had gone out as an emigrant. At home he had been in the habit of drinking to excess, and in Australia the loneliness and difficulty of his life was too much for him; he drank to excess, and then took away with his own rash hand his blighted life. In Australia the number of such blighted lives through drink is far too plentiful.
CHAPTER XII.
AN AUSTRALIAN MILLIONAIRE.
Mr. James Tyson.
As I was seated in the dining-saloon of the Orizaba, an Australian, pointing to a particular table, remarked to me that there were three millionaires dining there. I am no company for such. They are out of my sphere. However, one of them kindly invited me to dine with him in Melbourne. I would like to have accepted the invitation. Alas! I was engaged to dine elsewhere. One would like to dine with a millionaire. Tom Hood evidently did, or he would not have told how
‘The company ate and drank from gold,
They revelled, they sang, and were merry;
And one of the gold sticks rose from his chair,
And toasted the “Lass with the golden hair,”
In a bumper of golden sherry.’