An Australian Ramble; Or, A Summer in Australia

by J. Ewing Ritchie

CHAPTER I.
OFF TO AUSTRALIA.

The Orizaba—Reasons for Travelling—The Bishop—Soda and Whisky—The Spanish Coast—Heroic Memories—Gibraltar—Wickedness of Naples—Port Said.

I send this from the Orizaba, one of the finest, if not the finest, of the fine steamers of the Orient Line that keep open the communication between this country and Australia; and this is how it came to pass. One day last summer I was standing on the deck of a steamer, when a gentleman remarked to me, ‘I come from a country where they have had no rain for nine months.’ ‘Where is that?’ said I. ‘Australia,’ was the reply; and immediately I made up my mind to go there. As is the custom of most of us, I talked the matter over with my friends, some of them in the first rank of the medical world. ‘You can’t do better,’ was the unanimous reply; ‘you will come back ten years younger,’ said they all. Well, surely it is worth taking a little trouble and incurring a little expense, for a man—not to put too fine a point on it—presenting daily a more venerable appearance, to put back the clock, as it were, and to regain somewhat of his manly prime. ‘What can I do for you?’ said the family doctor to the mother of the Rothschilds, when he was summoned to her side; ‘I cannot make you grow young again.’ ‘No,’ was her ladyship’s reply; ‘I know you can’t, doctor; but I wish to continue to grow old.’ And here, just by taking a trip to Australia, and escaping the hardships of an English winter and spring, actually I shall achieve what the mother of the Rothschilds did not dare to hope for. Surely the attempt is worth an effort, especially when, owing to the kindness of a certain firm of publishers who shall be nameless, the question of expense was satisfactorily solved.

In these days of school-boards and universal travel a good deal has yet to be learned of our colonies. When I was younger, people in this country were in the most ludicrous state of ignorance as respects the size, area, wealth and value of what it is now the fashion to term the fifth quarter of the globe. At that time, say about 1830, there were not much more than 70,000 in all the land. Then Sydney Smith was writing of it as a region ‘in which Nature has been so capricious, that she makes cherries with the stones on the outside, and a monstrous animal, as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit and a tail as big as a bedpost, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile.’ Listen to Charles Lamb, as he writes, in his ‘Essays of Elia,’ to a friend in New South Wales: ‘What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man? You must have forgotten how we look. Do you grow your own hemp? What is your staple trade—exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists.’ It was at that time the popular belief was embodied by Tom Hood as follows in ‘A Letter from a Settler for Life in Van Diemen’s Land,’ wherein Susan Gale writes to her old friend and fellow-servant in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square: ‘As soon as ever the Botes rode to Land I don’t aggrivate the Truth to say their was half duzzen Bows apiece to Hand us out to shoar; and sum go so far as to say they was offered to through Speeking Trumpits afore they left the Ship-side.’ There is still a legend of a Missionary Society at home sending out a representative to Australia, and so carefully planning his route that he was to preach at Adelaide on the Sunday morning, and at Melbourne, some hundreds of miles away, in the afternoon, and that was before they had a railway. There are many who still think that a colony is a place where men are fortunate, as a late colonial governor remarked, if they enjoy three meals a day and a place to sleep in, where the inhabitants sit down to dinner in their shirt-sleeves, and think it a hardship if they take off their boots when they go to bed. But the greatest fallacy of all is the supposition that in a colony anyone can get a living, no matter how incompetent he may have proved himself at home. We laugh, but are we much wiser now? In Fleet Street last week, as I bade good-bye to a friend, he said to me, ‘I have a boy who will be coming home just as you land. I sent him out with the best introductions. He has been six months in Melbourne and Sydney and elsewhere, and can find nothing to do, and now I have to get him home again.’ It will be something if, in the course of my letters, and as the result of my inquiries, I shall be able to save fathers and mothers at home the trouble and expense and pain of such fruitless ventures, and it will be better still if I can help men and women at home to understand and realize what is being done by our fellow-subjects on the Australian Continent to plant that great land with Anglo-Saxon civilization and freedom and religion—if I can duly describe its cities and their people, their wealth and intelligence, their general activity and enterprise, their inner and public life. According to all accounts a good deal is yet to be told. Even Mr. Froude has omitted much that would interest the reader, and Dr. Dale has left something for the individual who may chance to follow in his steps. The fact is, the subject is too big for any one man.

I have said I send this from the Orizaba, one of the finest, if not the finest steamer of the Orient Line. Then there are the P. and O., who do not carry third-class passengers, and French and German steamers in abundance, to say nothing of other firms, who are always sending out steamers and sailing-vessels as well. As regards the latter, the firm of Devitt and Moore, of Fenchurch Street, deserve special mention, as they are the oldest people in the trade. Tourists who have the time to spare say there is nothing like a sailing-vessel for an Australian trip, and of the ships that sail in that direction, from all I hear, there are none that can equal the Sobraon (Captain Elmslie), and the Macquarie, in the Sydney trade (Captain Goddard, late of the Paramatta). All the fleet of this firm, however, bear a high character, and passengers, whether as regards accommodation or the commissariat, have no occasion to complain. The special objects of the managers of the Orient Company are to increase the facilities for the interchange of communication, and to promote the speed, safety, and, it may be added, pleasure of the passage. They are under contract with the Governments of New South Wales and South Australia to convey the mails fortnightly between England and Australia by way of Suez, and also run occasional steamers by the Cape of Good Hope. Since the Line was opened in 1877, upwards of 150,000 passengers have been carried to and fro, with all but total immunity from accident to life or limb. It cannot be doubted that the facilities thus afforded have added alike to the welfare and happiness of both the old world and the new. At home we are supplied with Australian produce, and Australia is a good customer in the English market. The service is performed by some eleven first-class steamers, varying from 3,000 to 7,000 tons. An old stager gave me the hint to choose one of the smaller vessels, on the plea that I should have better attendance on board. However, I prefer to follow the crowd, and have secured my berth on board the Orizaba, named after one of the highest mountains, somewhere, they tell me, in South America. Already she has carried the largest number of passengers ever taken by one vessel to Australia. She was built and engined by the Barrow Shipbuilding Company, the builders of the far-famed City of Rome. In the saloon there are chairs for 130 first-class passengers. The ship’s company numbers 200. There are second-class and third-class passengers on board. Apparently there is little danger of starvation, as the provision-chambers of the ship are sufficient to supply fresh provisions for 1,000 persons from England to Australia. The promenade deck is grand; and as to the saloons and drawing-rooms, they are fitted up in palatial style, and the electric light by night makes the interior look like fairyland. I ought to be happy with all the provision made for comfort on board. But who can say what may happen when I am in the Bay of Biscay, or even after I have set foot on terra firma? Strange things are constantly occurring. The other day I heard of a good man in Essex, in one of its small towns, who, as duty required, went to his favourite chapel on the Sunday morning; on his return to his Sunday dinner he was rather astonished to find that in his temporary absence his wife and daughters had packed up and started to join the Mormons on the other side of the Atlantic. It is to be hoped that no such calamity may happen to me. As to myself, there is little danger of my doing anything rash, for ‘he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,’ as the great Lord Bacon told the world long ago.

It was not till Sunday morning that we left Plymouth, instead of Saturday. The fact was we had a tremendous addition in the shape of passengers and luggage to take on board, as all the people from the North come viâ Plymouth, besides the London passengers who are glad to escape the dangers of the Channel. On Sunday morning we had a short service in what is termed the drawing-room. The bishop, of course, was a colonial (you never go to sea without meeting one), and wore his official robes, though his reading-desk was but a small table, which was covered by the British flag. The bishop followed up the prayers with a five minutes’ address, in which he said that a ship was like the world. In the world we were exposed to temptation, and so it was on board a ship. We were exposed to temptations from our fellow-passengers—an unkind reflection on some of us, I thought. Asking the purser what, from his wide experience of life on a ship, the peculiar form of temptation to which we were exposed was, his reply was ‘whisky and soda’—a form of temptation of which, apparently, the bishop had nothing to say. The bishop does not interest me greatly, though he has kindly volunteered to read prayers every morning. The air of the bishop’s lady is slightly subdued, as if the weight of her dignity were too much; she reads Church papers, whilst he evidently enjoys his novel.

But let me leave the bishop alone, and turn to things of a more worldly character. Poor Edgar Poe writes: ‘There are four conditions of happiness in life, and one of them is life in the open air.’ In this respect we are especially fortunate. We are no sooner out of the Devonshire mists than we are in the Bay of Biscay, calm as an infant on its mother’s breast. We live in the open air. Passed Cape Finisterre after dark on Monday night, and steamed pleasantly down the Spanish coast, having an especially fine view of Cintra and the mouth of the Tagus. All along the coast were dotted, amongst the foliage, white villages, and towns, and villas, all basking in the summer sun. Heroic memories come to us as we pass over the seas where the Captain was lost, in consequence, it is to be feared, of defective seamanship, with her crew of picked men and some of our finest lads of noble birth. All along that coast, when Old England was fighting for pre-eminence and power, and on those far-away hills has the noise of battle rolled, and not in vain, for the struggle that ended with Waterloo placed England in the first rank among the nations of the earth. From Tilbury’s ancient fort to Gibraltar we are reminded how England, with her wooden walls and hardy sons, proudly swept the seas, and was a terror to the despots and a deliverer of the slave. Plymouth especially calls up a host of glorious names, as we think of Drake, and Hawkins, and Frobisher, and the Pilgrim Fathers. It was from Plymouth that Cook and Vancouver sailed, to give us New South Wales in the East and British Columbia in the West. As soon as we cross the Bay of Biscay we think of Corunna and Sir John Moore. Afar off are the heights of Torres Vedras, celebrated in the Peninsular War. Cape St. Vincent, a bluff 260 feet high, having a convent, on which is the lighthouse, reminds us of the brilliant victory won by Sir John Jervis, with Nelson and Collingwood fighting under his flag; and in a little while we are at Trafalgar, to which sailors still look as the greatest sea fight in the history of our land, and as the one which saved our national existence. And we step on shore at Gibraltar, which rises out of the water, with its endless rows of barracks and its few scattered villas, and make our way to the lightning-struck tower known as O’Hara’s Folly—the O’Hara who was the friend of Johnson, and who ought to have married either Fanny Burney or Hannah More.

But it is idle to call up what to most of modern readers must be bare names, so soon, in this age of reading and writing and universal progress, do we forget the past. History in these mechanical days is getting as much out of fashion as theology. Let me write of living people; of men and women, poor creatures as they are at the best, to be brushed away as gossamer. There are just upon a thousand of us in the shape of passengers on board the Orizaba, and almost all are happy. The dark figure in the shape of Black Care we have left behind, as we have slipped out of English fog and cold into the region of cloudless nights and starry skies. We smoke, or read, or talk, or walk the deck, in a climate brighter even than that of an English summer in the leafy month of June. The ladies crochet or knit all day long in their lounging-chairs on deck, while the little ones play as if they had no fear or thought of the sea and its everlasting hunger for precious human life, and its cruel storms. What we should do with this unmanageable mass if anything were to go wrong no tongue can tell. All we can do is to hope for the best, for no Parliament will ever go so far as to order that no ship should leave an English port without its sufficient complement of boats; and if they did, no shipowner could carry on a profitable passenger trade. It ought not to be so, I know. What can one do? We are bound to travel, and we take the risk, whatever that may be, and trust to our sailors and captains, who are not half paid for the work they have to do. As it is, there is no life so pleasant as that of life on board one of our great passenger steamships. The Orizaba never rolls—well, only a little. The saloons are beautiful, the living is first-rate, the waiting is excellent, and the sleeping-berths are all that can be desired. By night, with the electric light all along the deck, the scene reminds you of the Arabian Nights, and mirth and music are everywhere; I pity the poor people who have to spend their winter at home. It is now a real pleasure to live. The only thing one misses are the newspapers and the old familiar faces. Well, I am not sorry to be out of the way of the papers; they only make me sick and sore as one reads the daily chronicle of poverty with which no one can grapple, and of crime which it seems impossible to repress, and the twaddle which envelops all. And as to the familiar faces, the further one travels the more one realizes all their loveliness and charm. For once the poet is right; absence does make the heart grow fonder.

‘How do you like our little town?’ said an Englishman to me as I was about to leave Gibraltar for our good ship, the Orizaba. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘for a place to spend an hour in I like it amazingly.’ ‘Oh, that’s about it!’ was his reply. It seems to me, however, as I plough my way on the blue waters of the Mediterranean—not bluer, however, at present than what we have on the English coast—that a couple of days may be agreeably spent at the far-famed rock, of which, however, you get a very fair idea without stepping on shore. As your eye rests on the harbour you see it full of steamers, which seem to come and go at all hours. As I write a French steamer slowly glides by with the yellow flag denoting sickness of some kind on board. Before us is the town, on our left the old Moorish fort—the oldest building in the place—and on our right the hospital, with houses reaching almost to the end. All the space between is filled with yellow or white houses, save where a thick grove indicates the existence of the Alameda, a public garden, where the band plays, where the townsfolk promenade, and which, with its cactuses and geraniums in full bloom, looks bright and gay even in December. The company have so arranged that you can step into a boat and get rowed to shore and back for a shilling each way—an example which I recommend to the corporation of Gravesend.

I land, and declining a carriage drawn by mules amid the loud vociferations of the Spanish owners, turn to my left, and find myself in the main street, the only ugly building in which is the red-brick mansion in which the British Governor resides. All the houses are shops—full of the little trifles of Morocco manufacture, such as pipes and jewellery and gay mats and carpets, with which we are familiar at home. There are 20,000 Spanish residents, and the place swarms with them. There are some 5,000 British soldiers here, and they are en evidence, as was to be expected. They have five years to stop here at a time, and they evidently think that—as indeed it is—too long. One of the first things to interest you is the little graveyard on your right, in which the heroes of the siege were buried—shaded by trees, especially by a fig-tree of gigantic size and very old, as you can tell by the smallness of the leaf. A building which attracts your eye just before you enter the busy street is that of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Institute, which is erected on a freehold site, and comprises on the ground floor a coffee and refreshment-bar, dining-room, bath-room, and lavatories; on the first floor a reading, writing, and recreation-room, with a small library; and above is a large hall for mission services, public meetings, Bible classes, and mothers’ meetings. The soldiers and sailors, I fear, do not appreciate the advantages as they might, though Mr. Holmes, the superintendent, tells me at times the hall is more than filled. It is in the streets—or rather in the people that crowd them—the chief charm of Gibraltar lies.