Amongst the few cultivated districts near Sydney is Parramatta. It is there that the trim gardens of dark green orange trees are, with their profusion of golden fruit hanging patiently among the leaves for three or four months. But to see agriculture on a large scale you must go by railway nearly thirty miles to the valley of the Hawkesbury. A richer alluvial soil than there is in this valley could not well be, nor one requiring less labour in its cultivation. But, owing to droughts and floods, so precarious are the crops that the cultivators are said to be content if they can secure one out of three which they sow. In the early days a bad flood on the Hawkesbury caused a scarcity throughout the colony. In June last an unusually bad one occurred. The river actually rose nearly sixty feet in perpendicular height, flowing more than forty feet above the roadway of the bridge near Richmond. You may see the rubbish brought down by it on the tops of the trees. And though the stream runs between high banks, the wide, flat plain above was twelve feet deep in rushing water, which a furious gale of wind made still more destructive. A few small patches are already green again with a luxuriant crop. The rest of the plain is a dismal brown expanse of dried mud. The strong post-and-rail fences are tumbling down or half buried. Here and there a few slabs or a door-post sticking up out of the ground mark the place from which a log hut or a cottage has been swept away.
Another fertile district, the Illawarra, may be reached by going in a coasting steamer for fifty miles south from Sydney. A longer but pleasanter way is to take the Southern Railway for thirty-five miles, and ride the remaining thirty. The ride is through poor, sandy, scrubby country, abounding, as sandy soils so often do, with brilliant wild flowers. The native or gigantic lily grows here in perfection, a single red flower on a straight stem, often fifteen or twenty feet high; and the waratah, or native tulip, in diameter as big as a sunflower, but conical, and crimson like a peony. Suddenly you reach the edge of a steep descent, so steep as to be almost a cliff, and look down amongst large timber trees interlaced with dark-leaved creepers of almost tropical growth, which hang like fringed ropes from the trunks and branches. Lower down are palms, wild figs, and cabbage palms; and beyond is a broad strip of rich green meadow land, lying far below between the cliff and the sea, and stretching many miles away to the south. Half an hour’s steep descent takes you down to it. There is a home-like look about the green grass, the appearance of prosperity, and the substantial look of the farm houses. Farmers’ wives jog along to Wollongong market with their baskets or their babies before them on the pommels of their saddles. Almost everybody, except a few of the larger landowners, is Irish. Here, if anywhere, the Irish have fallen upon pleasant places and found congenial occupation. There is very little agriculture. The land is all in pasture, and nothing is kept but cows. The population is wholly given up to making butter. Even cheese they do not condescend to make: but Wollongong butter is the butter of Sydney, and finds its way to far-off places along the coast. The meadows are as green in summer as in winter, or even greener. For then the sea breeze often brings heavy showers and storms, and droughts are seldom known there. I saw an English oak tree in full leaf in the middle of August—the February of the southern hemisphere. So valuable is the land, that as much as 20l. an acre has been given for uncleared land, and 2l. a year rent—prices almost unheard of in Australia.
But the pleasantest of all the short journeys to be made from Sydney is to the Blue Mountains. The range is not high, in few places, I believe, more than three thousand feet above the sea; but it is intersected by very deep precipitous ravines, and densely wooded; and the chain, or rather mass, of mountainous country is very wide. It was many years before the early colonists succeeded in penetrating it and getting at the good country beyond. Even now there is only one road and one cattle track across it. After the first ascent at the Kurrajong the track descends a little, and then runs nearly level for twelve miles till Mount Tomer is reached, on the highest ridge, beyond which the water-shed is to the south-west. Here, as at the Illawarra, occurs one of those sudden changes which are so delightful in the midst of the monotony of the bush. The ragged, close-growing, insignificant, ‘never-green’ gum-trees, which, mixed with a few wattles (mimosa) and she-oaks, are the principal constituents of bush, give place to enormous trees of the same as well as of other species. The delicate light green of the feathery tree-ferns relieves the eye. The air is full of aromatic scent from many kinds of shrubs, all growing luxuriantly. Wherever there is an opening you can see as far as the coast, and for nearly a hundred miles to the north and to the south, over the bush you have come through. And seen at a distance, the poorest bush has a peculiar and beautiful colour, quite different from anything we see in Europe, a reddish ground, shaded with the very deepest blue, often without a trace of green.
Sheep, it is said, do not thrive east (that is, on the Sydney side) of the Blue Mountains, till as far north-wards as the rich valley of the Hunter. As for cattle, I was told that the quickest and easiest way to get to a cattle station from Sydney was to take a voyage of two days and two nights in a steamer to Brisbane, in Queensland, and thence go a day’s journey by railway to the Darling Downs. For New South Wales is a vast country, and distances from place to place very great. Railways as yet do not extend far. Roads are very bad, seldom metalled, often only tracks. In the valley of the Hunter, on the great northern road, a road as much frequented and as important as any in the colony, I have seen twenty oxen yoked to one dray to drag it through the mud up a hill which was neither very steep nor very long. The coaches in New South Wales, as in Victoria, are all of the American kind, low and broad, resting on very long leather straps stretched taut longitudinally, which are the substitutes for springs. An ordinary English coach would very soon have its springs broken and be upset. They generally have (as they need to have) very good drivers, many of whom are Yankees or Canadians. The bodily exertion and endurance required for a long coach journey are not small. The ruts and holes made by the narrow wheels of the drays are often so deep as to make it advisable to leave the road for a mile or two, and drive straight through the bush amongst the trees. Often the best way of getting through a bad place is to go at it at a gallop. Everybody holds tight to save his hat and his bones, and when the difficulty is passed the driver looks round at his passengers and asks enquiringly, ‘All aboard?’ The horses, rough in appearance, possess wonderful strength and endurance. In spite of all difficulties, four horses will generally take a heavy crowded coach six or seven miles an hour, which is quite as fast as it is pleasant to travel on leather springs and on such roads. They are often used at first with little or no breaking-in. One day the driver of a mail coach meeting ours stopped us to ask if we had seen anything of his two leaders. They had broken loose from the rest of the team, he said, during the journey the night before, and got clear away, splinter-bars and all, and he had not seen or heard of them since.
X.
AN INSTITUTION OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
In New South Wales a considerable proportion of the population is of convict descent. It is impossible to say what proportion, for the line of separation is no longer strictly preserved, as it once was, between free settlers and emancipists; and questions are not often asked nowadays about origin and parentage. The tendency of the convicts when they got their liberty was to go to the country districts, rather than to the towns. Many became shepherds or hutkeepers on remote stations. Their children born in the bush have grown up with less instruction, religious or secular, often in even worse companionship, and with a still worse political education, than their fathers. For who was to look after them? Squatters, even if they had the will to do so, were few and far between, and Squatters’ wives fewer still. The Voluntary System does not supply clergymen where there is no demand, although common sense and common experience show that where there is the least demand there is the sorest need. Those who remain of the convicts sent from England are old men now, except a few who have come across from Tasmania, for it is more than a quarter of a century since the last shipload of them entered Port Jackson. But they have left a legacy behind them which is emphatically the ‘peculiar institution’ of New South Wales, as distinguished from the other Australian colonies—Bushranging.
In the old times bushrangers were simply escaped prisoners, often desperate ruffians, who took life, when it suited them, without scruple. Even then they were not regarded as we regard thieves and murderers in England. Familiarity with criminals had taught the more humane among the settlers to consider them as men of like passions with themselves, and not as only pariahs and enemies of the human race. I have heard an eye-witness describe the ‘sticking-up’ of a house in the country many years ago. One of the bushrangers, without any warning, deliberately shot a manservant in the kitchen through the window. The lady of the house, hearing the report, ran into the kitchen and found the man badly shot in the arm. The bushranger who had shot him, instead of setting to work to plunder with his companions, at once came to her assistance, obeyed her directions, fetched water, and the two were amicably engaged for a long time binding up the wounded limb and assisting the sufferer. The gang were nearly all taken and hanged afterwards, but I think the people of this house felt more pity than satisfaction at their fate.
Many of the lower class have hardly disguised their sympathy with these successful outlaws. There is a tinge of romance about their lives. A bushranger is a greater and a freer man than a Hounslow highwayman of a century ago. He rides an excellent horse, and leads another by his side. He is armed with a ‘six-shooter,’ and perhaps with a rifle as well. He has miles and miles of country to roam over, and many a hut where fear or sympathy will at any time provide him with food or a night’s lodging. Boys at school play at bushrangers, and no boy, if he can help it, will act the inglorious part of policeman. Even the name of the profession has been dignified by being turned into Latin. There is an inscription in the principal church of Sydney to some one a latrone vagante occiso.
And so it has come to pass that bushranging, which languished, or was kept under by the help of an efficient police, for many years, has broken out again with as great vigour as ever. The country is distributed between different gangs. I asked the driver of the Wollongong Mail if he had ever been ‘stuck up.’ His reply was, ‘Not for nearly a year,’ or something to that effect. On the main north road, along which you seldom travel a mile without meeting somebody, the mail coach was stopped at one o’clock in the day by a single armed man, who calls himself Thunderbolt, and carries on his depredations in this district. He compelled the driver to drive off the road into the bush, and there deliberately took down the mail bags and carried them off on a led horse. A few days later he unexpectedly came upon a policeman, who at once fired at him. He had just time to cover himself behind a horse he was leading; the bullet struck the led horse, and he escaped on the one he was riding. Less than three weeks after the first robbery he again stopped the same mail coach and the same driver, almost at the same place; this time at night. The account in the Sydney paper was as follows:—