Letters from Australia

by John Martineau

IV.

SQUATTING IN VICTORIA.

It sometimes happens that the commonest circumstances of life in distant countries are scarcely realised at home because they are too much matter of every-day experience to be spoken about. I doubt whether people in England appreciate the fact that the greater part of Australia is, in its natural state, for eight or nine months in the year almost entirely destitute of water. To a new comer it sounds strange to hear an up-country Squatter remark that he has no water on his run yet, but he hopes he soon shall have. Although more rain falls in Victoria than in most parts of England during the year, there are hardly any springs, and few streams except the large rivers, which are few and far between, which run for any considerable portion of the year. Why the rain runs off so fast is not thoroughly explained, but its seems there is an incrustation of the subsoil which prevents the rain from penetrating to any depth. The creeks, as they are called, leave water-holes, some of which never dry up through the summer; but these, also, are far between; and so generally the first business of a Squatter in new country is to construct tanks to receive the rain-water from the roofs of his house and outbuildings, which is his drinking-water, and very good water it is; and the second is to build a dam from six to twenty feet high across the nearest hollow—for almost every hollow is a water-course after heavy rain—and in this way to make a reservoir containing water enough for his sheep to drink all the year round, and be washed in at shearing time. A dam is as much an essential appendage to a station as a barn is to a farmyard.

Probably it is this absence of moisture in the ground, and consequently in the air also, which makes distant objects in Victoria so marvellously clear, and gives such peculiarly brilliant colour to the landscape where the conformation of the ground admits of a distant view. I never saw such brilliant colouring anywhere in Europe. It is the one redeeming feature, without which the scenery, except in the mountainous districts, would be tame and dreary enough. The country is seldom undulating, as in Tasmania. The trees are generally small, stunted, and diseased, except on the ranges; the plains are almost destitute of any trees at all, and vegetation is scanty, except in early spring-time. There is a great plain extending for nearly a hundred miles westward of Geelong almost without a break, so flat and (unlike the fen country in England) so destitute of trees or other objects high enough to break the line of the horizon, that at the height of a dozen feet from the ground you may any day see a hill—and not a high hill either—full forty-five miles distant as the crow flies, looking not dim and misty, but a clearly defined blue patch upon the horizon.

To most people there is something intolerably desolate and repulsive in such a plain. Even to those who are most fond of open country it must be depressing under certain circumstances, notably during a rainy fortnight in winter, or on a hot-wind day in summer. But there is something indescribably grand and enjoyable in the continual contemplation of so vast a landscape. When the sun is high it is an expanse of turf, green in winter and brown in summer; but as the afternoon advances, earth and sky become faintly purple, and crimson, and golden; the colours deepen from half-hour to half-hour, till the sun sinks into its bed of turf in a gorgeous blaze of splendour. There are several shallow lakes upon the plain, some very large, and most of them salt. Coming suddenly upon one of them one evening from behind some little sand-hills which concealed it, the margin for some hundred yards in width dry and coated with mud and brine, no human being or habitation visible, and the full brilliance of the setting sun lighting it up, the scene was (except for the absence of mountains in the distance) singularly like the landscape in Holman Hunt’s picture of the ‘Scape-Goat.’ It is a pity that this kind of scenery is spoiled by cultivation. Cut up into little pieces, a plain loses its vastness, while its monotony is increased.

It is a pleasant life to have a station up the country (but not too far up), at least for a man not over gregarious in his habits and tastes, and whose mind is not set on those pleasures of town life which seem to possess the greatest attractions for the majority of mankind. It may be ten or twenty miles to the next station, or nearest doctor, or post-office, or church: and the owner of the next station may happen to be illiterate and uncongenial, the doctor generally intoxicated when sent for, and the post-mistress so lonely and dull that it is a necessity to her, poor thing! to read your letters and communicate their contents to her friends. But nobody thinks much of distance; there are plenty of horses, good or bad, and by going a little further afield you may be better suited. Then people journeying up the country drop in occasionally for a dinner and a night’s lodging. If the visitor is at all presentable he is entertained with the best the house affords. If he is a stock driver, or shepherd, or labourer, he is entertained at the overseer’s or the men’s hut. There are rather too many such visitors sometimes; nobody is ever turned away, and there are idle fellows pretending to be in search of work and refusing it when it is offered them, who go from station to station living upon the Squatters. The house is generally comfortable enough nowadays, usually built partly of bluestone, partly of wooden slabs, and with only a ground floor, a single sitting-room, and a great deal of broad verandah, which answers the purpose of a sitting-room in fine weather. People are beginning to take pains with their gardens, and there is generally a fair supply of vegetables to help down the mutton. There is always good bread, and damper has long since vanished from civilised regions. Near the house is the overseer’s cottage, and a little way off is the men’s hut. The latter is usually only a log hut, made of boards; it contains two rooms, a day-room and a dormitory, and looks comfortless enough. The furniture is a bench or two, a table, and perhaps a wooden arm-chair; and in the dormitory the only beds are wooden bunks, like ships’ berths, built against the wall in two tiers. The unmarried men about the station live here, perhaps half a dozen in all. The head of the establishment is the cook, whose business it is to keep the hut and prepare the food. In the old, rough days he needed to be a man able to hold his own and preserve discipline, and if necessary to prove himself the better man against anyone who complained of the dinner. He is generally butcher and baker to the whole station. At a short distance off is the wool-shed, the most important and imposing building of all, where the sheep are shorn and the wool packed. And there are a few outlying shepherd’s huts, each with its hut-keeper (unless the shepherd is married), whose only business is to cook and keep house for the shepherd, and occasionally lend a hand with the sheep pens. They all get good wages. The shepherds get from 40l. to 50l. a year, and the hutkeepers from 30l. to 40l., and they get a sheep a week between two, and the other usual rations. Strange to say, the men do not seem to care for vegetables, and seldom take the trouble to make a garden, though they might have as much garden ground as they liked for nothing.

There is not often very much to do except for two or three weeks at shearing time, when everything is once fairly set going. The toils and pleasures of stock-riding on cattle stations, of which we read in Geoffrey Hamlyn, are almost at an end in Victoria. For, alas! it is found more economical to divide the runs into paddocks by wire fences, and so to employ fewer shepherds or stock riders. And so, though you can see the place you want to ride to, or at any rate know in which direction to go, you must ask your way among the fences almost as if they were rows of houses. The black-fellows, and the wild dogs, and (except in thickly-wooded districts, where they are as numerous as ever) even the kangaroos are gone, which is an unmixed advantage for the Squatter, if not for idle and inquisitive friends who stay with him. Near a forest you may see scudding about little white clouds, which, on closer inspection, are discovered to be composed of white cockatoos; but their sentinel is generally too wary to let you get within shot, though you may get near enough to see them put up their yellow crests in disgust. Of sport there is not often much to be had. There may be some rabbits or some quail. On the plains there are sometimes bustards, commonly called wild turkeys, and you may get a shot at one with a rifle now and then, especially if you drive after them, instead of walking or riding, for they do not expect hostilities from anything on wheels. Opossums are killed by thousands for their skins, generally by hunting them up trees after dark and shooting them there. But there is no sport to be got out of them; one might as well shoot a lamb, albeit indignant with them for scampering about the roof all night. I saw a large brown one one day looking at me from a bough about ten feet off, apparently only waiting for an introduction to offer me his paw to shake. I tossed a bit of clay on to his back to make him move. He only moved a yard higher up, and taking hold with one paw of a bough of the next tree, looked down with a countenance of mild reproof, as if meekly and generously affording me the opportunity to apologize before unwillingly quitting my society.

But a station is no bed of roses for a Squatter’s wife. Servants are difficult to get and to keep up the country, and especially when there are young children there is a good deal of work to be done by somebody. Then perhaps the shepherds’ wives will not condescend to do any washing, and there is no one else to do it. What with hot winds, hard work, solitude and anxiety, a wife transplanted from English luxury to the bush has a hard life of it, and too soon begins to look old and worn. It is almost impossible for her to get any attention paid to the little luxuries and prettinesses of life. Perhaps the cook persists in throwing the sheep’s bones into a great heap just outside the garden gate; or nobody can be spared to bury the cow that died in the home paddock, and her white skeleton has been lying there for months. To be sure, a hot wind is an effectual deodoriser, and there is only the look of the thing to be considered; but that is something, and I don’t know anything that strikes a person fresh from home more than the number of carcases he sees by the roadside everywhere.

The Squatter party has been for some years powerless in the Legislature. No Squatter has much chance of being elected for the House of Assembly, and is derisively bleated at on the hustings if he offers himself as a candidate. Even in England I observe that a writer speaks contemptuously about their ‘great ideal’ being to ‘cover the continent with sheep-walks.’ Surely, as regards all but a small proportion of the continent, this has been, and for some years to come will be, the ideal of every reasonable person, whether Squatter or not.

What else is to be done with the soil? Somewhere about 300,000 acres, which collected together would be equivalent in extent to a block of land a little more than twenty-one miles square, ought surely to grow enough wheat to feed the whole population of Victoria. For a quarter of wheat for each head of population, which is, I believe, the ordinary allowance in England, is probably much more than is consumed in Australia, where meat is eaten in abundance by the labouring classes. And eighteen bushels to the acre is about the average in Tasmania, where there is certainly no superabundance of capital or skill employed in farming; if Victoria cannot farm as well as that, it had better import its corn. Something must of course be added for other crops, but this amounts to comparatively little, for wheat may on most of the land be grown year after year without any rotation of crops, and with the help of subsoil ploughing without any present prospect of exhaustion. It must be remembered that meat is in England chiefly a product of agriculture, whereas in Australia it is a pastoral product. There would be no use in growing turnips or mangold (even if the climate admitted of it, which I believe it does not) in a country where there is no winter, and where stock will fatten on pasture alone. In South Australia large quantities of wheat have been grown for exportation chiefly to the other colonies, and also in one or two years to England. But in Victoria, till inland communication is very much more developed, there is no probability of its being exported to any extent; indeed I never heard of its being even suggested.