Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph of Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter city are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent. They cannot but admit the present glory of what they call the “Mushroom City.” The magnificent pile of the new Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which, when finished, will be larger than our own in London), the University, the Parliament-house, the Union and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Exchange, the viaducts upon the government railroad lines,—all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem built as if to last forever; still, they say that there is a certain want of permanence about the prosperity of Victoria. When the gold discovery took place, in 1851, such trade sprang up that the imports of the colony jumped from one million to twenty-five millions sterling in three years; but, although she is now commencing to ship breadstuffs to Great Britain, exports and imports alike show a steady decrease. Considerably more than half of the hand-workers of the colony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly half the population is resident upon the gold fields; yet the yield shows, year by year, a continual decline. Had it not been for the discoveries in New Zealand, which have carried off the floating digger population, and for the wise discouragement by the democrats of the monopolization of the land, there would have been distress upon the gold fields during the last few years. The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, and the squatters call loudly for assisted immigration and free trade, but the stranger sees nothing to astonish him in the temporary stagnation that attends a decreasing gold production.
The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in the world; the arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic. The brilliant statistician who fills the post of registrar-general to the colony, had the immense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged; and, as the governments of the other colonies have of the last few years taken Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I have seen a list of imposts, in which one class consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assafœtida, and astronomical instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; capers, cards, caraway seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves; maps and manure; philosophical instruments and salt pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages. Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind.
Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but the statistics of these young countries are figure-poems. Tables that in England contrast jute with hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or pit against each other, the powers of race and race.
Victoria is the only country in existence which possesses a statistical history from its earliest birth; but, after all, even Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where the settlers founded the “State Historical Society” a week before the foundation of the State.
Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of Victoria, and have each its party, political and commercial—diggers, agricultural settlers, and squatters—though of late the diggers and the landed democracy have made common cause against the squatters. Gold can now be studied best at Ballarat, and wheat at Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills behind Geelong; but I started first for Echuca, the headquarters of the squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upon my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural districts of the colony, and also the once famous gold diggings of Bendigo Creek.
Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made my first halt, the railway runs through undulating lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood, and well grassed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the burnt-up herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats, I found a likeness to the views in the weald of Sussex, though the foliage of the gums, or eucalypti, is thinner than that of the English oaks.
Riding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and the foot hills of the “Dividing Range,” I found the agricultural community busily engaged upon the harvest, and much excited upon the great thistle question. Women and tiny children were working in the fields, while the men were at Kyneton, trying in vain to hire the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than £2 10s. or £3 a week and board. The thistle question was not less serious; the “thistle inspectors,” elected under the “Thistle Prevention Act,” had commenced their labors, and although each man agreed with his friend that his neighbor‘s thistles were a nuisance, still he did not like being fined for not weeding out his own. The fault, they say, lies in the climate; it is too good, and the English seeds have thriven. Great as was the talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton district were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and showed the clearest signs of the small farmer‘s personal care.
Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia that I visited was a full-grown municipality. The colonial English, freed from the checks which are put by interested landlords to local government in Britain, have passed in all the settlements laws under which any village must be raised into a municipality on fifty of the villagers (the number varies in the different colonies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time a larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect.
After a short visit to the bustling digging town of Castlemaine, I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town of great pretensions, which occupies the site of the former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part of the line between the two great towns, my train dashed through some closed gates, happily without hurt. The Melbourne Argus of the next day said that the crash had been the result of the signalman taking the fancy that the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains, so he had “closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal, and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink.” On my return from Echuca, I could not find that he had been dismissed.