Chapter XIII.
THE AUSTRALIAN TITLED PERSON.
Everyone in Australia is in imminent peril of a title. Nobody is safe. There is no saying whose turn it will be next. When he gets up in the morning the first thing the Australian does is to look at the paper and see if his name is among the list of those knighted or otherwise decorated. The distribution seems to run like a sweep consultation. So many K.C.M.G.'s, so many C.M.G.'s, and so on. Then they put the names of all the people of Australia into a hat and draw for them.
There is no other way of explaining how the people who have titles got them, or why. In only one instance on record is there a proper fit. It is the particular case of a Sydney publican who sells threepenny beers with a free "counter lunch." He was made a C.M.G. The humour of the lottery once more. It is most amusing to anybody from the old country to see funny little men "Sirred" in Australia.
People whose luck is so much out that they can't draw a title make shift in the meantime with a hyphen. It is just as well that strangers know this for the purposes of answering invitations. Never forget the hyphen in Australia. No "family" is without it. In the early days Brown was hyphenated to Smith with a gyve.
The Australian titled person is mostly under-educated and over-fed. He is of no particular use except to company promoters, who put his name on the front page of a prospectus. Sometimes he opens a bazaar. He prefers, however, eating at complimentary banquets tendered to anybody whose fellow townsmen think justifies a gorge.
The prodigality with which the people responsible hand out titles to Australians is no doubt part of the scheme which sprang from the mind of William Charles Wentworth, the originator in the country of "that fatal drollery called representative government." Wentworth was known as "the shepherd king"—the titular craze again. There was also in Australia a bushranger king. Hall, who was shot by a policeman, was so titled by the New South Wales Premier of the times, Hon. (afterwards, of course, Sir) John Robertson. Hall owned a station.
But to return to Wentworth's scheme. It was to found "a colonial aristocracy," a House of Peers—"a replica of England rather than America." Martin in his "Australia and the Empire" chronicles the folly. "The subject," he wrote, "had been for years maturing in his (Wentworth's) mind; he even expounded his views on this question of an Australian House of Lords in a long-forgotten article in the pages of an English magazine...." Yet on this point of creating a brand new colonial aristocracy he failed miserably. The commonest street orator in Sydney could raise a ready laugh by giving a list of the expectant "nobility." Robert Lowe opposed it in the House of Commons, and his criticism had all the weight of colonial experience, while a young Sydney tradesman, by name Henry Parkes, as Dr. Lang described the Premier of New South Wales, first rose to public notoriety and favour by his diatribes against this feature of Wentworth's great measure.
The young Sydney tradesman afterwards drew a knighthood himself, and didn't send it back to the title lottery department of the Colonial Office.
There are certain fat people in Australia who are scant of breath through pursuing the House of Lords' will-o'-the-wisp. Desperate have been the efforts exerted.