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ON THE WALLABY
THROUGH VICTORIA

BY
E. M. CLOWES

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1911

Copyright, London, 1911, by William Heinemann

INTRODUCTION

This is not supposed to be a national or political history of Victoria. When I was asked to write something about the country which has extended its hospitality to me, and given me bread and cheese—sometimes no cheese, it is true, and more often than not no butter, but still always bread, and an ever-increasing appetite—I must confess I felt frankly scared. There is a very good, if somewhat vulgar, expression in use out here, which speaks of anyone who attempts what is beyond them as “biting off more than they can chew.” And the thought frightened me. There seemed to be so many people who had lived all their life in the country, and were therefore much more capable of writing about it than I could ever possibly hope to be.

However, I found that other “fools rushed in,” who had been here for even a shorter period than myself; who had never participated in any way in the true life of the country, or depended on it for their own life, which after all teaches one more than anything else ever can about a place. I may not be an “angel,” I thought, still I know it, which is one point in my favour; and, after all, eight years can scarcely be described as a “rush.” Besides, every proverb and popular saying seems to be balanced by another which is completely contradictory—and while it may be true that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” it is also true “that lookers-on see most of the game,” and perhaps score somewhat in the freshness of their impressions and in their facilities for comparison.

As it is I can only write about Victoria as I know it. There are many mistakes that I may have made through my inability to see all sides of a question; but they are at least honest mistakes, and not the deliberate misstatement of facts, from which Australia has so often suffered.

Of course, there are numberless phases of life out here which I have never even touched: my nose has been too close to the grindstone, while life has resolved itself for the most part into a mere struggle for existence. Still, that very struggle has brought me into touch with real people, and with the many grades of society which are to be found here as elsewhere, in spite of all the theories of democracy.

I have edited a woman’s fashion paper, of sorts, and was dismissed because—I confess it—the compositors were quite incapable of reading my writing. I have written short stories and articles; I have decorated houses, painted friezes, made blouses for tea-room girls, designed embroideries for the elect of Toorak, even for the sacred denizens of Government House. I have housekept, washed, ironed, cooked. Once I made a garden, drew out the estimates, engaged the men, bought soil and manure, shrubs and plants, laid out a croquet-lawn, delved, sowed and planted shrubs which, now threatening to become trees, perhaps represent the best result of all these years of continuous labour. Palpable results, I mean, for the other results, the enlarged outlook, the humanity, the pathos, and the friendship, with which the memory of them is crammed, form, after all, an asset which is by no means to be despised.

Still, when I recollect that I have been here for more than eight years; and that even now less than ten times that number of years has actually passed since the natives ceded to Batman, for knives, and beads, and looking-glasses, the present site of Melbourne, and much of the surrounding country, I am filled with the most abject shame at my own achievements and unlimited admiration for these people, so often dismissed by the ignorant at home and abroad as only “colonials,” who have built up such a town as Melbourne and such a country as Victoria is to-day.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS IN VICTORIA

The first landing in Victoria was purely involuntary, a vessel having been wrecked in 1797 on Furneaux Island, in Bass Strait, the supercargo, a man named Clarke, and two sailors—the only people saved out of a total of seventeen—making the Victorian shores, and by some incredible means reaching Sydney. Six years later an attempt was made to colonize what was then known as Port Phillip, by means of a convict colony, and a penal expedition of nearly 400 persons, 300 of whom were convicts, were sent out under the charge of Captain Collins. But water was scarce, the weather in the bay was stormy, and the blacks distinctly hostile; the whole outlook seemed so gloomy that Collins, who must have been pretty well distracted between the blacks on shore and the seething discontent of the convicts on his ships, applied for—and at last, after three months of unutterable misery in Port Phillip, received—permission to remove to Van Dieman’s Land, one of the very few children who accompanied this wretched party being John Pascoe Fawkner, who, thirty-two years later, assisted in the foundation of Melbourne.

Among old Victoria celebrities John Batman was one of the best known. Batman landed at Geelong in 1835—the site of the present town having been first discovered by Mr. Hamilton Hume and Captain Hovell, who, with a servant and six convicts, had, in 1824, set out overland from New South Wales with the intention of reaching Westernport. After having by some means ingratiated himself with the natives, Batman proceeded up the bay to what is now known as Williamstown, where, again conciliating the blacks, he induced them to consent to a treaty, under which he received some 600,000 acres of fine pasture-land in return for beads, knives, blankets, and looking-glasses; after which, having explored the river, he entered in his diary the Yarra Falls as being the most likely place for a village.

Soon, however, Batman’s sovereignty was to be disputed by Fawkner, who entered Port Phillip Heads a little later during the same year, with the Enterprise and a handful of prospective settlers. At the Indented Head Fawkner and his party were met by some of Batman’s men, who informed them that their master was owner alike of the bay and of the rivers, Batman, it appears, taking his part well as one of the first of Australian braggadocios. Still, this high-handed attitude appeared likely for awhile to succeed, for Fawkner obediently sailed northward, touching at the places which are now known as St. Kilda, Brighton, Mordialloc, and Dromana; finally, finding no satisfactory landing-place, he anchored in Hobson’s Bay, whence the Yarra was entered in a boat, and the present site of the Customs House determined on as a settlement. Next day the Enterprise herself was towed up the river; the settlers, with ploughs, grain, fruit-trees, building materials, and provisions, landed, and the city of Melbourne was founded in 1835. Only seventy-six years ago, and yet there are people who, having seen Melbourne as it is now, find their chief cause of complaint against the Australians in their lack of enterprise and general slackness.

To people such as these the present Victorian town of Wonthaggi, beside the State Coal-Mine, must have seemed to have sprung up with the astounding, challenging air of a “Jack-in-the-box.” At the time I write this infant prodigy is five months old, and boasts some 3,000 inhabitants, streets, shops, three newspapers, four churches, a skating-rink, and a theatre, though as yet no hotel. There is what is called a “Hostel,” which may procure a licence or may not—it depends on the powers of the Wowsers. Meanwhile, the only obvious way of obtaining a drink is from a beer-cart, with a two-gallon licence. Needless to say, there are other less obvious ways, many and devious, to judge by the fact that five keepers of sly “grog-shops” or “Pigs,” as they are popularly called—who were lately hauled up by the police, despatched a circular letter to all the business people in the township, asking that a fund should be organized for their defence—this being, I suppose, what the philanthropists call “an appeal to our common humanity”; though what response it met with I do not know.

In its first beginnings Melbourne was slower certainly than Wonthaggi. Materials and tools for every sort of work were more difficult to obtain, while it was pretty well a year before any goods ordered from England could arrive—four months each way being a good average passage by the old “wind-jammers,” with a further delay for preparing and packing ready for shipment.

After a little while Batman’s party of settlers from Indented Head also moved northward, and encamped at the back of Fawkner’s settlement, where St. James’s Church and the huge rabbit-warren known as St. James’s Chambers have long stood. Two years later Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, visited the new colony of Port Phillip, and planned out more definitely the towns of Melbourne, Geelong, and Williamstown. A resident magistrate was appointed, and in 1851 the colony was declared to have a separate and independent existence under the name of Victoria, the certainty that one can have nothing without paying for it being exemplified by the fact that, with separation, came also the birth of public debt in the new colony.

In 1840 took place the only really organized attempt made by the blacks, round Melbourne, to rescue their country from the whites, an abortive enough attempt, beginning with a large corroboree about nine o’clock one evening, and an over-liberal allowance of rum. Two hundred black fellows were taken prisoners, and marched to Batman’s Hill, where there was a rough prison in the form of a stockade, where they were placed, with a strong patrol guard all round them; these were packed off next day in boats, and let loose in the dense scrub where St. Kilda and Prahan now stand, as it would have been no joke to support 200 prisoners in those days, when flour was selling at £80 the ton, and meat at 1s. 6d. the pound—the white population, which in 1836 consisted of 143 men and 35 women, having by that time risen to 10,291 persons, and constituting a great drain on the resources of the new colony.

Soon, however, as the stock began to increase by leaps and bounds, meat became cheaper and living less difficult. The early settlers, however, used to have to work day and night to evolve some sort of order on their holdings, to live themselves, to clear their land, and at the same time to increase their flocks. An old lady told me once of the struggles she and her husband had in the early days, before they could get any proper bush shelter up on their run, when the ewes lambed too early in the season, while the nights were yet damp and cold. Her husband or the shepherd used to go round at night and collect armfuls of what they called “green-bobs”—freshly born lambs—and, after roughly cleansing them, insist on their being taken into bed, under the blankets, with herself and her children. Not—as she declared—that she ever raised any real objection; for she had the sense to know that all their lives hung on the existence of these poor little weaklings, and was only too proud to find, a few months later, when the flock came to be ear-marked, that it had more than doubled—partly, no doubt, as the result of her mothering. And yet no one has ever thought of canonizing women such as this! Can you picture it—the one-roomed house, with rough log walls, mud-plastered, and roofed with bark; the log fire on the open hearth, with the kettle slung above it, ready to warm milk for the young lambs, who lay on sacking before the fire, or shared the bed—where the mother and children lay together, heads and tails? The wild Australian wind outside—and what a wind, gathering in its gallop across miles of open country, and pushing and blustering in at the door, as the farmer thrust it open with his foot, his arms full of the tiny, trembling creatures, on whom his future depended. And all around the endless stretch of the unknown land. Something of the dangers and the loneliness being possible to gather from the matter-of-fact recital, by “A Pioneer,” of the finding of the body of a dead man who had been “bushed,” and died of thirst, to which he adds this statement: “I buried him where he had been found, as I had previously buried others who had perished under similar circumstances, crossing these plains from one station to another in the middle of the dry season.”

Gradually the old identities, people who remember days such as these, are dying out in Victoria; while so few personal histories have been written, and so few letters preserved, that the life and characteristics of the gallant early settlers seem more than likely to sink into oblivion.

Mr. Joseph Tuckwell, who died in Melbourne only a very few months ago, could tell some fine yarns when the spirit moved him. As far back as 1851 he was Inspector of Police in Hobart—a position that was by no means a sinecure in those days. Later, when the gold rush in Victoria started, he joined the police force there; then, in 1860, went to Dunedin; and a little later became Governor of Auckland Gaol—his reminiscences dating back to the times before he had sailed for Australia, when he had witnessed the burial of George IV. in St. George’s Chapel. Another link also with the early days passed away, only a month or so back, in the person of one of the last of the convict chaplains of the old Port Arthur Settlement; his wife, who is still living, being the daughter of John Price, the Inspector-General of Convicts, who was murdered in 1857, and niece of the great John Franklin.

It is interesting to remember that in those early days Victoria was a country with no old people. Lately I was talking with some old maiden ladies, who told me that, as children, they had never seen an old man or woman; and that when they first went home with their parents, in 1876, they were terror-stricken by the aspect of their old Scotch grandmother in her white mutch, whom they could not dissociate in their bewildered little minds from the wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” They had lived in those days just beneath the Dandenong Range, fifteen miles out of Melbourne, and speak now of the terror the escaped and liberated prisoners—of course, there were no real convicts in Victoria—used to be to them and their mother; the Botanical Gardens being then in the making, with gangs of prisoners employed upon them and upon the roads, working in small groups, watched over by officials with muskets.

It seems curious that, though Portland was settled at much the same time as Port Phillip, no one ever seemed to have thought of installing the new capital there, in spite of its truly magnificent bay. In 1836 Major Mitchell, who was the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, with a party of convicts, having followed the course of the Lachlan and Lower Murrumbidgee, crossed the Murray, climbed to the summit of Mount Hope, and saw stretched out before him a sweep of wide and promising pasture. Moving onwards to the south by south-west, he crossed this green and pleasant land, passed another range of mountains, which he named the Grampians, and thus reached the south coast of Discovery Bay, meeting at Portland with the famous Henty family, who two years earlier had established themselves there, with servants, sheep, horses, and cattle, that they had brought over with them from Tasmania. These they used to good purpose in trade with the whalers and scalers, who, indeed, were the first white inhabitants of Victoria, having run up rough temporary stores and other buildings at intervals along the coast, the principal traders, before the coming of the pastoral Hentys, being William Dutton—Dutton being now a well-known name in South Australia, though whether the family is the same I do not know—John Griffiths, and two brothers named Mills.

Portland suffers from no natural defects, and is simply prevented from taking its place as one of the best and busiest seaports by the fact that Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, in which it is situated. Equally ridiculous sentiments or regulations, I do not know which, ordaining that all goods from South Australia—Mount Gambia, the centre of one of the richest portions of that state, being only 73 miles from Portland—shall be transferred over 300 miles to Port Adelaide for shipment. Here is something, one would imagine, where Federation might be of real use, and the Montague and Capulet sort of feeling, which makes such a state of affairs possible, be mitigated, if not completely squashed.

I have never been to Portland, but am always hoping to go, for I am told that it is one of the most charming and old-world spots in Victoria. Moreover, it possesses one of the most beautiful and natural harbours possible—the finest in all Victoria, Westernport coming second, and Melbourne nowhere at all, for it is only by constant dredging, deepening, and general tinkering that the Melbourne Harbour is a harbour at all, and not a hill. As it is the harbour charges are necessarily so exorbitant in Melbourne that Tasmanians are already congratulating themselves on the fact that it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good; and that when ships get larger, as they seem likely to do, Hobart will be the only port where they can lie, the depth of water, right up to the quay, being some 72 or 73 feet, sufficient for any ship ever likely to be launched to float in at ease; so that Hobart may really become in time the distributing centre for the whole of the Commonwealth. And there all the time is Portland, of which Victoria can make no use, simply because it is not her capital, and she is not far-seeing enough to cultivate a second string to her bow; while South Australia can make no use of it either, because she would rather that her produce should be hopelessly depreciated in value by miles of useless haulage, than risk parting with one iota of trade to a sister State. Truly it is like the trivial etiquette of a provincial English town, where the butcher’s wife is not on calling terms with the baker’s wife—or that immortal ballad of the two men on a desert island, who would die of hunger and thirst rather than speak when they had not been introduced.

Oddly enough, it is not only in regard to its own affairs that Victoria seems incapable of realizing more than one town to each State or county; for, in spite of many protests, it still ships—with very few exceptions—its entire frozen produce to London, completely ignoring the other large and important English ports, and necessitating a most unnecessary amount of handling and extra freight charges in the distribution of its exports. Surely there is nothing so completely conservative as a democratic country can prove itself to be in some matters; a reversion to the original type, I suppose for, after all, the progenitors of the greater number of these Australians left England at a time when Toryism was at its height.

CHAPTER II
SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE

From the moment that the ship touches this shore—no, rather from the moment that the pilot boards her—a whiff of something, at once strange and stimulating, seems to fill one’s lungs and quicken one’s brain. The Australian pilots are a notably fine race—the younger men, those who have been born in the country—the finest type, perhaps, that it has as yet produced, with a breezy optimism, an immense faith in the land of their birth, and true affection for the Old Country, their very love for and dependence on the connecting seas helping, perchance, to annul any petty differences or jealousies; so that it is indeed well for all that they should be the very first to greet us in the new world to which we are come.

From Colombo one sails eastwards to Australia, so far east that one almost reaches the west in more senses than one. There are Trade Winds, and there are counter Trades, as we know; and if Australia owes her climate and her fertility to the warm, teeming East, mentally, in the tastes and outlook of her people, she is still altogether Western; so markedly so, indeed, that, in Melbourne in particular, one is at times seized with the whimsical idea that it has something to do with the roll of the earth, and that we may yet be slid into the very lap of America, ending by being far more completely akin to that democratic country than to the slow-moving, monarchical methods of England.

One must look back to one’s first clear-cut, vivid impression of a new country to realize how unnumbered are the differences, even under the many apparent likenesses, to which after a little while one becomes so used. In Melbourne the stevedores and dock-hands, who throng the ship and quay the moment she is docked, are almost as incredibly different from the same class in England as they are from the swarming blacks of Colombo. They are for the most part bigger and broader-shouldered; they look far better fed. They walk with a vigour and spring—indeed, with a sort of swagger—moving more from the hip than the English dock-hand, and less with that weary lurch of the shoulders which marks him as a creature of infinite labour and privation; while, above all, they are extraordinarily clean.

I shall never forget my first impression of these men—the brilliant blue sky, the blazing sun, the great swinging cranes, and the dexterity with which they handled the enormous masses of iron-rails, etc., which we carried, apparently with so little exertion, and absolutely no bullocking; while many of them were in spotless white overalls, delightful to look upon. I had arrived out from England in a sailing-ship, long overdue, owing to a succession of adverse winds, and in consequence water had run very short, so that washing with anything but sea-water was a quite impossible luxury. Our ship was clean, for our crew had toiled nobly with paint and varnish and holystone; and the sails were washed and bleached white by the sunshine and storm of many months on the open sea, far from smoke or dust. Still, I believe that we all felt horribly grimy as the tug towed us to our place at the quay; while I, for one, was longing for a Turkish bath; and that as soon as possible, for no ordinary amount of washing as I felt would, or could, be of any use. So that perhaps, on the whole, there was a double reason for the extraordinary cleanliness of the Melbourne dock-hands striking me as it did at the time. Still, that first impression has never faded, and, to this day, I regard the Australian working man—the worker, not the waster, I mean—as the cleanest in the whole world.

Some people, as I am well aware, are minutely clean in their persons, making it, indeed, a matter of religion, while some are clean in their raiment, but seldom both. Certainly the more completely a man is clothed, the more likely is it that he—or his clothes—are incompletely cleansed; his own mind, which I presume governs the washing of his body, and his wife’s mind, which governs the washing of his garments, seeming unable to work in unison. But, though the Australian labourer is quite completely clothed, and so white as to show dirt as easily as anybody—I mention this fact for the benefit of those who persistently regard him as black and naked—he and his wife appear to have somehow solved this question between them. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that he is better paid, and his wife is better fed than most wives of working men in the Old Country. And, then, the pipes do not freeze; while in even the tiniest three-roomed house there is usually a bath and a shower—though sometimes only in the scullery or back kitchen—with water laid on. And, after all, in a hot country cleanliness is not that affair of infinite toil that it is in a cold one; there is usually a day or so each week, even in the wettest weather, when there is enough sunshine to dry the clothes out of doors, so that one is saved the necessity of slinging them in lines across the kitchen, to drip on to the children’s heads, and lie in sullen grey pools on the floor. Yet there is the dust, which is beyond all words, and the flies, so that it is not all quite plain sailing, after all. Still, though the Australian workman has many little ways which at first rub every atom of your fur up in the wrong direction—he is bumptious, he is cock-sure, he is condescending; “I don’t mind if I do” is his one form of accepting any proffered favour, while a shrug of the shoulders and the “My troubles” are his response to any advice or sympathy you may offer—he is also essentially clean, in other ways apart from those that I have mentioned. Besides this, he does not cadge for tips; indeed, he more often than not resents the offer of money. “What’s that for?” he will ask, with a glance at the proffered coin that makes you blush to your very boots.

I’ve had a hard-worked lodging-house servant refuse a well-earned tip more than once. “Lord bless you, I ain’t going ter take yer money; you’ve enough to do with it!” has been said. Not long before I left the country I took lodgings down at the sea, to recoup from a long illness, with a carpenter and his wife and family of small bairns. When I left, the man walked to the station, carrying my bag for me, and as we shook hands on the platform, entreated me, in his wife’s name as well as his own, to come down and stay with them, if I was hard up or ill, for as long as ever I liked, and not to worry about the money. “For if there’s enough for us, there’s enough for you, providing you don’t mind our rough ways,” he added; “and don’t you go on working again till you’re fair worn out; for as long as we’ve a bit or a sup, or a roof over our heads, you’re welcome to a share.”

On the other hand, these people will be merciless to the humbug, to anyone who is mean or idle. They know their own value; “Business is business,” as they say. They will give freely enough, but they will not submit to be haggled with or underpaid; and why should they? I have worked shoulder to shoulder with them for eight years, and I never wish to work with better people. Their absolute indifference, except where they really like or respect a person, their crudity, their common sense, their shrewdness, is like a tonic. And thus, in spite of Mr. Foster Fraser’s assertion that the Australians can only exist by the constant effusion of fresh and virile blood from the Old Country, I must still believe that, for any elaborate ideals and ethics of over-civilization which we take with us to this new country, we receive in return very much more, certainly individually, than we have ever given; while in respect to the question of virility, Mr. Fraser must, I feel, have very largely judged Australians from the towns, and the undergrown shop-boys and factory-girls that he has seen there. After all, if we stay a little to ponder over what he regards as the degeneracy of these people—and it can only be the town people of whom he speaks—I think we shall realize that it is all only part of the natural order of things; that the more completely a plant belongs to the outdoor world, to the wilds and open places, the more it will suffer by transplantation to the vitiated air, the smoke and dust, of the city. Some day Australia may produce two types, as England does—the city type, with, in spite of its anæmic appearance, a quite immense vitality, and the country type, heavier, slower, and more robust. In the meantime, all these narrow-chested boys and precocious, over-developed girls who at night line the pavement of Swanston Street are really the inevitable result of a period of transition. Most likely when their parents were born there were no streets at all, as we now see them; while their fathers and mothers were such people as Walt Whitman must have had in mind when he wrote, saying: “I see the makings of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

The parents of these weedy boys and girls—who seem, like Jonah’s gourd, to spring to an untimely maturity—were, maybe, conceived and born in the open air, and toiled for their daily bread under conditions of hardship and danger such as we can scarcely realize. A people who lived in vast open spaces, the immensity and loneliness of which very few European minds can grasp, and yet who were dowered with such an abundance of air and sunshine that it is little to be wondered at that their progeny wilt as they do in the towns. And, after all, there is one persistent and saving quality about them: they hark back again to the open; their hearts are never really at one with the cities. The young boys and girls flock there, and love it for a while; but as they mature they begin to long beyond words for the country. Every little shopman, every successful artisan and his wife, cherishes, with few exceptions, the one ambition—to have a tiny place in the country, to farm a little, keep poultry, grow fruit, and live in the open. People settled for life, as one might imagine, in comfortable homes in Melbourne will give up everything—in what can but seem the most surprising fashion to those who have not got that touch of the wild, or the patriarchal, in their blood—and start afresh. Sometimes they are well over fifty years of age before they can feel free to please themselves. But even then, confident in the knowledge that all the youngsters are out in the world doing well for themselves, they will fly to the country and begin all over again in a little two-roomed iron-roofed shanty, where the bush still remains to be stubbled up, growing as it does to the veranda step, and the water has to be carried half a mile, while the only possible chance visitor is an occasional opossum on the roof, or black snake in the bed.

Yet for all this the Bush, which somewhere deep in their hearts has been calling to them all their lives, draws them at last irresistibly to its bosom; so that they will dare anything to be near it, to hear the laughing-kachass at their very door, and see the wild wattle-bloom in flower.

To us who have grown used, through many generations, to the life of the cities, such behaviour seems incredibly mad. We forget how very, very new the whole country still is; how it was won and watered by sheer sweat, and how the people love it all the more because of the life and youth that were lost in its making—love it because it is so near to them, so completely in their blood that the glint of stars through the weather-boards of a bush shanty is a better sight to weary eyes than any wall-paper that even the genius of Morris has evolved.

But I have wandered far from the ship with her furled sails and my first impressions of the new country: the coming and going of Custom-House and Health Officers, the bustle, the sunshine on the quay, and, above all, the curiously homelike Cockney drawl, which is so marked a characteristic of the Australian of to-day, all of which has amalgamated together in my mind, into a vivid and clear-cut picture. It is all very well to write as if I precipitated myself bodily and instantaneously into the hearts and homes of the people, for I did not. I liked them as little as they liked me. And that was very little, for it was a long time before I could be brought to realize that any relation of England could find any possible virtue to be proud of excepting that relationship. That the whole country, indeed, was not a sort of benevolent, though ignorant, country cousin, touchingly anxious to hear all about the head of the family, and be taught the true value of life by any of its scions. As a matter of fact, I had conceived a very clear mental picture of Australia as a burly, farmer-like person, with one hand outstretched in welcome, the other filled with desirable billets of all sorts, which awaited some new-comer, with that wide outlook possible only to one who has rubbed shoulders with the oldest civilization, the completest culture. It took me, indeed, months to realize that what is old, and to our minds completely well established, may be suspected of blue mould. Also that the only relation, likely to be of any use to the impecunious newcomer, is that “Uncle” whom I have discovered to be as outwardly ubiquitous and inwardly suspicious and grudging as in England. Finding, therefore, that everything was going on much the same as though nothing very exciting was expected; and that Australia, as a nation, did not seem to be awaiting me on the quay with open arms, I hustled my few belongings through the Customs, took a cab—the most medieval institution in Melbourne, a sort of closed waggonette, and incredibly rackety—and drove up to a Coffee Palace, which had been recommended to me as cheaper than an hotel.

These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer, the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers and his felt hat well at the back of his head.

“That there,” he responded, jerking his thumb in the direction of a gallery, where a few of the languidly select were draping themselves over the rail—“that there’s where the toffs grub, and there aren’t nothing served there not under two bob; but that there”—and he moved his thumb in the direction of a door to the right, from whence was streaming an endless succession of people, still chewing or, one stage later, picking their teeth—“that there’s where the blokes go: two courses fur a bob.”

He was very polite, and he delayed his pressing business with his teeth to give me the fullest information possible, even to the affair of the “serviette,” as he called it; but he did not take off his hat. The Australian is an inwardly chivalrous person—most wonderfully so, considering how his female belongings have elbowed him off the pavement. He never speaks of—or to—us with that sort of tolerant sneer with which the Englishman tries to pass off the humiliating fact that he was born of woman—that for him a woman’s hands had performed the first, and in all probability will perform the last, offices. But he does not part easily with his head-gear.

The first day, as I went down from my room in the lift, I remember distinctly a man getting in with a big lighted cigar in his mouth and his hat on his head. As he did not attempt to remove either, I fixed my eye on him with a stare that was meant to be significant. I was a snob in those days, though I did not realize it, till later on a working man asked me why I was so fond of talking of “common people.” “It’s the one thing I don’t rightly like about you,” he added, quite candidly and without malice. I have, I hope, been better since; anyhow, I have never forgotten what he said, or the aspect of affairs which his words opened to me. Well, all that the man with the hat and cigar did was to smile and make some remark about the weather, perfectly undaunted by my freezing glances. Then, as I still glared, his face dropped in a curiously hurt and childlike manner. At last, evidently realizing where my gaze was directed, he took off his hat, examined it thoughtfully, and, seeing nothing wrong, put it on again. Then he took out his cigar, looked at it curiously, replaced it in his mouth, and gave it a reassuring puff, as if to say it was certainly all right—so what could there be for me to stare at?

Then suddenly I remembered the chambermaid and the pearls and all the other differences, and nodded and smiled my thanks as he stood aside to let me step first out of the lift; for they will always do that, if possible—it is one of the odd contradictions of them.

As to the chambermaid and the pearls, which, to start with, reminds me of a story I heard of a girl up at a way-back hotel, whose name was Pearl. Some rowdy young larrikin, drinking among a crowd of associates, inquired if she was “the pearl of great price”; to which effort of wit she responded, with the greatest composure, that, on the contrary, she was “the pearl that was cast before swine”; for the progenitor of the untaught Australian brought a goodly share of mother-wit with him from London, in addition to his indelible accent.

I was curled well up under the bedclothes on that first morning, with the sheet over my head, to try and keep out the glare. All the beds in Melbourne seem to be placed facing the light, and blinds are regarded apparently as a mere useless luxury. But I sat bolt upright in sheer amazement when the chambermaid first addressed me, with some palpable, but quite good-tempered jealousy in her voice:—

“My word, but you do look comfy!”

As there were no blinds to be drawn and no tea had been ordered, she just stood there and smiled into my astonished face, with her hands on her hips, swinging easily from toe to heel and back again. She wore a neat black dress and apron, with a minute suggestion of a cap, all quite orthodox, but, in addition, she also wore a pearl necklace, formed of several rows of imposingly large and artlessly artificial pearls. As I caught sight of this, my feelings changed, for she was clean and smiling, while the necklace appeared to my eyes as a symbol and sign of all the extraordinary differences for which I must be prepared in the new world.

“You told me to call you at seven sharp,” she remarked, a note of aggression creeping into her voice, “so you needn’t be looking shirty at being woke. An’ you didn’t order no tea nor nothing.”

“Indeed, you were quite right to call me. Thanks very much. And I don’t want any tea, thank you; only a little hot water.”

“What! ter drink?”

“No, for washing.”

The girl gave a wholly surprised stare, then jerked her thumb in the direction of the door.

“Bath-room, third turn to the left, first to the right.”

For a moment I stared back stonily; then I remembered the pearls, and thanked her, adding: “It is only just seven, isn’t it?”

“The very tick when I opened that door. My word, but you’ve got nice ’air when it’s down like that. I like dark ’air, I do. The worst of light ’air”—and she strolled to the looking-glass and examined her own elaborately dressed amber locks complacently—“it’s toney enough, I do allow; but you do ’ave to keep it clean, and no mistake. Now, then, if you wants a bath, you’d best look nippy, for there’s a run on ’em this time o’ morning. Look ’ere! I tell you what do,” she went on, with sudden friendliness; “I’ll pop along and turn it on for you while you get into your wrapper. My word, but that’s pretty, ain’t it? I like them delainey stuffs. Now, don’t you be long. I’ve twenty rooms to see to, I ’ave. But it must be awkward like in a new country. Different from England, ain’t it? A bit more go-ahead, eh?”

“How did you know?” I asked in amazement, conscious of having removed every scrap of label from my luggage.

“Know?” echoed the chambermaid scornfully. “Why, any kid ’ud know that—it’s sticking out a mile!”

There are, of course, hotels in Melbourne, two moderately good and immoderately expensive, ones, and several smaller fry. But it is in the Coffee Palaces that the ordinary people congregate, and it is from the ordinary people, after all, that one can best judge of a nation; the highly educated—I will not say intellectual—and leisured classes being much the same anywhere. Therefore it is in one of the Coffee Palaces that I would advise anyone to stay who really wishes to study the life and character of the Australians. There comes the shrewd commercial traveller, who, in such a scattered country as this, is a person of wide experience, with by no means the safe and easy road before him that is trodden by his English compeers; while from him you are often able to draw some of the clearest and best-balanced judgments of the whole trend of the country and people that it is possible to obtain. Here, also, are the visitors from other States, with, perhaps, not too much money to spend, and the New Zealander and the Tasmanian, the country cousin, the cocky farmer, and the small squatter, gathering most thickly at the time of the Agricultural or Sheep Show, or during that great week when the race for the Melbourne Cup is run.

The places are, of course, as their name implies, teetotal. If you want anything stronger than tea or coffee, or a soft drink, you give the money to the waitress, who sends out for it. But it is a lengthy progress, and one which all your neighbours seem to regard with such an intense suspicion that usually you content yourself with the truly national drink—tea. In the days of one’s youth one used to be told that tea and meat combined would inevitably turn to leather in one’s tummy. In Melbourne I feel that it must be the internal organs themselves which have turned to leather, so that there can be nothing more left to be feared, and one can even, after a while, drink tea and eat oysters at one fell meal with impunity. Of course, a good many children have succumbed to the united effects of boiled beef and tea, which is really the national food. But, then, it all conduces to the survival of the fittest, and until people will condescend to learn the art of vegetable growing, especially in drought-stricken districts, from the despised John Chinaman, it is as well to be prepared for the worst. The tea is usually drunk very strong and sweet, and most often without milk, many Australians having a deep-rooted suspicion of any fluid, even remotely appertaining to that cow which made their young lives such an intolerable burden to them. The workman, the artisan, the labourer, and dock-hands carry their tin billies, and a portion of tea twisted up in a piece of paper, out to their day’s work with them; and in the towns there is always a gas-jet or a fire to be found at which someone will let them boil the water. The swaggies and the wandering army of station hands, the shearer and harvester, they, too, carry their billies in one hand, as inevitably as they carry their swag—their blanket and store of flour, and mackintosh sheet or bit of oilcloth. And for them there are dry, fragrant eucalyptus leaves and twigs—inflammable as tinder to the least spark from flint and steel—to boil their water over; the very fact of its having to be boiled, and therefore insuring some measure of safety from typhoid germs, being one of the best possible excuses for the universal popularity of tea, particularly among such wanderers, and dwellers in country districts.

One of the first difficulties that confronts the new arrival in Melbourne is that of suitable lodgings, when he shall have tired of hotel and Coffee Palace. I know I walked innumerable streets and answered innumerable advertisements, before I began to realize that those lodgings with one or two bedrooms, a sitting-room, and privately served meals—probably presided over by an ubiquitous ex-butler and cook—which we regard so completely as a matter of course in England, are almost unknown in Australia, and so scarce and expensive as to be an impossibility, excepting for the very wealthy. Either a place was frankly a boarding-house, or one was termed a guest, and expected to have meals with the landlady, her family, and occasional friends; once I remember at an up-country lodging the “friend” being an Assyrian pedlar—certainly the most interesting person I ever met there—while someone who could play the piano or recite, and was generally of a friendly turn of mind, was greatly to be preferred.

I shall never forget my first bewildering day in search for lodgings. As each front-door was opened I was met by the same mingled whiff of cabbage and linoleum, the same complete indifference as to whether I took the rooms or left them; the same superb air of merely letting rooms at all out of charity, or as a sort of careless hobby; also, incidentally, because, by some odd chance, the house happened to be too big for its occupants. Indeed, this reason was so inevitably offered to me that in time I found myself receiving the odd impression that all the lodging-houses had sprung up, gourdlike, to their present proportions the very night after the lease had been signed. The question of attendance, too, seemed to be always a vexed one, and, in most cases, even by extra payment, quite out of the question; while the very idea of separate meals was received with a sort of horror, as if anyone who wished to feed alone must contemplate awful orgies of an unutterable description. For the most part the beds were big, the charges bigger; the washing-basin and the slaveys who opened the door incredibly small—that is, with the professional boarding-house keeper. There seemed no possible reconciliation between the small maid and the small basin, for there the question of attendance came in—though one landlady did vouchsafe the information that her maid “slopped the room” every morning. But it seemed as if the relations between the big bed and the big rent might, and indeed were, expected to be equalized if I did not mind “sharing my room with another young lady,” in one case my possible hostess’s daughter.

I shall never forget my horror when this idea was first mooted to me, nor how, in my confusion, I protested that I “had never slept with another woman in my life.” On which the horror was transferred to the face of the prospective landlady, who retorted that—“if I was that sort, I might go elsewhere.”

These are the people who flood the daily papers with glowing advertisements—perhaps that landlady would say: “And these are the people who answer them.” But still I would have you beware, for they are false as their fringes—luckily, almost as palpably so. Once, I suppose, they held any temporary dweller in Melbourne irrevocably in their clutches, but since the Land Boom—“the Boom,” as it is always called—which, in spite of all its horrors, had a most potentially humanizing effect on the people, a few capable gentlewomen have taken the work of the landladies into their own hands, and comfortable, well-ordered, truly home-like boarding-houses are springing up, which threaten to oust these pre-historic harpies from their lairs.

The streets of Melbourne are, to my mind, the most tiring I have ever known. They are so straight, so uncompromising; Collins Street alone presents such an endless vista as one gazes up it that I remember, in those first days, feeling as if I would like to take it up in my hands and twist it into some unrecognizable form—warp it and bend it. Straight from west to east, side by side, run several such streets, the principal ones of the city, crossed again at right angles by others every bit as straight—all without a single saving grace of curve, of sheltering crescent, or tree-shaded square, so that when a hot north wind blows it rushes across the interstices of these streets like a hot blast from a furnace, eddying thick clouds of yellow dust—filled with the unutterable debris of the streets—furiously round each corner. There are some really most remarkably fine buildings, but the city is not yet sufficiently complete to show them to advantage or in any harmonious whole, and they look, on the whole, rather ungainly among their humble neighbours—squashed in, in an apologetic manner, between them. During those early days of my life in Melbourne, when the first fascination of newness had faded and I had not yet begun to know the true meaning of the city, the place impressed itself on my jaded mind, with photographic clearness, as an individual without eyelashes, staring unblinkingly, showing a face with no half-tints, no delicacy; and, though possessing a sort of humanity, as all big towns do, yet quite without a soul. Indeed, I believe that this is really the truth, and that the soul of the town is wanting because the hearts of the people, in spite of the manner in which they flock to the big cities, are really all the time in the open country, the strongest proof of this being perhaps found in the growth of the suburbs, which push their way ever further and further afield, and in the fact that very few people indeed—having no inborn love for the life of the town as so many of us have—live in the city itself if they can afford to do otherwise.

During the day, indeed, this absence of soul is but little realized, save when the hot winds and dust carve a heavy furrow down the centre of every brow and call into being a thousand criss-cross wrinkles. But at night, or on Sabbaths or holidays, the town is strangely empty, even more so spiritually than actually. On such days in old-world cities, it always seems to me as if the quiet dead were abroad, wandering lovingly round the shady squares—with their sober-faced houses—and the flagged paths of churchyards, the secluded seats, the ancient archways and narrow silent streets; articulate in the twittering of sparrows or the coo of pigeons, lost at other times in the roar of traffic.

But here it is different; the souls of the dead are all away in the primal forests or Bush that they loved, while the living are off to the mountains or sea—train-load upon train-load, many of them away at the first streak of dawn, leaving the parsons lamenting from their pulpits over an array of empty pews. I once went to Sunday morning service in St. James’s Church, which is known as the “Old Cathedral,” and found eleven fellow-worshippers there. And yet I believe the instincts of the people are true; that the sea, with its white sands, its cliffs, its rocks, and wonder of virgin Ti-tree, teach them more than any number of sermons could do. What thoughts the Ti-tree alone gives rise to! Pagan perhaps, yet all sublime. With the wild forest-myrtle it is the most human tree that could well be imagined. Such twisted trunks, such curious entwined limbs, such delicate flowing foliage! It is as if Pan, the great god Pan, still real and vital in this wide world, had chanced on a flock of nymphs at play along the shore, and embodied them thus as they turned to fly with outstretched arms and flowing tresses; or Neptune himself translated them to trees as they slipped from his embrace.

When the sea is so near and the wonder of the Ti-tree and the mountains, and the forests, with their giant gum-trees, and the deep gullies of ferns, cool and fragrant on the hottest days, perhaps, after all, one may consider that God has built temples to His own liking, and that the dreary little brick churches and tin tabernacles of the country districts are as little wanted as the more imposing structures of the town; while the crowds who flock each Sunday and holiday away from the dusty city into the open country have indeed chosen the better part.

That the young people make love openly and shamelessly in the railway-carriages or on the beach; that they are loud and larky and irreverent, does not matter at all; there is really less room for shame where there is shamelessness: and then as a living proof of what these rowdy boys and girls develop into there are the uncounted young families, father, mother and children, clean and smiling and prosperous, scattered in intimate little groups over every holiday resort within an hour’s reach of town. After all, in spite of “certain writers of our own day,” there is nothing very wrong with a country where the artisan—who, after all, is its backbone—can afford so much fresh air and freedom, so many health-giving holidays; and, in addition, can show such a cheerful helpmate, such a well-nourished, well-dressed little brood, as can the Australian artisan. There is rather an apt old saying, which it might not be amiss for some of us older people to lay to heart in discussing a State that is mainly the work of three generations, such as Victoria, and that is:—“They that can do, and they that can’t criticize.”

Every principal street in Melbourne seems to be possessed of a poor relation—meagre, dreary, and more or less unpresentable. There is Collins Street, for instance, wide and majestic, and—may I say?—awful in its unbroken length, leading straight up to the Houses of Parliament, and yet not emblematical, I hope, of that other wide and straight path that leadeth to destruction. Keeping step with it all the way, dim and narrow, noisy and bustling, in the shadow of its skirts runs Little Collins Street. Then there is to the right, still looking upwards towards the seats of the mighty, Flinders Street and Little Flinders Street; to the left, Burke Street and Little Burke Street—the haunt of John Chinaman—Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street, and so on; the transverse streets that cross them alone being free of these poor relations. “The most irrelevant things in Nature,” as Charles Lamb calls them. Indeed, I wish that more of the streets were without them, or that, at least, they did not run in such unbroken continuity—that one might tear the middle out of them in places, as one does out of a French roll, and form a hollow, instead of a block. Even in the place of a single warehouse, here and there, to have a little open space, a few trees—the city-loving plane or large-leaved maple—and a seat or two, so that the unnumbered city clerks and warehousemen might have some little open place and some greenery in sight of which to eat their lunch.

Melbourne is rich in public gardens of rare beauty, while in the Botanical and Fitzroy Gardens there are kiosks where one may get a meal served in the open. But they are all too far from the centre of the city to be of much use during the short hour or half-hour allowed for lunch; while for all the tiny people whose fathers are caretakers, or whose mothers are charwomen, in the very heart of the town, they are indeed a far journey, fraught with untold dangers.

For many years I lived and worked in a great mass of buildings, offices, single rooms, and chambers, rather to the west of the town, starving for the breath of a tree, the sight of a little greenery within easy reach; even the Flag-Staff Gardens, the nearest in that direction, being a good twenty minutes’ walk away. Then, to my joy, I discovered the little Old Cathedral, packed away among warehouses and offices, with its tiny garden, its patch of green sward, its few shady trees, and its herbaceous borders, where there grew a blue flower, whose name I do not know but which I imagine belonged to the borage tribe, of the intensest blue I have ever seen. There were other flowers, of course—geraniums and nasturtiums and dahlias, I believe—but it is the blue alone that lives in my memory, for, like Thoreau, I feel that there is something intensely exhilarating “even in the very memory of blue flowers growing in patches.”

After a while this little garden came to make a real difference in my workaday world—to represent such a true oasis in a desert, which was sometimes all despair, that I can but wish there were more such breathing-places in the midst of the bustling city world. St. James, of course, added very considerably to the glamour of the garden in this case; impressing me, as it always did, with a curious air of antiquity, breathing out more of the atmosphere of the old world than any other building in Melbourne. I use the word “curious” because, after all, it is only some seventy-four years old, though it has taken upon itself an air of reverent age, enwrapping itself about with an atmosphere of brooding peace, quite unviolated by all the fury of getting and spending which goes on around it. Perhaps it is the fact of its being surrounded, as it is, by such a medley of youth and vigour that gives it this precocious air of venerable age; like the eldest of a large growing family it has reached a sedate maturity very early in life, as one counts the lives of churches. Indeed, it is more than mature, and English nostrils sniff up greedily from within its portals the only possible odour of mould and mustiness to be found in Melbourne. Dear old church! The services are orderly and reverent, but in the high tide of work days, when it is empty, but—all praise to its Rector!—never shut during business hours, it and its little garden preach to us the best possible sermon on that one text which, English and Australian alike, we all want reminding of in these busy days, bidding us “study to be quiet.”

CHAPTER III
MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE FOR THE GANDER”

When I was a girl I remember many times hearing my father say that he would rather mount a lady on a young, well-broken horse than on an old hunter; that they knew too much, that they had mastered the art of falling soft, and preferred their own way to that of their rider. As a housekeeper, I know I would rather have an absolutely untaught young girl as a domestic than one who held her own views as to how everything was to be done; equally fearing and disliking any new innovation which might possibly mean extra work. For the same reason, if I was a politician, I would rather have my lines cast in a new country, not yet pot-bound by traditions. England seems at times to hover, literally paralyzed, between the devil of:—“They say” and the deep sea of:—“Has been.” I recollect that in the old days at home a ploughman was ordered to run his furrow along a special field from east to west. I can see now the odd, clouded look of bewilderment which came into his face as the order was given to him; then the drawing down of the long upper lip, the set of the obstinate chin, when his protestation that it “wur allus ploughed t’other way” were received merely by a smiling repetition of the command. Finally, his utter bewilderment when the—to his mind—unanswerable argument that it had “allus been ploughed that way, when ferther wur a lad, an’ gran’ferther wur a lad, an’ the owd meyster wur alive,” was met in the same manner.

The merest yokel in Australia could see no reason at all in an argument such as this. Here the people revel in change. They are ready to try anything, and, if one plan fails, another is at once experimented with. Sometimes it may be rather like the progress of a bull in a china-shop, but still it is progress, and the people here find it very difficult to realize the mind of a country which takes up the attitude of a man refusing to change his shirt for fear that he should suffer some chill or discomfort in the process. In the article on the Sydney Congress in the Times of May 24, 1910, the difference between the two countries in many political matters is very plainly stated:—“There is nothing more extraordinary in Free Trade propaganda than the lame contention that we must continue upon a ruinous course because a new policy will involve initial difficulties. That argument is laughed to scorn in Australia. The Australian fears no difficulties. The spirit which leads men to face and overcome obstacles is in his blood. His history and condition are one long record of triumphing over difficulties, and he cannot understand why the complexity of framing a tariff should be urged for a moment in England. He thinks, like many Englishmen, that the historian of the future will contemplate with amazement the spectacle of the Dominions seeking closer unity, while the Mother Country remains coldly repelling their advances.”

A question one very often hears asked in Australia, usually as a joke or sort of catch-phrase, is:—“Where do I come in?” But there is no joke at all about the state of mind which such a question implies. I have often heard new chums say very nasty things about what they call the “self-seeking nature of the people”; and they will point out—when the distinction between the old and new country are being discussed—all that Australia owes to England, how she depends on her for naval protection and for her very life as a nation. But, still, something more is expected from the modern mother than merely boxing the ears of all the other children who interfere with her progeny, and, after all, the obligation is not entirely one-sided. Even if we forget the ready help which was given in the time of the Boer War, we ought not to forget that in Australia many thousands of people, that England confessedly could do nothing with, have been remade into men and women, who—with their children—have gone to the making of a very fine people.

In many ways Australia is more loyal to England than she is to herself. Among private people there always seems very little preference given to Australian-made goods alone, but a very great deal to all goods made by English-speaking people, though naturally those in authority intend to protect their own manufacturers first. Out here Imperial Preference is not a party matter, and in these days to come across even one important question in politics, where the good of the entire country alone is considered, seems like opening a window and letting into a stuffy, gas-heated atmosphere a stream of pure air; while it is for this reason that the defeat of Mr. Deakin—during the last election—has not upset the whole apple-cart, as such a Labour victory would inevitably have done in England.

There is no doubt, I believe, that Australia, as a whole, is in favour of Imperial Preference. At the Sydney Congress, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart were frankly for it, and though the three great Chambers of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide remained neutral, none of the State capitals voted against it, while most of the smaller Chambers were most openly in its favour.

That some of the Chambers were neutral is not to be wondered at. Already Preference rates are extended to 294 items of British goods, coming under the Preferential tariff and paying on an average 24 per cent. less duty than foreign goods of the same kind; the total rebate on British goods in Australia in 1908 reaching the sum of £828,000. Foreign exporters are not blind to what the Australians are doing for their fellows, and in one instance a special discount was offered, equivalent to the amount of Preference given to British-made goods, while every sort of effort has been made to undervalue or dump foreign goods at less than their market value. And yet it is the British manufacturers who have most persistently tried to hoodwink the Australians, English cotton materials having been actually sent to the Continent to be printed and dyed, then back to England to be packed and shipped off as Preferential goods.

Now the stipulation has been made that goods commanding Preference must have not less than 25 per cent. of their value represented by English labour, the tolerance and moderation of the rule speaking well for the patience of Australia, though it certainly does not speak well for English manufacturers that there should need to be any such regulation. It is like having to compel a man, to whom you are paying ten pounds a week, to contribute ten shillings for the support of the wife, who keeps his house in order, cooks his food, and rears his children.

But this is not the only grievance that Australia has against English manufacturers; an even more fatal one is that they simply cannot get what they want. For some years I was working in Melbourne at house-decorating and fitting. My business took me among wholesale and retail tradesmen and importers of furniture, hardware, draperies, carpets, tiles, and the hundred and one items that are needed for the fitting up of a modern dwelling, and from one and all came the same complaint. They could not get what they wanted from the English manufacturers. Goods were not true to sample; there were not a sufficiency of one sort, and, when more was applied for, the buyers were either frankly told that they could not have it, or a different class of goods was sent in its place. Mr. Hamilton Wicks, the British Trade Commissioner, has spoken pretty plainly about the difficulties which Australian houses find in getting their orders properly attended to in England, however much they may wish to be loyal to the Empire. Often it is a case of:—“Oh, anything is good enough for the Colonies; they are used to roughing it out there!” or, perhaps, less flagrant, but none the less irritating, there is an absolute lack of knowledge as to the requirements in Australia; a pig-headed refusal to see that many articles needed here—particularly agricultural implements—are of a necessity quite different from those in use in England. “Give Grandam kingdom, and thy Grandam will give you a pear or apple or a plum,” says England, “and do not be impertinent enough to quibble about its being a trifle overripe or blighted.”

To the people at home who assert—as I have often heard them do—that Australia is a completely self-seeking country, I would recommend a short study of Australian commerce—even of Victorian commerce alone—and of the statistics showing the imports of the last few years, a very brief perusal of which will be sufficient to prove that an infinitely larger amount of Australian money is spent in England, and other parts of the Empire, than in any foreign country. In 1908 Australia spent in imports from British Possessions, including India, £36,319,781, as against £13,479,492 in those from all other countries, including the United States.

In 1904–1908 the proportion of goods imported from England and other British Possessions averaged 72.93 per cent., and from all other countries, including America, 27.7 per cent.—could England itself show as fair a record?

Again, though in 1908, £1,305,602 were spent on German imports by Victoria alone, the value of Victorian goods exported to Germany reached £2,015,536, so that the obligation was by no manner of means all on one side.

Mr. Foster Fraser has two great faults to find with Australians—they are slack, and they are few. Oddly enough, while continually reverting to the thinness of the population in the country districts, he finds fault—to take only one of the many instances—with the fact that the output of butter is nowhere near as great in Australia as it is in Denmark. Denmark, a made country! A country that has been perfecting its dairying industry for years! Why, I remember when I was quite a small child—and that was a long while ago—that the cooking butter used to be brought in little kegs from Denmark—to a pastoral country like England, too! Little Denmark, which, including Iceland, has a population of 2,708,470, with a density of 49^.94, as against the immense continent of Australia, with its population, according to the last census, of 4,275,306. Why, Denmark, including Iceland, covers an area of but 55,306 square miles, and Victoria, the smallest state in Australia, 87,884. Put 2,708,470 people—the population of Denmark—into it to start dairy-farming, and then comparisons may become merely odious, and not, in addition, ludicrous. As it is, Victoria alone exported to the United Kingdom, in 1908, butter to the value of £868,068, and that’s “none so dusty,” as her own people would say; while the amount of butter actually consumed there was valued at £1,250,000, and cheese, both consumed and exported, at £100,000.

It seems as if I was “barracking” for Australia as against England, but very far from that. Though I have lived in Australia for years, and though it has helped me to a wider, fuller life than I ever knew before, England is my own country, and still holds my heart. And yet, when one hears, as one so often does, sweeping and wholesale condemnations and criticism—or, perhaps worse, faint praise—given without any realization of what a country really is, and how it has reached the position it now holds, it seems only honest that those who have gained their living through that country, to whom it has afforded friendship, shelter, and consideration, should speak of it as they have found it. A sort of friction seems inevitable between parents and their grown-up children, but the fault is not always and altogether on the children’s side—and, in any case, the friction is only intensified either by interference or well-meant attempts at rearrangement. Australians hate alike interference and pity. If you sympathize with a man or woman out here, it is ten to one that they will inform you that they can do their “own lying awake at night.” Once when a miner died up West his mates put up above his grave these words as a text—and, in truth, there are many worse:—“He did his damndest; angels could do no more.” But, then, the world in general is much like the ultra-tidy housewife of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes writes “that if the Angel Gabriel did come down from heaven, she would be complaining of him, that he dropped his feathers about the house.”

Australia is so much overgoverned that it is really a wonder the broth is not spoilt between the multitude of cooks. It seemed bad enough before Federation, but it was nothing to what it is now, and one wonders that there is anyone left to govern. How long the state of affairs will go on which permits the expense of two Government Houses, and a superfluity of officials, I do not know. It seems, indeed, as if everybody must have been too busy to bother about it, and that the State Governorship remains, like many another archaic institution, simply because so many more intricate complications engage the attention of the people.

Luckily for Australia, the separate functions of her two Houses of Parliament—the Legislative Assembly, or Lower House, and the Legislative Council, or Upper House—are more definitely defined than those of the House of Commons and the House of Lords are at home—or have been till just lately. Still, Australian politics represent a tangled web to the new chum, and one which I have had very little time or opportunity of studying. I scarcely know, indeed, how I ever got started on the subject of Preference, but as the chapter somehow began itself in that way, and as this book is most likely to be read by people at home, who, by some chance, may happily know even less about the matter than I do, a few of the leading points of the game may not come amiss.

Frankly, I confess that the first day I was present at a debate in the Legislative Assembly I was reminded of nothing in the world so much as the trial scene in “Alice in Wonderland”:

“‘No, no,’ said the Queen; ‘sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

“‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

“‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

“‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

“‘Off with her head!’ said the Queen; but nobody moved.

“‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice. ‘You are nothing but a pack of cards.’

“At this all the cards rose up into the air and came flying down upon her.”

The question in the House at that time was, if I remember rightly, something to do with the duty on cloth caps made in Tasmania, and it really seemed astounding that so much excitement could be got out of such a little thing. Everything anyone said was frankly contradicted even in plainer words than “stuff and nonsense!” Everybody seemed to speak at once—or, rather, shout in a vain hope that they might be heard above the babel—and personalities of all sorts were freely indulged in, either to be completely disregarded or replied to by more abuse; often, I must confess, rather wittily put; while, should any orator succeed in shouting down his fellow, even then his troubles were far from ended, his every peculiarity being ruthlessly registered by the Press. The other day I came across an amusing and most characteristic notice of the New South Wales Premier in the Bulletin, from which I cannot resist quoting, affording as it does a very good example of this freedom of speech:

“McGowan will no longer be able to complain of getting too little newspaper space. He will get enough; but the Lord help those who have to ‘take’ him, and preserve them from charges of misreporting. For McGowan is the most slovenly speaker in the world. If he’s not, I’d like to shoot the other. Half his sentences are never finished, and his remarks trail round and round his subject like a snake in a hen-coop looking for the exit. His constantly repeated gag is—‘The point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is this.’ Then he suddenly discovers that he has mislaid the point, or left it at home, or in the tram, or somewhere, and while he is trying to recollect what he did with it, he fills in time by rounding off a flock of sentences which he left unfinished earlier in the evening.”

And again:

“The haste of the Fisher Government to do things lately moved Alfred Deakin to describe its proceeding as ‘quick-lunch legislation.’ Poor old Alfred’s variety was ‘fasting man’ or ‘dry-crust legislation.’ You sat down at the table and looked at Alfred’s political bill-of-fare. In about three years a dead waiter came, and you ordered chops. The waiter departed slowly in a state of decay, and fell into dust before he reached the door. Then you stayed around, through geological periods, till Judgment Day, and, looking down from the battlements of heaven, you saw Alfred’s cook still chasing the sheep through perdition. Truly there was no quick lunch about the Deakin methods! In his restaurant the dropped soup took six months to reach the floor, and, as likely as not, you saw Alexander the Great at the next table, for time didn’t matter there.”

One politician who reached the limit in the matter of political amenities, and who has died very recently, was Mr. J. H. Graves. The abuse, the satire, and the damning with faint praise, the awful disclosures, and the still more awful insinuations, that Mr. Graves indulged in, were a perfect nightmare to the House of his day, all the more to be dreaded from the fact that he never spoke at random, that all his shafts were at once winged and barbed by truth, and their course directed by a sure and certain knowledge of the tenderest portion of his writhing victim’s conscience. People said, and, I believe, with truth, that J. H. Graves kept a carefully compiled Doomsday Book, containing the history of every member of the House, with every possible detail of his every mistake and misdemeanour, and all the mistakes and misdemeanours, the scandals and family skeletons, of his progenitors. A speaker in the House cannot be summoned for libel; all that can happen is that he should be called upon to apologize for anything particularly insulting—and Mr. Graves was ready to apologize with cheerful alacrity. There was always plenty more in that fatal book. It is said that Mr. J. L. Purves, by whose death the Australian Bar has lately lost one of its most brilliant members, once got hold of the original book and burnt it; and that, though another was begun, it was so much less voluminous and comprehensive, members ceased, from that time onwards to feel cold shivers running down their backs when Graves’s glance fell upon them; and so much of his power was lost, though in a dispute with another man, who came from the same county as himself, this second book was actually produced in proof of its existence.

“I have never been guilty,” thundered a member recently, in a fine fury of indignation, “of going to the telephone and impersonating another man, and using the information obtained against him in Parliament under the cloak of privilege. But I must say the honourable member for — stands here self-convicted of that action.” I have not the faintest recollection of what it was all about, but it is characteristic; while the title “honourable,” as it is here used, strikes me as rather a meaningless survival in a democratic country. “Hi don’t call ’im the ’onourable,” I once heard an emphatic political opponent declare. “Hi calls ’im the ’orrible.”

“Cabbage-grower!” someone shouted at some public meeting where Mr. Bent was making a speech. “Well, there’s no question about that,” retorted the late Premier beamingly; “the question is, did I, or did I not, grow good cabbages?”

The odd thing is that out of all the schoolboy chaff, and the apparently hopeless babel of mere words, such good measures can be evoked. It is somehow like flinging a medley of unappetizing-looking scraps into a casserole, and, rather to one’s own surprise, evoking a good soup—when all the scum has been removed.

The State Governor, as the Victoria Year Book remarks bluntly, is only expected to exercise his judgment in assenting to, or dissenting from, or reserving of, any Bills passed by Parliament, and the granting or withholding of a dissolution—either of which measures will, for the time being, render him equally unpopular—or the appointment of a new Ministry. Apart from this, his whole duty consists in looking nice and behaving prettily, while by far the most arduous part of the position rests upon the shoulders of his wife. If I was going to choose a new Governor for Victoria—which somehow no one has even thought of asking me to do—I should not even want to see him, though my interview with his wife would be long and arduous. She must dress beautifully, for she is of little use unless she wears things that other women can copy; but she must give herself no airs, while the complete frankness of the criticism which she will meet with may be gathered, with some amusement, from the following description of a garden fête at Storrington, the State Government House:

“The visitors were so eager for the frivol that they arrived before schedule time (3.30). Motors and carriages were politely dissuaded from entering the gates, while Aides peeped unhappily round the pillars of the veranda, and sent agonized messages upstairs. But the Carmichaels were getting into party duds as fast as they could. They had been opening the motor-drive out to Toorak at 2.30, and the lady’s return home and quick change into a dream of a lilac gown had all to be compressed into the one brief hour. When at last the pair came out, the dress—a trailing circumstance of nonchalant coolness—was received with murmurs of admiration. Someone has been redrawing the lines of the Carmichael lady’s figure; it has the new slenderness necessary for the new dressing.”

The ideal Governor’s wife must be of the bluest possible blood—nothing insults a democratic country like playing down to it in the matter of nobodies—and yet she must forget all the class distinctions she has ever known. She must remember everybody, entertain royally, and spend lavishly. There was once a superlatively mean Governor, with a superlatively mean wife, in Victoria, and they will never be forgotten; it is a fault that the people here are not prone to themselves, and which they simply will not tolerate in those whom they consider handsomely paid to cut a dash. I never saw but one public-house called after that particular Governor, and this, in itself, is significant—besides, even it is in a mean back street.

When the Ministry finds it is unable to disentangle itself, when it has not a proper working majority, or is defeated on any matter which it considers vital, then the Premier, instead of tendering his resignation and asking the Governor to “send for” a leading member of the Opposition—as would be the case were he defeated in Parliament or at the polls—asks the Governor for a dissolution, the terms of which are very carefully dictated to him, though at other times he acts mainly on the advice of the Executive Council.

In the Executive Council there are eight salaried Ministers. Four at least of these must always be members of the Council or Assembly, but not more than two of the Council or six of the Assembly; while upon accepting office a Minister vacates his seat in Parliament, though he may return to it without being re-elected. The Council—or Upper House—consists of thirty-four members, being divided into seventeen electoral provinces, each of which returns two members. The member of each electorate who receives the largest number of votes retains his seat for six years, if there is no General Election, the other members retiring after three years.

In the Lower House there are sixty-five members, single electorates being provided for each seat. Universal suffrage is in force; all persons natural-born or naturalized, and untainted by crime, are on the general roll, and plural voting is not allowed. A member of the Assembly receives certain allowances for his expenses, at the rate of £300 a year. This is, I suppose, given that professional or working men may feel free to devote themselves exclusively to a political life, and be relieved from all other business anxieties. In England it may seem quite a lot, but it appears to me—considering the really large incomes to be made in Australia by a thoroughly able man in nearly any business or profession—that it is not enough. It pays the working man, hand over hand, to go into Parliament, for it is not likely that he would make as much at his own job, however good he was at it. But a capable lawyer, say, or doctor, upon whose mental training large sums have been spent, will earn far more than that if he is any good; and certainly, if he cannot manage his own affairs, he will not be able to manage those of his country. So that a successful man, particularly if he is married and has a family to bring up in the same way in which he himself has been brought up, would have to be peculiarly unselfish—almost culpably so—to relinquish his profession for a Parliamentary career. I suppose it would be impossible that members should be paid in proportion to their former earnings and their status in life, but, after all, that would be the fairest thing, and insure the best type of man.

Apart from personal expense, the election expenses of a candidate for the Upper House are fixed at £400, and those of a candidate for the Lower House at £150, while there are strict regulations regarding the manner in which this sum should be spent—viz., in printing, advertising, publishing, issuing, distributing addresses and notices; and on rolls, stationery, messages, postage, and telegrams; on hiring halls and holding public meetings; on the expenses of committee-rooms; on a scrutineer, one only at each booth; and on one agent for any electoral province or district.

Although the power of the Victoria Parliament has necessarily been considerably curtailed since Federation, all matters to do with the internal development of the State are still in its hands; while, apart from Customs and Excise, it retains the power of taxation for State needs and the Public Debt, the State railways, Crown lands, mining and factory legislation; while to the municipalities have now been accorded the Water Supply Trust, the Tramway Trust, and Mining and Land Boards; while the Postal System, all Custom and Excise Duties, and all affairs of Foreign Policy, are under the control of the Upper House.

Any income over £200 a year is subject to income tax in Victoria, with an exemption of £100 up to £15,000. Incomes derived from personal exertions are taxed 3d. for every pound of the taxable amount up to £300; up to £800, 4d.; up to £1,300, 5d.; and up to £1,800, 6d.; over that, 7d.; the incomes derived from property being taxed at double that amount—the tax-collectors seeming to be possessed of a considerable amount of insight. Certainly no one has ever so much as suggested to me that I should pay an income tax, though I am doubtful as to whether this should be taken as a compliment either to myself or my publishers; while I must confess that I have felt at times rather hurt that no one in authority has credited me with possible brains to the extent of over £200 a year.

A short study of the Victorian Land Tax seems to give one a singularly vivid picture of the country, being arranged, as it is, on a basis that would be out of the question at home, for the tax is levied, not on the mere size of the property, but on the amount of sheep that it will carry. Land that will carry four sheep or more to the acre is valued at £4 per acre; land carrying one and a half sheep—which half not being specified—£3; one sheep per acre, £2; under one sheep per acre, £1. All estates above 640 acres, and valued, by this means, at over £2,500, are taxed at the rate of 1¼ per cent. upon their capital value, after deducting an exemption for £2,500—exemption only being allowed on one estate for each owner.

The railways are the property of the State, the first railway-line in Victoria having been opened in 1854. Apart from a few suburban lines, for many years every thought was concentrated on directing the railways towards the mining centres, and very little attention was given to any but the gold producing areas. But gradually, as people began to return to their farms and sheep-runs, and the agricultural possibilities of the State again seemed worth considering, the numbers of railway-lines began to increase, and during the twenty years which followed 1874 no fewer than 2,498 miles of railway were constructed and opened for traffic, since which only 348 miles of line have been added, chiefly in the wheat-growing districts of the North-West.

The whole system of Victorian railways, with its staff of some 13,000 men, is managed under Parliament by three commissioners only—an odd exception to the general overgoverning that occurs in most public affairs.

People are always travelling in Victoria, seldom staying at home for even a single day’s holiday, while they think no more of going to Sydney for the inside of a week than the average Londoner would of going to Brighton; and it is amusing to remark that the number of passengers carried over the lines in the year 1908 represented sixty journeys a year for each man, woman, and child in the State—though, of course, there are many people who will take three or four different journeys to separate suburbs in one day, to balance the lonely dwellers in the back blocks who have never been in a train in their lives. Still, the average of 150,000 passengers coming and going at Flinders Street Station alone, in one single day, seems to me a very large one.

For the purpose of administering the Land Act, Victoria—and it must be remembered here that I am speaking of State, and not of Federal, affairs—is divided into seventeen districts, in each of which is a land office and officer. These districts include 3,316,727 acres of pastoral Crown land, exclusive of 6,412,500 acres of Mallee land—the entire Mallee covering 11,000,999 acres. This spare land is graded into first, second, and third class land, auriferous and pastoral land; the greater part of the first-class land, with sheltered valleys, suitable for vineyards and orchards, being in the Buln-Buln area, the soil of which is mostly volcanic, and of a warm chocolate brown.

A great many of the large estates in Victoria are being subdivided into farms, the squatters being under compulsion to sell a certain proportion of their property. The Land Branch has now acquired forty-nine properties, which it has subdivided into 1,203 farms, and 589 allotments for workmen’s houses—the question as to who the workmen are to work for apparently not having been very seriously considered—while shortly the Werribee Park Estate of 23,214 acres will also be available.

One knows, of course, that Victoria must be more thickly populated. But one cannot wonder that squatters whose fathers have acquired vast areas of land, who have built dwelling-houses, fenced and planted, invested money in stock, and, in fact, devoted the whole of their life to the care and the improvement of their properties, should feel aggrieved at seeing them taken away from them, chopped up into small holdings, and allotted to men who have never done anything towards the furtherance of the export and import trade, or the gain and credit of their country. Still far above this, it must be most galling of all to have shipload after shipload of emigrants brought out to occupy land which the squatters feel belongs to them—morally, as well as actually, if land ever did belong to anybody, wrested from the wilds as it has so often been by incredible labour and risk of life.

Progress seems always to involve a trampling underfoot. It is a Moloch whose chariot-wheels spurt blood at every turn. Many of the Victorian landowners are not only indignant, they are genuinely aghast; heart-sick at the deprivations of the Land Board, their grievance being aggravated by the undoubted fact that there is still a great quantity of land which is literally no man’s ground, as far as settlers are concerned. I heard one story of a very well-known family in the Western district, the founders of whom, a Scotchman and his wife and two children, journeyed up from Melbourne by waggon, in the days when the whole country was infested with dangerous blacks, and, finding a pleasant, fertile pastureland in the Western country, with rich volcanic soil, well watered, determined to settle there.

It was necessary, however, for the man to go back to Melbourne for implements, provisions, and stock, and all the other necessities of life. If they all went someone might come and snap up the land; in any case, it would be a long and weary journey with the bullocks, and he could get there more quickly and easily alone on horseback. So the waggon was made into a temporary house, and, with ammunition and food enough to last till her husband’s return—which at the quickest would not be before a month were well passed—the woman, an English gentlewoman, with her two tiny children, settled down to hold the land against the possible encroachments of other white settlers; above all, to hold her own life and that of her children against the more than probable onslaught of the blacks, and all the horrors of which they were capable. Some day, for the good of Australia and the Australians, the history of such people ought to be written. Yet it is to land so won and so held that every casual “rouse-about” or street loafer feels that he has a perfect right.

One can in some ways understand the feeling against large landowners better in England, where space is so limited; where people literally heat into anarchy with being packed so closely together; where land was acquired, for the most part, centuries ago, and the proprietors are nice and clean, alike of blood or sweat. But out here it is different. Old men remember the hand-to-hand fight with the desert; the danger, the almost incredible difficulties of transport; and, above all, the self-sacrifice and privation of the women whose sons now hold the land.

It is not the Land Board that one condemns; they are doing what they feel is best for the country, and perhaps will be best for the new settlers, when they have shaken down into their places, though one can but believe that, in the end, the man who is industrious and far-seeing will inevitably acquire more and yet more of the land which the thriftless muddler finds himself unable to manage, when large estates will gather again like snowballs. But it is the average man in the street who talks as if the squatters had done nothing but wallow in luxury for centuries that makes one so mad.

In many of the dairying districts owners of large estates have voluntarily sub-let a great part of their land, and set up butter factories, to which their tenants bring their milk. In the old days all the butter not required by a farmer’s own household would be bartered at the local store for groceries and clothing, the farmers’ wives getting a poor return indeed for it during the spring, when it was a drug in the market; and to such as these the central butter factories have proved a veritable boon, adding enormously to their comfort, and minimizing their labour. In some instances the farms are leased, and the tenant pays rent, but in others the landlord stocks the farm and provides all the implements, while the tenant supplies the labour, and proceeds are divided; one great advantage accruing to the small farm being that the factories pay for the milk either weekly or monthly, while the market is absolutely sure. Every day the tenant-farmer drives up with his milk-cart to the factory door; the milk is taken in and weighed; it is then analyzed, and the value, according to the percentage of cream, is credited to his account; while he drives off with the separated milk—due to from the day before for his poddy-calves—all his responsibility as regards the milk being at an end. Do they use the term “poddy-calves” in England? For the life of me, I cannot remember. Anyhow, it means a calf fed on the same system as a modern baby, this bottle-feeding of young calves being a serious item in the manifold work of a dairy farm.

A Victorian butter factory is a delightful sight. The scrupulous cleanliness, the huge tanks of cream, the vast churns at work, and, above all, the great swiftly-revolving disc of wood upon which the butter is worked. Delicious stuff it is, too, a rich, deep, natural yellow colour, and fresh flavour; infinitely superior to the ordinary home-made product, where the cream is often kept too long, in the effort to collect enough to be worth the churning. Already Victorian butter has reached Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Corea, Arabia, Cape Colony, Natal, Portuguese East Africa, German East Africa, Dutch East Indies, Malay States, Philippines, Reunion, Hawaii, Fiji, and Mauritius—and when I think of the butter we used to have, some ten years ago, when I was in the last-named island, I feel that it and many hundred similar places, have something to thank Australia for. I will not venture to name the country that the tinned abomination, which was sold there under the name of butter, came from, but it was like nothing so much as what the old Oxfordshire ploughmen used to call “dodments,” to “sloime with dodments” being, in their vernacular, the equivalent to “greasing a cart-wheel.”

Oddly enough, Victorian farmers do not take kindly to breeding pigs. I believe, if I ever became an agriculturalist, that would be the one line I should take up, though, as far as I know, I never heard of a woman pig-farmer. However, the assertion that Gilbert White makes in his “Natural History of Selborne” that the progeny of one sow amounted to 300 has always fascinated me, and it seems strange that, with the large increase of all other industries in Victoria—particularly of dairy and fruit farms—the number of pigs has actually fallen, though the prices they fetch are higher than they ever were before. Here, at least, should be a chance for the Irish emigrant further than that of “sitting on the gate.”

A friend of mine once told me that he was driving through a country district with the parish priest, when they passed an old Irishman engaged in this historical occupation. The priest, drawing rein, mentioned some wedding, at which he had lately officiated, expressing his regrets that he had been obliged to leave directly the ceremony was over, and inquired of the old man whether they had a good supper, and plenty of fun after it.

“Sure, yer Reverence,” answered Paddy, his face wreathed in smiles—“we did that. And lashins and lavins ther wur. Buther on bacon!” Lashins and lavins! And so there ought to be for the pigs in the dairy districts, judging from the statistics, which assert that the output of separated milk in the State is 1,385,000,000 pounds, leaving sufficient after every calf in Victoria has been fed to produce 40,000,000 pounds of pork. There’s “buther on bacon fur yez!”

In the early days, apart from gold, wool was one of the chief productions in Victoria, as in New South Wales. During later years, however, it has been surpassed by the combined industries of dairy produce and grain. Still, there are 14,000,000 sheep in the State, mostly merinoes, producing some of the finest wool in the world, particularly the sheep from the bounteous Western district, where the family of Macarthurs—Captain John Macarthur, nearly a hundred years ago, having introduced the first merino sheep from Spain and Great Britain—still flourish, or did flourish when I was last in that part of the world, before the craze for chopping up estates became the vogue. I remember being shown little samples of wool by an old squatter and told the different sort of sheep from which they were cut, then made to shut my eyes, and learn to name the varieties from the feel alone. I would have made a good wool-sorter, he said; and, honestly, I believe it would be a fine trade for women, with their delicate sense of touch.

That special station had been magnificently fenced and guarded from the wind by acre upon acre of gum-tree plantations. There had been a great bush fire just before I was last there, which swept for miles across the open country, destroying or injuring many of the old man’s treasured plantations, and even scorching the creepers off the solid, square-built stone homestead. Every man, woman, and child on the place had worked like fury to stamp it out, and just saved the home; but, beside the fencing and younger plantations, any number of sheep were destroyed, and, I believe, the wool-shed also. Then, a year or so later, just as the shearing was finished, there came a sudden late spell of hard frost and killed 10,000 of the sheep. So a station-owner’s life, even in these days, is not all beer and skittles, as the man at the street corner thinks; and who will make fences and plant trees when the country districts are all a patchwork of small holdings, each owner trying to get a fortune out of his own special little lot? It’s a vexed question all round, but somehow it seems there ought to be enough to pay Paul without robbing Peter.

What a dry chapter! The Bulletin would say it was written by a “Wowser”—a Wowser being an advocate of everything dry, of temperance and all the virtues, who expresses his opinions in such a manner that the good he advocates appears as offensive as he is himself. The Wowser is quite a common species in Victoria, and has even been known to crop up among the highest dignitaries of the Anglican Church.

CHAPTER IV
THE WORKING-MAN AND THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD

The working-man in Australia is being made a demigod of, with all sorts of frills added, so that the fact of his possessing feet of clay, like the rest of us, may be hidden, even from himself. He does not really care about it all. He wants—if he is a real working-man—to do his job, and smoke his pipe in peace, while all he asks for is fair play, or all he has asked for in the past; because now, like all spoilt children, he has come to a state of mind when he really does not know what he wants. He is like a boy, naturally brim full of the spirit of adventure, of pluck and endurance, who has been kept at home and pampered by an over-fond mother. It is not his fault that he has missed the bracing atmosphere of that greatest of all schools—the adverse world.

The wonder really is that the Australian working-man has kept his head as he has done and gone on with his job at all; that trees are being felled, bricks laid, roads made, and mines worked by these men, who—from the way their supporters talk—ought to be living on the unearned increment of the landowners; ought to be seething in revolt at the inequalities of life, “protesting and demanding,” and doing little else, instead of going plodding off to work each morning; with their lunch done up in a red pocket-handkerchief, that might be so much more effectively contrived into a cap of freedom. Luckily, the working-man, for the most part, regards his political supporters as any normal John Bull regards his womenkind. They are all very well in their way, but they are not, for a single moment, to be taken seriously—and so he refuses to be made a fool of. After all, what is there for him to fuss about? Usually he has grandparents, or ancient relatives or friends, who remember what the life of the working-man in England was like in their young days; at the present time he has newspapers, and probably knows as well as you or I do of the number of out-of-works and paupers, and deaths from starvation in England—125 dying from sheer want of food alone in 1909. Of course, he is sometimes out of work himself, and masters are mean, or wages low. I remember one case brought against a manufacturer of food-stuffs—porridge, oats, flour, pickles, etc.—where the awful fact came to light that the wives of some of the employés could not afford to spend more than 5s. a week on meat, this—with the best chops at 5d. per pound, and good joints at 3d. or 4d., and commoner sorts at 2d.—being equal to at least 10s. in England, where, in the country districts, meat more than once a week is very rarely seen on a workman’s table. Melbourne was terribly shaken over the disclosure; but still the workmen went on working for that particular manufacturer just as they did for any other. There was no bloodshed, no real boycott, no particular agitation—there seldom is among the bona fide workpeople; they know when they are well off. It is the agitators who agitate for them, who insist on treating them like enfants gântés.

After all, even the good things the reformers have procured for the working-men are not good for all. Take as an instance the minimum wage. It is good for the middling worker, for the man who is neither weaker nor stronger, better nor worse, than his fellows. It is not good for the man who is above them, because the universal high rate of pay prevents the employer from being able to raise it in any particularly promising case; already they pay so much that they can do no more. Neither is it good for the old or the feeble, for the pottering odd-jobman who is not up to a regular hard day’s work, and yet who could keep himself—at a time when his family are probably out in the world and doing well—by his own small exertions; living on far less than the minimum wage allows, and still feeling he is taking his part independently in the battle of life.

As another instance of the two-sided way things work, take the Trade Boards. There are now fifty-nine special Boards in Melbourne, by which the rates of wages and prices for piece-work are fixed, the average wages since the establishment of these Boards having risen very materially—in the bakers’ from £1 12s. 6d. a week to £2 4s. 7d.; in the furniture trade from £1 9s. 1d. to £1 16s. 8d.; in the bootmaking trade from £1 3s. 2d. to £1 16s. 8d., to cite only a few examples. In the face of this it is evident that the workman need not feel disturbed by any fear of being underpaid; the Board connected with his special trade will see to that for him. But, on the other hand, the high rate of wages—which sends out of the country a great quantity of work which might just as well be done in it—makes it possible that, as the population increases, the Australian workmen may be faced by a serious lack of employment, besides raising the cost of some articles very considerably. To take one instance. In 1908 Victoria exported 1,680,294 pounds of frozen beef. I presume all the cattle so used possessed skins—indeed, it was proved by the export of raw hides—and yet the leather imported into the State that same year was valued at £275,291, and the Australian workman pays more for his boots—if they are of leather—than does the English workman.

Yet, after all, clothing, boots, and house rent are the only things for which the Australian workman has to pay dearly out of his ample wages. Food is quite wonderfully cheap. I remember a restaurant—it was not The Paris nor The Vienna, nor was it situated anywhere in the vicinity of Collins Street—that I used to go to in my drab days. There one could get soup, hot meat with two vegetables—I particularly recollect quite delicious little beefsteak puddings, one served to each customer—a sweet, often apple-tart, or milk-pudding made with egg, a cup of tea, and as much bread as you wanted—all for 6d.! More than that, they would send round to any office or workshop a tray with meat and vegetables—an ample allowance, too—a pot of tea, and a plate of tart or pudding, milk, sugar, and bread, for the same price. Once I breakfasted there on tea and toast—plenty of it, thick and hot, and lots of butter, too—for 3d., a more ample breakfast, with the addition of a plate of porridge and a chop, or bacon and egg, mounting to 6d.

I remember that breakfast well. It was the day before Christmas Day, and I had gone into town from a suburb, three miles distant, by the first train, at five o’clock, thinking that I might do an article for a local paper on the Christmas show at the Victorian Market. Not that I did any regular journalistic work at that time, but I was like a sparrow; pecking round in the dust for anything I could get hold of. And it was dusty that day, too, even so early in the morning, dense and yellow with dust, and with a scorching north wind blowing. However, I got to town, and then, to save another tram-fare, toiled up the long hill to the market, in the very face of the wind and dust, with clenched teeth and tortured eyes, arriving there only to meet one of the regular staff of the paper for which I intended my article actually coming away! She had stayed with a friend in town, gone to the theatre, sat up all night, talking and tea-drinking, and reached the market soon after three!

The Melbourne Market is a wonder and a delight at any time, but at Christmas it is glorious. It must be remembered that it is the time of fruit and flowers. There are piles of cherries, early apricots and peaches, bananas, and pineapples and tomatoes, glowing masses of colours; and carnations, and roses, and irises, and the clear blue of cornflowers. There are confectionery stalls heaped high with every sort of cake and pastry. The keeper of one stall, where most delicious gingerbread was sold, told me that she made everything herself and had been at the market three days a week for thirty years. There are stalls of china, hats, dress materials; poultry and fish, dairy produce, pork, bacon, books. There are Chinese gardeners smiling urbanely over their stacks of vegetables; big sun-browned fruit farmers; busy wives with butter and eggs (in large white aprons); and butchers, with their blue coats, selling meat—the best at only 2d. and 2½d. a pound, here in the market—and making a most prodigious noise over it, too. I remember once fancying some brains for breakfast, fried in an outer wrapping of bacon—I knew exactly what they would look and taste like—and the laughter that greeted me when I inquired of the butchers if they had “any brains,” and how I laughed, too. When once one is up and out in the fresh air it does not take much to make one laugh at five on a summer’s morning.

There is one dairy-stall at the market that is presided over by five sisters. It is all exquisitely clean, and the butter and eggs, and bacon and sausages, and jars of yellow honey are the very best procurable; while the sisters—as fresh as paint—look delightfully pretty in their large white aprons and over-sleeves. If I was a Victorian up-country farmer, it is to that stall I should go if I wanted a wife; not to “Holt’s,” which is quite close by.

“Holt’s” is an institution in Melbourne—a matrimonial agency, with a minister of some sect or other always at hand; witnesses, ring, and all, ready for any venturesome couple. In England one is occasionally amused by seeing a matrimonial advertisement in some daily paper, but there are nearly always from six to a dozen a day in the Melbourne papers, and intensely amusing they are. Often, in their way, intensely pathetic too, evidently written, as they are, by up-country settlers, men who need a mate and comrade, and have no possible chance of meeting any unmarried woman in their far-away shanties; and by women who see a hopeless desert of celibacy stretching out in front of them, with no possible prospect of meeting any men outside their own family circle. The odd thing is that it is so often people with money and settled incomes who advertise, apparently as far from meeting, in a natural manner, with anyone on whom to lavish their affections as are the little servant-girls, milliners, and clerks who otherwise patronize “Holt’s.” I never, as far as I can tell, knew anyone who was married at this popular marriage-shop, but I must have met people so united again and again, if the very large percentage of marriages I once heard cited as taking place there is correct.

The whole matrimonial business is run by Mrs. Holt, though perhaps her husband assists in the part of witness, best man, etc. At one time, however, Holt was a very well-known repoussé metalworker and engraver, and made presentation shields, and cups, and all sorts of imposing things. Once, being most keenly interested in metal-work, which I adopted as a sort of side-issue to my other trades, I ventured into the smug and secretive-looking place—with the very clean and inviting steps, and the magic name over the door—to interview Mr. Holt, and ask if he would give me some lessons. He replied that he had no leisure for teaching; and apparently he was right, for all the time I was talking he kept being repeatedly called out of the room. The door would open a crack, a voice would breathe his name, and with a murmured apology he would rise and slip out. There would be more whispering in the hall; then the sound of a closing door and silence for about ten minutes, during which time I pictured some awful and all too binding rite being practised in another apartment. Then there would be more whispering in the hall; the sound of the front-door furtively closing; and mine host would slip back to me and our dropped conversation, which was engrossing, save for these interruptions, for I found him an enthusiast over his art, and quite willing to give me such information as was possible. All the same, it was somehow uncanny, and I was not sorry to get away, still free and unfettered by any “dark gentleman with means” or “fair young man, of a loving disposition”—a description that many of the would-be bridegrooms indulge in. One breach-of-promise case I remember well—though whether it was the outcome of one of “Holt’s” advertisements I do not know—where the romantically minded, would-be suitor described himself as “a young man of military appearance in the millinery business.”

There was once a Melbourne man who—for fear, I suppose, of the torment of jealousy—advertised for the “ugliest woman in Australia” as his wife—got her, too, and has her still, for the gods love beauty.

I seem to have wandered far away from the Victorian Market, but, in truth, it is but a few steps. From two o’clock in the morning of each market-day the carts roll past the very door of the marriage bureau, with sleepy men lolling on the top of their piles of produce, bringing, along with the loud rumblings of heavy wheels, a waft of country scents through the city streets. Till five o’clock the carts arrive in a long procession, the flowers and more fragile sort of fruits last of all, while by then there are others ready to leave, and the retreating tide begins.

Hundreds of carts and tented waggons wait in the road which divides the two sides of the great roofed-in market-place, many of them with a child or two, or a half-grown lad, placidly asleep on the pile of sacking inside. The noise is indescribable, the crowd is immense. Everyone seems to be eating bananas or sucking oranges; all save the mothers of families, who push their perambulators—laden high with fruit and meat, babies, and vegetables—up and down the narrow alley-ways between the stalls, driving them ruthlessly in upon the legs of the crowd, with a decision which suggests that an army of women with “prams” should be added to the Australian Defence Forces. The large buyers from the shops have usually all finished by six; then come the housewives, and a sprinkling of dainty, delicate-looking maidens, who at first puzzled me, but who, I found later, were mostly tea-room girls, out to buy fruit and flowers to decorate their tables. What fruit, too! Peaches, 2d. a pound; pineapples, 2d. each; oranges, 2d. a dozen; grapes, 1d., 2d., and 3d. a pound; bananas, 2d. a dozen; huge water-melons, with slices cut out of them to show their beautiful pulp, like “the King’s daughter, all glorious within.”

In the summer—if one goes early enough—the market is a sheer joy. In the winter it is almost more fascinating as a sight, lit with its flaring petrol torches, but it is not so nice getting there. I remember one cold winter’s morning, at five o’clock, half running, shivering, up the long hill in Queen Street, meeting only one policeman, who flashed his lantern at me suspiciously. I even remember what I bought—chops and a bunch of rhubarb, and six eggs, and six pounds of potatoes, and some gingerbread—two large hunks for a penny. I was going to buy butter, but I bought a bunch of early narcissi instead, and ate my bread dry for a week.

Later on the metal-work, which I had discussed with Mr. Holt, came to be the most paying of my many endeavours, and brought me some amusing adventures in my search for a work-shop—after having been politely requested to leave several buildings—where there was nobody to be disturbed by my incessant hammering, the tang, tang, tang being little short of maddening to anyone who was not actually doing it themselves; while, in addition to myself, and the girls whom I had taught to help with the more mechanical work, as often as not I had two or three pupils, all plying their iron tools and hammers at once.

After a long search I found a young motor engineer, who was willing to sub-let me a corner of a large upper workshop for the merest trifle; and here I established myself for some six months, till the craze for metal-work slackened. Here also came my pupils with praiseworthy zeal, picking their way daintily over the gritty and littered floor and up the most awful stairs I have ever encountered.

It was a grand place to work in, for we were allowed to use the bellows and blow-pipes for heating our metal and vices for shaping it, all far bigger than I could afford to obtain for myself; besides which we could get any broken tool replaced on the spot. At first the men at the far side of the room could hardly get on with their jobs for watching us. The hammering out of the pattern they could understand—that struck them as a sort of fancy job—but the shaping of the larger pieces of metal, and riveting and brazing seemed, I suppose, quite an extraordinary phase of women’s work; however, they soon got quite used to us—though never to the hats and costumes of my pupils—and what a good-tempered crew they were! The place was, at times, frightfully hot, with the sun blazing down through the skylight and the blow-pipes going; but they always seemed to be contented, laughing and joking, and I never heard a word of bad language—not real bad language—all the time I was there.

These engineers and metal-workers seemed, on the whole, a much more cheerful set than the painters and cabinet-makers. Several times I did jobs for a large drapery and furniture-making establishment, mostly painting white furniture with little garlands and wreaths in Louis Seize style, or cupboards and boxes with pictures from nursery rhymes. I found the cabinet-makers—apart from the carpenters who work in larger and more airy premises—and the French polishers on the whole a rather anæmic and melancholy class of men; though among them, as among all other Australian workmen, I, an alien, and—in their sense of the word—a mere amateur, met with the greatest possible courtesy and kindness, finding them always ready to give me a helping hand, lend me materials, or pass on any small trade secrets that might benefit me; while, somehow or other, someone inevitably conjured up a cup of tea to help me through the long afternoon hours. They did seem long, too, for, though I worked far longer than eight hours a day in my own rooms, at most times twelve, and for one awful week, I remember, fifteen, I went from one thing to another, and moved about directing or teaching, or doing little homely odd jobs in between. Still, I liked the working in the shops or factories best, and certainly all my happiest days in Australia have been spent among other workpeople; while to this special firm—Messrs. Buckly and Nunn—I owe a special tribute of thanks for unfailing fairness and consideration.

Before the great Women’s Exhibition I worked for some time with another firm, who gave me an equally free hand, paying me at the same rate, £1 a day, better than many a really skilful artist in London gets, and enabling me to live in clover while it lasted. Indeed, from only one firm in Melbourne did I meet with anything like unfairness. This was for one of the biggest pieces of decorative work I ever did—a frieze—for which the architect of the building for which it was intended arranged to pay £37, out of which, of course quite unknown to him, I got only £5 for my work, and £1 for the paint.

In the cabinet-making trade, wood carvers and turners get on an average 54s. to 56s. a week, as do all other skilled cabinet-makers. Bricklayers average 10s. a day, and carpenters the same. Unskilled labourers are paid 6s. a day; quarrymen, 45s. to 54s. a week; electric-light fitters, 54s. a week; farriers, 48s.; compositors, 56s.; blacksmiths, 54s. to 72s.; smiths, 45s. to 52s.; fitters and turners in engineering works, 60s. to 66s.; nail-makers, 50s. to 70s.—rather different to the 2d. an hour the Lancashire women have been agitating for; but women do not make nails in Melbourne, nor do they make chains—or wear them either.

It is little wonder that, with wages like these, in a country where food is so cheap as in Victoria—Mr. Coghlan estimates that only 37.5 per cent. of the earnings of the people is spent in food and drink as against 42.2 in Great Britain and 49.1 in Germany—with a climate in which fires are seldom a real necessity, certainly not for more than three months in the year, where the means of transit, of change and amusement are cheap and inexpensive, that the Australian workman, when it is impressed on him that he must show a proper twentieth-century spirit of revolt, is—being by nature a peaceful and good-tempered person—rather puzzled to know where to begin; and this is in spite of the fact that more than twice as much meat is consumed annually per inhabitant in Australia than in England, and more than four times as much as in Germany, and that a meat diet is supposed to give rise to a passion for revolt, crime, murder, and rapine in the heart of any man.

There is, I believe, only one vegetarian restaurant in Melbourne, and that is in the basement of a building in Collins Street, originally intended for a cellar. I would not like to say anything unkind about it or its habitués, but certainly they do not look as if they had been grown there; while I certainly prefer the appearance and colouring of the people who—cheerfully and persistently in the face of all food faddists—still consume their three meat meals a day, though there is, of course, moderation in everything.

There are no workhouses in Australia, and there is no Poor Law; on one side there is the State, and on the other benevolent asylums—the former instituting more or less spasmodic relief works in the time of any great depression; the latter helping lame dogs over stiles when needs be. But, except for the physically and mentally unfit, the Victorian does not need charity; there is nearly always work of some sort for the man who really desires it; while up-country the sun-downer, or bona fide worker in search for a job, will find “tucker” for the asking at any farm or station. For the people who habitually refuse to work there are the prisons, to which a man or woman may be sent for “possessing no visible means of employment,” which is considered paramount to battening on their fellow-creatures in some fashion or other. Farm colonies for incompetents have long been thought of, and certainly they are a very necessary movement in the face of the large class of men who are willing and able to do a set task, but quite incapable of tackling any job on their own initiative.

There is, of course, the Labour Colony of Leongatha, which, since it was established first, in 1893, has cost the State the large sum of £36,812 15s. 6d. The last four years, however, it has been more nearly self-supporting, under a new system of management, than it ever was before, and hopes are entertained that it may in time become entirely self-supporting. The colonists are instructed in all branches of farm-work, and mostly stay in the colony for some two or three months, after which employment of some sort is found for them. Up to 1907, 7,232 destitute men had been afforded relief—and £36,812 15s. spent on it! No one can say that Victoria shows a mean spirit towards her derelicts, though perhaps she is scarcely so generous toward her ratepayers; but, after all, one colony can scarcely grapple adequately with all the different types for which such places—even if regarded as mere sorting and grading centres—are needed, and Leongatha has suffered—and still suffers—from the indiscriminate types with which it is expected to deal.

However, the bona fide working-man who is out of a job, for any length of time, in Melbourne is very rare; and the other sorts one must class together as more or less invalids, even if only afflicted with the microbe of idleness or incapacity. It is not, then, charity or more work that the artisan or the town labourer wants. Indeed, he wants nothing. Really and truly that is why the strikes here, which are mostly for the bettering of what is already good, lack the passion and sincerity of strikes in England, agitating, as they usually do, for the remedying of what is intolerably bad. In this may be found the reason why Australian strikes are, for the most part, a failure, as were—among others—the railway strike of 1903, the New South Wales Tramways employés’ strike, and the great trade strike of 1890.

In country districts, however, though the wages may be good and the cost of living low, men often exist under conditions compared with which a prison life might be considered gay, and it is to these conditions that the Victorian Government will have to turn its attention more fully if they wish to count on all the emigrants, whom Messrs. M’Kenzie and Mead have been drawing into their net, not only settling upon the land, but writing home such accounts of their life there as may lead more of their fellows, in the Old Country, to follow their example. More irrigation centres, more railways, cheaper freight and railway accommodation for passengers in the far country districts are all needed, and, I believe, for the thinking man or woman, a better sort of encouragement for putting money and labour into the land than that afforded by the mere fact of taking it away from the old settlers and their descendants, who, on the whole, have worked as consistently for it and paid as honestly as any new emigrants are ever likely to do. “They have robbed others that we may have the land,” the new-comers might well say. “Let us make haste and get all we possibly can out of it, for what has happened once may happen again.”

Poverty at home is truly terrible, but I doubt if any poverty has ever been as unbearable as the utter loneliness and strangeness of this country and its ways will seem to many a new immigrant—used, as he has been, to the close community of village life—on finding himself twenty or thirty, or even fifty, miles from a doctor, beyond all reach of church or school, facing droughts which descend upon him like the incomprehensible, awful vengeance of some unknown God; day after day of blazing sun, of incredible toil, no leaf or blade of grass even reminding him of home. The best—the very best—the ablest, the strongest, above all, the least imaginative, will fight through; they will grow to love the gum-trees, the sunshine, and the silence of the Bush, but the first few years will prove a hard fight against home-sickness and hopelessness. It is a fight worth waging, a country worth living in. All the same, I only hope that the hundreds of people, the families of 2,206 persons—including 1,591 women and children—concerning whom M’Kenzie and Mead are so jubilant, and over whom the Argus has almost shed inky tears of sheer joy—do realize that, if they are to take their intended place on the land, it is to a real fight, and not to beer and skittles that they are coming.

Lately one of the members of the Victorian House of Representatives declared that he could, within twenty-four hours, bring to Parliament House a hundred young men—with plant, capital, health, and industry—who for months had been vainly seeking for land on which to establish themselves. In answer to this, two squatters near Camperdown, where the pick of the Western District country is to be seen, have each offered to find good land at a reasonable rental, and under a liberal lease for ten out of these hundred men. They would get entry for fallowing from July to December, 1912, and not be asked to pay any rent till March 1, 1913, when they would have been able to gather in their first crops. Such terms, it has been declared, have been offered for years, and the twenty men are not yet forthcoming, let alone a hundred. It still remains to be seen whether the English and Scotch farmers among the prospective emigrants will take a better advantage of the offer.

I was once talking to an Irishman, who was working on the railway-line out here, about his own country, for which he professed the most passionate affection, bringing tears to my eyes by the description of all the horrors that had attended the eviction of himself, his young wife, and children—the barbarous disregard of sentiment and feeling. “But why?” I exclaimed at last, when I did manage to get in a word—“why? Were you very much behind with your rent?”

“I was that—sure I’d niver paid it at all, at all, nor me feyther before me.”

“But if they knew you could not pay?”

“Ach, I could pay fine; but what should I be afther wasting good money paying rint fur? Now, tell me that.”

It sometimes seems to me that many of the would-be farmers, who in Melbourne clamour for land, hold much the same opinions as did that Irishman. Why should they waste good money buying land, or paying “rint” either? though the plea which is put forward is that the settlers want to buy the land, and the squatters—the two Camperdown men among others—wish to merely lease out and not to sell their properties. Perhaps it would be as well in either case to follow the precedent of the pie-man, and insist, as he did—“Show me first your penny”—or, anyhow, show the young men, if not their pennies, before subdividing any more of the large estates; for it may yet happen that Government finds more on its hands than it clearly knows what to do with.

The latest concession which the Government is agitating for on behalf of the working-man is a Compensation Bill, compelling an employer not only to compensate any man injured while at work, but also to provide for him in any disease which he may contract while in his employment. This, like the minimum wage, is a measure which, if carried out, will press heavily on the weak—the very people who, I believe, it honestly hopes to benefit. For the man with a cough, who might develop consumption; for the man who looks as if he might have a weak heart or a weak back, who even appears in any way delicate, it is ruinous; for who would dare take the risk of a responsibility which might run them in hundreds of pounds? The small settler who has heretofore eked out his living by casual work, at a busy season, on some neighbouring station, dairy, or fruit-farm, will suffer too; for who will venture to employ for a few days a man whom in the end they might have to support for life? It is all very well to temper the wind to the shorn lamb, but why skin it first? By the time this appears in print it is more than likely that the proposed Bill will have become law, for many members will vote for it, not because of their convictions, but because, if they stand firm, Federation may intervene with some measure even more stringent.

The worst part of Federation is that nobody quite realizes its power; it may be merely a semblance of reality, or it may be an ogre. It is like those shadows which lurk in the dark corners of a room, frightening wakeful children; or the genii that Sinbad at first hoisted, with such genial good-will, upon his back.

When I landed for the first time in Australia the relations between the landowners and the working-people were certainly far happier than they are now. People were proud of the vast estates, as indicative of the size of the country; of the immense flocks of sheep, and the merino wool that nowhere else could be matched for quality and quantity. Certain especially silky wools are procured from sheep in certain parts of the Western District of Victoria, and nowhere else, lambs’ wool actually reaching the price of 2s. a pound in Geelong market this last season. It was famous wool such as this, grown largely by the Macarthur and Russell families, which built up the reputation of Victoria far more surely than gold ever did, or pigs or onions ever will. Sheep do not reach to such a pitch of perfection by chance, and the Western District merinoes would scarcely be recognized by their original progenitors, popularly supposed to have emerged from the Ark. Immense sums of money have been spent on importing animals and bringing them to the highest pitch of perfection, and a question that has got to be faced is: Who—when the land is cut up into small holdings—will have either the money or enterprise necessary for importing fresh blood; and how will all the evils of inter-breeding, always such a danger on small farms, be avoided? Even now stud sheep are being sent out of the country, one owner a few months back having shipped off close on a dozen to Natal, feeling, I suppose, that there was nothing more to be made out of valuable sheep in a country which was, bit by bit, being cut away from under his feet.

“Men are more valuable than sheep,” is the parrot-like cry of politicians—some men I would say. In any case, men can live on sheep, and they cannot—unless they are cannibals—live on each other. If the large estates are not put to a proper use, if the sheep and wool they produce are a menace to the credit of the country, or when all the unsettled land is gone, then a reconstruction will become imperative. Meanwhile it is well to remember what has been done with the sheep, and what the sheep have done, and are still doing, for the country.

The original flock of sheep which formed the chief part of the stock owned by the Henty family was formed in Sussex at the end of the eighteenth century, taken out to Jamaica, then, later on, transferred to Portland by Edward Henty. To this flock many of the best of the Victorian sheep owe their origin, merinoes, also originally imported from England, being brought down from New South Wales by Captain Macarthur. In 1836 there were, officially, 41,332 sheep in Victoria—or Port Phillip. By 1842 the number had risen to 1,404,333, from which the number went on increasing by leaps and bounds till, in 1891, it reached 12,692,843, when the run of dry seasons, which lasted till 1901, decreased the flock to 10,841,790. The enormous rate at which the value of the export of wool increased may be gathered from the fact that between the years 1837—the year following the settlement of the Henty family in Portland—and 1840, five years after Faulkner’s settlement on the bank of the Yarra, and six years before the recognition of Victoria as a separate colony—this value rose from £11,639 to £67,902. In but one more year it leapt up to £85,735; while in 1908–09 the total value of the wool-clip in Victoria, with wool stripped from Victorian skins and exported on skins, has been estimated at £3,556,168, the weight of wool from the Western District sheep alone weighing 27,708,920 pounds.

The first live stock landed by Captain Phillips in Australia, in 1788, comprised 7 horses, 6 cattle, 29 sheep, 12 pigs, and a few goats.

Four months later the live stock in the colony were estimated, in a letter from Captain Phillips to Lord Sydney, Secretary of State for the Colonies, as follows:—“7 horses, 7 cattle, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks, 205 fowls, and 5 rabbits”—so that Mr. Austin was not the first, or the only, culprit in respect to Master Bunny.

In 1908 there were, roughly speaking, 87,043,266 sheep in this colony, the result of breeding and importation from the old country, from India, and the Cape, the sheep in the six years from 1902 to 1908 having increased by 33,374,919; while the value of the wool exported from the entire colony in 1908 was £22,914,236. In the face of these figures and the well-known fact that the number of sheep in all other countries is diminishing, it does seem rather like killing the goose with the golden egg to prohibit big estates, which, after all, are the only estates possible for pastoral success, As long as there is plenty of land still vacant and the output of wool is not only a great source of wealth, but also a credit to the country, it seems a mistake to financially cripple, beyond all hope, the people who produce it; while the fact that many of the large estates have been on the market more than once and found no purchaser, seems to have escaped the notice of Mr. Fisher when he so light-heartedly sent the maximum rate careering upwards. It seems, indeed, like trying to hang a man who has already been beheaded to take away all the land that is worth anything and impose the heaviest possible tax on that which is worthless.

As yet no one seems to know whether the Federal Parliament is or is not within its rights in levying any such tax at all. However, if their action is proved unconstitutional, the landowners will not be very much better off, as the State Parliament will be only too ready to impose a progressive tax on their own account. Still, they should certainly be able to show a trifle more discrimination than is possible for the Federal Government, while there is some hope that they may differentiate between the man who owns a vast stretch of land, far from any railway or town, and only possible for pastoral purposes, and the man with a small, compact estate, with rich soil, well watered, and capable of the closest cultivation; while something might be done to compensate individuals and companies “away out back” for the disadvantages under which they will labour in competing with the lease-holders of Crown lands, who will have no tax whatever to meet.

There is an idea in England, among the people who do not know much—and these are always the readiest to express their opinion—that the squatter simply sat down on a piece of land and raked in just as much as he could get from the surrounding country, mile upon mile upon mile of it; riding round, killing off horse after horse in the process, sticking up a post here and a post there, and asserting:—“All this is mine”; straddling over the land, with his long legs, and his top-boots, and his picturesque slouch hat, striking his breast, just like a man in a play, and reiterating, “Mine, mine!”

But it was not like that at all. It was blood, and sweat, and sheer endeavour, and hard cash. For one must remember that the men who hold the large estates are not the same men who ran up a fortune in a year on the gold-fields.

The land was paid for—and to the Crown, too—up to as much as 20s. and 25s. an acre. Yet, as Sir Henry Wrixon says during his report on the Federal Land Tax in the Argus of August 20, 1910, the present Government, in its desire to still have the cake its predecessors have eaten, would say to the landowners: “True, we have sold you this land and have got your money; indeed, in some cases we urged you to buy at more than its real value, in order to facilitate your plans for land settlement. But now we have altered our views; we want no large purchasers or holders of land. Clear out, you miscreants. Tremble before the vengeance of a triumphant democracy.”

It may be political, but is it—to put it in a characteristically Australian term—“is it cricket?” and is it sense? And is it the sort of behaviour that is likely to tempt new settlers with means to invest their money in Australian land?

At a public meeting lately Mr. Fisher assured a delegation of mercantile men that they might always rely on him in commercial matters. But Mr. Fisher, in as far as he counts—that is, politically—is not immortal, and his successor may in his turn “barrack,” to use another popular expression, altogether for the landowners; while the mercantile class may in their turn go to the wall with one single twist of the kaleidoscope.

If such a tax as is now determined on was not retrospective there would not be much to complain of. If it was even decreed that it would be regarded as a capital crime in the future to acquire any land over 5,000 acres in extent, that might be fair. But to sell a man anything, then count it a crime that he should possess it—well, it seems, to say the least of it, a peculiarly feminine way of looking at things. And I cannot help wondering if Mr. Fisher was going to try on a new suit, or buy a new hat, or anything else really important, when he lately dismissed the deputation of prominent pastoralists—headed by Mr. J. A. Campbell, President of the Pastoral Union of Southern Riverina—who sought to lay their side of the question before him, after twenty-five minutes, with the airy remark that:—“Doubtless we are all of us desirous of going somewhere else this morning.” And this to men whose homes and families, whose whole means of life, and pride of life, depended on such a twenty-five minutes!

It is true that Mr. Fisher promised to consider the new facts brought before his notice by the deputation. Still, it is not generally considered quite the best thing to mix a cake after it is baked. In our old nursery days we were inoculated with the saying that “It is better to be sure than sorry”; and it is an odd feature of the political affairs of this country that, while all discussion is perfectly free, and praise, criticism, and condemnation equally open to all, great questions are still settled and great measures passed with hardly any discussion at all, or even thought.

From the beginning that part of the new land tax which has been most carefully impressed upon the people is that, while they will all benefit from it, only some 6 or 10 per cent. will be called upon to pay it. This all the electors completely understand, as they naturally would anything that has been so carefully explained.

What has not been so clearly put before the people is the question as to whether the small farmers—who are to occupy the improved holdings on the alienated land, 200 acres or so—and who will be straining every nerve to meet the half-yearly payments, all the immigrants and townspeople will, in the future, be as beneficial to the working-man—whom the tax is supposed to benefit, who in any case has the pleasure of seeing others squirm beneath its weight—as the large landowners have been in the past. After all, these landowners have not stood alone. They have employed an enormous number of men, in an enormous number of ways, from the shearers who clip their sheep to the stevedores who ship their wool, the people who transfer it by railway or bullock waggon, the people who buy it—English, French, and Flemish wool-buyers, who live in Melbourne for two or three months each year, and spend money there; the tradespeople, servants, and artisans.

A big station is like a camp of soldiers; the store-room alone would amaze any English housekeeper, resembling, as it does, a shop, stocked with all the necessities of life in immense quantities. There have been an enormous number of people employed in Australia in growing, making, and packing most of these supplies; and the revenue has been swelled by the importation of the rest. In the shearing season the place is like a hive, and the whole country is alive with men flocking from one station to another, and carts and waggons with supplies—relatively alive, of course, for in these vast distances an army would have as little effect as a swarm of ants. Still, the big stations are the arteries of the back blocks, keeping vital tracts of country which, except for them and except for the sheep which find a living there, would lie uncared for and untouched.

The small cockies do most of their shearing themselves, all the family being called upon to help: the girls in carrying away the fleeces, and even clipping the belly-wool for their brothers; while sundry neighbours will drop in to give a hand, the wool-shed usually consisting of an extempore tent or canopy of hessian.

In other places the cockies shear in a neighbouring squatter’s wool-shed, after his flocks are finished with, keeping on some of the regular shearers if the wool-clip seems large enough to warrant it; while from many small selections all the men go off at shearing-time to make a bit of extra money on the neighbouring stations. It is upon co-operation such as this, both in the matter of wool-sheds, shearers, and stud rams, that—if all the large estates are to be cut up—the small selectors will have to depend in the future; unless the sheep is completely “taboo,” though the enormous tracts of country which are necessary to support the flocks will prevent this pastoral co-operation ever being so successful as in the matter of central butter, cheese, and bacon factories.

Hand-shears have been so completely replaced with machinery nowadays that only a minority of the younger men can clip by hand at all, and are often completely at a loss in the smaller flocks, where there are no machines in use.

A big shearing-shed is a tremendously inspiring sight, as every place is—even a match factory—where work is being done quickly and well. But, apart from this, there are the various marked characteristics of the men, the play of muscle in the sunburnt arms and necks, and the colour of the weather-worn clothes, the shimmer of heat and dust, and the silky gleam of the wool as it falls upon the boards, swathe upon swathe of it, exquisitely creamy-tinted and fine, the product of intensest care and cultivation, the result of breeding being shown in the fact that fifty years ago a fleece from a full-grown sheep averaged 3 to 4 pounds, whereas now it averages 8 or 9, from some flocks even 15, pounds.

The shearers live—that is, sleep and eat—in what is known as “the hut,” a long narrow structure with bunks at either side, in two tiers, each bunk just long enough to hold a man. The table, which runs pretty well the whole length of the hut, is made of sheet-iron tacked on to a rough frame, with benches at either side, and there is little else, save the atmosphere, which is thick and portentous, an intermingling of tobacco, wool, beer, spirits, clothes, boots, blankets, and men.

The better sort of shearers declare that the noise and the stench, the constant fidgeting and stirring all night, the snoring, coughing, spitting, and swearing, make it impossible for anyone to get a decent night’s sleep in these huts, and many pitch a tent for themselves and a pal, or build a mia-mia of boughs as far from the rest of their companions as possible.

The shearers have one chronic grievance, and that is the food and the cook. They have another constantly recurring grievance, and that is wet sheep, over which they are in a perpetual state of insurrection; and little wonder, considering that the labour and the menace to health incurred in shearing wet sheep is hardly to be overestimated. No squatter can make his men shear wet sheep since the formation of the “Shearers’ Union,” and rightly enough too, though he is bound to pay them all the time that they are in the sheds waiting for the sheep to dry. A really wet sheep can be picked out in a moment by the lank, dark look of the wool; but when the wetness is not so distinctly shown, the question between the shearers and the squatter—who naturally wants to get his sheep finished—becomes a vexed one. Often, too, the back is quite dry, while the neck and belly of the sheep is wringing wet; while the argument so often used in courts of law that no rain has fallen for weeks is absolutely futile. Anyone who is used to shearing in Australia is not likely to doubt the Scriptural story of the wet fleece, whether it was on the sheep’s back or off it, for the yoke of the wool will absorb moisture to any extent from fog, dew, or even from an atmosphere that is not palpably the least damp.

Harry Lawson has drawn us some grim pictures of life in the back blocks. It is often bad enough for the large landowner and his womenkind. But they have books, and papers, and motors—which have revolutionized country life in Australia more than anything else. They can take occasional runs up to town, and have friends to stay with them, so that existence becomes endurable in a way that it never could become to the small settlers, and it seems to me that before such people are uprooted it would be well to face clearly the question as to whether those who replace them will ever be able, or willing, to endure the life which they must face—conditions which will appear far more appalling to strangers than to people who have been bred and born in the country, and who possess, as all Australians seem to do, the most amazing powers of rebound. “John Barleycorn got up again and sore surprised them all” might be said of many a man and many a district in Australia. One of the most extraordinary things about the people being that they will live in absolute loneliness, facing drought, heat, and loss, toiling incredibly to get their stock fed and watered, watching them die day after day during a bad season; and then, when good times come, start again at the very beginning, with as gay a spirit as ever, absolutely unembittered by all the hardships through which they have passed.

Usually the spring might be expected, in its rebound, to fly too far in the opposite direction; but, oddly enough, men who have hardly seen a woman, or sat down to a decent meal for months; or known what it was to have a moment’s relaxation, or pleasure, or sport, will come up to Melbourne and enjoy themselves in as well-ordered a fashion as though they had been living in the very lap of civilization and luxury. In most countries where men had lived as these men had lived, there would be the wildest orgies and excesses, and all sorts of tragedies to follow; but the Australian possesses more than his share of “horse sense”—he also possesses a sense of humour which is mainly, I believe, the greatest reason for his not making a fool of himself.

Of course, men still go “on the bust,” cheques are planked down, and “shouting”—the Australian equivalent for “treating”—indulged in till all the money is finished. But, even so, the men are good-tempered, and it is not a case of shooting everyone who does not happen to be as thirsty as they are; while on the Australian gold-fields, from the very beginning, the record of crime and lawlessness has been far less than in other countries. I remember one story which shows the inspiring joy—even in anticipation—of planking down a cheque that strikes me as delightfully characteristic. A new-chum arrived at a shearing-shed and asked his way to a township some thirty miles distant. None of the men were able themselves to direct him, as they, too, were new to that district, but referred him to the cook, who, they declared, had been there. “Why, yes,” acknowledged that worthy when appealed to; “I’ve been there right enough; but I’m blessed if I remember the road. Ye see, mister, it was like this: I wur only along that way once, an’ I wur goin’ ter cash a cheque.”

An old book by an early Australian settler tells another characteristic story. A clergyman arrived at a far-away station at shearing-time, and was put up there for a few days, which happened to include a Sunday, when he expressed himself very desirous of holding a service for the shearers. As one may imagine, his host was rather torn in two between his desire to please his guest and not set all his men’s backs up. Anyhow, on Sunday morning he proposed riding on to the wool-shed—three miles’ distance—in advance, and preparing the congregation. As he expected, none of the men had a moment of time to spare; there were shears to sharpen, clothes to wash and mend; one man declared he was a Catholic, and had never been inside a church in his life; and the cook and his boy had dinner to prepare for thirty men.

Then the boss changed his tone, and declared: “Every man who attends the service in the wool-shed in half an hour’s time, and behaves himself in an orderly and respectful manner, shall have a glass of rum served out to him after the service.”

It was the greatest success. The men—as such men will—played fair; and years after that very clergyman, then become a high dignitary of the Church, described in a book on the Colonies the picturesque incident: the service in the wool-shed, with the wool-press as a pulpit, and the absorbed congregation of shearers and washers.

On another occasion it struck a visiting clergyman, who was merely travelling through the country, that there must be an enormous number of children who had never been baptized. As it was a slack season, he somehow inveigled the squatter at whose homestead he was staying to start out with him on a sort of camping expedition, during which they rode close on a hundred miles, meeting with several families of shepherds, whose children they baptized, often to the great indignation of the parents, who imagined some slur was thereby cast on the management of their progeny. One matron, however, declared that she was quite willing that her brood should be christened if only they could be caught. They were as wild as kangaroos, and as they had bolted into the scrub at the first sight of strange faces, the only thing possible was to ride them down and literally drag them by force into the Church’s fold. The highly amused squatter officiated at this ceremony both as godfather and godmother, and, I presume, whipper-in, though he declared himself as thankful never to have met any of his god-children in after-years.

The Australians, up to this day—though they are as good as most, and better than many—do not trouble themselves overmuch about the forms of religion, while just the same strenuous efforts are still made to gather wandering sheep more securely into the fold. Some years ago Parliament actually dared to attempt to interfere with the people’s Sunday, and an Act was passed which stopped all local and excursion trains running on Sunday mornings. Needless to say this law was short-lived, and endured, I forget exactly for how long, but certainly only a month or two. At the present time there is no Sunday post, and no second delivery of milk; but these regulations stand more for the benefit of the workpeople than the Church, I believe; while now the Postmaster-General is absolving all men in his department from Sunday labour who can plead “conscientious objections.” I believe that inquiries as to how these objectors spend their Sundays have been set on foot, with the result that fishing, cricket, and billiards have been found to rank highest in their esteem. Apparently it has not occurred to the Postmaster to try rum, as the more man-wise squatter did.

Oddly enough, even the Boer War has not diffused an idea, which is very general, that the Australian working-man is divided into two types—the luxurious, lazy, arrogant holiday-maker and the rollicking cow-boy sort of person. For myself, I should say that the town man, artisan or labourer, is much the same as in any other country, with the added—but quite unimportant—defects and virtues of his time and place. He is more cocksure, but he is also more self-respecting, than the labourer at home. He works less uninterruptedly, but he works harder while he is at it, though with less appearance of sweat and fever, merely because he is better fed, and all the conditions of his life are more wholesome, while his hours are shorter; but otherwise he is much the same as elsewhere.

In the country districts the difference is far more pronounced. “Away back” the shepherd and cattle-man is more ignorant than most of his fellows at home, but he is more resourceful; he has more spirit and more pluck. If the country is not new to him, it was new to his father or grandfather, and it needed all their power of resource and adaptability to get on in it.

I have said that the schoolmaster and schoolmarm in the back blocks face difficulties and meet with conditions almost incredible to their fellow men and women at home. The distance makes the outlook larger. An afternoon visit becomes a long day’s journey, an adventure, an undertaking. The Bush parson and the Bush doctor live a life completely different from the life of a country parish. The very fact of being so constantly on horseback, as they are, makes a difference. The many hours of open air, of sunshine and storm that are involved when they go to visit a patient or christen a baby—it all makes a difference, and a wholesome one too.

Then the postman; think of the country postman at home! His leisurely ways, his thick boots, his slow, steady progress, his many pauses for gossip and refreshment, all dignified by a sort of consideration which the other yokels show him as a servant of the King. Then think of the mailmen in Australia, of their dependence on their maps, and their knowledge of the country, the danger they are in from thirst, from privation, from the chance of being bushed, and from blacks—not, perhaps, in Victoria so much now, but certainly up North, which very fairly represents many other places as they were fifty or sixty years ago.

Only last year a mailman missed his way up by the Archer River, and turned up, nearly a week later, 120 miles farther south than he should have been, having gone right round Coen, for which he was bound, without striking his track. Again, quite lately another mailman in the same district was lost for fourteen days, having travelled round and round in a circle. When the police found him he was delirious, and fought them wildly, thinking they meant to murder him and steal the mailbag, which he had stuck to through all his suffering.

Coen, which is in Queensland, on the Cape York Peninsula, is indeed a place of tragedies. Another young mailman on the same track disappeared, and when his forsaken camp was discovered at the foot of Marsley’s Spur, a note was found pinned to the bag. “Please do not touch the mails; am away horse-hunting.” But though this man’s tracks were followed for miles, no trace of his body was ever found. One mailman, worn out by despair and long, dry stages, shot himself when within actual sight of Coen Post Office; while another was drowned while attempting to cross the Archer. In a district such as this even the arrival of a bill by post would cease to be a commonplace and inevitable event, the wonder being that it should arrive at all.

One often sees little boxes in the country places nailed to some tree on the road. It is there that the letters for the settlers, squatters, and cockies are left by the mailmen; while it is generally one of the duties of the daughter of the house to ride for the mail once, or perhaps twice, a week, twenty miles or so to where the precious documents have been dropped into the private box.

Another thing besides pluck and resource that the way-back districts breed is the true spirit of friendship. The first time I went up-country in Australia I travelled by night, arriving at my destination soon after four in the morning, and such a morning as I believe only an Australian spring can show: cool and fragrant, though it was at the height of a great drought, and enveloped in a haze of wonderful blue.

In spite of the beauty of the morning I must say I was feeling rather miserable and forsaken, and in doubt as to what was going to happen next, when I climbed wearily out of the train and saw no one I knew on the platform; and little wonder, I thought, considering the hour. However, my anxiety did not last long, for two young girls in fresh white dresses claimed me, explaining that they had promised my friends to come and meet me, and take me to their house, where I could have breakfast, and rest till later in the day, when I should be fetched.

That was my first introduction to a sulky, I remember. I and one of the girls packed into the odd little vehicle, and the other girl ran behind through the still sleeping township. There were a lot of streets, all with very imposing names at the corners on large name-boards, but we did not take much notice of them—indeed, there was nothing beyond the names to distinguish them from the open spaces of spare ground, between the little tin-roofed houses, across which we and the sulky and the running girl cut at a hard gallop.

When I arrived there was a room ready for me and a hot bath, the girls themselves having started the bath-heater before they came to the station; and a fire of logs—a welcome sight, for there was a nip of frost in the air—and tea and thin bread-and-butter, and a nightdress ready aired, so that I need not trouble to unpack. Of all the warm-hearted kindnesses I have ever met with in this country, this preparation for the coming of a woman who was an absolute stranger—simply the friend of another friend, herself a new-chum—lingers in my mind as one of the kindest. To this moment I remember vividly the feeling of exquisite comfort with which I snuggled my tired limbs in among the bedclothes, after my bath, and lay there, with the blinds down, sipping tea in the dancing firelight.

It is odd how often one can do with, and delight in, a fire in one’s bedroom out here; but days which have been blazing hot are apt to end with a cold night, and then the wood fires are so tempting, so cheerful and companionable. I recollect once staying a night with some friends on Mount Macedon, where the sitting-room boasted a really huge open fireplace, in which burnt an immense log, part of the trunk of a tree, banked up with smaller pieces. This monster burnt steadily all day till about eleven o’clock at night, by which time the middle of it had become a glowing mass of crimson, that finally broke, with a soft crash, a flare of sparks, and thick fall of silver-grey ash. It is a sound one grows after a time to listen for and love, this breaking of the burnt-through logs. Once up-country I was lodging in a little wooden shanty, through the cracks of which I could see the stars as I lay in bed. The nights were very cold, and I used to make up a good fire the last thing—the fireplace and chimney being the only part of the house built of bricks—to be regularly awakened after some hours by the soft crash of falling logs. Yet, though the nights were cold, the days were such a blaze of golden sunshine that my sheets—there were only one pair for each bed—used to be taken off, washed and dried, and aired in the sun, and put back again the same morning.

But it is not only among the well-to-do people that the spirit of comradeship shows itself, as it did to me that first morning up in the back blocks—it is everywhere among all classes. People have done surprising things for me—people to whom I was a complete stranger—while among themselves, from squatters to swaggies, though they do not write essays on friendship, they will hold by a mate through good and ill—and most of all through ill.

One instance, which, though it belongs to New South Wales, is so typical of this that I cannot resist quoting it, was lately cited in the Sydney Bulletin, which says:

“The Outback can still breed some true mates. One of them was heard of at Parkes (N.S.W.) the other day. With another man—a good deal older than himself—he had tramped into Forbes looking for work. On the way the older man’s boots gave out, so the mate bought him a pair, and then had only a few shillings left. They didn’t get the work they were after, so they decided to give their feet a rest and take the rail to Parkes. The older man’s fare was fixed up all right, but the young one quietly took a ticket as far as his money would stretch, and then, with a breezy: ‘So long!’ he got out and walked. The older man rode on; but bad luck had got him down, and when his mate turned up at Parkes he was a corpse. The coroner’s court said it was suicide on the part of one, and mighty fine and generous behaviour on the part of the other; and witnesses and others insisted on dropping their fees and some odd coins into the white man’s empty hat.”

CHAPTER V
THE WORKING-WOMEN OF MELBOURNE, AND IN
PARTICULAR THE CHAR-LADY

Very few people of any social standing beyond a few college professors and doctors actually live in Melbourne. But, still, it is thickly inhabited, and has a curious sublife of its own, quite distinct from that of the people who flock to it during business hours; returning again to their suburbs between five and six, only to reappear later, like flashing meteors, on their way to the theatre and supper at The Vienna or Paris Café. The professors congregate for the most part round the University, and the doctors up at the east end of Collins Street, where one would imagine there must be at least one doctor to every five people in the town. But beyond these there are the upper parts of shops, where the tradesmen who cannot yet afford a villa in suburbia live; and dingy, narrow streets, with little huddled homes where the workpeople dwell, and out of which issue on Sundays and high days the most resplendently attired young women that you could possibly imagine; while, besides these, there are huge blocks of buildings known as “Chambers,” the inhabitants of which are less easy to place—and what a hotch-potch they do present in all faith, kept ever a-simmer by a flame of gossip.

Rooms in these places are all prices, all sizes, all degrees of comfort or dinginess. Melbourne Mansions head the list; but these are really flats, beautifully appointed and proportionally dear. The drop from them is sudden indeed, chiefly marked by the washing accommodation. In Melbourne Mansions each suite, even if it consists of but two rooms, has its own bathroom attached. But the next step down in price gives two bathrooms, with hot water laid on, between the inhabitants of each floor, one floor for men, the next for women, and so on. Thus, if you live on the landing where the men’s bathroom is, and you happen to be a woman, you must walk the length of a long passage, and upstairs in your dressing-gown before you can reach your morning tub. It is all very well if you are early, before anyone else is about, but if you are late, you meet all the men coming out of their rooms on their way to work. Another drawback being that you more than occasionally forget to take your latchkey with you, and do not realize your fatal error till you return from your ablutions, when you alternately cower against your lintel and make wild dashes to the lift: entreating the lift-man to send the caretaker with his duplicate key, so that you may gain the shelter of your own apartment.

There is a rule that no one shall wash clothes in these baths, but everybody does; and when I used to hear the tap running furiously, and someone singing loudly behind the locked door, it needed no particular penetration to guess that it was all done with the idea of muffling the sound of scrubbing and rinsing. Considering the incomes of the people who lived in these chambers, and the exorbitant prices charged by laundresses; also the fact that many of the tenants have only one room, and have to carry both clean and dirty water up and down stairs, this washing habit cannot be wondered at; and only when people, quite beyond the pale, wash their saucepans and frying-pans in the same manner do any but the most inveterate grumblers register a serious complaint. Though I must say a great deal of sound and fury always rages round the bathrooms; one great scandal I remember being started by a lady whose husband had seen another lady going to the bath in her robe de nuit alone.

These particular chambers, or rather the entrance passages and stairs, are kept beautifully clean by a small army of men and char-ladies; as for the rooms—well, they vary; though it seems that the smarter the ladies are who come out of them the less savoury is any glance or whiff that one catches through the open door. But these are mostly comparative idlers: those people who never do have time for anything. No praise that I can give would be too high for the bona-fide working or business girls, who form a large percentage of the inhabitants of these places, the way they toil to keep themselves and their belongings dainty and fresh, and their unbounded goodness to any fellow in distress; their cheeriness and gallant efforts to keep up appearances, being beyond words.

There are telephone-girls, typewriting-girls, shop-girls, tea-room girls, University students, art students, dressmakers, and milliners. For the most part they live in one room, that presents on the whole a very cheerful appearance, with disguised packing-cases masquerading as cupboards—in which all the toilet paraphernalia is poked away—pegs with a curtain over them for a wardrobe, a basket and deck-chair or so, and a trestle-bed, which during the day does duty for a couch. These rooms are often no bigger than a medium-sized bathroom, but the girls entertain there; their men friends come to supper, and they make coffee over the little gas-ring, or primus, and cut anchovy sandwiches, and have a very cheerful time—washing up the cups in the bathroom at dead of night when it is all over. There is much gaiety and good-comradeship, and a little too much noise, perhaps. But if you are young, and have been tapping a typewriter all the day and answering your snappy employer in respectful monosyllables only, it is good, no doubt, to feel you are still a woman; and there are men in the world who like to talk to you, and would like to make love to you; cannot bear your soiling your hands over the kerosene stove; and are really disturbed because you look tired. After a long day’s grind to have a hot bath, which makes you feel as good as anyone; and brush your hair till it shines, Melbourne girls are veritable artists in hairdressing, marvellous when one thinks of the size of the looking-glasses; then to put on your best Jap silk blouse—at one and four-three a yard—made by yourself, aye, and washed and ironed again and again by yourself, and arrange your threepenny bunch of flowers in the vases, and turn the cushions to the clean side. Then “play at ladies,” waiting for your guests to arrive, life is really very pleasant, and the next day’s work seems far away; besides, anything may happen before that, for the life even of the most ordinary girl is full of infinite possibilities. Though if the expected visitors do not turn up, and send a wire or a note at the last moment, it is little short of killing; while the sight of the anchovy sandwiches—all curled up—which you try to eat for breakfast, in the cold dawn of the next day, because you simply cannot afford to waste them, seems the last straw.

These girls work incredibly hard, and live the straightest, simplest of lives, every day of which is a series of petty privations and self-denial, in spite of small pleasures. That some gayer damsels do have rooms in these buildings merely for the sake of the liberty it allows them, and use it, too, to its full extent, has, on the whole, given them rather a bad name. But this is grossly unjust to the greater number of the residents, who live there for the very good reason that they would rather have the tiniest room of their own, and “leave off work to carry bricks,” than herd with a lot of others in a boarding-house, at the mercy of a landlady. They rise very early—one kind-hearted music-teacher used to bring me a cup of tea in bed nearly every morning at six—and though I always turned out myself at half-past, I was never by any means first. The girls get their own breakfast—and along every corridor one hears the whirr of primus stoves; and smells, and breathes in, an atmosphere of kerosene, sausages and bacon; coffee is generally kept for evening parties, tea being both cheaper and more easily made. For the most part business girls have their lunch out, or take it with them—generally the all-ubiquitous scones and tea; but when they come back from work they get their own evening meal, and then the roaring of the primus starts afresh.

At midday on Saturday they flock home and start to turn out their rooms, and wash, and dust, and sweep, while whole stories may be read in the little odds and ends of furniture which take an airing in the passage while the cleaning goes on. Then, as often as not, they do their week’s washing, no inconsiderable task in the hot weather, when print dresses and blouses are worn. Still, they get through their work quickly enough—for the Melbourne girls are fine workers, sharp and decisive in all they do—hang their clothes on lines across their room, then dress and go out for the rest of the afternoon, with some friend, often ending with an evening at the theatre; for, though they work hard enough, goodness knows, yet they enjoy life on the whole. There are sweethearts, or “boys,” as they are always called, in plenty; and cottons and muslins are cheap; and the beach, with all the gaiety of bands and sideshows and bathing, to be reached for the small sum of threepence.

Then on Sunday mornings there is profound peace hanging over the building till well over nine o’clock, when the primus smell begins to be replaced by a distinct odour of ironing proceeding from every girl’s room for about an hour before she starts off—with flying white veil, crisp muslin skirts and blouse, long white washing gloves and beflowered hat—for a day by the sea or in the country with her “boy,” and another girl and her “boy”—the usual quartette. No wonder that these girls are more fearless-looking, healthier, brighter, and less neurotic than their fellows at home; for, apart from the greater facilities for fresh air and cheap, healthy amusements which they enjoy, they are better paid, a typist with a machine of her own getting half a crown a thousand words; while, if she is any good, she can always demand £2 a week in an office, with extra pay for overtime. The same thing holds good in every branch of women’s work, the domestic servants demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages every year.

In Melbourne it is no good trying to get a servant by merely stating your requirements at a registry-office, and asking that a likely girl should be sent out to see you. On the contrary, it is the mistresses who line the waiting-rooms at the offices. They come early and stay late, often bringing books with them, and only slipping out for a hurried meal when they are quite certain that every possible domestic is comfortably enjoying her dinner at home, or in some restaurant. If it is very hot or wet, no maids turn up at all, though the ladies still flock to town by each early tram and train; a wistful-eyed and weary host, so evidently bent on that all-absorbing quest that one gets after a time to recognize them at first glance as servant-hunters. When a smiling and self-satisfied young woman is brought into the room by the harassed person who runs the office, and introduced to some eager mistress, all the other ladies glare at the possibly successful candidate for the girl’s favour, and meanwhile smile at her in the most beckoning and easy-going way; though even when she has thrown the glove, so to speak, they all know that she will not have the faintest compunction in breaking her agreement. These are a few of the questions a mistress may have put to her:—Does she keep a piano for the maids? If not, are they allowed to practise in the drawing-room? Are there any children?—an unforgivable sin in the eyes of a Melbourne domestic; as one hopeless lady said to me, after many days of weary waiting:—“They expect us to put out the work and kill our children.” Is she allowed every evening out, and half a day a week, and a whole day a month, and every Sunday? And is she expected to wear a cap?

For the most part even the best of them refuse to call you “ma’am.” It is, “Hey, you there,” if they wish to attract your attention, and “All right” in response to any order. A little less in the rough, and they repeat your name every moment, till you are sick of the very sound of it. One woman I know, who remonstrated with her maid on the constant reiteration of “Mrs. —” was met with the response that if she was Mrs. — she ought not to mind being called so, and if she was not, she ought to be ashamed of herself!

But I have strayed far from the subject of the chambers and their inhabitants, of which, indeed, a whole book might be written. One sees the cheery, independent-looking girls walking, with that characteristic swing of the hips, along the passages, or hurrying to their work through the sunny streets; but this is all the brightest side of the picture, to which there is, as in all pictures true to life, a reverse side. Even here there are not always billets to go round; a girl may lose her situation, and not get another at once, and then the primus roars less frequently, and there is no odour of bacon or sausages mingled with the kerosene. The door is kept jealously closed. Sometimes the men from the shops which let out furniture on the hire system come and fetch it away. The inhabitant of the room tells you jauntily that she is moving, and that it is not worth while carting furniture about; but she stays on, with lips that every day grow whiter and more persistently smiling, while you meet her in the street during business hours, trying to look very busy and full of affairs.

Some girls will talk of their position; they are “out of a billet”; they are “awfully hard up,” and one need not fear greatly for those who can do this. We have all been in the same box, and are only too ready to give her a meal here and a meal there; to lend her a lounge-chair by way of a bed, till something turns up, and help out her scanty wardrobe, if she wants to appear particularly smart and prosperous when interviewing some possible employer. But it is those who do not and will not complain who are the difficult ones to deal with. One such girl, I remember, was found by the caretaker—when the busy people about her at last began to realize that they had not seen her go in and out of her room for some time—lying on the floor behind the locked door, as nearly dead as any woman could be, from sheer want—starvation, to put it bluntly—though there was not a single woman in the building who would not have helped her, if only the real state of things had ever been guessed at; for the uncharitableness of the Australian woman is, for the most part, verbal; they will abuse you like a pickpocket, but, while they will not leave you a shred of character, they will literally strip themselves in other ways that you may be clothed.

But girls such as I have been writing of do not comprise the whole inhabitants of these chambers. There are married couples, for the greater part, living as much on the edge of things as the girls. I remember one quite cheerful matron confessing to me that she and her husband at that moment had only twopence between them. He was an engineer, of sorts, and when he was out of a billet she used to take in dressmaking by the day, and get a small part at one of the theatres in the chorus, or as part of a crowd; or—being possessed of an extremely fine figure—pose for a photograph or sketch of some newly imported model gown for one of the larger drapery firms, or as an example of the newest styles of hairdressing for a ladies’ paper. Then there are more prosperous couples, sometimes with children—or more likely with one child—and various men who “batch” in places such as these, getting their meals out at some handy tea-room or restaurant.

Cheaper than these rooms are others, to be found for the most part in the narrow back-streets—buildings with long, echoing, uncarpeted passages, kept very moderately clean by occasional charwomen, with no hot-water supply whatever, and for the most part no bathroom. They are badly lighted, shivery places even on the hottest days, and though some of the rooms are bright and cheery enough, the doors, with the dirty, cracked, chipped paint, bear an ominous look, as though the wolf were for ever pawing at them. They are failures as buildings. Mostly they have not been designed for residential purposes at all, but as huge blocks of offices, in those days of swollen pride “before the boom.”—In England things have happened before the Conquest and after, but even B.C. and A.D. are letters which here have no significance—except to the geologist—and it is as “before the boom” or “after the boom” that all affairs of any importance are said to have occurred, unless the date is further particularized as “the year So-and-so won the Cup.” Among many other mementoes of the great bubble these buildings stand confessed failures: as unadapted for the purposes they are put to as are the many human failures, who drift into them, aimlessly as a stray leaf is drifted through an open door by some passing breeze.

From places such as these people are always moving, whether from an inborn restlessness or a desire to escape their creditors, I cannot say; but one day you see them toiling up and down stairs with the oddest, and most intimate, household and personal belongings clasped in their arms. There is an eddying whirl of dust and straw outside some room door, while from within it comes a persistent sound of hammering. Then only a week or two later you run across the very same people staggering downstairs under the same burdens, or dropping soft bundles over the banisters to the hall below; and pass a widely open door, which shows you an empty room, with fresh stains on the walls, and a fresh irruption of tin-tack holes everywhere; while a perspiring “char-lady” tussles valiantly with the dirt-begrimed floor, for these “flitters” take little or no pride in their surroundings.

The army of “char-ladies” in Melbourne is a large one. It is a “legion that never was ’listed”; it has no commander and no regulations; it is managed by no Acts of Parliament; is included in the affairs of no Board; has no fixed minimum wage; in fact, has no protection of any sort, beyond what lies in the tongue of each individual member; though that is, indeed, most often a two-edged sword. But, for all that, these women have one weakness, and that is their strength. If they were not strong enough to work their husbands would be supporting them. If they had not willingly and bravely put their shoulders to the wheel at the time of some crisis, scarcity of employment, or illness, their husbands would never have found out how much more capable they were than they themselves; for, with very few exceptions, the women that one sees scrubbing miles of passages and mountains of stairs, in warehouses and offices and chambers, long before it is light on a winter’s morning, are married women.

There was one charwoman attached to a big block of buildings I once lived in, a little upright, dark, bright-eyed incarnation of energy—very different from most of the bent and wearied regiment—to whom I often gave a cup of tea and some work to do in my rooms just for the sake of hearing her opinions. Remarking to her one day that I supposed a great many daily workers, such as herself, had husbands, as many as half—the rest being widows, with the exception of a very small percentage of spinsters—she replied that well over two-thirds of them were either deserted wives or supporting their husbands in idleness. Her own husband had been a hard-working fellow and very good to her and her two children, till one time when he was out of work she had turned-to and gone out charing. From that time onward she had never had a penny from him, for herself or the children. For a time he had lived at home in idleness on her earnings; then—what an irony of fate!—got a good job and gone to live with another woman, who spent every penny of his wages on dress and luxuries, not even doling out to him sufficient for his weekly allowance of tobacco, as even the most niggardly wife would have done. But for the most part these defaulting husbands have “gone West”; and when a husband does that—leaving his wife behind to follow him later on, when he has got a job—she might as well ring down the curtain and realize at once that her married life, anyhow, as far as he is concerned, is at an end.

In the heart of each individual wife hope lingers for a little while: “her Bill,” or “her Jim,” is not like the others, and at first letters and an occasional remittance may come pretty regularly. But in the ears of those who merely look on at the game the words “going West” ring like a knell, and God only knows what history of struggling hope, of poverty, of disillusion, and toil might be gathered round that one little phrase. As I write these women seem to visualize before my eyes; the work-bowed figures, the roughened hands, the tired faces, with their bright, eager eyes, all victims of the golden lure of the West, where the Victorian husbands seem to cast their conscience as easily as a snake casts its skin.

Luckily for the Melbourne “char-lady”—I once heard a child severely rebuked by its middle-class mother for speaking of a washer-woman, and the female side of the Melbourne prison, referred to as “the place where the lady convicts are kept”—she is far better paid than her English sister, the minimum daily wage being four shillings, with dinner and sundry cups of tea, while she receives at least half a crown a week for attending to an ordinary small office or room, lighting the fire during the winter months, and sweeping and dusting it daily. It is wonderful how much of this sort of work a really smart woman can get through, and the one of whom I have spoken seldom did less than twenty rooms regularly each day—the offices the very first thing in the morning, or the last thing at night, and the living-rooms of the bachelors and more prosperous business girls between nine and twelve. After this she would race home, see to her own house, cook her children’s dinner and return about six to get a certain proportion of the offices ready for the next morning; doing her own washing, as she told me, on Sundays—a practice not greatly to be condemned, seeing how near a place cleanliness occupies to godliness. Her four children were always very models of neatness and cleanliness—as was their mother—indeed, the appearance of all working-women in Melbourne, of whatever class, strikes me as very far superior to what I remember it in England.

One summer when I lived out of town and went to work every morning by the eight o’clock train, I used to marvel at the way the girls going to business in shops and offices managed to turn themselves out at such an early hour; and the amount of real work that it must have occasioned them to wash and get up their fresh stiffly starched print or linen dresses—which certainly could not be worn for more than two days—their dainty white cuffs and collars and other etceteras of the toilet. One particularly trim girl, I remember, confessed to me that she only possessed one set of muslin cuffs and collar, and washed and starched them regularly every evening when she got home, ironing them out before she left each morning. On the whole these girls are a far fresher, healthier set than those who live right in the town, as much, I suspect, from the better food they have when they are living with their people as from the better air. Indeed, without any exaggeration, it is worth while going to Flinders Street Station, or Princes Bridge, any day between eight and nine, for the mere delight of seeing the dozens of fresh, happy-looking girls that the early trains disgorge; then to watch them branch off in every direction—up Flinders Street, and down Flinders Street, and along Swanston Street—to their places of business. It is as if the puffing suburban trains were each a veritable part of the heart of the town, pumping bright new blood through every artery, in the shape of the grey and dust-grimed street. The human freight brought in by the later trains is more exotic, and on the whole less robust; though whether the work, in which the girls who arrive between nine and ten are employed, is more sedentary, or the girls themselves come of a more refined and delicate stock, I cannot say; but certainly the employees in the large, well-lighted, and airy shops, factories, and public buildings, though they may have a lower social status, work under more healthy conditions than those in the smaller offices.

It used to amuse me to notice the books these girls read on their way to and from town. At one time I kept a list during several months, and found that, apart from the little penny English papers, like Home Notes and Home Chat, Mrs. Henry Wood topped the list; then came, oddly enough for people who could not know his world, Dickens; and, still more odd, Thackeray.

In the dressmaking trade, at which many of these girls are employed, there is, as in all other recognized trades, a fixed minimum wage of half a crown a week for beginners—with a fixed rate of increase—so that it is impossible for an employer to use a girl without any payment under the pretence of teaching her, and then dismiss her when the time comes for her to receive an adequate wage. Indeed, the work-girl is most carefully protected, and her hours regulated in accordance with her age. In the tailoring trade the wages of female pressers and buttonhole makers average 21s. a week. Dressmakers’ assistants, or ordinary hands, get 26s. a week; the woman in charge anything from £2 to £7; and ordinary machinists, 21s.

As in all countries, the makers of underclothing, or white workers, are the least well paid, averaging only 16s. a week, the people who wash the clothes after they are made having far the best of it, as a fair laundry-hand, or ironer, can easily command £1 a week. Women working in the straw-hat factories are paid from 20s. to 30s. a week, and so are the pressers in the dye-works; knitting machinists, from 20s. to 28s.; printers’ feeders (female), £1 a week; box-makers, 22s. to 25s. Factory wrappers and packers average from 15s. to 22s. a week; match-makers, 17s. 6d.; and warpers in the woollen factories, 25s.

Over four employees of either sex constitute a factory, the room in which they work being then under factory laws and the supervision of the factory inspector. On the other hand, the employment of but one Chinese also constitutes a factory, and I cannot help thinking that this is rather a mean little law; though in its own way far-seeing in the interests of Australia, for, of course, no laundry proprietor who wishes to engage, say, one or two hands to help herself and her family, is likely to engage a Chinaman, however quick, clean, and hard-working, when it means all the trouble of being registered as a factory, and the constant irritation of official inspection and interference.

Among domestic workers cooks get from 17s. a week to 30s.; house-maids, 12s. to 15s., with everything found; thereby being much better off than many typists—who have themselves to keep—and in an infinitely superior position, from a pecuniary point of view, to the tea-room girls. These are for the most part ladies, and therefore, I suppose, expected to support themselves and keep up a good appearance on from 10s. to 16s. a week; whereas the hotel waitress gets from 15s. to 20s. and her board and lodging, besides tips, which no one ever thinks of offering to the pretty, refined tea-room girl.

I remember one such girl saying to me bitterly that men, when they wanted to show their appreciation of her services, sent her a box of sweets—or lollies, as they are called out here. A subtle irony to one who was so sick of the sight of anything in the shape of food, and would have been so truly thankful for some of the ready-money that the more plebeian waitresses pocketed gaily each day.

For girls wishing to enter the musical profession the premier University College, Trinity, is open to men and women alike—the Trinity College Hostel adjoining it affording accommodation for the resident students—while the women doctors and dentists hold very high place in the Melbourne world. There is one hospital—the Queen Victoria—where all the visiting surgeons and physicians are women, and where operations of all kinds are carried out. Though it is small, consisting of but two wards, medical and surgical, the out-patients’ department catering, as it does, for the needs of women and children only, is very large indeed. There are absolutely no men at all about the place. It might be the dream of the “Princess” come true, and rendered practicable, the very portress who works the lift in which the patients are carried up to the wards being a woman. I have been a patient in Melbourne hospitals more than once—Providence seeming to have constructed me in a gimcrack and random fashion. The last time does not bear thinking of, save for the delightful kindness and courtesy of the sisters and nurses, for Providence seemed also to have fatally muddled both the manners and the intelligence of the house physician. But the one really happy memory I have of hospital life all hangs round “the Queen Victoria.” It was extraordinarily gay; I do not think I ever heard more laughter and more droll remarks than in that surgical ward, where most of the patients were either waiting for, or recovering from, some serious operation. I remember particularly the storm of laughter and chaff that greeted me the first time I was able to rise from my bed and stand upright They christened me the “Canary”—not on account of my voice, but because of the thinness of my nether limbs, which, as one wit remarked, reminded her of number eleven on a cottage door—cannot you see it, the two straight, stark lines of white chalk on the rough boards?—while others, again, declared that I was like nothing so much as two yards of pump-water.

The work of resident physician and matron were combined in the person of one delightful woman, always immaculate in the whitest of white linen, who used to lend me books—her own books, not the hospital possessions—while the coming of the honoraries was always quite the event of each day. There is a fantastic illusion to the effect that women take no interest in their own sex. Anyone who could have seen how the coming of the visiting doctors was watched for by these poor women, many of them desperately ill, and have heard the conjectures made as to what they would wear, and the way the patients disputed together over the charms and “smartness” of their special honorary, might have lost all illusion on that point, once and for ever; if anything ever can destroy such a hidebound and century-old error. I think that convalescence was the most pleasant I have ever known, lying on a long couch in the balcony, looking out into sunlit courtyard with its huge fig-tree; the nurses in their pale green uniform flitting across it from the office to their dining-room; visitors coming and going; or the portress sweeping up leaves and burning them in a bonfire, from which the pungent smoke floated in a thin blue cloud up to the balcony. Then someone brought me a present of a soft grey dressing-gown, trimmed with pale blue silk, which I loved because I looked nice in it. I remember lending it one visiting day to a pretty girl whose young man used to come and see her—a matter of vast interest to us all; and she looked nicer still, because her blue eyes just matched the blue silk. She died a few months later, and I have always been sorry that I was not strong-minded enough to have given it her “for keeps,” as the children say.

Between the hours of seven and eight, when the ward was all tidied up ready for the night, the women’s husbands were allowed in to see their wives. It was midsummer, I remember, for I had my Christmas dinner there—and at that hour the long ward was filled with a tender twilight. We women who had no one to come and see us used to turn over on our sides and gaze out of the window at the leaves of the fig-tree, black against the pink sky—at least, I did, because there were no beds that way, other lonely patients, with a husband and wife on either side, having to lie on their backs and stare out stolidly in front of them; still, one could not help seeing the men tiptoeing in—some in their Sunday black, others straight from work in their blue dungarees—and noticing how the faces of some of the wives would flush and glow, as if a lamp had been lit behind the transparent white mask. And how the man would hold one hand in his, and fling his other arm over the pillow, above his woman’s head, and say very little, while she talked eagerly, incessantly, in a little weak whisper. We did not want to see all this. Not that they minded, as long as one was not ill-bred enough to stare deliberately; but it gave us a nasty lumpy feeling in our throats—nous autres who had nobody to come and see us during that twilight hour, which always seems so completely made for intimacy.

There is, I suppose, no state of life that does not bring its own pleasure and its own pain; and though perhaps, the ups of life are the most comfortable, on the whole I would award the palm for interest to the downs; and I for one never learnt more, from all of the world that I have known, than I did from the eight weeks in that hospital ward, where the very atmosphere seemed to breathe content and good feeling as palpably as it did iodoform and carbolic.

Taking it all round, I should say that women in Australia, of the working and middle classes, have a much better time of it than in England. In some ways they do not expect so much. A girl marries a man who is earning a decent wage because she loves him—even in the upper classes there is very little question of settlements, nor does she expect to start at exactly the same point as her parents have reached. I have lived in countries where coolie labour of all sorts is ridiculously cheap, and where a girl whose parents have, say, two hundred a year, need not even trouble to put on her own stockings; is literally waited on hand and foot, and knows nothing either of cooking or house-work, and, after all, I have come to the conclusion that the servant difficulty in Melbourne is by no manner of means an unmixed evil, and that certainly it is a great factor in the making of good wives. In England the attitude of men towards women is completely different from what it is in Australia. At home they expect a tremendous lot of their women, but in the smallest possible way. They must be purely domestic angels on the hearth, and not over-interested in anything beyond it. If they have no hearth on which to practise their virtues, then they are indeed unsexed. The women in Victoria naturally do not like to hear of the stone-throwing, etc., practised by their own sex in the fight for political equality at home, and, I believe, are truly sorry that there seems no prospect of the brains of those in authority being reached in any less forcible fashion; but, then, they literally cannot comprehend a woman’s side of the question being disregarded, simply because she is a woman. They have never themselves resorted to violence, because there was no necessity for it; the laws in Australia being the same for the women as for the men, in divorce, in labour, and the ownership and care of children. When one first lands in Melbourne one may, perhaps, form the hasty opinion that the men are not as courteous to women as they are in England—I am not speaking of the rich and travelled minority, who are much the same all over the world, but of the ordinary middle or lower classes. It is true that the men are not fond of parting with their hats, and will stand and talk to a woman with both hands deep in their hip-pockets. But, though they will not refrain from contradicting her because she is a lady, they will yet give her their fullest attention; and in business as well as pleasure weigh her opinion against theirs as carefully as though she were of their own sex. While men at home continue to treat girls and young women like pretty kittens, merely to be petted and played with, they must not be surprised that they develop at times into mature cats, using their claws, if only to show that they have got them. In England there seems always—everywhere—to be running beneath all social and political intercourse between men and women, and even beneath much domestic life—for nothing can be more bitter than the remarks some wives make on their husbands’ characters, pursuits, and pleasures—a sub-current of fierce sex-antagonism that is very rarely indeed felt out here where there is so much true equality between men and women; they know here that it pays them, if nothing else, to stand shoulder to shoulder, and to make of themselves and their family a compact little commonwealth, protecting their interests against outside interference only.

Certainly a very great number of women in Victoria do not use the vote now they have it, but that is no argument against its possession. A great many men—particularly in lonely, scattered districts, do not use theirs, either. Though voting by post is permitted to anyone living more than five miles away from the nearest polling-booth, or suffering from any illness or infirmity which prevents them from voting personally, this is not much help to people who are many more miles than five from a post-office, and probably quite unaware, even, that any election is taking place. As a matter of fact, the disparity between the number of men and women who availed themselves of their privilege at the election of 1906 is very small indeed—considering for how very short a time in the world’s history women have been permitted or expected to use their faculties outside their own homes; the number of male voters in Victoria for the Senate being 335,886, and the votes recorded 209,168; while the female voters enrolled numbered 336,168, and the votes recorded 171,933. But even in Melbourne all women are not interested in the actual possession of this much-coveted privilege, and I remember one labourer’s wife saying to me: “I don’t want no vote, not I! Jim votes as I tell ’im to; an’ if ’e didn’t, I’d let ’im know the reason why.”

She was a wise woman, that labourer’s wife, in more ways than one; an excellent help-mate, keeping her home spotlessly clean, and feeding her menkind—husband and grown-up son—thoroughly well—many a cup of tea and fresh-baked, featherlike scone have I enjoyed at her kitchen-table—but she insisted on her own rights and privileges, all the same. On Sundays her husband and son “lay in,” as she called it, till midday, while she gave them their breakfast in bed. But every Friday morning she “lay in,” and they lit the fire, prepared her breakfast, and took it to her in bed, cut their own lunches, and set off to work, leaving her to lie there quietly and rest till she felt inclined to rise and get herself a midday meal; usually a light one, in any case, for the Australian labouring classes mostly have their dinner, with hot meat and vegetables and, of course, tea,—when the men come back from their day’s work. But in every way there is more give and take, and not only between the sexes. One family I knew, consisting of four sisters who lived with their old mother in the suburbs and went up to town every day for business. They did not have to be at work till nine, and breakfasted a little after eight, the one servant bringing them all round the inevitable cups of tea at seven. On Sunday mornings, however, one of them always got the early tea, and took the maid a cup in bed. I do not in the least suppose that she was especially grateful—though doubtless she enjoyed it thoroughly—but neither did the girls expect her to be so. They simply did it because it seemed to them “fair.” And there you have the keynote of much which prevents the hardest work in Australia from developing into drudgery, or the poorest people from becoming downtrodden and hopeless; for, as far as is humanly to be expected, it is a fair country, while the people that are in it abide, at any rate, by this one great working ideal of “fairness.”

CHAPTER VI
VICTORIAN YOUTH

During the first week I was in Melbourne I came across a notice in the daily paper among the police-court news, stating that “Percy So-and-So, aged two years and four months,” had been “arrested on the charge of being a neglected child.”

“What a brutal country!” I thought. “Can it be possible that any human being can be found so hard-hearted and inhuman as to condemn a helpless child to any form of punishment, because by some tragic fate it has missed both a mother’s love and a father’s care?” Globe-trotters get all sorts of Adelphi-like impressions such as this, and then return home to rave in print about the barbarities and inefficiencies of other countries. Luckily for the correction of my ideas, however, I was to spend more than eight years in learning to understand this particular country a little better.

Very soon I began to realize that the most fortunate thing that can possibly happen to a child whose parents, or other guardians, persistently neglect or ill-treat it, is that it shall be thus summonsed; for then the State steps in in the place of its natural protector, and provides a decent home for it, food, clothing, and later on employment. In 1908 there were in Victoria 5,477 such wards of the State, and in all truth, however, the Government of Victoria may have been criticized for its management of other affairs, nothing—absolutely nothing—but good can be said of it in its position as foster-parent to this immense family. The 5477 children of whom I speak include 3,711 boarded out, 710 placed under supervision with friends, 748 maintaining themselves in service or apprenticeship, 306 in institutions or hospitals, and 2 visiting relations! By which it will be seen that a relation in Australia is no more overflowing with the milk of human kindness than in any other country. Among the newly-made wards of the State in 1908—numbering in all 1,240—the fathers were held to be blameable in 457 cases, and the mothers in 57; many of the heroic army of char-ladies being, I suspect, among the 457 who struggle bravely to support their offsprings unaided. There were 677 cases in which parents were held to be blameless; in some the family was too large for the father to adequately support all his children, while in others the father was dead, or an invalid, or in a lunatic asylum.

When the father is dead or an invalid, or has forsaken his wife, and the mother is known to be a hardworking, respectable woman, and yet unable to wholly maintain her family, then some—or all—of her children are made wards of the State, and boarded out to their own mother, who receives five shillings a week for their support; and in addition the help and advice of the State in all matters relating to their welfare: help that continues during the time that it is most particularly needed, which is when the youngsters have finished their schooling, and are ready to be put out into the world, with the need of a firmer hand than their mother over them.

If the children are committed to the care of private people, or institutions, these have to be approved of by the Governor in Council, five shillings a week being paid for each child boarded out to private people; unless it should be that they are voluntarily adopted, which is very often the case. I have not the faintest idea how many children are yearly adopted from hospitals and other institutions in Melbourne, but, judging by the number of cases I myself have come across, I should imagine it to be very large. In some ways people seem more humane, more primitive in Victoria than in England; certainly they are less easily reconciled to a childless home. They do not have large families, but if they have no child at all it is very common indeed for them to adopt one. Certainly I never personally knew anyone of wealth and good position in England to adopt a nameless child; but in Victoria I can bring to mind several cases in which this has been done, and the utmost care and love lavished upon it, while it never for one moment hears a single word that can cause it to doubt that the father and mother, of whose love it is so sure, are its own.

Over the little boarded-out baby the supervision is most especially strict. The whole administration of the Infant Life Protection Act, which was passed in 1890, and amended in 1907, has lately been taken out of the hands of the police, and put under the care of the Department for Neglected Children, to whom power is given to establish maternity homes and infant asylums. Any person who boards an infant must be registered; male or female inspectors must be permitted free access to the house, and allowed to examine the children, and give any necessary advice or directions, while no one is allowed to board out a child without first applying to the secretary of the Department, stating what amount he or she is prepared to pay weekly for its maintenance, no baby less than twelve months old being allowed to be boarded out under ten shillings a week, and all payments having to be made through the secretary. If these payments fall into arrears for four weeks the child becomes a ward of the State, while a penalty of £100, with or without imprisonment, is incurred for receiving or making payment for any infant contrary to the regulations of the Act, while it further provides that no illegitimate child—or boarded-out child—under the age of five years, who has died in such registered home, may be buried without a certificate from a coroner, justice, or member of the police-force.

That the need for such reform was pressing is shown by the vital statistics of the State for 1908; the number of illegitimate births being 1,790, and the deaths of these children under one year of age 354, the proportion of deaths among illegitimate children being between two and three times as great as that among children born in wedlock.

There are several foundling hospitals and rescue homes for women in Melbourne, but of these I am intimate with the working of but one—which for sheer humanity and complete realization of the claims of motherhood, apart from any other consideration, beats everything of the sort that I ever came across—and this is the Infant Asylum in Berry Street.

A girl who has got into trouble may apply at this asylum six or seven months before her hour of trial has come. She is taken in, fed and clothed, and—most merciful of all—given work to do, nobody, excepting the committee and matron, ever knowing her surname. When her time comes she goes to the Women’s Hospital for her confinement; and after that is over returns to the Home, to help in the general work, and to nurse and care for her own child. The value of this is scarcely to be estimated. The poor little mite is unfortunate enough as it is in possessing but one palpable parent, and being born under the stigma that—even in so free a country as Australia—is still attached to the completely innocent. If it is then taken from its mother and put straight into a foundling hospital, that mother’s whole memory of it will be so mingled with a nightmare of horror, and pain, and shame, that all she wishes for is to be able to forget its very existence; and so the poor mite is doubly orphaned. But I defy any mother—however reluctant—if she has but a spark of good in her, to suckle her child for a year or more, and not only feel bound to it by both love and duty, but capable of starting life again none the worse, and in many cases much the better—because more completely a woman—on account of its existence.

When the mother leaves the asylum, where she may stay for as long as two years, she is found a situation, and expected to contribute a percentage of her wages to the support of the baby who remains in the Home; unless, as is very often the case, she is allowed to have it with her; many people being quite willing—particularly in up-country districts where servants are scarce—to take a woman with a child, who as often as not becomes the pet of the entire household.

I have often seen mothers on Sundays at the Victoria Infant Asylum, who have called on their day out to see and have a romp with their children, who are all the dearer to them from the fact of the many small self-denials which they must practise to contribute to their support. To use the adjective “lost” or “fallen” to these women would be sheer nonsense. Personally I think they are infinitely and incomparably more moral than wives who sell their birthright by deliberately refusing the responsibilities of motherhood; while between them and the men whose name the children would have borne—had they entered the world with all honour and circumstance—there is no possible comparison, while it is due to the asylum where, in their blind terror, they first took refuge that these mothers have gained courage to stand upright, and face life as self-respecting women once more.

I feel I cannot write too strongly about this; I feel very strongly about it, and for the women on whom all the burden alone presses. Mr. Foster Fraser speaks of the number of illegitimate children in Australia. He says nothing at all of all the splendid measures that are being taken to combat this great source of misery, nor the facilities which are afforded, if marriage takes place later than it should do, for legitimizing children. Nor, though he compares the dairy output of Denmark and Australia, to the great disadvantage of the latter, does he extend the same comparison to a more vital matter, to wit, the percentage of illegitimate births—at which he is apparently so horrified—which is in Victoria 5.8, and in the Commonwealth 6.2, against 10.1 in Denmark; while in Sweden, another Northern country, it rises to 12.3. Even in Puritanical Scotland this percentage is 6.5, while it seems to me that for a country where for many months of the year the smaller houses and cottages have by evening become almost stifling; where the only possible relief for young people, who have no gardens of their own, is to be found either in the streets or public gardens, or on the easily reached sea-beaches, that the percentage is wonderfully moderate, that of Portugal, where the climatic conditions are much the same—though the young women are allowed far less of the liberty which I have heard so condemned in speaking of Australian life—being 11.4.

Education in Victoria is both free and compulsory, and yet the position of the State, or public schools is perfectly different from that of the Council schools at home. Once I was living in a little West Country town in England where the Rector, by sheer force of brains, had raised himself from a Board school to the position which he held. He was a most cultivated and charming man, but the matter of his education was never forgotten. Whenever he did anything his parishioners did not approve of—as even an archangel must have done, certainly he would have been no archangel if he had not—there was a shrugging of shoulders, and the inevitable remark: “Well, what can you expect from a man that’s been at a Board school?”

In Australia the fact of a boy being educated at a State school tells against him no whit unless it be among the very few rich people who like to consider themselves exclusive, idle people, of no consequence whatever in any affair of moment. Many families who are but moderately well off send their boys to the State schools while they are quite young, as at home they would send them to a Preparatory. When they reach the age of thirteen or fourteen they then enter them at one of the big schools corresponding to the lesser public schools at home, such as Wellington, Clifton, or Cheltenham. In Melbourne the principal among these schools are the Church of England Grammar School, the Presbyterian College—a beautiful grey stone building, covered in the autumn with a mantle of crimson creeper, and presenting more the appearance of a dignified old English dwelling-house than any building I have ever seen in Victoria—and the Scots College.

There is nothing higher than these—or need be, for the type of boy they produce, and the education both mental and physical, that they supply is most admirable. If an English Duke settled in Melbourne and wanted to send his son to school, it is between these three that he would have to choose; where his son’s class-mate might be a boy who had received his primary education in a State school, absolutely no slur whatever being cast on him on that account. Boys in England are the most arrant snobs. They are inoculated with it from the cradle. They must not play with the coachman’s children because they are common; they must not—if they belong to what is known as “the county”—play with the local lawyer’s boys or the grammar-school boys because they are “cads,” which reminds me of a fine definition of the two words “cad” and “snob”: “cads are the people we won’t know, and snobs are the people who won’t know us.” I find very little, if any, tendency of this sort in the Australian boy. A fellow is good at games or a “rotter,” and who his father and mother are, and whether he was or was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, does not concern his companions in the very least. It is not that the boys are any better or any worse than elsewhere; it is simply that they have not heard all the talk about position that is constantly ringing in the ears of an English lad. When I took my small boy home there was so much objection made to him playing with what were called “common children” that I was forced to try to explain to him the difference between the classes, with the effect that his whole ideas of right and wrong became hopelessly muddled; the discussion, as I remember it, running somewhat like this:

“But why mayn’t I play with them, mummy? They are good boys.”

“Yes, dear, but they are not gentlemen.”

“Why, what have they done?”

“Oh, they have done nothing.”

“Well, is it their daddies or their mammies have been naughty?”

“No, dear; they are quite good. It’s only that they are not in the same position that you are.”

“Is it because they are poor that you don’t like them? ’cause we are poor too.” And so on, till the only way out of the difficulty—the true invidiousness of which had, by years of absence, grown to seem as completely mysterious to me as it did to him—lay in imposing upon him the meaningless command to “do as you are told, and ask no questions.”

Among the State schools in Victoria there are bursaries and scholarships available for the secondary schools and universities; while for any boy to climb from the position of a State school pupil into that of Prime Minister is simply a matter of capability and grit.

Continuation schools have been established in Melbourne, Ballarat, and Bendigo for the purpose of giving a preliminary training to teachers, which must afterwards be followed by two years in the Melbourne Training College, when they are free to be appointed to sixth-class positions as State-school teachers, at an annual salary of about £120 for the men teachers and £100 for the women.

These positions are often by no means the tame affairs that they are in England, particularly to the city-born boy or girl. Lately there has been much agitation about the question of decent dwelling-places for State-school teachers in country districts, some of the statements made in the daily papers by these teachers, about two years ago, being little short of revolting. Often the young teacher boards out with some neighbouring “cocky” farmer and his wife, and, at the best, this may be better than sharing a wooden shanty with flies and white ants, where water is always scarce, and company of any sort an impossibility. But at the worst—and the worst of these “cocky” farmers’ homes are sordid beyond any word—it may prove pretty well unendurable, particularly to a young creature who has grown accustomed to the bustle and gaiety of college life; while the mental picture that rises to my mind of the sort of meal set out before a nerve-racked and wearied teacher in some such place, with the sickening slough of half-melted salt butter, the black, drawn tea, the indecent slab of boiled beef—the whole dotted with flies as thickly as a cake with currants—justifies completely the desperate assertion made to me by one delicately pretty young school-marm “I’d marry any man in the world who had a refrigerator.”

But this is the darker side of the picture, though in any case the life of a teacher in a back-block school is one of “alarms and excursions” till time and experience have mellowed it. Still, in all but the loneliest places there are certainly compensations. People are hospitable and friendly; distances are ignored; there is generally someone to lend a horse to the teacher, particularly if she be a girl and a good sort, and someone to teach her to ride, too. There are dances and picnics, moonlight picnics being rather a speciality in Australia, and plenty of wholesome fun. People will work incredibly hard on their farms up in the back blocks, particularly if they go in for dairying; but with all this they have a most extraordinary faculty for enjoying themselves, and there is many a morning when the young school teacher will ride home with an admiring escort none too early to start morning school, after dancing gaily all night. Australia is a good place to be young in, particularly when riding through the Bush in the early dawn; the clear air sweet with the scent which the dew brings out from the young gum-leaves and sweet briar; a good horse under you—and “possibilities” of divers sorts riding by your side; while the Bush dances, where there are as often as not six men to every girl—the men dancing together when they can get no better partners—would be a revelation to any English girl used to balls at home, where, though all the arrangements are far more elaborate, partners are few, and it is the men, and not the girls, who can pick and choose.

In some country places the dwellings are so scattered that the question of schooling becomes a very difficult one. In thinly-populated districts, if an attendance of twenty children can be secured, a full-time school is established; under this number the part-time system is arranged for, one teacher attending at two different schools on alternate days. In other scattered districts payment is made to assist parents in conveying their children to school; in any case a great many ride, and it is no uncommon sight to see three or four youngsters astride upon a sturdy pony, with their school-bags slung over their backs. Often when the attendance is not sufficient to warrant the Educational Department in erecting a school-house, the parents will club together to build a room, at a very small cost, as they provide the labour themselves; while the importance which is generally attached to education is proved by the fact that there are some 600 State schools in Victoria, with an attendance of between twelve and twenty pupils only. In still more sparsely populated districts a teacher goes from house to house within a certain radius, giving a lesson, setting tasks, and correcting them at his next visit; while in New South Wales travelling schools have been established, where the teacher moves about, gipsy-like, with a van, which is at once his home and school, fitted with blackboards and books and all the impedimenta necessary for housekeeping—far less, it must be owned, than would be required by an English man or woman of the same class, for they all seem, somehow, to travel lighter out here, and both the personal and domestic machinery of life is far less complicated:—tea, flour for a damper, sugar, matches, a blanket, a waterproof sheet, and a billy-can, and there is little to fear save thirst—and incidentally bull-dog ants. In Melbourne one may, with a settled income at one’s back, live as complicated and luxurious a life as is possible in any other city. But, on the other hand, when one has learnt the two great lessons of how to do without and how to put up with, one can get more fun for less money here than in any other country that I know of. The rural school-teachers may—and probably do—have a much rougher time than they would in England, but beyond a doubt they have a brighter and healthier; while their life is certainly far removed from the utter drabness which characterizes the existence of the ordinary middle-class man or woman at home.

Essentially Australia is, as I have said, a country for the young. The children are thoroughly well looked after, while as they attain to a larger growth they look after themselves in a way that sometimes makes one squirm. One of the first things that I noticed when I landed was that, in the hotels and coffee-palaces, the girls walked into the dining-room in front of their mothers. They took up the menu-card, examined it, and made their choice before handing it on to their meek parent. For the mothers are meek, there is no doubt about it—the fathers being generally too busy over their own affairs and the making of money for their families to count for much,—and I often look at them in wonder, trying to imagine the modern, breezy, self-assertive young woman of the present day ever being trained to such a perfection of self-obliteration by her daughter.

Partly, I believe, this supremacy is owing to the fact that there seems no stationary class. The people are always going up or down in the social scale. Those people who are rich, and in a way influential, to-day, are the people who served in the shops, dug the gardens, or washed the clothes of those who were rich yesterday; while the whole of the populace seems to slip about from one position to another like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. A great many of the people one sees in public places are “jumped up.” They had no chance of any education when they were young: their hands have been roughed and their shoulders bowed with toil during their youth and early middle age. Education—the mere getting of a certain form of stereotyped knowledge—riches, and what is known as “smartness,” are worshipped by the young—particularly those of the towns—in Australia. They are not ashamed of their parents because they are what might be called “common”; they are simply impatient with them because they are slower in their old-fashioned methods, and not so “smart,” so quick in the up-take, as themselves. In the main I think the children are very loyal to their parents. The lack of courtesy, of patience, and consideration is all fully en évidence, but I have never heard the sullen or bitter complaints against the tyranny and misunderstanding of fathers and mothers in Australia that I have heard in England. Apparently—and actually—the young people go their own way, and take the lead and tender their advice on every matter with a freedom unknown to even the most modern youth in the Old Country; but at the back of it all there is a real sense of comradeship.

In a great number of cases the Australian mother has had a bitterly hard time in her youth, and yet there has lingered in her nature something eternally young that enables her to enter with the greatest zest into her daughter’s enjoyment, by which she seems, indeed, to attain herself to a vicarious youth. You do not hear so many references to “the good old days” as in older countries, or the assertion, “I didn’t go to dances when I was young; why should you?” “I didn’t have any pleasure or amusement; why should you expect it?” etc., etc. On the other hand, you frequently hear the assertion, “One is only young once, and I am determined my children should have a gayer time, a better education, better clothes, and a better chance than ever I had.” It all goes too far, of course, and the children get an inflated idea of their own importance, as I once heard a Melbourne woman say: “The Australian baby begins to suffer from a swelled head at two months.” There is very little of parental discipline or of the machine-like regularity of nursery life—the machine-like servants stolidly going their inevitable round of daily duties; the machine-like, precisely punctual meals; the awful ceremony of the trivial daily round that bulwarks one’s earliest days at home.

In any but the largest households a proper nursery is unknown; in any case the youngsters have most of their meals with the grown-ups. Besides, domestic affairs are usually in the same kaleidoscopic condition as everything else. The servants leave en bloc before the Cup, or because some important ceremony in another State holds out to them the chance of larger wages as waitresses or cooks. Then the mother turns to and does the cooking; and the father brings back cold meats and salad-stuffs from the city, and helps wash up the dishes in the evenings, unless there are visitors to supper—and nothing of any sort ever stops the constant entertaining that goes on—when they are expected to do their share; the children run the errands, and dust, and sweep, and enjoy themselves thoroughly; adjourning with their parents, in a mass, to a restaurant for meals when they all get tired of the work, till a fresh domestic staff is procured.

The entire household is on a more intimate footing than at home. The children know all about Bridget’s young man, and will give her a hand with the dishes on any one of her many days out; or, when her temper is good, wander at their own sweet will in and out of the kitchen, with incessant demands for what is known as “a piece”—a liberal slice of bread, butter, and jam.