Greater Britain Part 25

Sydney people, in their jealousy of the Victorians, refuse to admit even that the superior energy of the Melbourne men is a necessary consequence of their having been the pride of the spirited youths of all the world, brought together by the rush for gold. At the time of the first "find"

in 1851, all the resolute, able, physically strong do-noughts of Europe and America flocked into Port Phillip, as Victoria was then called, and such timid and weak men as came along with them being soon crowded out, the men of energy and tough vital force alone remained.

Some of the New South Welsh, shutting their eyes to the facts connected with the gold-rush, a.s.sert so loudly that the Victorians are the refuse of California, or "Yankee sc.u.m," that when I first landed in Melbourne I expected to find street-cars, revolvers, big hotels, and fire-clubs, euchre, caucusses, and mixed drinks. I could discover nothing American about Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings and the width of the streets, and its people are far more thoroughly British than are the citizens of the rival capital. In many senses Melbourne is the London, Sydney the Paris, of Australia.

About the surpa.s.sing vigor of the Victorians there can be no doubt; a glance at the map shows the Victorian railways stretching to the Murray, while those of New South Wales are still boggling at the Green Hills, fifty miles from Sydney. Melbourne, the more distant port, has carried off the Australian trade with the New Zealand gold fields from Sydney, the nearer port. Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes from it mineral oil, before the Sydney people have found out its value; and gas in Melbourne is cheaper than in Sydney, though the Victorians are bringing their coal five hundred miles, from a spot only fifty miles from Sydney.

It is possible that the secret of the superior energy of the Victorians may be, not in the fact that they are more American, but more English, than the New South Welsh. The leading Sydney people are mainly the sons or grandsons of original settlers, "cornstalks" reared in the semi-tropical climate of the coast; the Victorians are full-blooded English immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada, or Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity to live in the exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest climate in the world for healthy men: Melbourne is hotter than Sydney, but its climate is never tropical. The squatters on the Queensland downs, mostly immigrants from England, show the same strong vitality that the Melbourne men possess; but their brother immigrants in Brisbane--the Queensland capital, where the afternoon languid breeze resembles that of Sydney--are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the Sydney "cornstalks."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD AND THE NEW. BUSH SCENERY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE.--P. 24.]

Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph of Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter city are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent. They cannot but admit the present glory of what they call the "Mushroom City." The magnificent pile of the new Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which, when finished, will be larger than our own in London), the University, the Parliament-house, the Union and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Exchange, the viaducts upon the government railroad lines,--all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem built as if to last forever; still, they say that there is a certain want of permanence about the prosperity of Victoria. When the gold discovery took place, in 1851, such trade sprang up that the imports of the colony jumped from one million to twenty-five millions sterling in three years; but, although she is now commencing to ship breadstuffs to Great Britain, exports and imports alike show a steady decrease. Considerably more than half of the hand-workers of the colony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly half the population is resident upon the gold fields; yet the yield shows, year by year, a continual decline. Had it not been for the discoveries in New Zealand, which have carried off the floating digger population, and for the wise discouragement by the democrats of the monopolization of the land, there would have been distress upon the gold fields during the last few years.

The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, and the squatters call loudly for a.s.sisted immigration and free trade, but the stranger sees nothing to astonish him in the temporary stagnation that attends a decreasing gold production.

The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in the world; the arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic. The brilliant statistician who fills the post of registrar-general to the colony, had the immense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged; and, as the governments of the other colonies have of the last few years taken Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I have seen a list of imposts, in which one cla.s.s consisted of ale, aniseed, a.r.s.enic, a.s.saftida, and astronomical instruments; boots, bullion, and salt b.u.t.ter; capers, cards, caraway seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves; maps and manure; philosophical instruments and salt pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages. Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind.

Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but the statistics of these young countries are figure-poems. Tables that in England contrast jute with hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or pit against each other, the powers of race and race.

Victoria is the only country in existence which possesses a statistical history from its earliest birth; but, after all, even Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where the settlers founded the "State Historical Society" a week before the foundation of the State.

Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of Victoria, and have each its party, political and commercial--diggers, agricultural settlers, and squatters--though of late the diggers and the landed democracy have made common cause against the squatters. Gold can now be studied best at Ballarat, and wheat at Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills behind Geelong; but I started first for Echuca, the headquarters of the squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upon my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural districts of the colony, and also the once famous gold diggings of Bendigo Creek.

Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made my first halt, the railway runs through undulating lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood, and well gra.s.sed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the burnt-up herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats, I found a likeness to the views in the weald of Suss.e.x, though the foliage of the gums, or eucalypti, is thinner than that of the English oaks.

Riding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and the foot hills of the "Dividing Range," I found the agricultural community busily engaged upon the harvest, and much excited upon the great thistle question. Women and tiny children were working in the fields, while the men were at Kyneton, trying in vain to hire the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than 2 10_s._ or 3 a week and board. The thistle question was not less serious; the "thistle inspectors," elected under the "Thistle Prevention Act," had commenced their labors, and although each man agreed with his friend that his neighbor's thistles were a nuisance, still he did not like being fined for not weeding out his own. The fault, they say, lies in the climate; it is too good, and the English seeds have thriven.

Great as was the talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton district were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and showed the clearest signs of the small farmer's personal care.

Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia that I visited was a full-grown munic.i.p.ality. The colonial English, freed from the checks which are put by interested landlords to local government in Britain, have pa.s.sed in all the settlements laws under which any village must be raised into a munic.i.p.ality on fifty of the villagers (the number varies in the different colonies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time a larger number sign a pet.i.tion to the contrary effect.

After a short visit to the bustling digging town of Castlemaine, I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town of great pretensions, which occupies the site of the former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part of the line between the two great towns, my train dashed through some closed gates, happily without hurt. The _Melbourne Argus_ of the next day said that the crash had been the result of the signalman taking the fancy that the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains, so he had "closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal, and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink." On my return from Echuca, I could not find that he had been dismissed.

When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to the possessor only, but to the whole community, care to avoid accidents might be expected; but there is a certain recklessness in all young countries, and not even in Kansas is it more observable than in Victoria and New South Wales.

Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and dale for many miles, the diggers following the gold-leads, and building a suburb by each alluvial mine, rather than draw their supplies from the central spot. The extent of the worked-out gold field struck me as greater than the fields round Placerville, but then in California many of the old diggings are hidden by the vines.

In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent restaurants of Virginia City; none of the gambling saloons of Hokitika; and the only approach to gayety among the diggers was made in a drinking-hall, where some dozen red-shirted, bearded men were dancing by turns with four well-behaved and quiet-looking German girls, who were paid, the constable at the gate informed me, by the proprietor of the booth. My hotel--"The Shamrock"--kept by New York Irish, was a thoroughly American house; but, then, digger civilization is everywhere American--a fact owing, no doubt, to the American element having been predominant in the first-discovered diggings--those of California.

Digger revolts must have been feared when the Sandhurst Government Reserve was surrounded with a ditch strangely like a moat, and palings that bear an ominous resemblance to a Maori pah. In the morning I found my way through the obstructions, and discovered the police station, and in it the resident magistrate, to whom I had a letter. He knew nothing of "Gumption d.i.c.k," Hank Monk's friend, but he introduced me to his intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me many things about the yellow diggers. The bad feeling between the English diggers and the Chinese has not in the least died out. Upon the worked-out fields of Castlemaine and Sandhurst, the latter have things their own way, and I saw hundreds of them washing quietly and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, finding an ample living in the leavings of the whites. So successful have they been that a few Europeans have lately been taking to their plan, and an old Frenchman who died here lately, and who, from his working persistently in worn-out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless idiot, left behind him a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, obtained by washing in company with the Chinese.

The spirit that called into existence the Ballarat anti-Chinese mobs is not extinct in Queensland, as I found during my stay at Sydney. At the Crocodile Creek diggings in Northern Queensland, whither many of the Chinese from New South Wales have lately gone, terrible riots occurred the week after I landed in Australia. The English diggers announced their intention of "rolling up" the Chinese, and proceeded to "jump their claims"--that is, trespa.s.s on the mining plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt themselves strong enough to purchase claims. The Chinese bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger who had sold them a claim for 50 one morning, hammered the pegs into the soft ground the same day, and then jumped the claim on the pretense that it was not "pegged out." This was too much for the Chinese owner, who tomahawked the digger on the spot. The English at once fired the Chinese town, and even attacked the English driver of a coach for conveying Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers in North Queensland are said to have kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport, as the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with terriers.

On the older gold fields, such as those of Sandhurst and Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the Chinese lies dormant, but it is not the less strong for being free from physical violence. The woman in a baker's shop near Sandhurst, into which I went to buy a roll for lunch, shuddered when she told me of one or two recent marriages between Irish "Biddies" and some of the wealthiest Chinese.

The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion is directed is no ill-conducted rogue or villain. The chief of the police at Sandhurst tells me that the Chinese are "the best of citizens;" a member of the Victorian Parliament, resident in the very edge of their quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as "well-behaved and frugal;" the registrar-general told me that there is less crime, great or small, among the Chinese, than among any equal number of English in the colony.

The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria, as they have been in California. Their testimony is accepted in the courts against that of whites; they may become naturalized, and then can vote. Some twenty or thirty of them, out of 30,000, have been naturalized in Victoria up to the present time.

That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay in the gold fields as merely temporary is clear from the character of their restaurants, which are singularly inferior to those of San Francisco. The best in the colonies is one near Castlemaine, but even this is small and poor.

Shark's fin is an unheard-of luxury, and even puppy you would have to order. "Silk-worms fried in castor oil" is the colonial idea of a Chinese delicacy; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant of Queensland waters, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

From Sandhurst northward, the country, known as Elysium Flats, becomes level, and is wooded in patches, like the "oak-opening" prairies of Wisconsin and Illinois. When within fifty miles of Echuca, the line comes out of the forest on to a vast prairie, across which I saw a marvelous mirage of water and trees on various step-like levels. From the other window of the compartment carriage (sadly hot and airless after the American cars), I saw the thin dry yellow gra.s.s on fire for a dozen miles. The smoke from these "bush-fires" sometimes extends for hundreds of miles to sea. In steaming down from Sydney to Wilson's Promontory on my way to Melbourne, we pa.s.sed through a column of smoke about a mile in width when off Wolongong, near Botany Bay, and never lost sight of it, as it lay in a dense brown ma.s.s upon the sea, until we rounded Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to the southward.

The fires on these great plains are caused by the dropping of fusees by travelers as they ride along smoking their pipes Australian fashion, or else by spreading of the fires from their camps. The most ingenious stories are invented by the colonists to prevent us from throwing doubt upon their carefulness, and I was told at Echuca that the late fires had been caused by the concentration of the sun's rays upon spots of gra.s.s owing to the accidental conversion into burning-gla.s.ses of beer-bottles that had been suffered to lie about. Whatever their cause, the fires, in conjunction with the heat, have made agricultural settlement upon the Murray a lottery. The week before my visit, some ripe oats at Echuca had been cut down to stubble by the hot wind, and farmers are said to count upon the success of only one harvest in every three seasons. On the other hand, the Victorian apricots, shriveled by the hot wind, are so many lumps of crystallized nectar when you pierce their thick outer coats.

Defying the sun, I started off to the banks of the Murray River, not without some regret at the absence of the continuous street verandas which in Melbourne form a first step toward the Italian piazza. One may be deceived by trifles when the character of an unknown region is at stake. Before reaching the country, I had read, "Steam-packet Hotel, Esplanade, Echuca;" and, though experiences on the Ohio had taught me to put no trust in "packets," yet I had somehow come to the belief that the Murray must be a second Missouri at least, if not an Upper Mississippi.

The "Esplanade" I found to be a myth, and the "fleet" of "steam-packets"

were drawn up in a long line upon the mud, there being in this summer weather no water in which they could float. The Murray in February is a streamless ditch, which in America, if known and named at all, would rank as a tenth-rate river.

The St. Lawrence is 2200 miles in length, and its tributary, the Ottawa, 1000 miles in length, itself receives a tributary stream, the Gatineau, with a course of 420 miles. At 217 miles from its confluence with the Ottawa the Gatineau is still 1000 feet in width. At Albury, which even in winter is the head of navigation on the Murray, you are only some 600 or 700 miles by river from the open sea, or about the same distance as from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the Mississippi.

During six months of the year, however, the Murray is for wool-carrying purposes an important river. The railway to Echuca has tapped the river system in the Victorians' favor, and Melbourne has become the port of the back country of New South Wales, and even Queensland. "The Riverina is commercially annexed" to Victoria, said the premier of New South Wales while I was in that colony, and the "Riverina" means that portion of New South Wales which lies between the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and the Murray, to the northward of Echuca.

Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up the _Riverina Herald_, published at Echuca; of its twenty-four columns, nineteen and a half are occupied by the eternal sheep in one shape or another. A representation of Jason's fleece stands at the head of the t.i.tle; "wool"

is the first word in the first line of the body of the paper. More than half of the advertis.e.m.e.nts are those of wool brokers, or else of the fortunate possessors of specifics that will cure the scab. One disinfectant compound is certified to by no less than seventeen inspectors; another is puffed by a notice informing flock-masters that, in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser goes upon the principle of "no cure, no pay." One firm makes "liberal advances on the ensuing clip;"

another is prepared to do the like upon "pastoral securities."

Sheep-chandlers, regardless of a.s.sociations, advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot ointment, their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and the last of the advertis.e.m.e.nts upon the front page is that of an "agent for the sale of fat." The body of the paper contains complaints against the judges at a recent show of wool, and an account of the raising of a sawyer "120 feet in length and 33 feet in girth" by the new "snag-boat"

working to clear out the river for the floating down of the next wool clip. Whole columns of small type are filled with "impounding" lists, containing brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of each district. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are surprising.

Who not to the manner born can make much of this: "Blue and white cow, c.o.c.k horns, 22 off-rump, IL off-ribs?" or of this: "Strawberry stag, top off off-ear, J. C. over 4 off-rump, like H. G. conjoined near loin and rump?" This, again, is difficult: "Swallow tail, off-ear, [backwards-D]

and illegible over F off-ribs, PT off-rump." What is a "blue strawberry bull?" is a question which occurred to me. Again, what a phenomenon is this: "White cow, writing capital A off-shoulder?" A paragraph relates the burning of "10,000 worth of country near Gambier," and advertis.e.m.e.nts of Colt's revolvers and quack medicines complete the sheet. The paper shows that for the most part the colonists here, as in New Zealand, have had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native names of places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and ships. Of the Panama liners, the _Rahaia_ and _Maitoura_ bear the names of rivers, the _Rechine_ and the _Kaikoura_, names of mountain ranges; and the colonial boats have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian names; for instance, _Rangitoto_, "hill of hills," and _Rangitiri_, "great and good." The New Zealand colonists are better off than the Australian in this respect: Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo are not inviting; and some of the Australian villages have still stranger names.

Nindooinbah is a station in southern Queensland; Yallack-a-yallack, Borongorong, Bunduramongee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y-poora, Yanac-a-Yanac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolongu-woong-wrinan, Woori Yalloak, and Borhoneyghurk, are stations in Victoria. The only leader in the _Herald_ is on the meat question, but there is in a letter an account of the Christmas festivities at Melbourne, which contains much merry-making at the expense of "unacclimatized new chums," as fresh comers to the colonies are called. The writer speaks rapturously of the rush on Christmas-day from the hot, dry, dusty streets to the "golden fields of waving corn." The "exposed nature of the Royal Park" prevented many excursionists from picnicking there, as they had intended; but we read on, and find that the exposure dreaded was not to cold, but to the terrible hot wind which swept from the plains of the northwest, and scorched up every blade of gra.s.s, every green thing, in the open spots.

We hear of Christmas dinners eaten upon the gra.s.s at Richmond, in the sheltered shade of the gum-forest, but in the botanical gardens the "plants had been much affected by the trying heat." However, "the weather on boxing-day was somewhat more favorable for open-air enjoyment," as the thermometer was only 98 in the shade.

Will ever New Zealand or Australian bard spring up to write of the pale primroses that in September commence to peep out from under the melting snows, and to make men look forward to the blazing heat and the long December days? Strangely enough, the only English poem which an Australian lad can read without laughing at the old country conceit that connects frosts with January, and hot weather with July, is Thomson's "Seasons," for in its long descriptions of the changes in England from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, a month is only once named: "rosy-footed May" cannot be said to "steal blushing on" in Australia, where May answers to our November.

In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled into the gum-forest on the banks of the Campaspe River, not believing the reports of the ferocity of the Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black trees, relieved upon a ground of white dust and yellow gra.s.s, were not inviting, and the scorching heat soon taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the thermometer (in the wind) reached 116 in the shade, but there was nothing oppressive in the heat; it seemed only to dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you with intense brightness.

I soon came to agree with a newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a friend of mine that Australia was a strange country, for he could not see that the thermometer had "the slightest effect upon the heat." The blaze is healthy, and fevers are unknown in the Riverina, decay of noxious matter, animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by the drought. This is a hot year, for on the 12th of January the thermometer, even at the Melbourne Observatory, registered 108 in the shade, and 123 in the shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence of the Murray and the Darling.

As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at least the sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tuneful chiming, and the forest was vocal only with the ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note recalled the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian landscapes show best by the red light of the hot weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foliage of the gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the fiery fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resembling that which in winter is reflected from our English snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as I turned to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died again, while the trees sighed themselves uneasily to sleep, as though fearful of to-morrow's blast.

A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless dawn, and the scorching sun returned in all its redness to burn up once more the earth, not cooled from the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed by enormous gains before they will work with continuous toil in such a climate, however healthy.

CHAPTER IV.

SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY.

"What is a Colonial Conservative?" is a question that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was always, "A statesman who has got four of the 'points' of the People's Charter, and wants to conserve them," but as used in Victoria, the term "Conservative" expresses the feeling less of a political party than of the whole of the people who have anything whatever to lose. Those who have something object to giving a share in the government to those who have nothing; those who have much, object to political equality with those who have less; and, not content with having won a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon a 5000 qualification and 100 freehold or 300 leasehold franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks upon the Legislative a.s.sembly.

The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all monetary tests, though an intelligence basis for the franchise is by no means out of favor, except with the few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was driving from Melbourne to Sandridge, in company with a colonial merchant, he asked our car-driver: "Now, tell me fairly: do you think these rogues of fellows that hang about the sh.o.r.e here ought to have votes?" "No, I don't." "Ah, you'd like to see a 5_s._ fee on registration, wouldn't you?" The answer was sharp enough in its tone.

"Five shillings would be nothing to you; it would be something to me, and it would be more than my brother could pay. What I'd have done would be to say that those who couldn't read shouldn't vote, that's all. That would keep out the loafers."

The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground in Victoria; it is far more likely that the present generation will see the Upper House abolished than that it will witness the introduction of restrictions upon the manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower; but there is one branch of the plutocracy which actively carries on the fight in all the colonies, and which claims to control society, the pastoral tenants of crown lands, or Squatter Aristocracy.

The word "squatter" has undergone a remarkable change of meaning since the time when it denoted those who stole government land, and built their dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were defined by the chief justice of New South Wales as people occupying lands without legal t.i.tle, and who were subject to a fine on discovery. They were described as living by bartering rum with convicts for stolen goods, and as being themselves invariably convicts or "expirees."