Greater Britain Part 28

The "Sewing Clubs" of the war-time are at the bottom of a good deal of the "woman movement" in America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of the Northern States formed themselves into a.s.sociations for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts to the army: the women of a district would meet together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat while they were sewing.

The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally inclined, through the operation of its old interest-begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed them in the "Timaeus," along with horses and draught cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he said that all the brutes derived their origin from man by a series of successive degradations, of which the first was from man to woman. There is, however, one strong reason why the English should, in America, have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, retaining them in Australia, where the conditions are not the same. Among farming peoples, whose women do not work regularly in the field, the woman to whom falls the household and superior work is better off than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation in which women were held by our former ancestry. In Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily retrograding upon this point.

It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of the English mind against the labor of what we call "inferior races" will be found to extend to half the superior race itself. How will English laborers receive the inevitable compet.i.tion of women in many of their fields?

Woman is at present starved, if she works at all, and does not rest content in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupations which society allows her. Where a man can see a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many women as there is room for invade each of this small number of employments. In the Australian labor-field the prospects of women are no better than they are in Europe, and during my residence in Melbourne the Council of the a.s.sociated Trades pa.s.sed a resolution to the effect that nothing could justify the employment of women in any kind of productive labor.

CHAPTER IX.

VICTORIAN PORTS.

All allowance being made for the great number of wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of traffic in the Melbourne streets.

Trade may be said to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while the tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Australian commerce, do not pa.s.s through Melbourne, but skirt it, and go by railway to Williamstown, Sandridge, and Geelong.

Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and become the first port of all Australia, I found gra.s.s-grown and half deserted, with but one vessel lying at her wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-cla.s.s ships was moored alongside the pier. When the gold-find at Ballarat took place, Geelong rose fast as the digging port, but her citizens chose to complete the railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Melbourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed to control the legislature, and grants were made for the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and brought the trade of Upper Queensland and New South Wales down to Melbourne, in the interest of the ports of Williamstown and Sandridge. Not content with ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set themselves to ridicule it. One of their stories goes that the Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of gra.s.s, that a free selector has applied to have them surveyed and sold to him, under the 42d clause of the New Land Act. Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died, and went to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his knock, asked, "Where from?" "Geelong." "Where?"

said Peter. "Geelong." "There's no such place," replied the Apostle. "In Victoria," cried the colonist. "Fetch Ham's Australian Atlas," called Peter; and when the map was brought and the spot shown to him, he replied, "Well, I beg your pardon, but I really never had any one here from that place before."

If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the same as rapid decline would be with us, the famed wheat country around it seems as inexhaustible as it ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving sheet, save where it is broken by the stunted claret-vineyards. Here and there I came upon a group of the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tending and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy cheeks, and shiny pigtails of their native Rudesheim all flourishing beneath the Southern Cross.

The colonial vines are excellent; better, indeed, than the growths of California, which, however, they resemble in general character. The wines are naturally all Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret, port, and sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better. The Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be bought in Europe at its price, but in some places this wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while the dealers foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of hermitage.

Of the wines of New South Wales, White Dallwood is a fair Sauterne, and White Cawarra a good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Cha.s.selas is singularly cheap; and the Tokay, the Shiraz, and the still Muscat are remarkable.

Northwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot-hills of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the headquarters of deep quartz mining, and now no longer a diggers' camp, but a graceful city, full of shady boulevards and n.o.ble buildings, and with a stationary population of thirty thousand. My first visit was made in the company of the prime ministers of all the colonies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a conference, but really to enjoy a holiday and the International Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the spending of other people's money which distinguishes colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our disposal, the result of which was that, feted everywhere, we saw nothing, and I had to return to Ballarat in order even to go through the mines.

In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the mining district on each side of Ballarat, I found myself able to discover the date of settlement by the names of places, as one finds the age of a London suburb by the t.i.tles of its terraces. The dates run in a wave across the country. St.

Arnaud is a town between Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also are Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears the name of the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the end of the war, lie to the northward, in the Wimmera.

Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the coast, but free from the sudden changes of temperature that occur in Melbourne twice or thrice a week throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children and to persons of weak health. After two or three days of the hot wind, then comes a night, breathless, heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises, once more fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have seen the shade thermometer in the cool verandas of the Melbourne Club standing at 95 before ten o'clock, when suddenly the sun and sky would change from red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze, dancing up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and across the Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature in an hour to 60 or 65. After a few days of cold and rain, a quiet English morning would be cut in half about eleven by a sudden slamming of doors and whirling of dust from the north across the town, while darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the cry of "Shut the windows; here's a hot wind," and down would go every window, barred and bolted, while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and private houses will keep out the heat for about three days, but if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts longer, then the walls are heated through, and the nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers know nothing of these changes. The regular irregularity is peculiar to the Melbourne summer.

CHAPTER X.

TASMANIA.

After the parching heat of Australia, a visit to Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward, and enjoy the charming views of wood and river, instead of having to stand with downcast head, as in the blaze of the Victorian sun.

The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its scenery like that of the non-Alpine districts of the west coast of New Zealand, but softer and more habitable than is that of even the least rude portions of these islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian plains, there is likeness between any green and humid land and the last unparched country that he may have seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks nor homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley. Somersetshire cannot surpa.s.s the orchards of Tasmania, nor Devon match its flowers.

The natural resemblance of _Maria_ Van Dieman's Land (as Tasman called it after his betrothed) to England seems to have struck the early settlers. In sailing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County of Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after those at home, according to their situations, from its Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Alban's Head, round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon, with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay.

Hurrying through Launceston--a pretty little town, of which the banks and post-office are models of simple architecture--I pa.s.sed at once across the island southward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmanian Mountains--detached and rugged ma.s.ses of basaltic rock, from four to five thousand feet in height--are wanting in grandeur when seen from a distance, with a foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening, too, in an English colony, to see half the houses shut up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these older portions of the island have worked their lands to death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them into a momentary life. Since leaving Virginia, I had seen no such melancholy sight.

Nature is bountiful enough: in the world there is not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree-ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the same time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tasmania may be said to present on a small area an epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the n.o.blest harbor in the world, all are contained in a country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the South.

Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wellington,--the spurs in the foreground clothed with a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant; the city nestled under the basaltic columns of the crags,--even here it is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and D'Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the world.

The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still more frightful ma.s.sacres of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman's Land has never been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in changing its t.i.tle, seems not to have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the English village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before the recollection of the circ.u.mstances under which the harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Ba.s.s's Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.

We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Battues of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the Queensland settlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out to murder natives unprovoked; they have that provocation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to wait, which the Brazilians wait for now--the provocation of robberies committed in the neighborhood by natives unknown. It is not that there is no offense to punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who know no better. Where one wretched untaught native pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the settlers, "as an example," and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other devils'

missionaries have done their work.

Nothing will persuade the rougher cla.s.s of Queensland settlers that the "black-fellow" and his "jin" are human. They tell you freely that they look upon the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treatment of the "jins," or native women, while the "wrens" of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No great distance appears to separate us from the days when the Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the face and arms all the natives they could catch, and gamble them away for wine.

Though not more than three or four million acres out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania have as yet been alienated by the crown, the population has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years. Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum of trade in 1853.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION.--P. 86.]

The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but winterless, are content to dream away their lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but less equable clime--Queensland, for example--are energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural cause of decline, Van Dieman's Land is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the island. The old free settlers will tell you that the deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van Dieman's Land.

Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the sh.o.r.es of which are not to be forgotten in a decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions punished. A day seldom pa.s.sed without five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a s.p.a.ce of five years, during which the prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes administered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or without cannibalism, two were captured with portions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and cannibalism, and seven are reported to have made good their escape, though this is by no means certain.

It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death, they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly thanked G.o.d that they were to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were known to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death to Macquarie Harbor.

The escapes were often made with the deliberate expectation of death, the men perfectly knowing that they would have to draw lots for which should be killed and eaten. Nothing has ever been sworn to in the history of the world which, for revolting atrocity, can compare with the conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill party during their attempted escape. The testimony of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation to which man can descend. The most fearful thought, when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that probably many of those subjected to them were originally guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent man, four human beings were consigned each year to h.e.l.l on earth. We think, too, that the age of transportation for mere political offenses has long gone by, yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost received his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid the horrors of Port Arthur.

Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the convict population in any great degree, for the free colonies have always kept a jealous watch upon her emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to Victoria, almost every "Tasmanian bolter" and many a suspected but innocent man was seized upon his landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil within its twenty-foot walls till death should come to his relief. Even now, men of wealth and station in Victoria are sometimes discovered to have been "bolters" in the digging times, and are at the mercy of their neighbors and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled into granting pardons for their former deeds. A wealthy Victorian was arrested as a "Tasmanian bolter" while I was in the colony.

The pa.s.sport system is still in force in the free colonies with regard to pa.s.sengers arriving from penal settlements, and there is a penalty of 100 inflicted upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Melbourne.

The conditional pardons granted to prisoners in West Australia and in Tasmania generally contain words permitting the convict to visit any portion of the world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive even our pardoned convicts.

It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies have taken in this matter, for to them the transportation system appears in the light of moral vitriol-throwing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn between the action of the New South Welsh and that of the New Yorkers, when they declared to a British government of the last century, that nothing should induce them to accept the labor of "white English slaves:" the Sydney people have enjoyed the advantages of the system they now blame. Even the Victorians and South Australians, who have never had convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The Australian colonies, it might be urged, were planted for the sole purpose of affording a suitable soil for the reception of British criminals: in face of this fact, the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in the spots which their government had chosen as its giant prisons have little right to pretend to rouse themselves on a sudden, and cry out that England is pouring the sc.u.m of her soil on to a free land, and that they must rise and defend themselves against the grievous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly the good and evil, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Victorians have much reason to object to a system which sends to another country a man who is too bad for his own, just as Jersey rogues are transported to Southampton. The Victorian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly of the colonial expirees, and shipping them to England in exchange for the convicts that we might send to Australia, was but a plagiarism on the conduct of the Virginians in a similar case, who quietly began to freight a ship with snakes.

The only cure for Tasmania, unless one is to be found in the mere lapse of years, lies in annexation to Victoria; a measure strongly wished for by a considerable party in each of the colonies concerned. No two countries in the world are more manifestly destined by nature to be complementary to each other.

Owing to the small size of the country, and the great moral influence of the landed gentry, Tasmanian politics are singularly peaceful. For the Lower House elections the suffrage rests upon a household, not a manhood basis, as in Victoria and New South Wales; and for the Upper House it is placed at 500 in any property, or 50 a year in freehold land.

Tasmanian society is cast in a more aristocratic shape than is that of Queensland, with this exception the most oligarchical of all our colonies; but even here, as in the other colonies and the United States, the ballot is supported by the Conservatives. Unlike what generally happens in America, the vote in the great majority of cases is here kept secret, bribery is unknown, and, the public "nomination" of candidates having been abolished, elections pa.s.s off in perfect quiet.

In the course of a dozen conversations in Tasmania, I met with one man who attacked the ballot. He was the first person, aristocrat or democrat, conservative or liberal, male or female, silly or wise, by whom I had found the ballot opposed since I left home.

The method in which the ballot is conducted is simple enough. The returning officer sits in an outer room, beyond which is an inner chamber with only one door, but with a desk. The voter gives his name to the returning officer, and receives a white ticket bearing his number on the register. On the ticket the names of the candidates are printed alphabetically, and the voter, taking the paper into the other room, makes a cross opposite to the name of each candidate for whom he votes, and then brings the paper folded to the returning officer, who puts it in the box. In New South Wales and Victoria, he runs his pen through all the names excepting those for which he wishes to vote, and himself deposits the ticket in the box, the returning officer watching him, to see that he does not carry out his ticket to show it to his bribers, and then send it in again by a man on his own side. One scrutineer for each candidate watches the opening of the box. In New South Wales, the voting papers, after having been sealed up, are kept for five years, in order to allow of the verification of the number of votes said to have been cast; but in Tasmania they are destroyed immediately after the declaration of the poll.

Escaping from the capital and its Lilliputian politics, I sailed up the Derwent to New Norfolk. The river reminds the traveler sometimes of the Meuse, but oftener of the Dart, and unites the beauties of both streams. The scenery is exquisitely set in a framework of hops; for not only are all the flats covered with luxuriant bines, but the hills between which you survey the views have also each its "garden," the bines being trained upon a wire trellis.

A lovely ride was that from New Norfolk to the Panshanger salmon-ponds, where the acclimatization of the English fish has lately been attempted.

The track, now cut along the river cliff, now lost in the mimosa scrub, offers a succession of prospects, each more lovely than the one before it; and that from the ponds themselves is a repet.i.tion of the view along the vale of the Towy, from Steele's house near Caermarthen. Trout of a foot long, and salmon of an inch, rewarded us (in the spirit) for our ride, but we were called on to express our belief in the statement, that salmon "returned from the sea" have lately been seen in the river.

Father ----, the Catholic parish priest, "that saw 'em," is the hero of the day, and his past experiences upon the Shannon are quoted as testimonies to his infallibility in fish questions. My hosts of New Norfolk had their fears lest the reverend gentleman should be lynched, if it were finally proved that he had been mistaken.

The salmon madness will at least have two results: the catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a blank sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down and nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the British wasp will be acclimatized in the southern hemisphere. One is known to have arrived in the last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent cheerfulness his one hundred days in ice. Happy fellow, to cross the line in so cool a fashion!

The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and excursions are the snakes, which are as numerous throughout the island as they are round Sydney.

One of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: "Parrots is as thick as crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen to sixteen feet long;" but in sober truth the snakes are chiefly small.

The wonderful "snake stories" that in the colonial papers take the place of the English "triple birth" and "gigantic gooseberry" are all written in vacation time by the students at Melbourne University, but a true one that I heard in Hobarton is too good to be lost. The chief justice of the island, who, in his leisure time, is an amateur naturalist, and collects specimens for European collections in his walks, told me that it was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it into Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an hour before he had hung his stick with a rare snake in readiness for the government naturalist, he found to his horror that the viper had been only scotched, and that he had made use of his regained life to free himself from the string which confined his head and neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swinging to and fro, or "squirming around," as some Americans would say, with open mouth and protruded tongue. When la.s.soing with a piece of twine had been tried in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and succeeded in killing the snake and much damaging the stone-work of his vestibule.