CHAPTER XXXIA PARADISE OF FRUIT
Whoin England does not know the Tasmanian apple—rosy, juicy, and expensive—appearing about Easter, and continuing until the English orchards yield their own annual output? A foreign and delectable fruit is this apple, welcome enough in the off season “at home.”
I am writing in the very heart of Tasmania, in the midst of a wonderful valley, covered with huge crops of hops and apples. We have done two days of motoring, and in the aggregate have covered many thousands of acres, yet never have we lost the view of immense orchards and hop gardens. From a score of heights we have gazed upon plains and valleys unsurpassed for loveliness and fertility. We are in the true home of the apple.
The house in which we are now staying is a roomy, old-fashioned farm-house, built after the English pattern, with certain Tasmanian features added, the whole being surrounded by an old-world garden, such as is seen in small English country towns or large English villages. We are playing at an English holiday, and cheating ourselves with the sweet illusion that the railway yonder really goesto London. Everything here is so English that it would occasion no surprise to discover that this old-fashioned railway is the branch of an English trunk line to London.
To this place we came from Glenorchy, where Dr. Benjafield, the Medical Officer of Health, has one of the finest pear orchards in the southern hemisphere. Two better centres of the apple and pear industry than Glenorchy and Bushy Park it would be impossible to find. All that can be known about the cultivation of the apple and the pear we learn here, from the very beginning of the process when the bush is cleared and fruit saplings are planted until the moment of packing for the English market. Roaming over these enormous expanses of cultivated land, it appears almost incredible that this fertility is the work of a comparatively few years. In the Old Land orchards very frequently have a history. Here there has been no time for making history. A few years ago this country was covered with a stubborn scrub, surmounted with the giant eucalyptus. To-day it has been brought under the dominion of man, to whom it yields a marvellous profit. A system of almost perfect irrigation has converted land which aforetime was worth ten shillings an acre into fertile orchards which to-day could not be bought for two or three hundred times that amount.
No fewer than 200 varieties of apples are grown in Tasmania, including all the best English fruit, such as Ribstons, Cox’s Orange, and the like. As to pears, one grower alone cultivates seventy varieties,and he boasts, with pardonable pride, that his fruit has graced the table of King George. An afternoon spent on his estate was a perfect revelation of the possibilities of the soil. We stood in the centre of one of the largest orchards I have ever seen, and gazed along avenues of fruit trees extending half a mile in length. Pear and apple trees occupied the ground, the former predominating. The fruit was so plentiful that in scores of cases it completely hid the wood of the branches from view. Enormous branches, bending under their healthful weight, literally touched the ground, and here and there was the spectacle of branches broken in twain by reason of the excess of fruit they bore. Some of the pears weigh eighteen ounces when fully ripe, and Dr. Benjafield assured me that they fetched as much as a shilling each, wholesale, in Covent Garden Market. In this orchard, one of five owned by him, were no fewer than 5,000 pear trees. Had the camera been able faithfully to depict the fruit-laden trees, I would have sent some photographs home; but, unfortunately, the protruding fruit is not so distinct from the leaf in a photograph as to give the desired impression.
Orcharding means fortune for the majority of growers if they will attend to their business, cleaning their ground, pruning the trees, and spraying against the dreaded codling-moth. One grower openly admitted that, as a professional man, he had earned nearly £2,000 a year, but the fruit industry paid him better. Year by year the output increases. Oneestate of 290 acres that I visited is only five years old, and yet in that short time it has yielded 80,000 cases of apples, each case containing from forty to fifty pounds weight of fruit. The ambition of Tasmania is to become the chief fruit-producing area of the southern hemisphere. This year it is likely that a million cases will be shipped from Hobart to Great Britain, South America, and Europe.
These facts and figures show what a change is passing over an island which a century ago was the haunt of the most degraded aboriginal known. And how easily it might have been Dutch or French instead of British! Pride of the flag is most naturally engendered at the view of these wonderful conquests of Britain’s mind and toil.
Orcharding in Tasmania—and, for that matter, in Australia also—offers certain hints which the British “at home” would do well to heed. The Australian and the Tasmanian understand the art of making their fruit trees produce the maximum of yield with the minimum of labour and expenditure. It is true that the unparalleled climate has much to do with their success. But I was a little astonished to learn that poor soil—third-rate soil—produces the best results in apples. The secret lies, not in the richness of the soil, but in careful irrigation and in careful pruning. The trees are what in England would be called dwarfs. They rarely exceed eight or ten feet in height. They are thus dwarfed so as to dispense with the loss of time in the use of ladders. All the fruit can be picked by men standing on the earth or uponsmall boxes, or by boys who leap into the fork of the tree, and from that elevation gather the fruit. This method makes an astonishing difference to the time and expense of plucking.
Not only are the trees deliberately dwarfed, but they are so pruned that all the fruit is thrown into six or seven large branches, which are thick with apples, growing as low down as a foot from the ground. Thus, by the cutting away of all inner branches, light and air gain access to every part of the tree. It is a simple method of cultivation, but it is highly successful. In addition to this, the growers practise what is called “summer pruning.” Two or three weeks before the apples are gathered all superfluous small branches and leaves are removed, so that the sun can reach every apple on the tree. The appearance of apple trees developed on this system is rather curious at first, and it contrasts unfavourably with the large and bushy aspect of trees in an English orchard; but, judged by results, the Tasmanian and Australian system is far preferable to the English system.
As I write, the picking season is in full swing. We are following the entire process. Swarms of men and boys invade the orchards, filling their bags with the golden fruit. But oh! the holocaust! It is enough to make a man weep to see the thousands of “rejects.” The tiniest speck in an apple, a little sunburn, or the merest suspicion of the codling-moth is sufficient to cause the fruit to be flung upon the ground. Only sound fruit, absolutely perfect, isallowed to be packed. Lynx-eyed inspectors open each case of apples upon the wharf, and defect in a single apple means condemnation for the entire case. In the packing-sheds each apple is wrapped in a separate piece of paper before being committed to the case. Clever workers can earn as much as ten or eleven shillings a day by wrapping up the fruit. They are paid a penny a case of, say, one hundred and fifty or sixty apples. Think of the rapid manipulation of the fingers which, at this rate of work, can earn eleven shillings a day! It means the handling of twenty thousand separate pieces of fruit.
The healthfulness of the orchardist’s life is apparent to all. Dr. Benjafield, in presenting his annual report as Medical Officer of Glenorchy, declared that the health of the municipality, a district of one hundred square miles, had established for the year a world’s record—not a death from preventible infectious disease; one case only of true consumption; the death-rate nearly down to zero. Dr. Benjafield is a medico trained in London and Edinburgh, and he has been in Tasmania for thirty years. Besides being Medical Officer of Health, he is an orchardist on his own account, and he speaks of health in the orchard thus:
“I have seen for myself the great things which are included in life in a garden. I have seen many babies born in the district, but never a mother died. I have seen rollicking, toothless, fat babies munching away at red apples, or stuffing in raw strawberries,and their mothers just laughed at the horror on my face; and when the thermometer stands at 90 degrees or 100 degrees sunstroke never troubles them.”
The much-lauded “simple life” is the general life here—“early to bed and early to rise”—and then the whole day in the sunshine—pruning in winter, digging and ploughing in spring, weeding and spraying, in big apple and pear orchards, and picking small fruits in early summer, and later on the harder fruits as they come in, until the great autumn gatherings close the season.
There is no hustle here—a great thing that in the battle of life. Each worker has own row to hoe, and pretty well his own time that he takes to do it.
In the next chapter I shall say something of the orchards as a desirable investment for English workers.
Meanwhile, let us follow the fruit to the end. When all the sound fruit has been exported there remain millions of “rejects,” which are sent to the jam factory and there converted to profitable uses. At Hobart we inspected a large factory where every kind of jam is made and many kinds of fruit preserved. The process is wonderfully clean, most of the fruit being untouched by hand. A great deal of “pulp” is sent to England, to be there treated and converted into preserve, but the jam itself is not exported, because English people have a great prejudice against tinned preserves. This is a pity,and the prejudice is entirely without foundation since the introduction of enamelled tins. If this prejudice could only be overcome, Englishmen might taste a new sensation at present denied to most of them—peach jam. Australia and Tasmania can supply this delicacy, but not until the folk at home look with kindlier eyes upon the despised “tin.”