“As the Pakéha fly has driven out the Maori fly;As the Pakéha grass has killed the Maori grass;As the Pakéha rat has slain the Maori rat;As the Pakéha clover has starved the Maori fern,So will the Pakéha destroy the Maori.”
“As the Pakéha fly has driven out the Maori fly;As the Pakéha grass has killed the Maori grass;As the Pakéha rat has slain the Maori rat;As the Pakéha clover has starved the Maori fern,So will the Pakéha destroy the Maori.”
THESEare the mournful words of a well-known Maori song.
That the English daisy, the white clover, the common thistle, the chamomile, the oat, should make their way rapidly in New Zealand, and put down the native plants, is in no way strange. If the Maori grasses that have till lately held undisturbed possession of the New Zealand soil, require for their nourishment the substances A, B, and C, while the English clover needs A, B, and D; from the nature of things A and B will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in largerquantities, not easily losing vigor and nourishing force, and recruiting their energies from the decay of the very plant that feeds on them; but C and D will be the more ethereal, the more easily destroyed or wasted substances. The Maori grass, having sucked nearly the whole of C from the soil, is in a weakly state, when in comes the English plant, and, finding an abundant store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and crushes down the Maori.
The positions of flies and grasses, of plants and insects, are, however, not the same. Adapted by nature to the infinite variety of soils and climates, there are an infinite number of different plants and animals; but whereas the plant depends upon both soil and climate, the animal depends chiefly upon climate, and little upon soil—except so far as his home or his food themselves depend on soil. Now, while soil wears out, climate does not. The climate in the long run remains the same, but certain apparently trifling constituents of the soil will wholly disappear. The result of this is, that while pigs may continue to thrive in New Zealand forever and a day, Dutch clover (without manure) will only last a given and calculable time.
The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori and the English fly live on the same food, and require about the same amount of warmth and moisture: the one which is best fitted to the common conditions will gain the day, and drive out the other. The English fly has had to contend not only against other English flies, but against every fly of temperate climates: we having traded with every land, and brought the flies of every clime to England. The English fly is the best possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally beat down and exterminate, or else starve out, the merely provincial Maori fly. If a great singer—to findwhom for the London stage the world has been ransacked—should be led by the foible of the moment to sing for gain in an unknown village, where on the same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his best, the London tenor would send the provincial supperless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly.
Natural selection is being conducted by nature in New Zealand on a grander scale than any we have contemplated, for the object of it here is man. In America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons his red or black fellow, and exterminates him through the workings of superior knowledge; but in New Zealand it is peacefully, and without extraordinary advantages, that the Pakéha beats his Maori brother.
That which is true of our animal and vegetable productions is true also of our man. The English fly, grass, and man, they and their progenitors before them, have had to fight for life against their fellows. The Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts to which he trades all manner of men, of grass seeds, and of insect germs, has filled his land with every kind of living thing to which his soil or climate will afford support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and fortifies the race by continual buffetings. The plants of civilized man are generally those which will grow best in the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in any case, the English fauna and flora are peculiarly fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same, and our men, flies, and plants—the “pick” of the whole world—have not even to encounter the difficulties of acclimatization in their struggle against the weaker growths indigenous to the soil.
Nature‘s work in New Zealand is not the same as that which she is quickly doing in North America, in Tasmania, in Queensland. It is not merely that a hunting and fighting people is being replaced by an agricultural and pastoral people, and must farm or die: the Maori does farm; Maori chiefs own villages, build houses, which they let to European settlers; we have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners, Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders, Maori sailors, and even Maori traders. There is nothing which the average Englishman can do which the average Maori cannot be taught to do as cheaply and as well. Nevertheless, the race dies out. The Red Indian dies because he cannot farm; the Maori farms, and dies.
There are certain special features about this advance of the birds, beasts, and men of Western civilization. When the first white man landed in New Zealand, all the native quadrupeds save one, and nearly all the birds and river-fishes, were extinct, though we have their bones, and traditions of their existence. The Maories themselves were dying out. The moa and dinoris were both gone; there were few insects, and no reptiles. “The birds die because the Maories, their companions, die,” is the native saying. Yet the climate is singularly good, and food for beast and bird so plentiful that Captain Cook‘s pigs have planted colonies of “wild boars” in every part of the islands, and English pheasants have no sooner been imported than they have commenced to swarm in every jungle. Even the Pakéha flea has come over in the ships, and wonderfully has he thriven.
The terrible want of food for men that formerly characterized New Zealand has had its effects upon the habits of the Maori race. Australia has no nativefruit trees worthy cultivation, although in the whole world there is no such climate and soil for fruits; still, Australia has kangaroos and other quadrupeds. The Ladrones were destitute of quadrupeds, and of birds, except the turtle-dove; but in the warm damp climate fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense population. In New Zealand the windy cold of the winters causes a need for something of a tougher fiber than the banana or the fern-root. There being no native beasts, the want was supplied by human flesh, and war, furnishing at once food and the excitement which the chase supplies to peoples that have animals to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories. Hence in some degree the depopulation of the land; but other causes exist, by the side of which cannibalism is as nothing.
The British government has been less guilty than is commonly believed as regards the destruction of the Maories. Since the original misdeed of the annexation of the isles, we have done the Maories no serious wrong. We recognized the claim of a handful of natives to the soil of a country as large as Great Britain, of not one-hundredth part of which had they ever made the smallest use; and, disregarding the fact that our occupation of the coast was the very event that gave the land its value, we have insisted on buying every acre from the tribe. Allowing title by conquest to the Ngatiraukawa, as I saw at Parewanui Pah, we refuse to claim even the lands we conquered from the “Kingites.”
The Maories have always been a village people, tilling a little land round their pahs, but incapable of making any use of the great pastures and wheat countries which they “own.” Had we at first constituted native reserves, on the American system, we might,without any fighting, and without any more rapid destruction of the natives than that which is taking place, have gradually cleared and brought into the market nearly the whole country, which now has to be purchased at enormous prices, and at the continual risk of war.
As it is, the record of our dealings with the Queen‘s native subjects in New Zealand has been almost free from stain, but if we have not committed crimes, we have certainly not failed to blunder: our treatment of William Thompson was at the best a grave mistake. If ever there lived a patriot he was one, and through him we might have ruled in peace the Maori race. Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a people which in India showers honors upon its puppet kings and rajahs, he underwent fresh insults each time that he entered an English town or met a white magistrate or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the colonies—according to Pakéha physicians, of liver complaint; according to the Maories, of a broken heart.
At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half-breeds are fine fellows, possessed of much of the nobility of both the ancestral races, while the women are famed for grace and loveliness. In miscegenation it would have seemed that there was a chance for the Maori, who, if destined to die, would at least have left many of his best features of body and mind to live in the mixed race, but here comes in the prejudice of blood, with which we have already met in the case of the negroes and Chinese. Morality has so far gained ground as greatly to check the spread of permanent illegitimate connections with native women, while pride prevents intermarriage. The numbers of the half-breeds are not upon the increase: a few fresh marriages supply the vacancies that come of death, butthere is no progress, no sign of the creation of a vigorous mixed race. There is something more in this than foolish pride, however; there is a secret at the bottom at once of the cessation of mixed marriages and of the dwindling of the pure Maori race, and it is the utter viciousness of the native girls. The universal unchastity of the unmarried women, “Christian” as well as heathen, would be sufficient to destroy a race of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the Tahitians, and is written in the decorations of every gate-post or rafter in their pahs.
We are more distressed at the present and future of the Maories than they are themselves. For all our greatness, we pity not the Maories more profoundly than they do us when, ascribing our morality to calculation, they bask in the sunlight, and are happy in their gracelessness. After all, virtue and arithmetic come from one Greek root.
CLOSELYresembling Great Britain in situation, size, and climate, New Zealand is often styled by the colonists “The Britain of the South,” and many affect to believe that her future is destined to be as brilliant as has been the past of her mother country. With the exaggeration of phrase to which the English New Zealanders are prone, they prophesy a marvelous hereafter for the whole Pacific, in which New Zealand, asthe carrying and manufacturing country, is to play the foremost part, the Australias following obediently in her train.
Even if the differences of Separatists, Provincialists, and Centralists should be healed, the future prosperity of New Zealand is by no means secure. Her gold yield is only about a fifth of that of California or Victoria. Her area is not sufficient to make her powerful as an agricultural or pastoral country, unless she comes to attract manufactures and carrying trade from afar, and the prospect of New Zealand succeeding in this effort is but small. Her rivers are almost useless for manufacturing purposes owing to their floods; the timber supply of all her forests is not equal to that of a single county in the State of Oregon; her coal is inferior in quality to that of Vancouver Island, in quantity to that of Chili, in both respects to that of New South Wales. The harbors of New Zealand are upon the eastern coasts, but the coal is chiefly upon the other side, where the river bars make trade impossible.
The coal that has been found at the Bay of Islands is said to be plentiful and of good quality, and may be made largely available for steamers on the coast; the steel sand of Taranaki, smelted by the use of petroleum, also found within the province, may become of value; her own wool, too, New Zealand will doubtless one day manufacture into cloth and blankets; but these are comparatively trifling matters: New Zealand may become rich and populous without being the great power of the Pacific, or even of the South.
The climate of the North Island is winterless, moist, and warm, and its effects are already seen in a certain want of enterprise shown by the government and settlers. I remarked that the mail steamers which leaveWellington almost everyday are invariably “detained for dispatches:” it looks as though the officers of the colonial or imperial government commence to write their letters only when the hour for the sailing of the ship has come. An Englishman visiting New Zealand was asked in my presence how long his business at Wanganui would keep him in the town. His answer was: “In London it would take me half an hour; so I suppose about a week—about a week!”
In Java, and the other islands of the Indian archipelago, we find examples of the effect of the supineness of dwellers in the tropics upon the economic position of their countries. Many of the Indian isles possess both coal and cheap labor, but have failed to become manufacturing communities on a large scale only because the natives have not the energy requisite for the direction of factories and workshops, while European foremen have to be paid enormous wages, and, losing their spirit in the damp, unchanging climate of the islands, soon become more indolent than the natives.
The position of the various stores of coal in the Pacific is of extreme importance as an index to the future distribution of power in that portion of the world; but it is not enough to know where coal is to be found without looking also to the quantity, quality, cheapness of labor, and facility for transport. In China (in the Si Shan district) and in Borneo, there are extensive coal fields, but they lie “the wrong way” for trade. On the other hand, the Californian coal—at Monte Diablo, San Diego, and Monterey—lies well, but is bad in quality. The Talcahuano bed in Chili is not good enough for ocean steamers, but might be made use of for manufactures, although Chili has but little iron. Tasmania has good coal, but in no greatquantity, and the beds nearest to the coast are formed of inferior anthracite. The three countries of the Pacific which must, for a time at least, rise to manufacturing greatness, are Japan, Vancouver Island, and New South Wales, but which of these will become wealthiest and most powerful depends mainly on the amount of coal which they respectively possess so situated as to be cheaply raised. The dearness of labor under which Vancouver suffers will be removed by the opening of the Pacific Railroad, but for the present New South Wales has the cheaper labor; and upon her shores at Newcastle are abundant stores of a coal of good quality for manufacturing purposes, although for sea use it burns “dirtily,” and too fast, the colony possesses also ample beds of iron, copper, and lead. Japan, as far as can be at present seen, stands before Vancouver and New South Wales in almost every point: she has cheap labor, good climate, excellent harbors, and abundant coal; cotton can be grown upon her soil, and this, and that of Queensland, she can manufacture and export to America and to the East. Wool from California and from the Australias might be carried to her to be worked, and her rise to commercial greatness has already commenced with the passage of a law allowing Japanese workmen to take service with European capitalists in the “treaty-ports.” Whether Japan or New South Wales is destined to become the great wool-manufacturing country, it is certain that fleeces will not long continue to be sent half round the world—from Australia to England—to be worked, and then round the other half back from England to Australia, to be sold as blankets.
The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably brilliant; but it is not New Zealand, the center of the water hemisphere, which will occupy the position thatEngland has taken in the Atlantic, but some country such as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out into the ocean from Asia or from America, as England juts out from Europe. If New South Wales usurps the position, it will be not from her geographical situation, but from the manufacturing advantages she gains by the possession of vast mineral wealth.
The political power of America in the Pacific appears predominant: the Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan all but ruled by her, while the occupation of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already planned. The relations of America and Australia will be the key to the future of the South.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On the 26th of December I left New Zealand for Australia.
FORthose who would make trial of Maori dishes, here is a native bill-of-fare, such as can be imitated in the South of England:
END OF VOL. I.
A RECORD OF TRAVELINENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIESDURING 1866-7.BYCHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.VOL. II.W I T H M A P S A N D I L L U S T R A T I O N S.
PHILADELPHIA:J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.1869.
G R E A T E R B R I T A I N.
ATearly light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer, theKaikoura, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far inland upon the gale. We had placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he could steer, but, as we reached the steamer‘s side, instead of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently before the wind, although our treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours the wind moderated, and I reached theKaikourajust before she sailed. While we were steaming out of the harborthrough the boil of waters that marks the position of the submarine crater, I found that there was but one other passenger for Australia to share with me the services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons. “Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Australasian colony to another,” I felt inclined to say, but during the voyage and my first week in New South Wales I began to discover that in England we are given over to a singular delusion as to the connection of New Zealand and Australia.
Australasia is a term much used at home to express the whole of our Antipodean possessions; in the colonies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in the way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a congratulatory paragraph on the amount of the New Zealand debt; the only allusion to Australia that I ever detected in the WellingtonIndependentwas in a glance at the future of the colony, in which the editor predicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would be a great naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or levying a contribution upon Sydney.
New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country; New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic. Had Australia and New Zealand been close together, instead of as far apart as Africa and South America, there could have been no political connection between them so long as the traditions of their first settlement endured.
Not only is the name “Australasia” politically meaningless,but geographically incorrect, for New Zealand and Australia are as completely separated from each other as Great Britain and Massachusetts. No promontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of any New Zealand cape; the distance between Sydney and Wellington is 1400 miles; from Sydney to Auckland about the same. The distance from the nearest point of New Zealand of Tasman‘s peninsula, which itself projects somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than that of London from Algiers: from Wellington to Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from Manchester to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil.
The sea that lies between the two great countries of the south is not, like the Central or North Pacific, a sea bridged with islands, ruffled with trade winds, favorable to sailing ships, or overspread with a calm that permits the presence of light-draught paddle steamers. The seas which separate Australia from New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without islands, torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and traversed in all weathers by a mountainous swell. After the gale of Christmas-day we were blessed with a continuance of light breezes on our way to Sydney, but never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that seemed to surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw was as often out of as in the water; and in a fast new ship we could scarcely average nine knots an hour throughout the day. The ship which had brought the last Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed was struck by a sea which swept her from stem to stern, and filled her cabin two feet deep, and this in December, which here is midsummer, and answers to our July. Not only is the intervening ocean wide and cold, but New Zealand presents to Australia a rugged coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by asnowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and America all her ports and bays.
No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct as Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian continent by negroes. New Zealand is ethnologically nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zealand to Australia.
If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, the countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is one of the groups of volcanic islands that stud the Pacific throughout its whole extent; tremendous cliffs surround it on almost every side; a great mountain chain runs through both islands from north to south; hot springs abound, often close to glaciers and eternal snows; earthquakes are common, and active volcanoes not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and windy; the land is covered in most parts with a tangled jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants; water never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the summer heat is never great; the islands are always green. Australia has for the most part flat, yellow, sun-burnt shores; the soil may be rich, the country good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is an arid plain; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather the thermometer rises higher in the interior than it does in India, and dust storms and hot winds sweep the land from end to end. It is impossible to conceive countries more unlike each other than are our two great dominions of the south. Their very fossils are as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna of our time.
At the dawn of the first day of the new year, we sighted the rocks where theDuncan Dunbarwas lost with all hands, and a few minutes afterward were boarded by the crew engaged by the SydneyMorningHerald, who had been lying at “The Heads” all night, to intercept and telegraph our news into the city. The pilot and regular news-boat hailed us a little later, when we had fired a gun. The contrast between this Australian energy and the supineness of the New Zealanders was striking, but not more so than that between my first view of Australia and my last view of New Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy peak of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Iva, while we ran before a strong breeze, in the bright English sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon; the albatrosses screaming around our stern: to-day, as we steamed up Port Jackson, toward Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night of oven-like heat, the sun rose flaming red in a lurid sky, and struck down upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless foliage of the Australian bush; while, as we anchored, the ceaseless chirping of the crickets in the grass and trees struck harshly on the ear.
The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is not without a singular beauty if seen at the best time. By the “hot-wind sunrise,” as I first saw it, the heat and glare destroy the feeling of repose which the endless succession of deep, sheltered coves would otherwise convey; but seen from shore in the afternoon, when the sea-breeze has sprung up, turning the sky from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land that leads out to the Government House, you catch a glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side, rippled with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with white sails; the brightness of the colors that the sea-breeze brings almost atones for the wind‘s unhealthiness.
In the upper portion of the town the scene is less picturesque; the houses are of the commonplace Englishugliness, worst of all possible forms of architectural imbecility, and built, too, as though for English fogs, instead of semi-tropical heat and sun. Water is not to be had, and the streets are given up to clouds of dust, while not a single shade-tree breaks the rays of the almost vertical sun.
The afternoon of New Year‘s day I spent at the “Midsummer Meeting” of the Sydney Jockey Club, on the race-course near the city, and found a vast crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red earth that did duty for “turf,” although there was a hot wind blowing, and the thermometer stood at 103° in the shade. For my conveyance to the race-course I trusted to one of the Australian hansom cabs, made with open fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as to allow a free draught of air.
The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be distinguished from Englishwomen in dress or countenance, but the crowd presented several curious types. The fitness of the term “cornstalks,” applied to the Australian-born boys, was made evident by a glance at their height and slender build; they have plenty of activity and health, but are wanting in power and weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate, without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand, eating much meat, spending their days in the open air, constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping fellows, physically the perfection of the English race, but wanting in refinement and grace of mind, and this apparently constitutionally, not through the accident of occupation or position. In Australia there is promise of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New Zealanders, are as little given to book-learning, butthere is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quickness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Australians boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and every young face in the Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not more like that of the Peloponnesus than they are like the old Athenians. The eager burning democracy that is springing up in the Australian great towns is as widely different from the republicanism of the older States of the American Union as it is from the good-natured conservatism of New Zealand, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment would of itself suffice to distinguish the Australians from both Americans and British. Large as must be the amount of convict blood in New South Wales, there was no trace of it in the faces of the persons present upon the race-course. The inhabitants of colonies which have never received felon immigrants often cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the prejudice is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants, nor by the records of local crime. The black stain has not yet wholly disappeared: the streets of Sydney are still a greater disgrace to civilization than are even those of London; but, putting the lighter immoralities aside, security for life and property is not more perfect in England than in New South Wales. The last of the bushrangers were taken while I was in Sydney.
The race-day was followed by a succession of hot winds, during which only the excellence of the fruit-market made Sydney endurable. Not only are the English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas, oranges, loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Brisbane, figs of every kind, and the delicious passion-fruit; and if the gum-tree forests yield no shady spots for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta.
A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom known was brought to a close by one of the heaviest southerly storms on record. During the stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the approach of a gale from the far south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here and there men‘s feet left footprints on the stairs.
Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are known as “southerly bursters;” but the earlier settlers called them “brickfielders,” in the belief that the dust they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brickfields to the south of Sydney. The fact is that the sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles, from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; for the Australian “burster” is one with the Punjaub dust-storm, and the dirt-storm of Colorado.
NEWSouth Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.
The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of “shoddy;” but of Queensland—an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves possess—the Sydney folks are not without reason envious.
A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony—a wheat-growing country—is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling every year.
The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats—a policy which, however beneficial to Australia it may in the long runprove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers—at all events, of skilled artisans—are still excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.
To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in England of dissuading letters.
As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation.
[larger view][largest view]
In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, “squatters,” as they are called, sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South Wales power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign;but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the “up-country desert” or “unwatered tracts” can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural settlers.
The struggle between the great crown tenants and the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine.
The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the settlement of a tropical country by Englishmen, and of its cultivation by English hands. The future, not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of every tropical country, of our race, of free government itself, are all at stake; but the success of the experiment that has been tried between Brisbane and Rockampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has prospered much, quadrupling its population and trebling its exports and revenue in six years, but it is the Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep countries, or, on the other hand, the Northern gold fields, which are the main cause of the prosperity; and in the sugar and cotton culture of the coast, colored labor is nowalmost exclusively employed, with the usual effect of degrading field-work in the eyes of European settlers, and of forcing upon the country a form of society of the aristocratic type.
It is possible that just as New England has of late forbidden to Louisiana the importation of Chinamen to work her sugar fields, just as the Kansas radicals have declared that they will not recognize the Bombay Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have refused to allow the further reception of convicts by West Australia, separated from their territories by 1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh and Victorians combined may at least protest against the introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, Chinamen, South Sea Islanders, and Malays, to cultivate the Queensland coast plantations. If, however, the other colonies permit their Northern sister to continue in her course of importing dark-skinned laborers, to form a peon population, a few years will see her a wealthy cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the vices of a slaveholding government, though without the name of slavery. The planters of the coast and villages, united with the squatters of the table-lands or “Downs,” will govern Queensland, and render union with the free colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take place, and save the country to Australia.
Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere shows itself in the acts of English settlers, there might be a bright side to the political future of Queensland colony. The colored laborers at present introduced, industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hindostan, laborious, sober, and free from superstition, should not only be able to advance the commercial fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the Mauritius, but eventually to take an equal share in freegovernment with their white employers. To avoid the gigantic evil of the degradation of hand labor, which has ruined morally as well as economically the Southern States of the American republic, the Indian, Malay, and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become members of landholding associations. A large spice and sugar-growing population in Northern Queensland would require a vast agricultural population in the south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals, might grow up as sister countries, each depending upon the other for the supply of half its needs. It is, however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned field-hands provide only for the payment of wagesin goods, at the rates of 6s.to 10s.a month. The “goods” consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging from the experience of California and Ceylon, there can be little hope of the general admission of colored men to equal rights by English settlers, and the Pacific islands offer so tempting a field to the kidnapping commanders of colonial “island schooners,” that there is much fear that Queensland may come to show us not merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds, in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to death than to “breed” him.
Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise to power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent poverty of New South Wales, that were the question merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the subtropical settlers would be as certain of the foremost position in any future confederation as they were in America when the struggle lay only between the Carolinas and New England. As it is, just as America was first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Australiawill be saved by the coal of New South Wales. Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of the future is on the side of the free settlers of the cooler climate, at Newcastle, in New South Wales.
On my return from a short voyage to the north, I visited the coal field of New South Wales at Newcastle, on the Hunter. The beds are of vast extent, they lie upon the banks of a navigable river, and so near to the surface that the best qualities are raised, in a country of dear labor, at 8s.or 9s.the ton, and delivered on board ship for 12s.For manufacturing purposes the coal is perfect; for steamship use it is, though somewhat “dirty,” a serviceable fuel; and copper and iron are found in close proximity to the beds. The Newcastle and Port Jackson fields open a singularly brilliant future to Sydney in these times, when coal is king in a far higher degree than was ever cotton. To her black beds the colony will owe not only manufactures, bringing wealth and population, but that leisure which is begotten of wealth—leisure that brings culture, and love of harmony and truth.
Manufactories are already springing up in the neighborhood of Sydney, adding to the whirl and the bustle of the town, and adding, too, to its enormous population, already disproportionate to that of the colony in which it stands. As the depot for much of the trade of Queensland and New Zealand, and as the metropolis of pleasure to which the wealthy squatters pour from all parts of Australia, to spend, rapidly enough, their hard-won money, Sydney would in any case have been a populous city; but the barrenness of the country in which it stands has, until the recent opening of the railroads, tended still further to increase its size, by failing to tempt into country districts the Europeanimmigrants. The Irish in Sydney form a third of the whole population, yet hardly one of these men but meant to settle upon land when he left his native island.
In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris, in Austria a continual drain toward Vienna, in England toward London. A corresponding tendency is observable throughout Australia and America. Immigrants hang about New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Sydney, Melbourne; and, finding that they can scrape a living in these large cities with toil somewhat less severe than that which would be needed to procure them a decent livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty as well as the dissipated throng together in densely-populated “bad quarters” in these cities, and render the first quarter of New York and the so-called “Chinese” quarter of Melbourne a danger to the colonies, and an insult to the civilization of the world.
In the case of Australia this concentration of population is becoming more remarkable day by day. Even under the system of free selection, by which the legislature has attempted to encourage agricultural settlement, the moment a free selector can make a little money he comes to one of the capitals to spend it. Sydney is the city of pleasure, to which the wealthy Queensland squatters resort to spend their money, returning to the north for fresh supplies only when they cannot afford another day of dissipation, while Melbourne receives the outpour of Tasmania.
The rushing to great cities the moment there is money to be spent, characteristic of the settlers in all these colonies, is much to be regretted, and presents a sad contrast to the quiet stay-at-home habits of American farmers. Everything here is fever and excitement;—as in some systems of geometry, motion is the primary, rest the derived idea. New South Welshmentell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria; to a new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne.
Judging from the colonial government reports, which immigrants are conjured by the inspectors to procure and read, and which are printed in a cheap form for the purpose, the New South Welsh can hardly wish to lure settlers into “the bush,” for in one of these documents, published while I was in Sydney, the curator of the museum reported that he never went more than twelve miles from the city, but that within that circuit he found seventeen distinct species of land snakes, two of sea snakes, thirty of lizards, and sixteen of frogs—seventy-eight species of reptiles rewarded him in all. The seventeen species of land snakes found by him within the suburbs were named by the curator in a printed list; it commenced with the pale-headed snake, and ended with the death-adder.
THEsmallest of our southern colonies except Tasmania,—one-fourth the size of New South Wales, one-eighth of Queensland, one-twelfth of West Australia, one-fifteenth of South Australia,—Victoria is the wealthiest of the Australian nations, and, India alone excepted, has the largest trade of any of the dependencies of Great Britain.
When Mr. Fawkner‘s party landed in 1835 upon the Yarra banks, mooring their boat to the forest trees,they formed a settlement upon a grassy hill behind a marsh, and began to pasture sheep where Melbourne, the capital, now stands. In twenty years, Melbourne became the largest city but one in the southern hemisphere, having 150,000 people within her limits or those of the suburban towns. Victoria has grander public buildings in her capital, larger and more costly railroads, a greater income, and a heavier debt than any other colony, and she pays to her governor £10,000 a year, or one-fourth more than even New South Wales.
When looked into, all this success means gold. There is industry, there is energy, there is talent, there is generosity and public spirit, but they are the abilities and virtues that gold will bring, in bringing a rush from all the world of dashing fellows in the prime of life. The progress of Melbourne is that of San Francisco; it is the success of Kokitika on a larger scale, and refined and steadied by having lasted through some years—the triumph of a population which has hitherto consisted chiefly of adult males.
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, assert so loudly that the Victorians are the refuse of California, or “Yankee scum,” that when I first landed in MelbourneI 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 surpassing 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 vitalitythat 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.”
THE OLD AND THE NEW.THE OLD AND THE NEW. BUSH SCENERY.BUSH SCENERY.
COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE.—P. 24.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 assisted immigrationand 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 class consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assafœtida, and astronomical instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; 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 grassed. 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 Sussex, 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 10s.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, andshowed 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 municipality. The colonial English, freed from the checks which are put by interested landlords to local government in Britain, have passed in all the settlements laws under which any village must be raised into a municipality 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 petition 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. TheMelbourne Argusof 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 asgreater 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 Dick,” 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 herelately, 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, trespass 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 oneor 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 compartmentcarriage (sadly hot and airless after the American cars), I saw the thin dry yellow grass 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 passed 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 mass 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 grass owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses 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 unknownregion 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 theRiverina Herald, published at Echuca; of its twenty-fourcolumns, 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 title; “wool” is the first word in the first line of the body of the paper. More than half of the advertisements 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 associations, advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot ointment, their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and the last of the advertisements 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, cock 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 advertisements 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, theRahaiaandMaitourabear the names of rivers, theRechinéand theKaikoura, names of mountain ranges; and the colonial boats have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian names; for instance,Rangitoto, “hill of hills,” andRangitiri, “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 theHeraldis 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 grass, every green thing, in the openspots. We hear of Christmas dinners eaten upon the grass 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 grass, 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 minethat 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.