AFTERthe 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 surpass the orchards of Tasmania, nor Devon match its flowers.
The natural resemblance ofMariaVan 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 passed 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 masses 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 noblest 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 itis 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 massacres 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 title, 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 circumstances 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 Bass‘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 whoknow 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 class 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.
GOVERNOR DAVEY‘S PROCLAMATION.—P. 86.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 theirlives 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 shores 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 passed without five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a space 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 God 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 hell 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 passport system is still in force in the free colonies with regard to passengers 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 inthe 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 scum 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 ishere kept secret, bribery is unknown, and, the public “nomination” of candidates having been abolished, elections pass 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, butoftener 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 repetition 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 lassoing 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.
After a week‘s sojourn in the neighborhood of Hobarton I again crossed the island, but this time by a night of piercing moonlight such as can be witnessed only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heavens, and opposite the moon, was the solemn constellationof the Southern Cross, sharply relieved upon the pitchy background of the Magellanic clouds, while the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firmament elsewhere. The next day I was again in Melbourne.
MELBOURNEis unusually gay, for at a shapely palace in the center of the city the second great Intercolonial Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are drawing to their close, fifty thousand people—a great number for the colonies—visit the building every week. There are exhibitors from each of our seven southern colonies, and from French New Caledonia, Netherlandish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to remember now that in the colonization both of New Zealand and of Australia, we were the successful rivals of the French only after having been behind them in awakening to the advisability of an occupation of these countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French fleet was anticipated there several times by the forethought and decision of our naval officers on the station; and in the case of Australia, the whole south coast was actually named “La Terre Napoléon,” and surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and occupied by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to the French.
The present remarkable exhibition of the products of the Australias, coming just at the time when the border customs between Victoria and New South Wales have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems to point to the formation of a customs union between the colonies, leads men to look still further forward, and to expect confederation. It is worthy of notice at this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists, as a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate neighbors, just as those of America protect the manufactures of the Union rather than of single States. They tell us that they can point, with regard to Europe, to pauper labor, but that they have no case as against the sister colonies; they wish, they say, to obtain a wide market for the sale of the produce of each colony; the nationality they would create is to be Australian, not provincial.
Already there is postal union, and a partial customs union, and confederation itself, however distant in fact, has been very lately brought about in the spirit by the efforts of the London press, one well-known paper having three times in a single article called the governor of New South Wales by the sounding title of “Governor-General of the Australasian colonies,” to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim.
There are many difficulties in the way of confederation. The leading merchants and squatters of Victoria are in favor of it; but not so those of the poorer or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of being swamped. The costliness of the federal government of New Zealand is a warning against over-hasty confederation. Victoria, too, would probably insist upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of her convict population. The continental theory is undreamt of by Australians, owing to their having alwaysbeen inhabitants of comparatively small States, and not, like dwellers in the organized territories of America, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous empire.
The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a matter of peculiar difficulty. It is to be hoped by all lovers of freedom that some hitherto unknown village will be selected. There is in all great cities a strong tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise, narrow lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill dealt with by free government, we are told. Englishmen who have been in Paris, Americans who know St. Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the Préfet is impossible, cry out that London, that New York, in their turn need a Haussman. In this tendency lies a terrible danger to free States—a danger avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of the legislature being placed, as in Canada and the United States, far away from the great cities. Were Melbourne to become the seat of government, nothing could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the already gigantic power of that city by choosing her merchants as their representatives.
The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests is a more simple matter. Although union will tend to the earlier independence of the colonies, yet, if federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally than they could be if remaining so many separate countries. They would also be a stronger enemy; but distance will make all their wars naval, and a strong fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition against us, in which it would probably not be the interest of Australia to join.
From the colonial point of view, federation wouldtend to secure to the Australians better general and local government than they possess at present. It is absurd to expect that colonial governors should be upon good terms with their charges when we shift men every four years—say from Demerara to New South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The unhappy governor loses half a year in moving to his post, and a couple of years in coming to understand the circumstances of his new province, and then settles down to be successful in the ruling of educated whites under democratic institutions only if he can entirely throw aside the whole of his experience, derived as it will probably have been from the despotic sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial governors fit for Australia until the Australian governments are made a separate service, and entirely separated from the West Indies, Africa, and Hong Kong.
Besides improving the government, confederation would lend to every colonist the dignity derived from citizenship of a great country—a point the importance of which will not be contested by any one who has been in America since the war.
It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confederation is in every way desirable. If it leads to independence, we must say to the Australians what Houmai ta Whiti said in his great speech to the progenitors of the Maori race when they were quitting Hawaiki: “Depart, and dwell in peace; let there be no quarreling among you, but build up a great people.”
THEcapital of South Australia is reputed the hottest of all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the English race, and as I neared it through the Backstairs Passage into the Gulf of St. Vincent, past Kangaroo Island, and still more upon landing at Glenelg, I came to the conclusion that its reputation was deserved. The extreme heat which characterizes South Australia is to some extent a consequence of its lying as far north as New South Wales and Queensland, and so far inland as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are visited; for although by “South Australia” we should, in the southern hemisphere, naturally understand that portion of Australia which was farthest from the tropics, yet it is a curious fact that the whole colony of Victoria lies to the south of Adelaide, that neither of the great southern peninsulas of Australia are in, but that nearly all the northernmost points of the continent now lie within, the country misnamed “South Australia.”
The immense northern territory, being supposed to be valueless, has generously been made a present of to South Australia, which thus becomes the largest British colony, and nearly as large as British Hindostan. If the great expenditure which is going on succeeds in causing the discovery of any good land at the north, it will of course at once be made into a separate colony. The only important result that seemslikely to follow from this annexation to South Australia of the northern territory is that schoolboys’ geography will suffer; indeed, I should say that a total destruction of all principle in the next generation would be the inevitable result of so rude a blow to confidence in books and masters as the assurance from a teacher‘s lips that the two most remote countries of Australia from each other are united under one colonial government, and that the northernmost points of the whole continent are situated in South Australia. Boys will probably conclude that across the line south becomes north and north south, and that in Australia the sun rises in the west.
Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the staples here are wheat, sheep, copper, and my introduction to South Australia was characteristic of the colony, for I found in Port Adelaide, where I first set foot, not only every store filled to overflowing, but piles of wheat-sacks in the roadways, and lines of wheat-cars on the sidings of railways, without even a tarpaulin to cover the grain.
Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern the wheat and flour trade are, perhaps, the strangest to the uninitiated. Breadstuffs are still sent from California and Chili to Victoria, yet from Adelaide, close at hand, wheat is being sent to England and flour to New York!
There can be no doubt that ultimately Victoria and Tasmania will at least succeed in feeding themselves. It is probable that neither New Zealand nor Queensland will find it to their interest to do the like. Wool-growing in the former and cotton and wool in the latter will continue to pay better than wheat in the greater portion of their lands. Their granary, and that possibly of the City of Sydney itself, will be found in SouthAustralia, especially if land capable of carrying wheat be discovered to the westward of the settlements about Adelaide. That the Australias, Chili, California, Oregon, and other Pacific States can ever export largely of wheat to Europe is now more than doubtful. If manufactures spring up on this side the world, these countries, whatever their fertility, will have at least enough to do to feed themselves.
As I entered the streets of the “farinaceous village,” as Adelaide is called by conceited Victorians, I was struck with the amount of character they exhibit both in the way of buildings, of faces, and of dress. The South Australians have far more idea of adapting their houses and clothes to their climate than have the people of the other colonies, and their faces adapt themselves. The verandas to the shops are sufficiently contiguous to form a perfect piazza; the people rise early, and water the sidewalk in front of their houses; and you never meet a man who does not make some sacrifice to the heat, in the shape of puggree, silk coat, or sun-helmet; but the women are nearly as unwise here as in the other colonies, and persist in going about in shawls and colored dresses. Might they but see a few of the Richmond or Baltimore ladies in their pure white muslin frocks, and die of envy, for the dress most convenient in a hot dry climate is also the most beautiful under its bright sun.
The German element is strong in South Australia, and there are whole villages in the wheat-country where English is never spoken; for here, as in America, there has been no mingling of the races, and the whole divergence from the British types is traceable to climatic influences, and especially dry heat. The men born here are thin, and fine-featured, somewhat like the Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are all alike—small, pretty, and bright, but with a burnt-up look. The haggard eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the dreaded presence of my old friend of the Rocky Mountains, the brulot sand-fly.
The inhabitants of all hot dry countries speak from the head, and not the chest, and the English in Australia are acquiring this habit; you seldom find a “cornstalk” who speaks well from the chest.
The air is crisp and hot—crisper and hotter even than that of Melbourne. The shaded thermometer upon the Victorian coast seldom reaches 110°, but in the town of Adelaide 117° has been recorded by the government astronomer. Such is the figure of the Australian continent that Adelaide, although a seaport town, lies far up as it were inland. Catching the heated gales from three of the cardinal points, Adelaide has a summer six months long, and is exposed to a fearful continuance of hot winds; nevertheless, 105° at Adelaide is easier borne than 95° in the shade at Sydney.
Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the capital. In laying out Adelaide, its founders have reserved a park about a quarter of a mile in width all round the city. This gives a charming drive nine miles long, outside which again are the olive-yards and villas of the citizens. Hedges of the yellow cactus, or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia, bound the gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and aloe grow upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward are the cool wooded hills of the Mount Lofty Range, on the tops of which are grown the English fruits for which the plains afford no shade or moisture.
Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by railway, to Kapunda, I beheld one great wheat-field without a break. The country was finer than any stretchof equal extent in California or Victoria, and looked as though the crops were “standing”—which in one sense they were, though the grain was long since “in.” The fact is that they use the Ridley machines, by which the ears are thrashed out without any cutting of the straw, which continues to stand, and which is finally plowed in at the farmer‘s leisure, except in the neighborhood of Adelaide. There would be a golden age of partridge-shooting in Old England did the climate and the price of straw allow of the adoption of the Ridley reaper. Under this system, South Australia grows on the average six times as much wheat as she can use, whereas, if reaping had to be paid for, she could only grow from one and a half to twice as much as would meet the home demand.
In this country, as in America, “bad farming” is found to pay, for with cheap land, the Ridley reaper, and good markets, light crops without labor, save the peasant-proprietor‘s own toil, pay well when heavy crops obtained by the use of hired labor would not reimburse the capitalist. The amount of land under cultivation has been trebled in the last seven years, and half a million acres are now under wheat. South Australia has this year produced seven times as much grain as she can consume, and twelve acres are under wheat for every adult male of the population of the colony.
A committee has been lately sitting in New South Wales “to consider the state of the colony.” To judge from the evidence taken before it, the members seemed to have conceived that their task was to inquire why South Australia prospered above New South Wales. Frugality of the people, especially of the Germans, and fertility of the soil were the reasons which they gave for the result, but it is impossible notto see that the success of South Australia is but another instance of the triumph of small proprietors, of whom there are now some seven or eight thousand in the colony, and these were brought here by the adoption of the Wakefield land system.
In the early days of the colony, land was sold at a good price in 130-acre sections, with one acre of townland to each agricultural section. Now, under rules made at home, but confirmed after the introduction of self-government, land is sold by auction, with a reserved price of £1 an acre, but when once a block has passed the hammer, it can forever be taken up at £1 the acre without further competition. The Land Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and a few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines, being paid out of it, the remainder is divided into three portions, of which two are destined for public works, and one for immigration.
There is a marvelous contrast to be drawn between the success which has attended the Wakefield system in South Australia and the total failure, in the neighboring colony of West Australia, of the old system, under which vast tracts of land being alienated for small prices to the crown, there remains no fund for introducing that abundant supply of labor without which the land is useless.
Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immigrants come of themselves, and, in the assisted importation of both men and women, the relative proportions of English, Scotch, and Irish that exist at home are carefully preserved, by which simple precaution the colony is saved from an organic change of type, such as that which threatens all America, although it would, of course, be idle to deny that the restriction is aimed against the Irish.
The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in the want of women: not only is this a bar to the natural increase of population; it is a deficiency preventive of permanency, destructive of religion; where woman is not there can be no home, no country.
How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a question which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales, have each in their turn attempted to solve by the artificial introduction of Irish work-house girls. The difficulty apparently got rid of, we begin to find that it is not so much as fairly seen; we have yet to look it squarely in the face. The point of the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest girls,—not women merely, but women fit to bear families in a free State.
One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a lately-received batch of Irish work-house girls, has said that, if these are the “well-conducted girls, he should be anxious to see a few of the evil-disposed.” While in South Australia, I read the details of the landing of a similar party of women from Limerick work-house one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city authorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more abominable than their conduct in the mean while. They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs, keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by the time the authorities came down to pack them off by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky. At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shockedand horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech; nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish work-house girls. This was no exceptional case: the reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can show as bad; and in Canada such conduct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parliamentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The woman was duly sent down, and found next day in her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in her own words: “Here I am with my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say.”
It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls cost a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as the free passages across the seas of an equal number of worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint. Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigration superintendents that the traces are visible to this day, for wherever the women went, “sin, and shame, and death were in their track.” The Irish unions have no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of their most abandoned girls; their interests and those of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be effective in the face of facts like these. The class that the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with babies in their arms; no one will take them into service because the children are in the way, and in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonialbenevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow up or the mothers die. Even when the girls are not so wholly vicious as to be useless in service, they are utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of neither domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to refuse employment unless they were engaged to serve together. The agents are at their wits’ ends; either the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of life that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant in their new-found “independence” that they on their side will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every evil upon the long sea voyage. They say that they select the best of girls, but a few days at sea suffice to demoralize them.
The colonies could not do better than combine for the establishment of a new and more efficient emigration agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; for here as in America it is found that the Scotch and Germans are the best of immigrants. The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in the known world. Half the most prominent among the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the great merchants of India are of the same nation. Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the most part men of better education than those of other nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotchman owes his uniform success in every climate to his perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact remains, thatwherever abroad you come across a Scotchman, you invariably find him prosperous and respected.
The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland because he wishes to rise faster and higher than he can at home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in calculating contentment; the Irishman in sorrow and despair.
At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines there is not much to see, so my last days in South Australia were given to the politics of the colony, which present one singular feature. For the elections to the Council or Upper House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50 or a leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single district, and the majority elect their men. In a country where party feeling runs high, such a system, were it possible, would evidently unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of representation, but in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selection of a governor for an American State, use their position with great prudence, and make choice of the best men that the country can produce. The franchise for the Lower House, for the elections to which the colony is “districted,” is the simple one of six months’ residence, which with the ballot works irreproachably.
The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a capital for the Northern territory; that coast of tropical Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a promise to nameafter me either “a city” or a headland. He said he should advise me to select the headland, because that would remain, whereas the city probably would not. When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry passengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs, and the whole of the money received from capitalists at home, for 300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the government are seriously thinking of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for land. It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, as tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland that the work is done.
It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the northwest of Australia is called “The land of gold;” and we are told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese reported their discovery.
By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George‘s Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light layglowing along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.
AFTERfive days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King George‘s Sound—“Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie,” as I saw it written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curiously-cut leaves.
The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives—tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the “colonists” by a gang of fiend-faced convictsworking in chains upon the esplanade, and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.
Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most considerable convict establishment we possess across the seas.
At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or emancipists within the “colony,” of whom 1500 were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 5000 had been released upon conditional pardons: 600 of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500, or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women and children.
If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled us to draw the moral, that transportation and free emigration cannot exist side by side: the one element must overbear and destroy the other. In Western Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two-thirds of the whole population, and the district is agreat English prison, not a colony, and exports but a little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.
Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts as with free settlers: fifty or sixty convicts have successfully escaped from the settlement within the last few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a month or two, although sheltered by the people, the vast majority of whom are ticket-of-leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every year.
On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was striking down on him in a way that none can fancy who have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an armed warder, who idled in the shade by the roadside. This was an “escape-man,” thus treated with a view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to get away from Albany. No wonder that the “chain-gang” system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than before the introduction of this tremendous punishment.
Many of the “escapes” are made with no other view than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Adelaide to King George‘s Sound, a convict coal-man was found built up in the coal-heap on deck: he and his mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by the help of theothers “for a change.” Of ultimate escape there could be no chance; the coal on deck could not fail to be exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and this they knew. When he emerged, black, half smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punishment. Acts of this class are common enough to have received a name. The offenders are called “bolters for a change.”
A convict has been known when marching in his gang suddenly to lift up his spade, and split the skull of the man who walked in front of him, thus courting a certain death for no reason but to escape from the monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punishment for fun by calling out to the magistrates, “Gentlemen, pray remember that I am entitled to an iron-gang, because this is the second time of my absconding.”
One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the many-sided character of the form of early settlement: Central North America we plant with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia with our transported felons. Transportation has gone through many phases since the system took its rise in the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the moss-troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing the exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was introduced in the reign of George II., and by an Act then passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and knocked down to men who undertook to transport them, and make what they could of their labor. In 1786, an Order in Council named the eastern coast of Australia and the adjacent islands as the spot to whichtransportation beyond the seas should be directed, and in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across the page of history which records the foundation of the colony of New South Wales. From that time to the present day the world has witnessed the portentous sight of great countries in which the major portion of the people, the whole of the handicraftsmen, were convicted felons.
There being no free people whatever in the “colonies” when first formed, the governors had no choice but to appoint convicts to all the official situations. The consequence was robbery and corruption. Recorded sentences were altered by the convict-clerks, free pardons and grants of land were sold for money. The convict overseers forced their gangmen to labor not for government, but for themselves, securing secrecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men, who in turn bought native women with all that they could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to show on muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumulated by some of the emancipists, by fraud and infamy rather than by prudence, we are told, and a vast number of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town itself, without the knowledge of the police. As the settlements grew in years and size, the sons of convict parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few free settlers as arrived—“the ancients,” as they were styled, or “the ancient nobility of Botany Bay”—were wholly dependent on convict tutors for the education of their children—the “cornstalks” and “currency girls;” and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of both sexes. The newspapers were without exception conducted by gentleman convicts, or “specials,” as they were called, who were assigned to the editors forthat purpose, and the police force itself was composed of ticket-of-leave men and “emancipists.” Convicts were thus the only schoolmasters, the only governesses, the only nurses, the only journalists, and, as there were even convict clergymen and convict university professors, the training of the youth of the land was committed almost exclusively to the felon‘s care.
A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is simple and pathetic; it is from the parents and guardians resident in Van Dieman‘s Land. They set forth that there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony, that within six years alone 24,000 convicts have been turned into the island, and of these but 4000 were women. The result is that their children are brought up in the midst of profligacy and degradation.
The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal infamy degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in the parties working in the “chain-gangs” on the roads. “Assignees” too bad even for the whip of the harshest, or the “beef and beer” of the most lenient master, brutalized still further, if that were possible, by association with those as vile as themselves, and followed about the country by women too infamous even for service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and found a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting their camp, and traversing the country, robbing and murdering those they met, and sacking every homestead that lay in their track.
The clerk in charge of one of the great convict barracks was himself a convict, and had an understanding with the men under his care that they might prowl about at night and rob on condition that they shouldshare their gains with him, and that, if they were found out, he should himself prosecute them for being absent without leave. Juries were composed either of convicts, or of publicans dependent on the convicts for their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge was known to say: “If I don‘t attend to the recommendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a man guilty again,” and jurymen would frequently hand down notes to the counsel for the defense, and bid him give himself no trouble, as they intended to acquit their friend.
The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in the courts was rife. It has been given in evidence before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of New South Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had a tailor‘s bill sent in which he did not owe, he having been but a few weeks in the colony. He instructed a lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He afterward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had sworn to the bill, but the immigrant‘s lawyer, “to save trouble,” had called a witness who swore to having paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes there were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but convict judges.
The assignment system was supposed to be a great improvement upon the jail, but its only certain result was that convict master and convict man used to get drunk together, while a night never passed without a burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts’ mistresses went out from England as government free emigrants, taking with them funds subscribed by the thieves at home and money obtained by the robberies for which their “fancy men” had been convicted, and on their arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their paramoursassigned to them as convict servants. Such was the disparity of the sexes that the term “wife” was a mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the government vied with each other in sending out to Sydney the worst women in all London, to reinforce the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory. Even among the free settlers, marriage soon became extremely rare. Convicts were at the head of the colleges and benevolent asylums; the custom-house officials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious convict, who was actually recommitted to Bathurst after his appointment, and yet allowed to return to Sydney and resume his duties.
The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment system was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned convicts spent their time working for high wages, living and drinking with their masters; others were mere slaves. Whether, however, he be in practice well or ill treated, in the assignment or apprenticeship system the convict is, under whatever name, a slave, subject to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot himself flog his “servant,” can have him flogged by writing a note or sending his compliments to his neighbor the magistrate on the next run or farm. The “whipping-houses” of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel in New South Wales; a look or word would cause the hurrying of the servant to the post or the forge as a preliminary to a month in the chain-gang “on the roads.” On the other hand, nothing under the assignment system can prevent skilled convict workmen being paid and pampered by their masters, whose interest it evidently becomes to get out of them all the work possible through excessive indulgence, as intelligent labor cannot be produced through the machineryof the whipping-post, but may be through that of “beef and beer.”
Whatever may have been the true interest of the free settlers, cruelty was in practice commoner than indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of solitary confinement, years of labor in chains upon the roads, were laid upon convicts for such petty offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and disobedience. In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions for disorderly or dishonest conduct, and in a year the average was 3000 floggings, and above 100,000 lashes. In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered 15,000, the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes 50,000 a year.
The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South Wales contain the condemnation of the transportation system. In the single year of 1834, one-seventh of the free population of Van Dieman‘s Land were summarily convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a population of 37,000, 15,000 were convicted before the courts for various offenses. Over a hundred persons a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a fourth of the convicts served their time without incurring additional punishment from the police, and those who thus escaped proved generally in after-life the worst of all, and even government officials were forced into admitting that transportation demoralized far more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assigned convicts made their escape to the back country, and became bushrangers; many got down to the coast, and crossed to the Pacific islands, whence they spread the infamies of New South Wales throughout all Polynesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commonsreported, in words characteristic of our race, that these convicts committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific, “outrages at which humanity shudders,” and which were to be deplored as being “injurious to our commercial interests in that quarter of the globe.”
Transportation to New South Wales came to its end none too soon: in fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been transported to that colony, and 30,000 to the little island of Tasmania in twenty years.
Were there no other argument for the discountenance of transportation, it would be almost enough to say that the life in the convict-ship itself makes the reformation of transported criminals impossible. Where many bad men are brought together, the few not wholly corrupt who may be among them have no opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that may exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not obscene. Those who have sailed in convict company say that there is something terrible in the fiendish delight that the “old hands” take in watching the steady degradation of the “new chums.” The hardened criminals invariably meet the less vile with outrage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon succumb to ruffians who have crime for their profession, and for all their relaxation vice.
To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are told, would be impossible. The imagination will scarce suffice to call up dreams so hideous. Four months of filthiness in a floating hell sink even the least bad to the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is unknown; the convicts are their own masters and the ship‘s, but the shrewd callousness of the old jail-bird teaches all that there is nothing to be gained even bymomentary success. Rage and violence are seldom seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blows,—conversation that transcends all crime in infamy.
It will be long before the last traces of convict disease disappear from Tasmania and New South Wales; the gold-find has done much to purify the air, free selection may lead to a still more bright advance, manufacturing may lend its help; but years must go by before Tasmania can be prosperous or Sydney moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide to those who have to save West Australia, as General Bourke and Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales, but as an example, not picked from ancient rolls, but from the records of a system founded within the memory of living man, and still existent, of what transportation must necessarily be, and what it may easily become.
The results of a dispassionate survey of the transportation system are far from satisfactory. If deportation be considered as a punishment, it would be hard to find a worse. Punishment should be equable, reformatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the most costly of all the punishments that are known to us; it is subject to variations that cannot be guarded against; it is severest to the least guilty and slightest to the most hardened; it morally destroys those who have some good remaining in them; it leaves the ruffianly malefactor worse if possible than it finds him; and, while it is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its character, it is useless as a deterrent because its nature is unknown at home. Transportation to the English thief means exile, and nothing more; it is only after conviction, when far away from his uncaught associates, that he comes to find it worse than death. Instead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime;instead of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms in villainy the already infamous. To every bad man it gives the worst companions; the infamous are to be reformed by association with the vile; while its effects upon the colonies are described in every petition of the settlers, and testified to by the whole history of our plantations in the antipodes, and by the present condition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which, however, New South Wales has happily escaped. We have come at last to transportation in its most limited and restricted sense; the only remaining step is to be quit of it altogether.
In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure some means of separating the men one from another as soon as the actual punishment is terminated: to settle them on land, to settle them with wives where possible, should be our object. The work which really has in it something of reformation is that which a man has to do, not in order that he may avoid whipping, but that he may escape starvation; and it is from this point of view that transportation is defensible. A man, however bad, will generally become a useful member of society and a not altogether neglectful father if allowed to settle upon land away from his old associates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are strengthened by close association with others who are laboring under a like infirmity: and where the former convicts are allowed to hang together in towns, nothing is to be expected better than that which is actually found—namely, a state of society where wives speedily become as villainous as their husbands, and where children are brought up to emulate their fathers’ crimes.
To keep the men separate from each other, after the expiration of the sentence, we need to send the convicts to a fairly populous country, whence arises thisgreat difficulty: if we send convicts to a populous colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forcing the workmen of the colony into a one-sided competition; that we are offering an unbearable insult to the free population; that, in attempting to reform the felon, in allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial society, we are degrading and corrupting the whole community on the chance of possible benefit to our English villain. On the other hand, if we send our convicts to an uninhabited land, such as New South Wales and Tasmania were, such as West Australia is now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, whither we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of the ruffians of the world, to form a community of which each member must be sufficiently vile of himself to corrupt a nation.
If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can be avoided, transportation might be replaced by short sentences and solitary confinement, and low diet, to be followed by forced exile, under regulations, to some selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa, opposite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the Zambesi River. Exile after punishment may often be the only way of providing for convicts who would otherwise be forced to return to their former ways. The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seeking employment are too terrible for them not to accept joyfully any simple plan for emigration to a country where they are unknown.
In Western Australia, transportation has not been made subservient to colonization, and both in consequence have failed.
On going on board the Bombay at King George‘s Sound, I at once found myself in the East. The captain‘s crew of Malays, the native cooks in long whitegowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-blue turbans, red cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers; the negro or Abyssinian stokers, and passengers in coats of China-grass; the Hindoo deck-sweepers playing on their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the punkahs below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck; and, above all, the general indolence of everybody, all told of a new world.
A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which took place before we left the harbor for Ceylon, and I remarked that the dejection of his countenance exceeded that of the felon-laborers who worked in irons on the quay. There is a wide-spread belief in England that unfair favor is shown to “gentlemen convicts.” This is simply not the case; every educated prisoner is employed at in-door work, for which he is suited, and not at road-making, in which he might be useless; but there are few cases in which he would not wish to exchange a position full of hopeless degradation for that of an out-door laborer, who passes through his daily routine drudgery (far from the prison) unknown, and perhaps in his fancy all but free. The longing to change the mattock for the pen is the result of envy, and confined to those who, if listened to, would prove incapable of pursuing the pen-driver‘s occupation.
Under a fair and freshening breeze, we left the port of Albany, happy to escape from a jail the size of India, even those of us who had been forced to pass only a few days in West Australia.
PACINGthe deck with difficulty as the ship tore through the lava-covered seas, before a favoring gale that caught us off Cape Lewin, some of us discussed the prospects of the great south land as a whole.
In Australia, it is often said, we have a second America in its infancy; but it may be doubted whether we have not become so used to trace the march of empire on a westward course, through Persia and Assyria, Greece and Rome, then by Germany to England and America, that we are too readily prepared to accept the probability of its onward course to the Pacific.
The progress of Australia has been singularly rapid. In 1830, her population was under 40,000; in 1860, it numbered 1,500,000; nevertheless, it is questionable how far the progress will continue. The natural conditions of America in Australia are exactly reversed. All the best lands of Australia are on her coast, and these are already taken up by settlers. Australia has three-quarters the area of Europe, but it is doubtful whether she will ever support a dense population throughout even half her limits. The uses of the northern territory have yet to be discovered, and the interior of the continent is far from being tempting to the settler. Upon the whole, it seems likely that almost all the imperfectly-known regions of Australia will in time be occupied by pastoral crown tenants,but that the area of agricultural operations is not likely to admit of indefinite extension. The central district of Australia, to the extent, perhaps, of half the entire continent, lies too far north for winter rains, too far south for tropical wet seasons, and in these vast solitudes agriculture may be pronounced impossible, sheep-farming difficult. As far as sufficient water for sheep and cattle-stations is concerned, there will be no difficulty in retaining this in tanks or raising it by means of wells, and the wool, tallow, and even meat, will be carried by those railways for which the country is admirably fitted, while the construction of locks upon the Murray and its tributaries will enable steamers to carry the whole trade of the Riverina. So far, all is well, but the arable lands of Australia are limited by the rains, and apparently the limit is a sadly narrow one.
Once in awhile, a heavy winter rain appears to fall in the interior; grass springs up, the lagoons are filled, the up-country squatters make their fortunes, and all goes prosperously for a time. Accounts reach the coast cities of the astonishing fertility of the interior, and hundreds of settlers set off to the remotest districts. Two or three years of drought then follow, and all the more enterprising squatters are soon ruined, with a gain, however, sometimes of a few thousand square miles of country to civilization.
Hitherto the Australians have not made so much as they should have done of the country that is within their reach. The want of railroads is incredible. There are but some 400 miles of railway in all Australia—far less than the amount possessed by the single infant State of Wisconsin. The sums spent upon the Victorian lines have deterred the colonists from completing their railway system: £10,000,000 sterlingwere spent upon 200 miles of road, through easy country in which the land cost nothing. The United States have made nearly 40,000 miles of railroad for less than £300,000,000 sterling; Canada made her 2000 miles for £20,000,000, or ten times as much railroad as Victoria for only twice the money. Cuba has already more miles of railroad than all Australia.
Small as are the inhabited portions of Australia when compared with the corresponding divisions of the United States, this country nevertheless to English eyes is huge enough. The part of Queensland already peopled is five times larger than the United Kingdom. South Australia and West Australia are each of them nearly as large as British India, but of these colonies the greater part is desert. Fertile Victoria, the size of Great Britain, is only a thirty-fourth part of Australia.
In face of the comparatively small amount of good agricultural country known to exist in Australia, the disproportionate size of the great cities shows out more clearly than ever. Even Melbourne, when it comes to be examined, has too much the air of a magnified Hobart, of a city with no country at its back, of a steam-hammer set up to crack nuts. Queensland is at present free from the burden of gigantic cities, but then Queensland is in greater danger of becoming what is in reality a slave republic.
Morally and intellectually, at all events, the colonies are thriving. A literature is springing up, a national character is being grafted upon the good English stock. What shape the Australian mind will take is at present somewhat doubtful. In addition to considerable shrewdness and purely Saxon capacity and willingness to combine for local objects, we find in Australia an admirable love of simple mirth, and a serious distaste for prolonged labor in one direction, while the down-rightnessand determination in the pursuit of truth, remarkable in America, are less noticeable here.
The extravagance begotten of the tradition of convict times has not been without effect, and the settlers waste annually, it is computed, food which would support in Europe a population of twice their numbers.
This wastefulness is perhaps, however, in some degree a consequence of the necessary habits of a pastoral people. The 8000 tons of tallow exported annually by the Australias are said to represent the boiling down of sheep enough to feed half a million of people for a twelvemonth.
Australian manners, like the American, resemble the French rather than the British—a resemblance traceable, perhaps, to the essential democracy of Australia, America, and France. One surface point which catches the eye in any Australian ball-room, or on any race-course, is clearly to be referred to the habit of mind produced by democracy—the fact, namely, that the women dress with great expense and care, the men with none whatever. This, as a rule, is true of Americans, Australians, and French.