IX.
SYDNEY AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD.
Thechief towns of the five principal Australian Colonies are separated by nearly equal intervals. The distances from Adelaide to Melbourne, from Melbourne to Hobart Town, from Melbourne to Sydney, and from Sydney to Brisbane are not very different. That from Melbourne to Sydney is a little the longest of them. It is rather more than a two days’ and two nights’ voyage. To go by land is a tedious and laborious journey, except for those who know the country and its inhabitants very well. Only a small portion can be done by railway, and most of the way is through flat, monotonous country, more or less afflicted with floods, bushrangers, bad roads, and worse inns. Indeed, whenever there is steam communication by water between two Australian towns, it is seldom that there is any other practicable way of going.
The Melbourne steamer keeps close in shore all the way. The coast generally has a barren look, and, except at Cape Schank and near a mountain called the Pigeon House, has few striking features. It is so little settled or cultivated that its appearance from the sea cannot bemuch changed since Captain Cook explored it. It is seldom that there is a sail in sight. At the very entrance of Port Jackson hardly a living creature, few buildings except the lighthouses, and no mast of a ship at anchor are visible. It is not till the narrow opening between the high precipitous cliffs is entered and the South Head rounded, that a scene of beauty bursts upon you as suddenly as a vision in a fairy story. In an instant the long rollers and angry white surf (for there are rollers and surf on the shores of the Pacific on the calmest day) are left behind, and the vessel is gliding smoothly over a glassy lake, doubly and trebly land-locked, so that the open sea is hidden from every part of it. To the north and east numberless inlets and coves branch off, subdivide, and wind like rivers between rocky scrub-covered shores, which are fragrant with wattle, and brilliant with wild flowers, all new and strange to a European eye. To the left, on the southern side, are large deep bays, on the shores of which the rich men of Sydney have built villas and planted gardens, with which no villa or garden at Torquay or at Spezzia can compare. Farther on, perhaps four miles from the Heads, you pass three or four men-of-war, lying motionless at anchor little more than a couple of stone-throws from the shore, having for their background the graceful bamboos, and trim Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay pines, and palms, and other semi-tropical vegetation of the Botanic Gardens. Steamers of all sizes, from the great P. and O. and Panama ocean steamship, to the busy, puffing,gaily-painted little harbour paddle-boat, plough up the clear water. Pleasure boats, from the yacht to the sculler’s funny, flit noiselessly about. Or a panting steam-tug drags a merchant ship amongst the hulls and masts and funnels which fringe the innermost part of the harbour. Above the masts, with miles of winding wharfage at its base, stands Sydney. At sunrise or sunset on a calm day there is something almost Oriental in the brilliancy of colour, something dreamy and unsubstantial in the water, the shores, the black hulls and spars, seen through the sun-lit haze, like pictures one sees of the Golden Horn—such as Turner would have delighted to paint. Port Jackson, both for use and beauty, is almost unsurpassed in the world. It is nowhere much more than a mile in width; its most distant extremities are not twenty miles apart in a straight line; yet its perimeter, measured along the water’s edge and up its numberless little inlets, must be hundreds of miles in length.
But once land and enter the town itself, and all pleasing prospects and illusions vanish at once. Never was a city less worthy of its situation. The principal street is nearly two miles long. For the greater part of the way this street is more or less in a hollow, and from hardly any part of it is the harbour visible. The rest of the city straggles right and left of it, covering with its suburbs a very large extent of ground. Only one good street, Macquarie Street, is finely situated. There are two really fine buildings, superior to anything of the kind in Melbourne, the new Cathedral,and the Hall of the University. A few public buildings and some of the banks are solidly, if not gracefully, built. But in general the houses are small, ugly, ill drained, ill built, and in bad repair, and the greater part of the town a poor specimen of the mean style of house architecture prevailing in England forty or fifty years ago. It is but seldom that any attempt has been made to make the plans of houses such as to suit the requirements of the climate, as has been done so successfully at Melbourne. Deep verandahs, which add so much to the appearance of a building by producing contrasts of light and shade, and which are so essential to comfort in a hot, glaring climate, are the exception rather than the rule. People who can afford to be comfortable and luxurious live out of town now, and so what is perhaps the best part of Sydney has been preserved almost unaltered from the Governor-Macquarie era of half a century ago.
The climate is such as to make shade and protection from sun, wind, and dust almost a necessity. In winter, in July and August for instance, it is very pleasant. Even then it is often as hot in the sun as on an average fine day in England in summer; and a fire is out of the question, except in the evening or on a wet day. Snow has not fallen in Sydney, it is said, for twenty years. A sensation was produced the other day by a large snow-ball which a guard on the railway brought in his van from somewhere up the country where there had been a snow-storm. Towards the end of September it begins to be unpleasantly hot. Thestreets are for the most part left unwatered. Often a violent hot wind blows, filling the air with fine red dust, which penetrates through closed doors and windows, covering everything, and severely trying all mucous membranes, eyes, and tempers. This wind is known as aBrickfielder. It blows from the west, and generally lasts from one to two days. Then comes a southerly wind, often accompanied by rain and thunder, which strikes it at right angles, and prevails over it. The temperature at once falls. The sea breeze is disliked by many almost as much as the other, for though cool it is enervating. The temperature in summer at Sydney is not nearly so high as in the interior. Yet the Squatter from up the country when he comes there complains of the heat. Labourers declare that they cannot do a good day’s work there. With all classes hours of work are short and holidays frequent. Old people and persons with delicate and peculiar constitutions may have their lives prolonged; but strong men get ill who never were ill before, and complexions and faces look white, sallow, and shrunken almost like those of Anglo-Indians.
Sydney is specially deserving of attention as being politically a fair average type of an Australian city. It is more like what most other Australian towns are likely to become than any other place. For the colony is nearly eighty years old. It has a history by no means uneventful or uninteresting. Among its early heroes it can point to many men of conspicuous ability, energy, and integrity. Most of the populationare natives of the colony, real colonials, and not emigrants from the old country. They are less restless, less excitable, perhaps less energetic, than their neighbours at Melbourne. Some of them have hardly ever been ten miles from their native city.
Though no longer the capital or even the first city of Australia, Sydney is an important and increasing town. The more rapid growth of Melbourne has thrown it into the shade, and no doubt Melbourne will maintain its position, and, owing to its central situation, continue to be the commercial emporium of the other colonies. But it may be doubted whether Victoria will maintain its lead over New South Wales. The good land of Victoria extends to the very shores of Port Phillip, the country is small comparatively, and has been easily opened up. In New South Wales three trunk lines are in progress and are open for some distance, but hundreds of miles of railway must be made before many fertile districts can be even known, except by report, and before even the inhabitants—much more, possible emigrants at home—begin to realise the enormous resources of the country. Gold is found in all directions, though as yet in few places, compared with Victoria, in quantities which repay the digger. Iron is plentiful. There is an unlimited supply of coal close to the mouth of the Hunter. Kerosene is being procured in abundance. The English cereals flourish as well as maize and arrowroot. Almost any quantity of wine might be grown, and some of it is about as good as average light French claret. Light wine is a great addition tocomfort in this climate; and as it becomes more plentiful, and cheaper, it will help more than anything to drive out the old colonial vice of excessive spirit-drinking, already on the decline. There are several varieties of climate, for climate depends more upon height above the sea-level than upon latitude. From the mountainous district of Kiandra the telegraph day after day even to the end of September reports ‘snow falling,’ while at Sydney we are broiling. In New England, close to the borders of Queensland, there is almost an English climate, and strawberries and other English fruits and vegetables grow in perfection; while a short distance off, on the Clarence, and on the vast plains to the westward, the heat, though dry and comparatively healthy, is intense, and men will put away their coats and waistcoats in a box, only to be taken out if they want to go to Sydney or to look specially respectable. To the number of sheep and cattle which may be kept there is practically no limit. Only there is a distance beyond which the expense of carting wool or driving cattle to a market eats up all the profit. For wool, railways will at once extend this distance. As for cattle, there is a new invention for freezing meat by means of ammonia, and thus preserving it entirely unchanged for any number of weeks or months. If this is successful, as there is every reason to hope, frozen meat may be brought down to the nearest port and kept frozen for a voyage of any length, and thus the English market may be supplied with fresh meat from the heart of Australia.
Food, both animal and vegetable, is perhaps as cheap in Australia as in any part of the world. Even in Sydney, where it is comparatively dear, the best beef and mutton cost only about fourpence a pound, a price which is said to pay a very large profit to the butcher. Inferior meat is as low as a penny or two-pence a pound. Wheat this year has been as low as half-a-crown a bushel in some country places. In the bush, where shepherds and others get their rations of half a sheep each a week, the waste is often very great. Much is thrown away, or given to the dogs, or spoilt by bad cooking. This abundance makes it at first sight seem extraordinary that the early settlers at Sydney should have been for so many years dependent on supplies of salt provisions brought from England or the Cape, and that when these supplies ran short they should several times have been on the verge of starvation. But a ride outside the town explains it. The soil for many miles round is sandy and barren. To this day unenclosed and uncultivated land extends up to the very streets of the town. Even market gardeners have not found it worth while to establish themselves, except in a few gullies where the soil is a little better. It is a good thingnowthat this is so; for near a large city, which can easily be supplied from a distance, an unlimited expanse of natural park is better than ploughed fields. Populous and straggling as the town is, a short ride, or half an hour’s row across the harbour, takes you into country as wild as a Scotch moor. On the north shore you may almost lose yourself in the bush withintwo or three miles of the town. To the south you may ride in an hour and a half over glorious open country, amongst scarlet bottle-brush, epacris, and a profusion of beautiful wild flowers, to the clear water and white, sandy, uninhabited shores of Botany Bay, which even in mid-winter quite deserves its name.
Amongst the few cultivated districts near Sydney is Parramatta. It is there that the trim gardens of dark green orange trees are, with their profusion of golden fruit hanging patiently among the leaves for three or four months. But to see agriculture on a large scale you must go by railway nearly thirty miles to the valley of the Hawkesbury. A richer alluvial soil than there is in this valley could not well be, nor one requiring less labour in its cultivation. But, owing to droughts and floods, so precarious are the crops that the cultivators are said to be content if they can secure one out of three which they sow. In the early days a bad flood on the Hawkesbury caused a scarcity throughout the colony. In June last an unusually bad one occurred. The river actually rose nearly sixty feet in perpendicular height, flowing more than forty feet above the roadway of the bridge near Richmond. You may see the rubbish brought down by it on the tops of the trees. And though the stream runs between high banks, the wide, flat plain above was twelve feet deep in rushing water, which a furious gale of wind made still more destructive. A few small patches are already green again with a luxuriant crop. The rest of the plain is a dismal brown expanse of dried mud. The strongpost-and-rail fences are tumbling down or half buried. Here and there a few slabs or a door-post sticking up out of the ground mark the place from which a log hut or a cottage has been swept away.
Another fertile district, the Illawarra, may be reached by going in a coasting steamer for fifty miles south from Sydney. A longer but pleasanter way is to take the Southern Railway for thirty-five miles, and ride the remaining thirty. The ride is through poor, sandy, scrubby country, abounding, as sandy soils so often do, with brilliant wild flowers. The native or gigantic lily grows here in perfection, a single red flower on a straight stem, often fifteen or twenty feet high; and the waratah, or native tulip, in diameter as big as a sunflower, but conical, and crimson like a peony. Suddenly you reach the edge of a steep descent, so steep as to be almost a cliff, and look down amongst large timber trees interlaced with dark-leaved creepers of almost tropical growth, which hang like fringed ropes from the trunks and branches. Lower down are palms, wild figs, and cabbage palms; and beyond is a broad strip of rich green meadow land, lying far below between the cliff and the sea, and stretching many miles away to the south. Half an hour’s steep descent takes you down to it. There is a home-like look about the green grass, the appearance of prosperity, and the substantial look of the farm houses. Farmers’ wives jog along to Wollongong market with their baskets or their babies before them on the pommels of their saddles. Almost everybody,except a few of the larger landowners, is Irish. Here, if anywhere, the Irish have fallen upon pleasant places and found congenial occupation. There is very little agriculture. The land is all in pasture, and nothing is kept but cows. The population is wholly given up to making butter. Even cheese they do not condescend to make: but Wollongong butter is the butter of Sydney, and finds its way to far-off places along the coast. The meadows are as green in summer as in winter, or even greener. For then the sea breeze often brings heavy showers and storms, and droughts are seldom known there. I saw an English oak tree in full leaf in the middle of August—the February of the southern hemisphere. So valuable is the land, that as much as 20l.an acre has been given for uncleared land, and 2l.a year rent—prices almost unheard of in Australia.
But the pleasantest of all the short journeys to be made from Sydney is to the Blue Mountains. The range is not high, in few places, I believe, more than three thousand feet above the sea; but it is intersected by very deep precipitous ravines, and densely wooded; and the chain, or rather mass, of mountainous country is very wide. It was many years before the early colonists succeeded in penetrating it and getting at the good country beyond. Even now there is only one road and one cattle track across it. After the first ascent at the Kurrajong the track descends a little, and then runs nearly level for twelve miles till MountTomer is reached, on the highest ridge, beyond which the water-shed is to the south-west. Here, as at the Illawarra, occurs one of those sudden changes which are so delightful in the midst of the monotony of the bush. The ragged, close-growing, insignificant, ‘never-green’ gum-trees, which, mixed with a few wattles (mimosa) and she-oaks, are the principal constituents ofbush, give place to enormous trees of the same as well as of other species. The delicate light green of the feathery tree-ferns relieves the eye. The air is full of aromatic scent from many kinds of shrubs, all growing luxuriantly. Wherever there is an opening you can see as far as the coast, and for nearly a hundred miles to the north and to the south, over the bush you have come through. And seen at a distance, the poorest bush has a peculiar and beautiful colour, quite different from anything we see in Europe, a reddish ground, shaded with the very deepest blue, often without a trace of green.
Sheep, it is said, do not thrive east (that is, on the Sydney side) of the Blue Mountains, till as far north-wards as the rich valley of the Hunter. As for cattle, I was told that the quickest and easiest way to get to a cattle station from Sydney was to take a voyage of two days and two nights in a steamer to Brisbane, in Queensland, and thence go a day’s journey by railway to the Darling Downs. For New South Wales is a vast country, and distances from place to place very great. Railways as yet do not extend far. Roads are very bad, seldom metalled, often only tracks. Inthe valley of the Hunter, on the great northern road, a road as much frequented and as important as any in the colony, I have seen twenty oxen yoked to one dray to drag it through the mud up a hill which was neither very steep nor very long. The coaches in New South Wales, as in Victoria, are all of the American kind, low and broad, resting on very long leather straps stretched taut longitudinally, which are the substitutes for springs. An ordinary English coach would very soon have its springs broken and be upset. They generally have (as they need to have) very good drivers, many of whom are Yankees or Canadians. The bodily exertion and endurance required for a long coach journey are not small. The ruts and holes made by the narrow wheels of the drays are often so deep as to make it advisable to leave the road for a mile or two, and drive straight through the bush amongst the trees. Often the best way of getting through a bad place is to go at it at a gallop. Everybody holds tight to save his hat and his bones, and when the difficulty is passed the driver looks round at his passengers and asks enquiringly, ‘All aboard?’ The horses, rough in appearance, possess wonderful strength and endurance. In spite of all difficulties, four horses will generally take a heavy crowded coach six or seven miles an hour, which is quite as fast as it is pleasant to travel on leather springs and on such roads. They are often used at first with little or no breaking-in. One day the driver of a mail coach meeting oursstopped us to ask if we had seen anything of his two leaders. They had broken loose from the rest of the team, he said, during the journey the night before, and got clear away, splinter-bars and all, and he had not seen or heard of them since.