VI.
TASMANIA.
Theheat, and drought, and dust of summer begin to make Melbourne unpleasant by December. In Sydney and Adelaide it is hotter still, and in Queensland there is almost as great heat as in India, without all the elaborate Indian appliances and luxuries for making it bearable. Christmas holidays and lawyers’ Long Vacation are just beginning. Hence there is a considerable migration about this time of year of Australians on the mainland who may be ailing or wanting a holiday, to the cool fresh air of Tasmania; and well filled steamers go about twice a week from Melbourne to either Launceston or Hobart Town, and once a fortnight from Sydney.
Our long narrow vessel, crowded with passengers and incommoded with an unpleasant deck-cargo of two or three hundred sheep, which makes her roll like a porpoise, steams swiftly away from Melbourne down the dirty sluggish Yarra-Yarra, between flat marshy banks, more malodoriferous than the worst parts of the Thames in its worst days. By sunset we are out of Port Phillip and in Bass’s Straits. Next morning wepass high jagged rocky islands, rising abruptly and precipitously out of deep water; then through Banks’s Straits, which seem to be a funnel for collecting the wind, for it is almost always blowing hard there from the west; and in the afternoon we glide suddenly out of the rough water into the serenest and calmest of seas, protected from the fierce westerly winds by Tasmania, the east coast of which lies a few miles off to starboard, a pretty peaceful shelving shore, with bold mountains rising up in the distance. Another night at sea, and we wake up at daylight as the vessel is rounding the fine precipitous headlands of Cape Pillar and Cape Raoul, with basaltic columns like those in the cliffs of the Giant’s Causeway, and is entering Storm Bay with its wooded islands, narrow-necked peninsulas, and deep inlets running far into the country, till the eye is puzzled to discern where our course will be, and to distinguish island from coast. Two hours more and the estuary of the Derwent is reached, broad, but as we proceed wholly land-locked by hilly shores, rising gently from the water’s edge, and green with cultivation near their base, their summits dark with trees and half-cleared bush. I can think of nothing to compare it with unless it be the Lake of Thun without its snow mountains, or the Dart at its widest near Dartmouth; but both are bad comparisons. Soon after, the dark blue-grey wooded mass of Mount Wellington faces us, rising up four thousand feet and more; and on the sloping shores of the little bay below it lies Hobart Town, with wharves along the water’s edge,and water deep enough for a man-of-war within two hundred yards of the shore. Sea, river, mountain, forest, farm, and city, are before the eye almost at once. It is the most beautiful spot for a city I ever saw in the world.
The steamer comes alongside a deserted looking wharf, occupied only by two or three drays and carriages, and a knot or two of lounging, ill-conditioned porters; and with the picture of busy, thriving, restless, eager Melbourne fresh upon our minds, we land, to find ourselves in what looks like a pleasant, neat, old-fashioned English country town, perhaps twice as large and straggling as Dorchester, Ipswich, or Bury, but ten times more stagnant, dull, and lifeless. A greater contrast in every way to Melbourne could hardly be conceived. At Melbourne most people seem to be there only for business, that they may accumulate and save money and retire with it to England. Of Hobart Town the most conspicuous and characteristic feature is the number of small, quiet, comfortable houses in small, pretty, gay gardens, such as men with incomes of from 300l.to 800l.might inhabit, and which look like the abodes of retired sea-captains, merchants, or tradesmen. The House of Assembly and Custom-house, the Post-office, and other public offices, are very well placed in a central position not far from the wharves—handsome, stone-faced, neatly-finished buildings, free from attempts at florid ornamentation, and though small and unpretending, more appropriate, and in better taste, than many of the public buildings ofMelbourne or Sydney. They were planned and begun, most of them, in the days when there was any amount of convict labour available, and have been finished since, at heavy cost owing to the dearness of labour, by the help of loans, the interest of which presses somewhat heavily on the colony. But so seldom is anyone to be seen passing in or out of them, that one doubts at first sight whether they can be in use.
The streets are almost empty. Nobody looks busy. Nobody is in a hurry. Converse with anyone about the state of the Colony, and the worddepressionis one of the first you hear, and it will come over and over again till you are weary of it. Different people mean different things by it, and feel the tendency from prosperity to adversity in different ways, but few or none dispute the fact. Elderly ladies lament the old days when there was more society, and a more abundant supply of soldier and sailor ball-partners; merchants and tradesmen the time when Hobart Town promised to be the emporium if not the metropolis of Australia. It is seldom indeed that anyone can be heard to speak cheerily of the present, or hopefully of the future of Tasmania. Nor is the colony suffering merely from one of those temporary checks in the advance of prosperity, which always occur from time to time in young colonies,—such as, for instance, the wide-spread ruin in Queensland, which was mainly, and so strangely, caused by the commercial panic in London, and which is already passing away. Tasmania (or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was originally called—the name waschanged to efface, if possible, the very memory of its identity and existence as a convict colony) is the oldest next to New South Wales of the Australian colonies, and till twenty or twenty-five years ago was still, next to it, the most important. Now it is thrown completely into the shade by Victoria, South Australia, and even by Queensland. For the last fifteen years the revenue, the trade, the shipping, and the general prosperity and enterprise of the colony have been steadily decreasing. And although the population has increased, the increase has been due solely to the excess of births over deaths, and not at all to immigration—the number of persons who have left the colony during this period being considerably in excess of those who have arrived in it, in spite of very large sums spent out of the public money on immigration—and hence the population of adults has remained nearly stationary, while only that of old people and children has increased. A settler of twenty or thirty years’ standing, especially in the southern part of the island, can perhaps point to only one or two houses in his township which have been built since he came.
It is not difficult to account for this state of things. Wool first, and then gold have been the two principal causes of prosperity in Australia. Of gold there is not sufficient quantity in Tasmania to pay for working it. Wool it does produce according to its capabilities; but it must not be forgotten that the island is comparatively small (roughly, about as big as Ireland), that much of it is thickly timbered or for other reasonsuseless, and only a small proportion available for pasture. What there is has been almost all taken up and made the most of, for nearly thirty years past. And so mere excess of numbers drove men, and young men especially, away from Tasmania, to become Squatters in Victoria, and in younger colonies where there was more room for them. For the most profitable sheep-farming, according to the present system and condition of things, is that which is done on a large scale. Ten thousand acres is a very small station. I have heard of as much as seven hundred thousand acres, the size of a large English county, belonging to one cattle-station in a remote part of Queensland. It is said that sixty thousand sheep is about the best and most economical number for a Squatter to have, that being large enough and not too large for him to manage, with the assistance of his overseer and shepherds. And sixty thousand sheep take a great many acres of the thin thirsty Australian grass to keep them alive through the summer droughts.
It is true that Tasmania with its excellent and temperate climate is especially suitable for agriculture. According to the government statistics the average produce of an acre of wheat is about eighteen bushels. In England the average is said to be twenty-eight, in Ireland twenty-four, and in France only fifteen and a half.[5]And bearing in mind that in a new country the cheapness of land and dearness of labour and of capital renders farming almost of necessity slovenly, this maybe considered a comparatively large yield. But there are great difficulties in the way of the agriculturist. Most of the rich chocolate-coloured soil in the north is very heavily timbered, and requires much labour to clear it. It is seldom indeed that farming is made remunerative, even by settlers who have had many years’ experience, except in the immediate neighbourhood of a large town. For it must be remembered that the population of an Australian colony is very small, comparatively, and its market soon glutted; and that as the town and manufacturing population is small compared with the country population, the tendency is always in the long run rather towards over supply of agricultural produce, and consequent low prices. Now and then of course there is a violent reaction; but the great fluctuation in price is of itself an evil and a difficulty. The crop that pays best one year may, however abundant, be a loss the next.[6]A farmer needs something of the judgment and experience of a merchant and of a speculator to enable him to succeed, as well as skill to grow good crops. And often capital is thrown away upon a soil which is too poor to repay cultivation; for it is difficult to form a correct opinion of the value of land which has never been cultivated. One often passes fields which have been abandoned, and in one place I saw a whole valley left to return into its original condition of bush.
Tasmania has suffered, too, more perhaps than even New South Wales, though in a way that is less likely to be permanent, from the abuse of the convict system. I say theabuseof it, for looking upon transportation to Australia as a whole, I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that it has been a great and conspicuous success. But poor Tasmania was very hardly treated. In 1840—rashly and needlessly as Lord Grey thought[7]—transportation to New South Wales was suddenly stopped, and the whole stream turned on the unfortunate island. For many years after this the convicts far outnumbered the free population. In 1845 there were 25,000 male convicts in the island, and the country was simply a huge penal settlement without even sufficient room for expansion, the moral sink and sewer of England. It is true that in this colony the convicts were seldom able to marry or leave children, or settle on the land, as they did in New South Wales, and that the great majority left the country as soon as their sentences expired, so that considering the immense number brought there, the number now remaining is surprisingly small. It may also be true, as is asserted (though I hardly believe it), that crime measured by the number of convictions is now not more frequent than in England, in proportion to the population. Still in one way or another they have left a curse behind them. The settlers were demoralized by the assignment system, which while it lasted gave them almostthe power of slave-holders. A convict could be hired for little more than the cost of maintaining him; sometimes in consideration of leisure allowed him, he even paid money to his master in addition to his services; and the master could get him even punished at the public expense by sending him to the nearest magistrate with the written message, ‘Please give the bearer twenty lashes, and return him to yours truly.’
Free labour, as is always the case, suffered from contact with forced labour. The convict taught the free labourer many bad lessons, and one of them was how to do the least possible amount of work for a day’s wages. The accepted standard of a day’s work became a low one. Wages might fall, but such labour was dear at any price. All this time the Home Government was spending about half a million annually in the colony, and was making roads, harbours, and wharves, on a magnificent scale by convict labour; so that the cost was not felt in taxation. Government originated everything, planned everything, paid for everything. An unhealthy artificial condition of society was produced which tended to enervate all classes, and left the colony ill prepared to stand against, or profit by, the events which followed. In deference to the general outcry at its gross abuse, transportation was suddenly stopped, and with it ceased most of the annual half million from England. At this time Victoria had for some years past been attracting from Tasmania many of the most enterprising and adventurous of its population, but from the moment when the wonderful news ofthe gold came, it seemed as if none would be left behind but old men, women, and children. Most would indeed have done better to stay behind and cultivate the land. For wheat rose till it sold for five to six pounds a quarter in Melbourne, and hay at from twenty to forty pounds a ton. A great trade sprang up with Melbourne in corn, timber, vegetables, and fruit, and there was a hope that Tasmania would establish itself as the granary of Victoria. But year by year this trade has been diminishing, and now American flour and even American timber undersell Tasmanian in the Melbourne market. Some fortunes indeed were made in those years of gold, but they were comparatively few and small, and those who made them have for the most part invested them elsewhere, or been content to live quietly on the interest of the money rather than risk their capital in doubtful enterprises.
For there more than elsewhere in Australia—as much, perhaps, take the whole year round, as anywhere in the world—do scenery and climate invite retirement to country life. It is the Capua of the Australias. Snow scarcely falls except to ornament the summits of Mount Wellington and of the distant ranges of the uninhabited and almost unexplored west coast. The frosts are seldom fatal even to the tenderest plant. The stifling hot winds of the continent are cooled by a hundred miles of sea before they reach the island. Nor is the air stagnant or sultry. Hot as the sun is by day, the summer nights are cooler than in England. English trees, flowers, and fruits, flourish with a rareluxuriance, side by side with pines from Norfolk Island and New Zealand. Geraniums blaze out in huge pink and scarlet masses, growing in almost wild profusion. The English sweet-briar has been introduced, and has spread of itself till in its luxuriance it has become a noxious weed to the farmers. Fruit follows fruit so fast under the early summer sun that apples ripen almost before strawberries are over. It is in such profusion that it lies rotting on the ground for want of mouths to eat it. Life is long here, and you seldom see the pale, thin, dried-up, prematurely old faces and lean figures of the other colonies, which almost make one doubt whether the English race was meant to live in climates such as those of Queensland and of South Australia. Sometimes indeed it seems as if the climate weretooCapuan, too little compelling to exertion. Invalids bask in it, rheumatic people find in it relief from pain, and the consumptive live out the full tale of their days. But the strong and active seem to lose something of their vigour, to ride where they used to walk, to walk where they used to run, to drink stimulants when they used to eat. Children seem to grow up less hardy for want of the nipping of the keen frost and the bitter blast of the English east wind to compel them to activity and to make repose for half the year, except by the fire-side, impossible.[8]