VIII.
TASMANIA(continued).
I mustrecall even the little I have said in a former letter in dispraise of the Tasmanian climate. In the valleys it may be too mild and enervating, but there are other parts where it is very different.
Go in the coach, for instance, for sixty miles along the high road to Launceston, which is still the main artery of the settlement, having been made in the old times, with enormous expenditure of labour, by huge gangs of convicts, clusters of whose ruined and deserted huts are still to be seen. It is by far the best road in all the Australian colonies, the only one (as far as I know) over which a common English stage-coach can travel, and travel too at the rate of ten miles an hour, including stoppages. Then mount your horse, leave highways and civilisation behind, and ride westwards along a pleasant grassy road to the foot of a long wooded range, or tier, as it is called. You ascend perhaps a thousand feet and find yourself, not on a ridge or a mountain, but on a high table-land, in a new and uninhabited country and in a new climate. It is the lake country. Five large lakes, from one tothree thousand feet above the plains, are ready to pour down their waters and irrigate the whole island into a garden. The sun’s rays are as powerful as on the plains, but the air is fresh and even keen, and at night for the greater part of the year it freezes sharply. Snow falls often as early as March, the first month of autumn. There is no fear of relaxing heat there. The grass is greener, too, and feels softer and more springy to ride over. A continuous fence is on each side of the track; for the country, though uninhabited except by sheep and their keepers, is most of it purchased and fenced now. But it is a dead-wood fence of unhewn trunks, with the smaller branches built up horizontally upon them, and therefore not an eyesore, like the ugly straight post-and-rail fences; and, moreover, capable of being easily cleared by a horse at any weak place. Eight miles of this, and a large and beautiful lake startles you by shining not a hundred yards off through the trees, and, almost at the same moment, another lake on the opposite side. Between them is a log hut, the first habitation passed for twenty miles, and out of it appears a fine, active-looking old man, whose privilege it is to stop passers-by for a ten minutes’ chat. In Tasmania it is not safe to ask a strangerwhyhe left home, but you may always askwherethe old home was, and the old man is soon full of Oxford, and the boats, and boat races, and knows (alas!) which boat has been winning at Putney of late years. And so you may go on day after day. It may be there is nothing strikingly magnificent inthis part of the country, but there is not a mile of the track that is not charming in its way. Only you must not lose it. For some distance the fences of the sheep-runs are parallel to and indicate it, and there is no fear of getting wrong, but afterwards you need some one who knows the country for a guide. For it is seldom that there are landmarks to go by. Once off the track, and there is nothing but the compass or the sun to steer by, and nothing bigger than a hut to aim at. One gum is like another gum, and one wattle like another wattle, and you may come back to the same spot without recognising it. And there is nothing to eat in the bush, unless by chance you come across a kangaroo, or an opossum, or a kangaroo-rat, and have the means to kill, and the inclination to eat, such food. In old times this part of the country was a favourite haunt of bushrangers, but want of food obliged them to make frequent incursions into the more settled districts, and in all the Australian colonies bushranging was, for this reason, easily extinguished, where it had not the connivance of some of the settlers. In New South Wales there must be a taste for preserving bushrangers, for they still flourish there.
Or if you prefer a more settled country with farms and townships at distant intervals, cross the broad deep Derwent by the steam-ferry at Hobart Town, or, taking the other road, by a ferry three or four miles higher up, of which a burly Yorkshireman has charge. The first road winds round a high hill, and the second mounts it by a gradual continuous ascent of threemiles. The cleared land with its yellow harvest or green, growing crops, and neat dead-wood fences and bushes of luxuriant sweet-briar, and perhaps a garden and green English trees, make a foreground to a forest of gum-trees and wattles, which has been thinned but not cleared by fire, or by cutting a deep ring through the bark of the trees, for the sake of the scanty brown grass underneath, which their shade and growth make still more scanty. The bare white trunks and boughs of these slaughtered but still standing trees stand out grim and gaunt against the sky for many a year, till a pitying gale or a fire at their roots brings them to earth, making weird and ghostly dells such as Gustave Doré loves to draw, and too often needlessly caricatures. The road descends again upon a township. There is generally something dreary and repelling about the townships in all the Australian colonies. They are like little bits cut out of a modern English manufacturing town, and more than half killed in the process. Bare square-built brick houses, without a scrap of flower-garden or shrubbery, or any heed given to prettiness or neatness. Almost every tree cut down for perhaps a mile round; dust and glare; an inordinate number of public-houses, none of which care much to take you in unless you are a large consumer of strong drinks. They look like places intended only for business, and not for homes at all. And so you pass through a township, if possible, without stopping, and this time three miles on you turn aside across pleasant meadows to where, halfhidden by St. Helena weeping willows and by a thick high hedge of brilliant yellow broom, stands a hospitable house. There is another house, the prettiest of wooden cottages, or rather bungalows, where you would be equally welcome; but you must leave it for another time, for if you stopped everywhere where you were tempted, you would not travel far in Tasmania. The road henceforth is in general only a track cleared, where it is necessary, amongst the trees; and you and your horse’s feet rejoice in the absence of all pavement save nature’s own. Day after day you ride on through the pleasant bush, meeting or passing or seeing some one perhaps once in two or three hours. Bright-coloured parrakeets fly about in flocks; the blue, red, and green Rosella parrot is the commonest bird of any in the bush. Now and then, though rarely, you may see a white cockatoo raise his yellow crest, or a kangaroo or wallaby jump across the track, or a mild-eyed opossum looks foolishly at you from a tree; or you stop to kill with a whip or stick a snake basking by the roadside, as you are bound to do if possible, for they are numerous and all poisonous. Of sounds there are few. Sometimes in the early morning the native magpie fills the air with the music of his delicious dreamy note, or later in the day the jackass utters his absurd laugh. The bush is monotonous perhaps, and the foliage and vegetation grey and brown and scanty, and the ground often bare instead of grassy, as in moister climates, but here there is constant change of hill and valley, constant pleasant surprises of new scenery, such as onemeets with only in travelling for the first time in country undescribed by tourists and guide-books. If it spoils the interest of a novel to be told the plot beforehand, does it not ten times more spoil the enjoyment of new country to be forewarned of its surprises of scenery, which are the most delicious morsels of our pleasure in it? And along this east coast you seldom or never need a guide, for, wild and lonely as it often is, the track is always clear enough. You may, if you please, take a cart and luggage, for it is astonishing how carts and their horses learn to dispense with roads. A horse that is used to it thinks nothing of drawing a cart over a fallen trunk a couple of feet in diameter, going at it obliquely, one wheel at a time. But as tall hats, and black coats, and crinolines, and bonnets are about as necessary on a bush journey as an Armstrong gun or a pair of skates, you will probably dispense with any such useless incumbrance, and take only a change of clothes in a valise on the pommel of your saddle or behind it, or a mackintosh-covered bundle of eight or nine pounds weight strapped neatly to the off side of your side-saddle. You are free then, and can go or stay when and where the spirit moves you. And to anyone with the faintest idea how to use pencil or brush, the sharpness of outline, the clear blue of the distance, the brilliant sunshine and strong defined shadows, offer temptations to stop at every turn, and let your horse stand quietly grazing—‘hung up,’ as the phrase is, to a tree—while you sketch at leisure. You spend a day or two perhaps on Prosser’sPlains, a level tract lying charmingly amongst bush-covered hills; or turn aside to Cape Bougainville with its lovely views of the coast and of Maria Island; and you pass close along the calm shore of Oyster Bay, the sea a deep Prussian blue with broad dark lines of shadow, and beyond, closing in the bay, the bright purple island and peninsula of Schouten. A lovelier coast, and a less frequented, it would be hard to find. Hobart Town is seventy or eighty miles off, and there are no made roads to communicate with it. Formerly a small steamer plied thither, but somebody must needs start an opposition steamer, and so they ruined each other, and both ceased to ply, and now there is only a small schooner. Every fifteen or twenty miles, or oftener, you come to cleared land, often studded with stumps two or three feet high in the midst of the growing crops, and to the house of the proprietor generally built all on the ground-floor, and all the prettier and more comfortable in consequence, and almost always with a deep verandah, which gives it shadow and character. Properties are small and produce little, compared with the huge stations of the other colonies, and there is little prospect of acquiring great wealth. But, on the other hand, there is not the same Damocles-sword of anxiety lest a drought or a fall in the price of wool should bring inevitable bankruptcy and ruin. Here up the country one does not hear so much moaning and groaning as in the towns about the depressed state of the colony, which after all is for the most part only an unduehurry and impatience to get rich. Cannot people be satisfied with a fair profit on their own capital, without borrowing at eight or nine per cent., and expecting a large profit over and above on that? There may be too much wealth in a country for comfort and happiness, as well as too much poverty, if people would only believe it. Few things disturb honest industry and breed discontent more than the contemplation of too easily and too rapidly acquired fortunes. Those that were made in Victoria and elsewhere soon after the discovery of gold have left their demoralising and disheartening influence on all Australia. Without a large income, Arcadian luxury of climate, scenery, and quiet may be enjoyed in Tasmania. It is the perfection of retired country life. If there is in general not much wealth, there are almost always comfort and plenty. It does not matter that Hobart Town is some days’ journey distant, and that a day’s shopping is an occurrence that seldom happens once a year—sometimes not once in many years—for almost every want of the household is supplied from its own resources. And a traveller from the old country, utter stranger though he be, meets with a welcome so cordial, so hearty, so completely as a matter of course, that to one used only to the highways of European travel it bears a tinge almost of romance, and the memory of days thus spent in perfect enjoyment gathers a halo about it which no words of mine can describe.
Or ride out of Hobart Town, where, perhaps, towards the end of the summer scarcely any rain hasfallen for two or three months, and follow the new road to the Huon, over the side of Mount Wellington. As you ascend, on a sudden it is cold and damp, and the road sloppy with wet. The vegetation, too, has changed. The gums are ten times the height of those down below, straight gigantic trunks, rising fifty to a hundred feet without a branch. People speak of trunks seventy feet in circumference twelve feet above the ground, but I have seen none so large as that. I am afraid to guess at their height: the mightiest European trees are dwarfs in comparison. Splitters are at work felling them and clearing away the underwood, and the blows of the axe sound and echo as if in a banqueting-hall of the gods. It is sacrilege to fell them; but the gaps made open out a view far away over the tops of the trees below to the mouths of the Derwent and the Huon, the jagged coast-line, the distant capes and breakwater-like islands, conspicuous amongst them, long, narrow Bruni, where Captain Cook landed nearly a century ago; and over all the south wind blows cool and fresh from the Southern Ocean, for there is nothing but sea and ice between you and the Pole. Further on the road diminishes to a narrow track, cut amongst the huge gums, and through an undergrowth of almost tropical vegetation so dense that within twelve miles of Hobart Town it remained till a few years ago almost unpenetrated. There is the sassafras, with straight, tapering stem and branches, and fragrant myrtle-like leaves; and fern trees, drooping their large graceful fronds from thickbrown or red stems, from six to thirty feet high; and bright purple nightshade berries as big as cherries, and shrubs without end, and it seems almost without names, except such barbarous misapplications of English names as are in use to distinguish them, till the Heralds’ Office of the Linnæan Society gives them title, rank, and lineage—all growing in a dense mass, and baffling even the all-penetrating sun. Then the track descends a little, and it all vanishes, and the ground is dry as before, and two hours’ more riding brings you out suddenly upon the bank of a fine river, the Huon, as wide here and deeper than the Thames at Richmond. A short distance off along the bank are a roughly made landing-stage and a ferry boat, and you mustcooéin the best falsetto you can (if there is a lady of the party she will probably do it better) till the ferryman hears you and comes, and with some trouble persuades the horses into the boat, and punts you across, and gives you directions how to thread your way through the scrub till you emerge upon a corduroy road and upon the township of Franklin. It is the chief township of the district, with some six hundred inhabitants, exceptional in being the perfection of a country village, stretching along the base of a hill two or three hundred feet high, and fringing the river bank and tiny wharf with its neat wooden houses. The grass is green, and not burnt up and brown, as it is in most places long before summer is over, for here there is moisture enough all the year round. The people here grow apples, and send them off by shiploadsstraight from the wharf to the all-devouring Melbourne market; and they make shingles for roofing, and shape timber, and saw up the famous Huon pine, which they often have not even the trouble of felling, for the winter floods wash it down from almost unpenetrated bush. Though it is not thirty miles from Hobart Town and civilization, yet westward for seventy or eighty miles to the sea is no human habitation, nothing but bush so thick, so devoid of anything to support life, that of the convicts who from time to time in years past escaped into it from Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast, scarcely any got through alive. Much of it needs only clearing to make fine agricultural land. There are millions of acres to be bought by the first comer at a pound an acre. Yet, out of sixteen and a half million acres which Tasmania contains, only three and a half are alienated, and on this small portion, including the towns, the population is less than one person for thirty-five acres!
Can any country be more perfectly delightful? Once mounted (and, rich or poor, there are few who cannot possess or borrow a horse of some sort in Tasmania) one is free with a freedom known only in dreams to dwellers in the old country of hedges and Enclosure Acts, where to quit the dreary flinty roads is to trespass and to break the law. One’s first reflection is on the astonishing folly of humanity in neglecting to inhabit it. Surely there must be many wearied with the crowd and strife and ugliness ofEnglish cities, who, brought to a virgin forest such as this, would be ready to sing theirNunc dimittisin thankfulness that it had been permitted them to exist in such beauty, to have their dreams helped to the imagination of the glory of the new heavens and the new earth. Probably, however, not one person in twenty, take England through, would have his or her enjoyment of life materially increased by living in a free unspoiled country, with abundance of space and air, or indeed in natural beauty of any kind; and doubtless a large majority at heart prefer the shops of Oxford Street, for a continuance, to the most beautiful scenery imaginable. And it may be there is something of a true instinct in them, such as was in Sir Robert Peel when (as the story goes) he used to stand at the top of Trafalgar Square, and looking down over the dreary, ugly, blackened buildings, and the busy colourless crowd, say it was the most beautiful sight he ever saw. For after all men are better than trees. Besides, rich people are too comfortable to change their homes and their hemisphere, and poor people must go where they can find bread as well as beauty. So till the country is found to provide a cure for impecuniosity as well as for less tangible and less generally recognised requirements, it must remain, I suppose, nearly as it is.
The common, and no doubt correct, reason given for its failure in this last respect, is that it is essentially an agricultural and not a pastoral country, owing to the quantity of timber, and that wheat is too cheap torepay even a moderate profit on cultivation. Wheat is unnaturally cheap now, because the popular cry in Victoria lately has been for protection, and the Victorian Government, to conciliate it, and to nurse their ‘cockatoo’ settlers, has put a duty on corn and other produce which, to a great extent, drives the Tasmanians from their natural and legitimate market. Certainly, at the present low prices, a farmer employing labourers finds it difficult to make a living. In some places there is land thrown out of cultivation, looking dismal enough. Nevertheless, for common agricultural labourers there is plenty of demand; a labourer can earn at least three times as much as he can in the southern counties of England. In wages he gets at least ten shillings a week, out of which he has hardly anything but his clothes to buy; for in addition he has rations, consisting of twelve pounds of mutton, twelve pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of tea; and a log hut, and a garden if he likes, rent free. Fresh comers from England sometimes do not know how to consume so large an allowance of meat, and ask to have part of it changed for something else. But before long they fall into the universal Tasmanian custom of eating meat three times a day, and learn to be glad of it all. At shearing time a large number of hands are wanted at once, and wages are much higher. It is a common thing for a man after shearing is over to give the cheque he has earned, perhaps for twenty pounds or more, to the keeper of the nearest grog-shop, and bid him supplyhim with liquor there and then till it is all spent. If a man will only keep from drink he can save money enough in a few years to buy land and support himself till his first crop is reaped. He has no labour to pay for, and like the peasant proprietors of Adelaide, who this year have been sending their wheat to England, may succeed where an employer of labour fails. There is land along the north coast rich as any in the world, but heavily timbered. The settler gets rid of the smaller trees and underwood simply by setting it on fire, and sows his seed in the ashes, and gets a fine crop without even ploughing, leaving the larger timber to be felled as he has leisure for it. There are harbours all along this coast, and a railway is about to be made, and before many years are over it will take a heavy tariff to keep the produce of this fertile district out of Melbourne market.
And after all, at the worst, is it to come to this—that a shrewd, strong, hard-working man, with plenty of land of his own, cannot live unless markets and prices are favourable? Need an Englishman starve now, under circumstances in which a Saxon or a Dane of a thousand years ago would, after his fashion, have luxuriated in plenty? If so, it is the custom of excessive subdivision of labour, the growing incompleteness in themselves of men and of households, which has spoilt us for settling in a new country. Such subdivision of course increases production in a highly civilised country, but it may easily become a source of mental and physical degradation to the producer.Sheffield knives may be the best and cheapest in the world, but we have all heard of the Sheffield emigrant girl, who, landing in a new colony, and seeking employment, confessed she had never been taught to do anything whatever, indoors or outdoors, butpack files. If wheat or other produce will not fetch a profit, cannot a man grow less of it, and instead keep sheep and poultry to supply himself with meat, and on such a soil as this grow perhaps grapes for his own wine, such as it is, and even possibly flax for his own linen? And if his wife be of the right sort for a settler’s wife, and not of the file-packing sort, there will be few things for which he need go to a shop. Such a state of things, if possible, and not Utopian, has at least this advantage, that it saves the wife and young children from the great bane of peasant proprietorship, that of becoming like mere unthinking, routine-following beasts of burden on the soil, as we see them too often in Belgium and France, with no other thought or employment but how to put the utmost possible pound of manure on the soil, and how to extract from it the utmost bushel in return, to the neglect of all things else on earth. At any rate, it is hardly to be believed that English agricultural labourers will not, sooner or later, have spirit to attempt to solve the problem for themselves one way or another, rather than rest contented with their present condition. The present generation may hope to live to see them asking twice or three times their present wages, and, if unableto obtain them, departing for a new, and, for them, a freer country.
Unfortunately, some working men at home have singularly unpractical ideas about freedom. At least so it appears to us out here at the antipodes, where home questions assume such different relative proportions, and the monthly mail, with its tale of political strife, is so often a weariness rather than a pleasure to read. Franchise questions are trifles compared to land questions out here, and we cannot see the point (even after allowing for rhetorical flourish) of people choosing to call themselves serfs because they have not got votes. It is difficult to understand what conceivable meaning those men could have attached to the word ‘freedom,’ who considered that they were asserting or claiming it by parading the streets at the summons of a Beales. To us, such an exhibition of franchise-worship—if that be what it means—under such a high priest, appears like lingering round a golden calf, when a promised land lies waiting to be claimed.