Duringthe first week I was in Melbourne I came across a notice in the daily paper among the police-court news, stating that “Percy So-and-So, aged two years and four months,” had been “arrested on the charge of being a neglected child.”
“What a brutal country!” I thought. “Can it be possible that any human being can be found so hard-hearted and inhuman as to condemn a helpless child to any form of punishment, because by some tragic fate it has missed both a mother’s love and a father’s care?” Globe-trotters get all sorts of Adelphi-like impressions such as this, and then return home to rave in print about the barbarities and inefficiencies of other countries. Luckily for the correction of my ideas, however, I was to spend more than eight years in learning to understand this particular country a little better.
Very soon I began to realize that the most fortunate thing that can possibly happen to a child whose parents, or other guardians, persistently neglect or ill-treat it, is that it shall be thus summonsed; for then the State steps in in the place of its naturalprotector, and provides a decent home for it, food, clothing, and later on employment. In 1908 there were in Victoria 5,477 such wards of the State, and in all truth, however, the Government of Victoria may have been criticized for its management of other affairs, nothing—absolutely nothing—but good can be said of it in its position as foster-parent to this immense family. The 5477 children of whom I speak include 3,711 boarded out, 710 placed under supervision with friends, 748 maintaining themselves in service or apprenticeship, 306 in institutions or hospitals, and 2 visiting relations! By which it will be seen that a relation in Australia is no more overflowing with the milk of human kindness than in any other country. Among the newly-made wards of the State in 1908—numbering in all 1,240—the fathers were held to be blameable in 457 cases, and the mothers in 57; many of the heroic army of char-ladies being, I suspect, among the 457 who struggle bravely to support their offsprings unaided. There were 677 cases in which parents were held to be blameless; in some the family was too large for the father to adequately support all his children, while in others the father was dead, or an invalid, or in a lunatic asylum.
When the father is dead or an invalid, or has forsaken his wife, and the mother is known to be a hardworking, respectable woman, and yet unable to wholly maintain her family, then some—or all—ofher children are made wards of the State, and boarded out to their own mother, who receives five shillings a week for their support; and in addition the help and advice of the State in all matters relating to their welfare: help that continues during the time that it is most particularly needed, which is when the youngsters have finished their schooling, and are ready to be put out into the world, with the need of a firmer hand than their mother over them.
If the children are committed to the care of private people, or institutions, these have to be approved of by the Governor in Council, five shillings a week being paid for each child boarded out to private people; unless it should be that they are voluntarily adopted, which is very often the case. I have not the faintest idea how many children are yearly adopted from hospitals and other institutions in Melbourne, but, judging by the number of cases I myself have come across, I should imagine it to be very large. In some ways people seem more humane, more primitive in Victoria than in England; certainly they are less easily reconciled to a childless home. They do not have large families, but if they have no child at all it is very common indeed for them to adopt one. Certainly I never personally knew anyone of wealth and good position in England to adopt a nameless child; but in Victoria I can bring to mind several cases in which this has beendone, and the utmost care and love lavished upon it, while it never for one moment hears a single word that can cause it to doubt that the father and mother, of whose love it is so sure, are its own.
Over the little boarded-out baby the supervision is most especially strict. The whole administration of the Infant Life Protection Act, which was passed in 1890, and amended in 1907, has lately been taken out of the hands of the police, and put under the care of the Department for Neglected Children, to whom power is given to establish maternity homes and infant asylums. Any person who boards an infant must be registered; male or female inspectors must be permitted free access to the house, and allowed to examine the children, and give any necessary advice or directions, while no one is allowed to board out a child without first applying to the secretary of the Department, stating what amount he or she is prepared to pay weekly for its maintenance, no baby less than twelve months old being allowed to be boarded out under ten shillings a week, and all payments having to be made through the secretary. If these payments fall into arrears for four weeks the child becomes a ward of the State, while a penalty of £100, with or without imprisonment, is incurred for receiving or making payment for any infant contrary to the regulations of the Act, while it further provides that no illegitimate child—or boarded-out child—under the age of five years,who has died in such registered home, may be buried without a certificate from a coroner, justice, or member of the police-force.
That the need for such reform was pressing is shown by the vital statistics of the State for 1908; the number of illegitimate births being 1,790, and the deaths of these children under one year of age 354, the proportion of deaths among illegitimate children being between two and three times as great as that among children born in wedlock.
There are several foundling hospitals and rescue homes for women in Melbourne, but of these I am intimate with the working of but one—which for sheer humanity and complete realization of the claims of motherhood, apart from any other consideration, beats everything of the sort that I ever came across—and this is the Infant Asylum in Berry Street.
A girl who has got into trouble may apply at this asylum six or seven months before her hour of trial has come. She is taken in, fed and clothed, and—most merciful of all—given work to do, nobody, excepting the committee and matron, ever knowing her surname. When her time comes she goes to the Women’s Hospital for her confinement; and after that is over returns to the Home, to help in the general work, and to nurse and care for her own child. The value of this is scarcely to be estimated. The poor little mite is unfortunate enough as it is in possessing but one palpable parent, and being bornunder the stigma that—even in so free a country as Australia—is still attached to the completely innocent. If it is then taken from its mother and put straight into a foundling hospital, that mother’s whole memory of it will be so mingled with a nightmare of horror, and pain, and shame, that all she wishes for is to be able to forget its very existence; and so the poor mite is doubly orphaned. But I defy any mother—however reluctant—if she has but a spark of good in her, to suckle her child for a year or more, and not only feel bound to it by both love and duty, but capable of starting life again none the worse, and in many cases much the better—because more completely a woman—on account of its existence.
When the mother leaves the asylum, where she may stay for as long as two years, she is found a situation, and expected to contribute a percentage of her wages to the support of the baby who remains in the Home; unless, as is very often the case, she is allowed to have it with her; many people being quite willing—particularly in up-country districts where servants are scarce—to take a woman with a child, who as often as not becomes the pet of the entire household.
I have often seen mothers on Sundays at the Victoria Infant Asylum, who have called on their day out to see and have a romp with their children, who are all the dearer to them from the fact of themany small self-denials which they must practise to contribute to their support. To use the adjective “lost” or “fallen” to these women would be sheer nonsense. Personally I think they are infinitely and incomparably more moral than wives who sell their birthright by deliberately refusing the responsibilities of motherhood; while between them and the men whose name the children would have borne—had they entered the world with all honour and circumstance—there is no possible comparison, while it is due to the asylum where, in their blind terror, they first took refuge that these mothers have gained courage to stand upright, and face life as self-respecting women once more.
I feel I cannot write too strongly about this; I feel very strongly about it, and for the women on whom all the burden alone presses. Mr. Foster Fraser speaks of the number of illegitimate children in Australia. He says nothing at all of all the splendid measures that are being taken to combat this great source of misery, nor the facilities which are afforded, if marriage takes place later than it should do, for legitimizing children. Nor, though he compares the dairy output of Denmark and Australia, to the great disadvantage of the latter, does he extend the same comparison to a more vital matter, to wit, the percentage of illegitimate births—at which he is apparently so horrified—which is in Victoria 5.8, and in the Commonwealth 6.2, against10.1 in Denmark; while in Sweden, another Northern country, it rises to 12.3. Even in Puritanical Scotland this percentage is 6.5, while it seems to me that for a country where for many months of the year the smaller houses and cottages have by evening become almost stifling; where the only possible relief for young people, who have no gardens of their own, is to be found either in the streets or public gardens, or on the easily reached sea-beaches, that the percentage is wonderfully moderate, that of Portugal, where the climatic conditions are much the same—though the young women are allowed far less of the liberty which I have heard so condemned in speaking of Australian life—being 11.4.
Education in Victoria is both free and compulsory, and yet the position of the State, or public schools is perfectly different from that of the Council schools at home. Once I was living in a little West Country town in England where the Rector, by sheer force of brains, had raised himself from a Board school to the position which he held. He was a most cultivated and charming man, but the matter of his education was never forgotten. Whenever he did anything his parishioners did not approve of—as even an archangel must have done, certainly he would have been no archangel if he had not—there was a shrugging of shoulders, and the inevitable remark: “Well, what can you expect from a man that’s been at a Board school?”
In Australia the fact of a boy being educated at a State school tells against him no whit unless it be among the very few rich people who like to consider themselves exclusive, idle people, of no consequence whatever in any affair of moment. Many families who are but moderately well off send their boys to the State schools while they are quite young, as at home they would send them to a Preparatory. When they reach the age of thirteen or fourteen they then enter them at one of the big schools corresponding to the lesser public schools at home, such as Wellington, Clifton, or Cheltenham. In Melbourne the principal among these schools are the Church of England Grammar School, the Presbyterian College—a beautiful grey stone building, covered in the autumn with a mantle of crimson creeper, and presenting more the appearance of a dignified old English dwelling-house than any building I have ever seen in Victoria—and the Scots College.
There is nothing higher than these—or need be, for the type of boy they produce, and the education both mental and physical, that they supply is most admirable. If an English Duke settled in Melbourne and wanted to send his son to school, it is between these three that he would have to choose; where his son’s class-mate might be a boy who had received his primary education in a State school, absolutely no slur whatever being cast on him on that account. Boys in England are the most arrant snobs. Theyare inoculated with it from the cradle. They must not play with the coachman’s children because they are common; they must not—if they belong to what is known as “the county”—play with the local lawyer’s boys or the grammar-school boys because they are “cads,” which reminds me of a fine definition of the two words “cad” and “snob”: “cads are the people we won’t know, and snobs are the people who won’t know us.” I find very little, if any, tendency of this sort in the Australian boy. A fellow is good at games or a “rotter,” and who his father and mother are, and whether he was or was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, does not concern his companions in the very least. It is not that the boys are any better or any worse than elsewhere; it is simply that they have not heard all the talk about position that is constantly ringing in the ears of an English lad. When I took my small boy home there was so much objection made to him playing with what were called “common children” that I was forced to try to explain to him the difference between the classes, with the effect that his whole ideas of right and wrong became hopelessly muddled; the discussion, as I remember it, running somewhat like this:
“But why mayn’t I play with them, mummy? They are good boys.”
“Yes, dear, but they are not gentlemen.”
“Why, what have they done?”
“Oh, they have done nothing.”
“Well, is it their daddies or their mammies have been naughty?”
“No, dear; they are quite good. It’s only that they are not in the same position that you are.”
“Is it because they are poor that you don’t like them? ’cause we are poor too.” And so on, till the only way out of the difficulty—the true invidiousness of which had, by years of absence, grown to seem as completely mysterious to me as it did to him—lay in imposing upon him the meaningless command to “do as you are told, and ask no questions.”
Among the State schools in Victoria there are bursaries and scholarships available for the secondary schools and universities; while for any boy to climb from the position of a State school pupil into that of Prime Minister is simply a matter of capability and grit.
Continuation schools have been established in Melbourne, Ballarat, and Bendigo for the purpose of giving a preliminary training to teachers, which must afterwards be followed by two years in the Melbourne Training College, when they are free to be appointed to sixth-class positions as State-school teachers, at an annual salary of about £120 for the men teachers and £100 for the women.
These positions are often by no means the tame affairs that they are in England, particularly to thecity-born boy or girl. Lately there has been much agitation about the question of decent dwelling-places for State-school teachers in country districts, some of the statements made in the daily papers by these teachers, about two years ago, being little short of revolting. Often the young teacher boards out with some neighbouring “cocky” farmer and his wife, and, at the best, this may be better than sharing a wooden shanty with flies and white ants, where water is always scarce, and company of any sort an impossibility. But at the worst—and the worst of these “cocky” farmers’ homes are sordid beyond any word—it may prove pretty well unendurable, particularly to a young creature who has grown accustomed to the bustle and gaiety of college life; while the mental picture that rises to my mind of the sort of meal set out before a nerve-racked and wearied teacher in some such place, with the sickening slough of half-melted salt butter, the black, drawn tea, the indecent slab of boiled beef—the whole dotted with flies as thickly as a cake with currants—justifies completely the desperate assertion made to me by one delicately pretty young school-marm “I’d marry any man in the world who had a refrigerator.”
But this is the darker side of the picture, though in any case the life of a teacher in a back-block school is one of “alarms and excursions” till time and experience have mellowed it. Still, in all butthe loneliest places there are certainly compensations. People are hospitable and friendly; distances are ignored; there is generally someone to lend a horse to the teacher, particularly if she be a girl and a good sort, and someone to teach her to ride, too. There are dances and picnics, moonlight picnics being rather a speciality in Australia, and plenty of wholesome fun. People will work incredibly hard on their farms up in the back blocks, particularly if they go in for dairying; but with all this they have a most extraordinary faculty for enjoying themselves, and there is many a morning when the young school teacher will ride home with an admiring escort none too early to start morning school, after dancing gaily all night. Australia is a good place to be young in, particularly when riding through the Bush in the early dawn; the clear air sweet with the scent which the dew brings out from the young gum-leaves and sweet briar; a good horse under you—and “possibilities” of divers sorts riding by your side; while the Bush dances, where there are as often as not six men to every girl—the men dancing together when they can get no better partners—would be a revelation to any English girl used to balls at home, where, though all the arrangements are far more elaborate, partners are few, and it is the men, and not the girls, who can pick and choose.
In some country places the dwellings are so scattered that the question of schooling becomes avery difficult one. In thinly-populated districts, if an attendance of twenty children can be secured, a full-time school is established; under this number the part-time system is arranged for, one teacher attending at two different schools on alternate days. In other scattered districts payment is made to assist parents in conveying their children to school; in any case a great many ride, and it is no uncommon sight to see three or four youngsters astride upon a sturdy pony, with their school-bags slung over their backs. Often when the attendance is not sufficient to warrant the Educational Department in erecting a school-house, the parents will club together to build a room, at a very small cost, as they provide the labour themselves; while the importance which is generally attached to education is proved by the fact that there are some 600 State schools in Victoria, with an attendance of between twelve and twenty pupils only. In still more sparsely populated districts a teacher goes from house to house within a certain radius, giving a lesson, setting tasks, and correcting them at his next visit; while in New South Wales travelling schools have been established, where the teacher moves about, gipsy-like, with a van, which is at once his home and school, fitted with blackboards and books and all the impedimenta necessary for housekeeping—far less, it must be owned, than would be required by an English man or woman of the same class, for theyall seem, somehow, to travel lighter out here, and both the personal and domestic machinery of life is far less complicated:—tea, flour for a damper, sugar, matches, a blanket, a waterproof sheet, and a billy-can, and there is little to fear save thirst—and incidentally bull-dog ants. In Melbourne one may, with a settled income at one’s back, live as complicated and luxurious a life as is possible in any other city. But, on the other hand, when one has learnt the two great lessons of how to do without and how to put up with, one can get more fun for less money here than in any other country that I know of. The rural school-teachers may—and probably do—have a much rougher time than they would in England, but beyond a doubt they have a brighter and healthier; while their life is certainly far removed from the utter drabness which characterizes the existence of the ordinary middle-class man or woman at home.
Essentially Australia is, as I have said, a country for the young. The children are thoroughly well looked after, while as they attain to a larger growth they look after themselves in a way that sometimes makes one squirm. One of the first things that I noticed when I landed was that, in the hotels and coffee-palaces, the girls walked into the dining-room in front of their mothers. They took up the menu-card, examined it, and made their choice before handing it on to their meek parent. Forthe mothers are meek, there is no doubt about it—the fathers being generally too busy over their own affairs and the making of money for their families to count for much,—and I often look at them in wonder, trying to imagine the modern, breezy, self-assertive young woman of the present day ever being trained to such a perfection of self-obliteration by her daughter.
Partly, I believe, this supremacy is owing to the fact that there seems no stationary class. The people are always going up or down in the social scale. Those people who are rich, and in a way influential, to-day, are the people who served in the shops, dug the gardens, or washed the clothes of those who were rich yesterday; while the whole of the populace seems to slip about from one position to another like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. A great many of the people one sees in public places are “jumped up.” They had no chance of any education when they were young: their hands have been roughed and their shoulders bowed with toil during their youth and early middle age. Education—the mere getting of a certain form of stereotyped knowledge—riches, and what is known as “smartness,” are worshipped by the young—particularly those of the towns—in Australia. They are not ashamed of their parents because they are what might be called “common”; they are simply impatient with them because they are slower intheir old-fashioned methods, and not so “smart,” so quick in the up-take, as themselves. In the main I think the children are very loyal to their parents. The lack of courtesy, of patience, and consideration is all fullyen évidence, but I have never heard the sullen or bitter complaints against the tyranny and misunderstanding of fathers and mothers in Australia that I have heard in England. Apparently—and actually—the young people go their own way, and take the lead and tender their advice on every matter with a freedom unknown to even the most modern youth in the Old Country; but at the back of it all there is a real sense of comradeship.
In a great number of cases the Australian mother has had a bitterly hard time in her youth, and yet there has lingered in her nature something eternally young that enables her to enter with the greatest zest into her daughter’s enjoyment, by which she seems, indeed, to attain herself to a vicarious youth. You do not hear so many references to “the good old days” as in older countries, or the assertion, “I didn’t go to dances when I was young; why should you?” “I didn’t have any pleasure or amusement; why should you expect it?” etc., etc. On the other hand, you frequently hear the assertion, “One is only young once, and I am determined my children should have a gayer time, a better education, better clothes, and a better chance than ever I had.” It all goes too far, ofcourse, and the children get an inflated idea of their own importance, as I once heard a Melbourne woman say: “The Australian baby begins to suffer from a swelled head at two months.” There is very little of parental discipline or of the machine-like regularity of nursery life—the machine-like servants stolidly going their inevitable round of daily duties; the machine-like, precisely punctual meals; the awful ceremony of the trivial daily round that bulwarks one’s earliest days at home.
In any but the largest households a proper nursery is unknown; in any case the youngsters have most of their meals with the grown-ups. Besides, domestic affairs are usually in the same kaleidoscopic condition as everything else. The servants leaveen blocbefore the Cup, or because some important ceremony in another State holds out to them the chance of larger wages as waitresses or cooks. Then the mother turns to and does the cooking; and the father brings back cold meats and salad-stuffs from the city, and helps wash up the dishes in the evenings, unless there are visitors to supper—and nothing of any sort ever stops the constant entertaining that goes on—when they are expected to do their share; the children run the errands, and dust, and sweep, and enjoy themselves thoroughly; adjourning with their parents, in a mass, to a restaurant for meals when they all get tired of the work, till a fresh domestic staff is procured.
The entire household is on a more intimate footing than at home. The children know all about Bridget’s young man, and will give her a hand with the dishes on any one of her many days out; or, when her temper is good, wander at their own sweet will in and out of the kitchen, with incessant demands for what is known as “a piece”—a liberal slice of bread, butter, and jam.
The Australian—both child and adult—devours enormous quantities of jam, particularly up in the back blocks, where butter is almost an unknown luxury; so much so that the cattle-men, shearers, and shepherds get their internal machinery completely ruined in time by the quantity of inferior boiled sugar and fruit that they consume, and which they have inelegantly christened “rot-gut.” But, still, one cannot live on boiled beef and damper alone, and as tomato sauce and jam are the cheapest relishes obtainable, every camping-place and hut is littered round with an inevitable medley of sauce-bottles and tins.
Everyone loves “lollies”—as they are called out here, the word “sweets” only being applied to what we generally call “puddings,”—and Melbourne and Sydney are the only towns where I have ever seen grown-up people gathered in absorbed and wistful groups round the windows of the confectioners’ shops, both men and women, discussing the good things on show there as engrossedly as theywould stocks and shares—or hats; this characteristic being so marked that I was actually told to observe it by the captain of the ship I travelled out on, who himself hailed from “the land o’ cakes,” while a young man here very rarely goes to call on a girl without an offering of a box of lollies, apparently not being so overweighted with a sense of his own sufficiency as he is at home.
It is extraordinarily difficult to rid oneself of old ideas that one has imbibed in one’s bread-and-milk days: to lose that inherent English faculty of taking “short views,” which Sydney Smith recommends as a virtue, and look forward sufficiently far to realize what does really matter; what is, and what is not, of lasting importance.
At the best the independence of the Australian child—or “kid,” as it is inevitably called—is piquant and rather charming; at the worst it is intensely irritating. Still, unless it resolves into rudeness, which in a child or adult is always repulsive, the idea of the deference due to age, merely as age, is after all only the result of our own idea of our own self-importance. If there ever was a youth that wanted to see “the wheels go round” it is the Australian youth, who must know the why and wherefore of everything. There must be a distinct reason, beyond mere years, to persuade him to show any deference to anybody, and some reason, beyond that of youth, for humility on his own side. Theman who has kicked the greatest number of goals that year at football, or made the most runs at cricket, or ridden the Cup winner; who is palpably successful in business or pleasure—thatthey can understand, but little else;heis “a bit of all right,” but the merely fictitious value of age they “have no time for,” as they would say.
All this tends, no doubt, to an ugly, offhand manner, a disregard of the claims of mere intellectual superiority and spiritual beauty, and a crudity of outlook. Opinions formed by the young on those of more mature and well-informed people than themselves, and handed down to them mellow with age and honour, tend without doubt to a greater refinement, but hardly, after all, to a greater vitality. Gradually I am growing to believe that to form even erroneous opinions of one’s own is better in the end for one’s character than to take them obediently like pap from a spoon; and the Australian child, gay and light-hearted, quick in resource, independent and self-assertive, is certainly more suited to the needs of the young country in which its lines have been cast than the more “set” product of the English nursery. “We” do this or that, says the Australian child, reckoning itself as part of a double commonwealth of home and State.
“Mummy and me, we are the boss of this place,” I once heard a young man of five—whokept house with his widowed mother—declare, no trace of arrogance in his voice, simply making the assertion. “I thinkwehad better marry again,” he remarked once, deeply concerned over the fact of his mother having to go out to work at one time when she was ill, and—even to his childish eye—manifestly unfit.
Somehow, in spite of all their crudeness, their irrepressible larkiness, and their precocious love-affairs, there is something essentially sound and wholesome at the bottom of the Australian youth, omitting, of course, the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom which are much the same everywhere. Certainly, the boys, if they pass safely through the almost inevitable trip West and attendant gold-fever, make most excellent husbands, steady-going, hard-working, and considerate; while the girls settle down into good wives and devoted—often too devoted—mothers.
In Australia the child’s future is generally very carefully considered, and the better class of parents will make immense sacrifices to fit it for some definite trade or profession. I believe a very large percentage of the girls marry; the amount of marriages in Victoria in 1908 being the largest total ever recorded—a sign apparently of prosperity, for between 1891 and 1894, which was a period of commercial depression, the number of marriages fell 20 per cent.—5,650 more persons having beenmarried, allowing for the increase in population, in the last five years than between 1899 and 1903, despite universal suffrage. Naturally, though, now that there are so many more women than men in Victoria, the girls’ chances are fewer than in the old days, when very much the reverse was the case, yet, in spite of all the talk here, as elsewhere, of the hopeless superfluity of women, there, somehow, seems to be a sweetheart for every girl.
Still marriage is not regarded as a profession—though, on the whole, the girls are better equipped for it than at home, knowing far more of the value of money, cooking, and general house-work—and the daughters equally with the sons are prepared for some other and more certain mode of life. Men and women can be trained in Melbourne for almost any profession for which they show a bent, though there is no doubt that a year or so in England, Germany, or France is of immense advantage to them, particularly in medicine.
One would imagine that in a country still so largely in the making there would be ample room for any engineers, both electrical and mechanical, that it could produce, and ample facilities for training them. But people complain that their sons can reach a certain point in their engineering training, and find no one to carry them on any further; while even for those who are most thoroughly trained and capable the openings are veryfew, and a number of the most promising young Australian engineers are yearly passing out of this country to America.
There is little doubt that very soon, in all other professions as well as that of engineering, the scant population will mean a serious lack of employment for all the upper classes. The young doctors and dentists want patients; the architects want houses to build and towns to plan; the surveyors and engineers want new country opened, new railways, new mines; lawyers and land agents want clients. It is always the same; the educated few must depend for their living on the more or less uneducated masses, the people engaged in that class of labour for which numbers are required. A township with a bank-manager and clerk, doctor, parson, and lawyer would fare badly if it could show only an equal number of factory hands, labourers, or masons. And yet this is what education and prosperity seem likely to do for us, a tendency which the present influx of immigrants is too small to counteract. There must be more people to doctor, to bank for, to legislate for, and to teach, in proportion to the number of highly-educated young men and women who are now being prepared at school and college for professional life or clerical duties.
It seems to me that too many people have made money in Victoria; that too many have risen from the ranks of the manual labourers, with sons anddaughters whom they naturally wish should go even one step higher than themselves.
There was an old dairyman, I once knew, not far from Melbourne, who kept a dozen or so cows, milked them himself with the help of a boy, tended them himself, and drove his own carts to town. He was a peasant to the backbone—and that’s no bad thing to be, better by far than any half and half—a delightfully genial old son of the soil, while his wife, who had probably never been in bed later than six any morning during her entire life—unless she was ill—and would not have dreamt of expecting the duties of her tiny household to be done by anyone but herself—washing, cooking, sweeping, scrubbing, making, and mending from dawn to dark—was just the same homely sort of old body as her husband. Still the boy who helped the old man with the cows was not theirs, but a mere, ever-changing hireling. Humble and contented as the old couple were, they yet cherished a wider ambition for their son, who had in truth nobly fulfilled their expectations; passing from the State school on to college; training for a doctor; walking the hospitals; passing all his examinations with flying colours; and, finally, with the old man’s help—help that had been made possible only by infinite never-ending toil—bought a country practice, and took his place among the professional classes.
A thing like this is very fine. It stirs one’s pulse,and warms one’s heart even to think of the self-denial of those two dear old people, and the gallant success of the boy. But there is another side to the question, a prosaic, matter-of-fact side. If there had been ten sons, instead of one, there would have been no money to spare for extra education; there would have been less care possible, less thought, less food for every individual member of the family, and therefore less chance of development. The ten sons would have become milkmen, dairy-hands, labourers, or artisans—and a good doctor have been lost to the State. But still, which is the most needed? Now when the vast empty spaces of the Continent are crying out for population and subsequent cultivation? The small families, which are the almost inevitable rule among the better sort of people—the weak-minded and undesirable breed as freely here as elsewhere—may be for the good of the individual, but they are certainly not good for the State, where quantity is required more than quality—apart from that of good sound bodies—and where there is already almost too much “cleverness.” The art, the literature, the general quickness of comprehension, the business methods, they are all clever—they are not profound or intellectual; neither are they plodding. They are the outcome indeed, for the most part, of the adored only child, whose every word and action is a miracle. Australia needs larger individual families, producing a deepersubsoil of hard-working people, without too many ideals, while as the mother of a nation it needs to open its arms, to enlarge its sympathies, and to get rid, once for all, of that “precious only child in the world” idea by which it seems each year to grow more completely engrossed—I mean the “Australia for the Australians” ideal.
Melbourneis not a cosmopolitan city. It neither lies in the direct route of globe-trotters, who will, indeed, often miss the whole of Australia and pass on to New Zealand or the Pacific Isles, nor does it possess many natural interests or curiosities. It is a level-headed place, too, and, though it amuses itself well enough, it does not cater for that class of people who will search the world over for a new sensation or exotic pleasure. If strangers come to Melbourne it is for the most part either to find work and carve out a new future for themselves, or to escape from the responsibilities and duties which they have pressed too insistently on them in the Old World. In either case they find that their aim is best accomplished by identifying themselves as much as possible with the life of the country and people, which is, indeed, so vital and compelling that it quickly robs them of all national characteristics, so that they, or at any rate their children, very soon become completely Australian. It is very difficult for us, who in England count time by centuries, to realize during how very few years Australia has existed for thewhite man, and for how still shorter a period Victoria has had a separate existence to New South Wales. Indeed, only in the year 1855 was it declared a State, while but twenty years earlier, in 1835, Melbourne was for the first time occupied by white people.
That any country at the most between seventy-five and eighty years old—the average life-span of one man—should have formed out of the conglomerate masses of different classes which have poured into it from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and in a lesser degree from France and Germany, such a truly distinctive race is scarcely believable, while if it has a little outgrown its strength, if it does suffer at times from that complaint which its own people designate as “swelled head,” is it to be wondered at? For there it is, in spite of all, an indisputable fact, a nation in all its characteristics, and not a dependency.
That there must be some strange, ever-moving yeast at work, either in the climate or the circumstances of life, which shows an overpowering tendency to draw all within its grasp; to work on it and with it; to amalgamate it into the general mass, I can quite believe; and this yeast is the spirit of Australia. Something stronger than the entire pull of home apron-strings, of gratitude, of association, and of blood.
It all tends perhaps to the loss of individuality,but individuals are not needed in a new country; what is needed is one great family which will present as a whole an unbroken phalanx to the world. Exceptions, however brilliant, do but break the ranks; no one has time to bother with, or be bothered by them. One must keep step with the regiment, or one will be left behind to die of privation.
Yet it is, on the whole, that very necessity for ever pushing onward, for hewing wood and drawing water to keep this marvellous new household going, that makes Melbourne such a cruelly hard place for the merely intellectual man or woman, the writer, the artist, the poet, the dreamer. Between the upper and nether millstone of the merchants, professional classes, and landowners, and the artisans, mechanics, and labourers, they are crushed so closely that their very existence is apt to remain unnoticed. It is no good blaming these people; it is not their fault; it is part of the rough, crude necessity of nation-building; we start by giving a naked man a shirt; there is no time to worry over people who offer to hemstitch frills for it, even gratis, while he is shivering.
All this is why I say Melbourne is not cosmopolitan. Sydney, older and more settled in her ways, perhaps also more languid from the effects of her relaxing climate, is far more so, but in no city anywhere near its size have I heard foreign languages so little spoken as in Melbourne. The newcomer mustlearn to speak with the tongue of the people, not they with his; in more senses than one. They have no time for “frills,” and as the spirit of the strange country is usually stronger than the homesick spirit of the stranger within its gates, it is the stranger who gives way. That is if he be anything but Irish. Generally speaking, Australia can do little with the Irish; as some old proverb has it: “You can’t hang soft cheese from a hook on the wall.” The summit of the ambition of most Irish colonists is to attain to the dignity of keeping a public-house. There are exceptions, of course. I have in my mind’s eye, as I write, a family of whom the two brothers hold the highest position in Melbourne—but it is not often the case. There is a free and easy feeling about the life which appeals to Pat. He has few ideals; he is too easily contented, and inclined to let things slide. Sad to say, if he loses these faults he loses most of his virtues with them. The successful Irishman in Australia is for the most part something of a toady—hard, and mean, and shifty. I am half Irish myself, and I have the strongest affection for the people. When I first landed in Melbourne I caught eagerly at even the hint of a brogue, or Hibernian name; but only in the poor, the struggling, the unsuccessful, did I ever find the true spirit of Ireland.
I remember driving home from dinner one night, and as I paid the cabman on my return home,remarking his brogue, I asked him how long he had been in Australia.
“A matter of twenty years,” he said, and he had come from such and such a place; in fact, his father, and great-grandfather, and progenitors for centuries back, had, as I found, worked for my own mother’s people, and his joy was unbounded at being able to talk over the old days and the Old Country.
Nearly a year later I was dining at the same house, and a cab was sent for to take me home. My host went out to interview the cabman, and describing my destination, asked if he knew it, whereupon, with a rolling brogue, all of honey and butter, came the answer: “God Almighty, shall I ever forget that. Sure I drove a young lady there from County Galway.”
It is odd how the brogue holds in Australia, so that it is as pronounced in people that have been out here fifty years as if they had landed this week. If you are ever in Melbourne, and want to hear such a round rich brogue as you will seldom chance on, even in the Ireland of to-day, drive out to Heidelberg, one of the loveliest of Melbourne’s offshoots, and ask to be directed to Flynn’s Hotel, a matter of a mile or two farther on. There you will find a little old man and his wife—if they are still alive, and God grant they are, for they are true Irish, warm-hearted, hospitable, and altogether delightful—whose language and outlook on life arestill absolutely typical though they landed in Melbourne as much as fifty-five years ago, when the town itself was all canvas or weather-board, and a thickly-wooded creek ran down to the River Yarra, where the cable trams now rush through Elizabeth Street, one of the principal thoroughfares of the whole city.
Still, in spite of all their undeniable cleverness and charm, the Irish do not, as a whole, attain to any high or permanent place in the country, even their adherence to their national characteristics representing a fluidity of will rather than a real spirit of patriotism; they will run into any mould so easily, and out again so easily, that no change is permanent. There is about them none of the passionate desire to remain unchanged, which was shown once in a young Frenchman’s answer to my question, as to whether he liked Melbourne. “I am afraid,” he said; he used no adverb, but the intonation of his voice expressed all he meant in that one word “afraid,” “that I may grow to like it.” He felt the yeast working; he felt himself being chewed up, as it were, in the hungry and compelling maw of the new country, and all that was French in him fought desperately against the process. The Chinaman, of course, remains mysterious, immutable, unmatched; perhaps that is the secret in some measure of his unpopularity, but his unchangeableness lies in his decision, and the Irishman’s in his want of it.
Still, there is one place in Melbourne where people seem to revert back to their original state: where the Frenchman, the German, the Greek, the Italian, and Russian throw off the garment of Australianism, and eat, look, and speak like men of their own country, glorying in it, too. It is as though a little patch had been cut clean out of Soho, andplanté làin the midst of this prosaic city. The great and good of Melbourne do not know of its existence, by which I mean the great-and-good in family masses, all hyphened together; but still, there is potential greatness to be met with there, and active goodness, and light-heartedness, and charm—that undefinable, subtle quality in which a balance at the bank mercifully plays no part. And yet it is only a little Italian café—what, in my ultra-English days, I might have called “a common little café.”
When first I knew it, it was situated in a low, straggling building in a rather undesirable street. There were two private rooms in front where the family lived. I know that because I once penetrated into one of them to see a sick baby. Between these was a narrow passage leading to a large room, with one long table running down the centre, the kitchen, at the door of which one usually lingered to have a few words with the hostess, and a smaller dingy room lying to the side. At the end of the long room was a window, and a door opening into a courtyard, patched with yellow light and velvetyblack shadows; and shaded for the most part with a trellis of vines, most delicately and deliciously green in the spring and early summer, and great dark casks, which had come filled with red wine straight from Italy, the very blood of the country, and about which the old host was for ever busied with a funnel and many bottles, for white or red wine was supplied free of extra charge to all the customers. After a word with the two daughters, busy over the long table at which never more than thirty were served each evening, one moved out, if one were early, as I always took care to be, to a bench in the court yard, pleasantly cool even on the hottest evening to sip one’s vermouth in the open air, and chatter to the old host, who would answer back in slow difficult English—only answering, volunteering no remark. Not that it mattered, for the peace, the sense of having slipped all the burdens of the day off one’s shoulders on to that single meagre door step, made one discursive; besides, a little later on there would be so many people talking, so much to listen to, that one’s chance would be gone.
Then the other guests began to arrive, nearly all men. An Italian, the first violin from the — Theatre; the sub-editor of one of the “dailies”; a Member of Parliament; a man with a scar on his neck, who was said to be an ex-Turkish brigand; a few art-students—one with inordinately long hair, smoothed back from his forehead and cut all to thesame length at the back, so that when he grew excited over a song and shook his head violently it all fell forward, like a lion’s mane, well below his breast. Then there was a Frenchman, who owns a vineyard a little way out of Melbourne, a German merchant, and a Greek youth, but these were only a few. For the most part one could fix the people who frequented this little café with no particular place in life, their nationality alone being uppermost. There were usually a few girls, mostly of the quiet, rather wan, student type; saving one vivid creature, of immature years and marvellous maturity of intellect, whose knowledge and self-possession made one feel like a crude child; and who, if her lines had been cast in a wider sphere, and she had been less weakened by admiration, might have developed into one of those mysterious women that—at all times—have been found wire-pulling in court and diplomatic circles, even from the very back of the throne itself, using their wit and their charm with an equal sureness and audacity.
Long before the last glow of day had faded from the little vine-shaded yard—where in a swinging hammock slept the much-pampered, and continually fêted, “Bambina” of our host’s married daughter—the long, low room inside had to be lighted by the hanging kerosene lamp, which threw the corners into an even more sombre darkness, shining but dimly from the very first through thethick veil of cigarette-smoke, the incense of modernity.
The talk was incessant, and perforce loud, for everyone joined in any topic which interested them, no matter how far down the long table it might have originated. If the young Frenchman on your right was discussing grape-growing in Champagne with the little wrinkled Spaniard, with waxed moustaches, on your left, of whom such stories were told—mon Dieu, bombs, and what not!—and their talk became wearying, what so natural as that you should join in with the fierce argument on the Fiscal Question that a member of the Upper House might be holding with the little Socialist, whose blood-thirsty policy, as exemplified by his scarlet tie, was for ever warring against his warm Irish heart; “The little Doctor,” as he is fondly called by all the habitués of the place, for he is decidedly a better, or at least a safer, physician of the body than the mind, while it was declared that the all-adored Bambina owed life itself to his care and skill.
A young Greek talked of Athens, all aglow with fervour, to an art-student, one of those completely self-sufficient girls who are so typical of Melbourne. “But why?” I heard her ask, with the curiously drawled accent—also typical, both question and accent; for the Australian likes all his or her information to be precise—with the reason thereof plainly showed, and “but why?” is their crushing responseto most of our enthusiastic eulogiums on the old order of things.
They were an interesting couple from their very contrast; but soon, one’s wandering attention would float away on a new stream, piloted most likely by one of the best talkers of the place, a man who was so completely soaked in the spirit and literature, the eternal glow and romance, of the Renaissance, that it seemed always as if Providence must have merely amused itself, in some freakish fit, by reincarnating him here in Melbourne. An atom of imagination was enough, and one was away with him, wandering through the sun-soaked street of old Florence. Gone the babel of talk and laughter, the queer, eager faces, the shabby coats, the bright eyes, and erratic locks; the kerosene-lamps and long table, with its vases of artificial flowers, all quite gone, as one paced demurely by his side, between the stately palaces and high, huddled houses. Peeped through the interstices of the iron gates into the great courtyards at the orange-trees in their stone vases, where such or such a great Prince lived, or such a lady—of a beauty, ah yes! But as to morals—well, a shrug of the shoulders told all there was to be told with propriety. Stopped at this corner, or that, where such and such a party-broil took place, or stood agaze at so-and-so, who wrote those sonnets, or so-and-so who painted so divinely. Then pressed back into a deep doorway while Lorenzo himself—Lorenzo the Magnificent—swept past, with all his gay and courtly suite, to see how the new frescoes came on, which were to make that young Michael and his great master famous throughout the entire world, or so said Lorenzo, bracketing himself and the artist urbanely together. Such a whiff of perfume, such a rustle of stiff brocaded silks, and flow of silver laughter as they passed; then, with a sudden rasping sound, which brought one back with a jerk to the world of reality, the chairs were pushed back over the boarded floors; there was a crash of notes at the piano, and someone would begin to sing. Perhaps the heart-rending words and melody of “A wearing o’ the green,” perhaps the “Marseillaise,” or just as likely “Little Mary.” The coffee was brought, the table cleared. Delicately burning his spoonful of eau-de-vie over his coffee, the Frenchman on my right would throw out some words on Arragon that set my other neighbour aflame, and a hot argument would ensue, each man speaking his own language with a wealth of expletives and abandonment of gesture. Feeling the fiery breath flame on either cheek, and catching the eye of our old hostess who, the night’s work done, had joined her guests, knitting in hand, I would nod my response. For those eyes, so human, tolerant, and wise, said as plainly as any words could, “What children those men are! what ‘blaguers!’” then draw back my chair, and place it near to hers; when wewould talk, sober women’s talk—reasonable and profitable—of the cost of food under the new tariff, and how the spaghetti had been cooked in that fresh fashion at dinner. And if I asked the man to the right of that big man—the German there—for a little tarragon for the vinegar, he would surely give it, for he had a large garden, and then the Signora would present me with a bottle. And of the Bambina, what gave it that little cough—cigarette smoke! But he had breathed little else since he was born!
Someone would perhaps bang a fist down on the table, and fling the single word “separation” like a lighted torch among tinder, or the big German make bragging assertions as to the superiority of Goethe over Shakespeare. One caught the choicest morsels from that week’sBulletinwith which the art-students regaled each other, for theBulletinis the bible of the Australian Bohemian. Or the murmur of the perennial discussion on the Armenian question, in which the big Turk ensnared all newcomers; less effective than it might have been owing to the fact that in moments of excitement he forgot all the little English that he ever had, and reverted to his mother-tongue, which no one else at table could understand. But all this was mere sound and fury, leaving our little oasis of quietude quite untouched. Then an immense man, who looked like a Portuguese, but was in reality a half-casteChinaman, would most likely draw his chair up to mine, and join in our talk of the Bambina, with some strange lore regarding the souls of children, and that little moment when they remember all of the life they have lived before, while the old woman dropped her knitting on her knee and listened open-eyed, till he drifted off to other subjects—art and literature for the most part. He had never been out of Australasia, and yet there seemed to be no historical spot in Europe which he did not know intimately, not a half-forgotten verse that he could not finish for me, not a writer whose works he had not only read, but whose place in literature and whose influence he clearly realized. And then sometimes he would quote Chinese poetry, accompanying it with a running translation which was a delight to the ear.
One evening I remember some insolent, loud-voiced remarks on a “White Australia” were flipped down the table in his direction, but he only shrugged his great shoulders. “We shall see,” he said; “after all it is the best who win.”
It always seemed strange—I write in the past, for, though the little cosmopolitan restaurant is still in being, the old people have relinquished their share of it, and it has changed its quarters, thereby losing some of its indefinable charm; it seemed strange, I say, to come out of such an atmosphere into the wide, dreary drabness of Lonsdale Street, so nearlyrepellent, indeed, in its entire lack of expression or soul, that often enough we would turn aside toward Little Burke Street, to soak ourselves afresh in that “something different” towards which we are all for ever striving.
Long ago I wrote for a Melbourne paper an article on “Lilly Bulke Street”—which, with the cosmopolitan café, was the only possible hunting-ground for “something different” in the whole city—that was translated and republished in a Chinese paper, giving me a sort of fame among its denizens; so that: “You the lady that like Lilly Bulke Street?” they would often say to me, with their slow smile of sympathy; and of appreciation, too, for a little thought, a little understanding.
Lately, since the opium laws have become so stringent, the people are shy of Europeans in their shops and “fan-tan” rooms; but only a little while before I could go anywhere I liked, and did so. Into the upper rooms of the few Chinese who were married to women of their own race, to talk, and sip tea, and play with the solemn-eyed children; even into the opium dens, where men reposed sleeping off the effects of the drug with a seraphic expression; or sat puffing, fiercely and wildly anxious for the coming of the rainbow-tinted dreams, which would, for a while, shut away from them all the hard and sordid realities of life.
After dark Little Burke is bordered, save for afew Chinese chemists’ shops and eating-houses, by jealously closed doors, through which not one single crack of light penetrates.
Some have a name above the lintel or a sentence in Chinese; and though one may not remember the name or understand the sentence, one soon knows what places are worth entering, and, pushing open the door, pass in, secure in the knowledge that though one may be met with the cold inquiring stare of many narrow inscrutable eyes—and a dead silence where there has before been a babel of voices—one will encounter no incivility, no insolent look or gesture.
Sometimes the dim, narrow door opens into an even narrower passage, or a little ante-room leading into a larger apartment, where in a recess, on a bracket—beneath which a joss-stick or so sends up a blue spiral of scented smoke—a plaster figure of Buddha, resplendent in gold and crimson, sits smiling his tolerant, far-seeing smile, out over the heads of thirty or more men all intent upon a game of fan-tan.
No European is allowed to play fan-tan with a Chinaman in Melbourne; so we must satisfy our lust of gain vicariously by watching the players, by putting ourselves in the place of first one man, then another, of all the throng who have placed their money on the table; or in the place of the loiterers who have lost all, and yet linger, gazing eagerly,with a hunger that nothing will ever satisfy, at the shifting piles of counters and coin.
There are two croupiers; one makes the stakes, entering them on a paper-pad with a long camel’s-hair brush, which he holds quite upright, and manipulates with a marvellous delicacy like a watchmaker does his tool.
The stakes are made—that is, every man playing pushes out in front of him what money he wishes to risk—maybe a sovereign, maybe a single threepenny-bit—each being entered in the first croupier’s book for fear of any dispute.
Then the second croupier shakes out of a basin a number of little greenish-white counters; and places over as many of them as possible a small metal cover with a stem to it. This done, he begins to rake towards him with an ivory paper-knife all the counters outside the cover, calling the numbers out loud as he goes. Soon all the loose counters are gathered aside, and no more bets must be made, everything depending now, for each man, on the number beneath the little cover, some having betted on the odds, some on the evens. For a moment or so the croupier hesitates solemnly, his delicately poised forefinger and thumb just touching the little brass stem, and looks around him. Feverishly the players push forward higher stakes, or stretch out eager hands to claw back what they have already placed on the table. There is an absolutely deadsilence in the room; it would seem as if nobody so much as breathed. The shiny yellow faces are immobile, as if cast in metal, only the narrow dark eyes gleam, and shift, and glance.
Then, with a gesture of infinite ceremony, the little lid is lifted, and the croupier begins to rake the counters towards him one by one with his ivory knife. After the first two or three are moved the more seasoned players, who know at a glance what remains, odd or even, push forward their money and move away from the table; or draw out of their sleeves fat notebooks wherein to enter their winnings; but for us the breathless charm holds to the very end; and, till the last counter is drawn aside, we cannot be certain whether it will prove to have been ninety-seven or ninety-eight—a hundred, or a hundred and one.
One little old man I particularly remember, in a faded blue blouse, who one night began by putting down shillings and florins, and always losing. If he shifted his stake from odd to even, from even to odd, the game shifted too, till it seemed like some malignant fate. But still he went on, each stake higher than the last; from half-crowns to ten-shilling pieces, and then to sovereigns, and yet there was nothing reckless in his air, none of the fevered excitement a European gambler would show. Only an intense, silent, agonizing anxiety, which seemed to set such a strain on him that all his muscles wererigid, and he appeared like a dead man, not moving at all, excepting to automatically push forward his stakes. One felt that his blood had ceased to circulate, that his heart no longer beat. Only in his hungry eyes did there seem to remain a spark of life burning fiercely beneath the wrinkled lids, which it veritably seemed to shrivel as with fire.
At last, in a sort of desperation, he pushed forward four sovereigns—all that remained to him in the world, I believe—placing them on the even. Never, never shall I forget his face as the croupier raked aside with his ivory knife the scattered counters, then very slowly—more slowly than ever it seemed to me—with the air of performing a sacred rite, lifted the little lid. For one moment the old gambler gazed as if spellbound at the compact pile which remained; gave one awful shudder, which shook him like a reed, from head to foot, and then, turning, slipped silently away among the crowd, God only knows where, or to what—to some world of shadows, I veritably believe, that world which is so near, so easily reached, for a few short hours by the magic pipe, or for perpetuity by the merest prick of a “bare bodkin.” Still I lingered, hoping past hope for the little grey man, till the very last counter had been drawn aside—one hundred—one hundred and one—one hundred and two—one hundred and three—odds!
From the gaming-houses we would drift into the eating-houses, and perchance sup on savoury ragout of duck, served in a porcelain bowl, flanked by lesser bowls, each filled with some mysterious odoriferous condiment, or venture daringly on eggs of an infinite age and most potent flavour; then pry into the kitchen, clean as a new pin, yet fragrant with all the mysterious scents of the East; peep into the great caldrons in which the brass-bound cooking vessels steamed and simmered; lift the green jade teapot out of its wadded case, and sip tea from one of the fragile little bowls, which are kept ever at hand in a basin of clear cold water.
In some of the gambling-houses men were playing a game somewhat resembling dominoes, the slips used being cut out of black wood, and marked with any number, up to twenty, of sunken red or white spots, the arrangement of which seemed capable of infinite variation; one slip perhaps showing four white, two red, and again four white; or two red, three white, two white, three red; the different colours crossing the dominoes horizontally, or diagonally, or vertically. A croupier holds all the slips and plays them, the lookers on laying the stakes; but never for one moment does he glance either at what he holds, or places on the table, for all the time his eyes are wanted in case some hand should be pushed out furtively to rearrange the stakes. His slim fingers, however, are never still; like lightningthey skim over the surface of the slips he holds, and he calls out the numbers as quickly as he plays them. It seems quite impossible to believe for a moment that he can really count them, as he brushes them with a butterfly touch; even if he did it is a mystery to any Western mind how he could differentiate between the colours, but the even monotonous voice never hesitates; though perhaps, all on one slip, there may be five or six different arrangements of dots, still his voice runs on without a break—“six red, four white, three red, one white, two red”—or again, “three red, four white, eight red, one white,” slip after slip dropping with a little crack on the table, as he enumerates their marking as quickly as the words can be formed.
I once had a long talk with a Europeanized Chinaman—who often acts as interpreter in the “Lilly Bulke Street” Court cases—on this subject, and he declared that it was only a matter of practice, that the old players know at once by the feel; the red dots are a little rougher than the white, orvice versa, while they count them by a sort of instinct, and yet the extraordinary swiftness of the process still remains, and ever will remain, perfectly inexplicable to me.
This wonderful sense of touch shows itself everywhere, in all that the Celestial does; in the swift, fan-like arrangement of a hand of cards—each suit holding four times the number of ours—in the waythe cooks in the eating-houses—stout high-priests, Buddhas of gastronomy—slice the infinitesimal shreds of pastry, for garnishing soup, with the most monstrous of knives; in the deftness with which the men in the herb-shops mince and shave and weigh the aromatic herbs.
These herb or chemists’ shops are fascinating. There are to be found remedies for every disease that flesh is heir to.
“That never was ther grievance hot ne cold,There was eke every holsome spice and gras—”
“That never was ther grievance hot ne cold,There was eke every holsome spice and gras—”
says Chaucer, in his, “The Assembly of Foules”, and so it is in Little Burke Street. Chiefly I go there for camphor—granulated like brown sugar, and of a greyish tint, but of such a perfume! toothpowder made of the powdered ashes of scented geranium-leaves; and an unfailing remedy for toothache, put up in minute fairy-like bottles.
The interiors of the herb-shops are dim and mysterious; the dispensers—ever busy chopping herbs and weighing spices—and the doctor in attendance all of the most placid and confidence-inspiring solemnity.
One learned physician I particularly remember, a new-comer and speaking “velly little Eenglish.” He was quite young, as far as years go, but his smile was the oldest thing I have ever seen. It seemed, indeed, as if since the days of Confucius he musthave let the corners of his mouth curve, indulgently and mirthlessly, over the furtive strivings and droll pretensions of humanity. Indeed, one feels that everyone in “Lilly Burke Street,” all the men in the china, the provision, and the herb-stores, the cook-shops, and gaming-houses, have existed since the beginning of time—till at last their souls have become indifferent alike to good and ill; life appearing, to each, but a task to be finished with, one bead in the necklace of eternity, an oft-repeated routine, where philosophy has ousted pleasure.
To pass from this sombre and leisurely old world in among the flashing lights and loud twanging voices of Greater Burke Street makes one feel as if one had been roughly flung through the centuries, regardless of time and space—just flipped off from the thumb and finger of some potent, all-indifferent Deity, leaving the greater part of one’s anatomy behind one in the process, and with it some subconscious memory, something far away and so deeply buried, beneath a weight of actualities that only in sleep, for the most part, can one catch a glimpse of its shadow, an echo of its voice; though among those inscrutable people, to whom a hundred years or a day are alike but a fragment of eternity, one may yet meet it face to face.
But the Chinamen do not all gather in Little Burke Street, nor do they confine themselves altogether to the making of that cheap furniture, forwhich they are equally well known and detested, for by them most of the market-gardens within easy reach of Melbourne are both owned and worked.
The Chinaman is the most careful and thrifty, the most loving, gardener in the world. It seems as if his little plot of land grows to be to him as his child—no matter how small it is. I remember once watching from my bedroom window, in one of the Melbourne Coffee Palaces of which the back overlooks Little Burke Street, a Chinaman in a blue linen coat, busied during the dinner hour, day after day, with some narcissus in blue bowls on a neighbouring roof, and marvelled at the infinite loving care with which he was tending them. As in the smaller so in the greater, though perhaps, on the whole, he is the truest artist in the minute. The Australian does not like the Chinaman; he resents his frugal ways—in a country that is certainly not frugal—his colour—his strangeness, his untiring, unswerving industry. You see a lot of white men working in the market gardens round Oakleigh and Garden Vale. They stop to talk with each other, to look round at the sky and distant landscape, to enjoy a few quiet puffs at their pipes; above all, to spit on their hands. The Chinaman never looks up, never stops from dawn to dark. He divides his ground into little oblong patches, with channels between to conserve every drop of moisture; he pampers the young weak plants, shading them from wind andsun with bits of sacking, boards, or slates; he loosens the ground unceasingly round them, and waters untiringly. I do not for a moment advocate Australians working in this manner; a man must sometimes straighten his back and look around him, must have something of a soul beyond early tomatoes and green peas; but still there is very much that he could be taught from the alien in his midst; and it is a schoolboy’s poorest excuse not to learn from a master because he is personally distasteful to him.
Australia, particularly in its up-country places, needs more vegetables most terribly, if it is to escape at all from the scourge of cancer which already lays such a heavy toll on its inhabitants; and if it needs more vegetable gardens to satisfy its human needs, it certainly needs more flower gardens for its spiritual needs, as a humanizing, home-making influence, nothing striking the new chum more forcibly than the utter lack of any attempt at beautifying the outside of up-country cottages, save with empty condensed milk and jam tins.
For many years squatters in the drought-stricken districts have employed Chinese gardeners, to whom they often owe the fact that their families grow up healthy, and their wives find some solace, some reminder of their girlhood’s home in the lonely wind-swept plains, where the poor despised John Chinaman has—with unceasing toil, with infinite manceuvring, by means of prehistoric wind-wheels andpumps old as Egypt in design—made a little oasis to blossom for them.