CHAPTER VAGRICULTURE AND GOLD
Itwas the discovery of gold in West Australia that gave the first real impetus to the development of the state. In the earlier half of the nineteenth century the country was urgently in need of labour, and from 1843 onwards was glad to supply the deficiency by the importation of convicts. The convict system “assigned” people, as it was called, to the settlers to live upon their property and perform compulsory labour for them; the residue worked in “road gangs” or in Government penal settlements. All the other states, as they grew and prospered, began to resent the dumping on their shores of the least desirable element of the population from home. As early as 1837 a Parliamentary Committee was appointed to inquire into the whole question, both from the point of view of the unhappy convicts and their Australian hosts, and recommended that the practice should cease. It was, however, too convenient a solution of a difficulty to be readily relinquished by thehome authorities. It continued in a modified form till the Eastern states protested so vigorously and actively, that soon after 1848 the home Government, not without reluctance, were obliged to limit the importation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then called, and Western Australia.
The fact that Western Australia was glad to utilise this forced labour, and continued to do so, for many years later, provoked deep resentment in the Eastern states; it was seriously suggested that Western Australia should be boycotted by the other colonies. It was not till 1868 that transportation was finally abolished, and by that time the colony was firmly established.
So far the most important product of Western Australia has been her mineral wealth. As early as 1842 mining operations were begun with the discovery of lead and copper. Minerals form three-fourths of the value of all the exports by the state since 1900, and nearly a third of the whole mineral produce of the continent from the same date. The chief mineral has of course been gold. It was discovered in the north at Kimberley in 1882, and the announcement of the discovery brought many fortune seekers whose adventure ended in disappointment, for Kimberley has not produced any startling results.The real history of mining in Western Australia did not, however, begin till 1892. It was in the early nineties that the gold rush took place to the mining centre of Coolgardie, and it is the East Coolgardie goldfield which includes the mining centre of Kalgoorlie, that has produced more than half of the whole value of the mineral products of the state. The total produce was calculated up to the end of 1912 at more than £113,000,000, and of this total more than 54% was produced by the East Coolgardie goldfield.7The principal part of it came from the famous group of mines which form the “Golden Mile” at Kalgoorlie. Much has been written about the goldfields of Western Australia, and the gold rush of the early nineties. Now Coolgardie has burnt itself out, is a dead city, though mining is still carried on at Kalgoorlie. When gold was discovered there was no water within three hundred miles of Coolgardie, and an engineer of rare gifts and indomitable enterprise, conceived a scheme for conveying water from the hills round Perth the three hundred odd miles through the intervening almost desert plains. His name was C. Y. O’Connor, and he is also responsible for the artificially constructed harbour at Fremantle.
He got his water from the Darling Range, the low wooded hills that make such a charming background to the Swan River, utilising a stream in the hills to form a great dam or weir. Mundaring Weir is one of the sights of Perth, not merely as a triumph of engineering, but for its beautiful scenery. We started early in the afternoon one hot day on the pretty little journey up to the granite slopes of the Darling Range. The intervening country is almost populous, and very busy. The line runs through Midland Junction, where the rolling stock for Western Australia is constructed, and past a blank stretch of brickfields. The granite begins to crop out on the grassy slopes of the hills as the train approaches Mundaring. The neighbourhood is very fertile, with large vineyards, and groves of orange trees covered with fruit. The river, which forms the weir, had the appearance of a large lake lying between steep, wooded banks, in the hot afternoon sun. It was faintly reminiscent of Coniston, except that a large area of the trees on the distant hills had been ringbarked to increase the water supply. They stood a melancholy sentinel company on the hills they had once clothed, tossing twisted, white arms to Heaven in mute appeal. The air was heavy with the scent of wattle flashing golden among the sombre greyof the other trees. The distant rattle of frogs in some backwater below, and the occasional sharp trill of a bird were the only sounds to break the stillness. We descended the rocky bank to get a better view of the great dam. Its concrete walls are so sloped that the falling water does not leave them at any point, and so an impact that would wear out the wall is avoided.
In the course of its construction a large fissure was discovered in the bed of the river, which had to be filled in with cement. We visited the power-house, where the great pumps are busy day and night sending water to the goldfields. It took eleven days from the time the first trickle of water left Mundaring Weir for it to reach Coolgardie. While the work was nearing its completion, its successful achievement seemed incredible to the outside world. Unfortunately the inventor of this great experiment, Mr. C. Y. O’Connor, died just too soon to know that the water from Mundaring Weir had covered the three hundred odd miles to the goldfields. A statue of Western Australia’s famous state engineer stands on a hill above the scene of his greatest achievement. The execution of this scheme, as well as that of the harbour at Fremantle, were largely due to the influence and interest of Sir John Forrest, first Premier of WesternAustralia, to whose enlightened views and active patriotism the state has owed much.
We had tea at a hotel, whose verandah overlooked woods falling steeply away at the back. It was a charming little place, and we should have liked to stay there, forgetting that in Australia there is no soft, lingering twilight, but dusk follows immediately, darkness very swiftly, on the setting of the sun. Sometimes there is an afterglow, a luminous orange light suffuses the darkness, and the heavy masses of gum trees stand out inky black on the horizon. Such an afterglow illuminated our return journey from Mundaring Weir to Perth.
Apart from its natural beauty and engineering achievement, Mundaring Weir, or at least its neighbourhood, has a peculiar interest for the zoologist. It is the home of a certain little black animal. To the uninitiated its appearance is something between that of a small black slug and a caterpillar, but to the scientific man it is of paramount importance, because its legs are not real legs. Peripatus is its name, and it lives under stones. Only recently, however, the secluded and innocent life of the unfortunate peripatus has been rudely interrupted, and he was in fact well-nigh exterminated by the visit to Perth of a learned society all in search of specimens. Sothat henceforth the peripatus will be more esteemed than ever in the scientific world.
We said it was the gold rush that created, or at least accelerated the agricultural development of Western Australia. The influx of population, with the direct aim of gold-digging, brought in its train a dependent and attendant crowd of settlers to minister to its needs by the provision of agricultural produce, meat, flour, butter, and vegetables. Moreover, many of those who had come out to seek gold in the mines, sought it instead in the fruits of the earth, in grain, and in hay, in fruit and corn-growing. In the extreme north, known as the Kimberley country, cattle are raised; south of that, in the south-west pastoral district, sheep are the principal stock. The wheat belt, as it is called, is a strip of country stretching about five hundred miles from the Murchison River in the north, to the south coast east of Albany. But the limits of the wheat-growing area cannot at present be defined, the riverless districts of Australia are not desert in the sense that the Sahara is a desert; strips throughout the so-called desert are pastoral country on which grass will grow, supporting a more or less sparse vegetation. After rain the desert is clothed with vegetation, and the permanent plants depend on small local supplies ofsubterranean water. But there is besides a vast artesian storage. These so-called desert areas are shrinking every year, and the “wheat-line” is encroaching upon and absorbing them as improved methods of agriculture prevail. Thus at present farmers “are getting remunerative crops from regions of low rainfall and light sandy soil, which would have been looked upon as chimerical a decade ago.”8
The land laws in Western Australia are framed on easy terms for the settler. The holdings are limited to two thousand acres of agricultural land, including a homestead farm, or the equivalent of five thousand acres in grazing land, but the husband or wife of the holder may select an additional thousand acres of agricultural land, or two thousand five hundred acres of grazing land. A homestead farm of 160 acres can be taken up by new settlers on payment of about £9 in fees, with an additional 30s. for a Crown grant at the end of seven years. Larger grants may be had at from 10s. an acre, payable in twenty years without interest. Certain conditions attach to land purchase. The holder of a homestead farm of 160 acres, for instance, must reside there for six months in each of the first five years; he must expend four shillings an acrewithin the first two years, and a total of fourteen shillings an acre in seven years, of which total only £30 is allowed to be deducted in value for the cost of his house. Half the land must be fenced within five years, the whole within seven years. One hundred to a thousand acres of “Conditional Purchase Land,” at from 10s. an acre, may be taken up. It is paid for in forty half-yearly instalments, which, during the first three years, need not exceed 3d. an acre. Conditions of residence, relating to improvements and fencing are, of course, attached to these holdings. Conditional purchase by direct payment is made on equally easy terms.
ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.
ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.
ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.
We spent a Sunday in Perth, which was devoted partly to attending the cathedral service, and partly to visiting a native compound some distance away. Perth appeared to be a church-going place, and its people, Prayer Book in hand, and in their Sunday clothes, were setting off to their various places of worship, of which the neighbourhood affords a great variety. The service in the cathedral was well attended, and was conducted with that dignified simplicity characteristic of the best traditions of English church worship; and the familiar words of the liturgy seemed more deeply filled with meaning in this far-off country. The singing of the choir was an admirable performance,and would compare favourably with that of most English churches.
After the service we were to lunch with the State Premier, and his car was waiting for us. The chauffeur was not the uniformed and correct personage, who drives our cars at home, but, as befits a democratic country, a genial and friendly soul, who having bade us welcome to the car, whirled us up to Mount Lawley, throwing occasional information at us over his shoulder. Mount Lawley is a pleasant suburb of Perth, if one can talk of suburbs where all is suburban; it lies upon the slopes of the Swan River, and commands an inspiriting view of the city, spreading out far and wide over its hills in vigorous new growth. This Australian household in which we were guests had a charmingly patriarchal atmosphere, for three generations sat at table: a delightful, picturesque old couple, who had come out to Australia in those hard and grinding early days, before a colonist had his bread buttered, and his house built for him immediately on his arrival.
It was on this occasion that we saw for the first time those formidable, but insignificant-looking Australian pests, the white ant. We had gone out to see our host’s collection of wallabies, large, brown, rat-like creatures, with the hind legs of arabbit, and we expressed a wish to see also the insect that could eat everything except iron and jarrah wood. Australians cannot bear to disappoint a guest. They would regard it as a breach of hospitality, and an exhaustive search was made at once, till some white ants were discovered under a wooden tub of plants—tiny white specks hurrying away from the light.
The road to the Native Compound, for which we started after lunch, led through the King’s Park or Government Reserve. Near all large townships the Government has wisely set apart a tract of country to remain public property. These are not parks in our sense of the word, for they are not laid out in trim lawns and flowerbeds, or at least only a small fraction of them; but the bush is left in its wild state, a sanctuary for birds and animals. In the King’s Park red carriage drives lead through the bush, at one point giving place to lawns and flowering trees, and commanding a fine view of the Swan River and of Perth, whose extent we for the first time realised. We were impressed by the prosperous air of the crowds, whom the fine warm Sunday afternoon had brought out; there were none among them who did not look well-to-do. But our afternoon was only beginning. The Native Compound lay in the direction of Guildford, a village about tenmiles off, a settlement of some antiquity compared to Perth. The way out into the country was crowded with innumerable buggies taking whole families for an airing, and a haze of red dust hung over the road.
We passed the race-course, as indispensable to an Australian town as the post office, and the football ground, where we paused for a moment to look on at a vigorous match between “the jockeys” and the “bread-carriers.” Farther on people were playing on a newly laid-out golf-course, driving off from tees on which the unfailing kerosene tin did duty for sand-boxes, though one would hardly have thought it necessary to collect sand in boxes in Western Australia. Turning up a narrow, muddy road, we passed a lot of small nursery gardens, “Chinamen’s gardens,” with the Chinamen busy in them, but the activity of the Chinaman in Australia is hardly more popular than that of the white ant. We ploughed and splashed our ways along this side track, for the road was not made, till it ended abruptly in a gate. Now inured to the methods of the Australian motorist, we almost expected the car to take the gate in its stride, but having opened it, we ran up the side of a grassy bank on to a sort of plateau, girdled by the bush, with what looked like a very low-classgipsy encampment in one corner, not aristocratic gipsies with vans, but dirty little round tents like those that were formerly dotted about the banks of the Thames, near London, in haymaking time, but which have vanished before a too inquisitorial County Council.
THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
This was the native camp we had come to see; it had been a camping-ground for the blacks from time immemorial, and the present owner of the estate leaves it free to those, whose camping-ground was formerly the whole vast continent. There are not very many natives in Australia now; it is supposed by some that they were never very numerous, that the struggle for existence on those arid plains and waterless hills was too severe for these hardy nomads. Be that as it may, they are dwindling, and in contact with the whites they lose the primitive virtues they possess. The natives we saw at the camping-ground near Perth certainly did not appear to have primitive, or any other virtues. They were, it is true, principally half-breeds, and whether regarded from the physiological or moral point of view, they were a depressing spectacle. They were provided with Government blankets, instead of kangaroo skins, and some form of a mission was singing hymns for their edification; but both men and women were a miserable, degenerate,apathetic looking crew. They talked English with a cockney accent. The strange mob of yapping, small dogs of indistinguishable breeds were the only thing that evinced much vitality.
There were, however, among them a few full-blooded blacks. One of these, a shrewd-looking old woman with a grizzled mop of hair, told us that when she was a baby, “the white people took me, but I lay in the wood and listened to my people talking till I learnt their language; then I ran away and went back to them.” We were anxious for an exhibition of throwing the boomerang, or “kyle,” as they call it, that curved stick, which, apparently missing its aim, describes an arc and returns to the hand that threw it. The half-castes have lost the art both of throwing and carving the kyle, and are too indolent to achieve either, but an old native stepped out from among them to show us how it was done. He had thick black hair, and his bright dark eyes gleamed in his flat, glistening, ebony face. It was very curious to watch him standing there turning his head about, sniffing and feeling the direction of the wind, and at last he threw the kyle, spinning, circling, returning, many times, while we watched him fascinated, and the motley crowd of half-breeds looked on too at the art they had no skill to practise. They haveeven lost the art of making fire with the hard fruit of the banksia, “mungite” is the native name for it. “Never go before a black,” they say in Western Australia; they can’t be trusted, apparently, not so much from their malevolence as a sort of light-hearted instinct of destruction. For instance, seeing a man standing by the wall of a small shed at a little distance from the camp, one of the blacks playfully let fly at him with a boomerang. He fortunately missed the man’s leg, but made a hole in the building.
We left the camp, for there appeared a pretty little English girl, who, having heard that there were visitors to the compound, had been sent by her mother to ask them to tea in the hospitable Australian fashion; so following a grassy track, we came to our great surprise upon a dignified old country house on a wooded promontory overlooking a higher reach of the Swan River. The owners of this beautiful estate belonged to one of the “Seven Families” of Western Australia; that is, they were descended from Australian grandparents on both sides. In Australia one says, “My grandmother came over in 1830,” as we should say in England, we came over with the Conqueror; for 1830 is in the West, at all events, the beginning of Australian civilised history, and those earlysettlers had a heroic struggle, and had to face every sort of hardship, hunger, and the want of any kind of comfort, in a way that settlers of to-day, even those who venture upon the strenuous life of the backwoods, can never experience. The details of the lives of these pioneers would form an extraordinarily interesting chapter in Australian history, and, as was the fashion at that time, they beguiled their loneliness with keeping diaries, a most valuable fashion to the historian, for even the dullest chronicler unconsciously throws light on manners and customs of the day, commonplaces to him, that the next generation has forgotten. But invaluable as these old diaries would be, they have unfortunately been in most cases destroyed.
Our hostess told us regretfully of several instances she had known of this being done by very old people. They were very small communities in those days, the life was rough and wild, and there was no public opinion to control it, and, for that very reason, these intimate records would have been all the more valuable and curious. As we sat at tea in the charming drawing-room, with something of an old-world atmosphere, somebody commented to our hostess on the extremely difficult approach. Yes, she said, matter-of-factly, I prefer to have no roadto the house, it keeps “sundowners” away. The sundowner is the Australian tramp; he arrives at nightfall and demands food and lodging; if he does not get it, the householder pays the penalty in missing poultry, or burnt ricks. Of course he only extorts this toll in lonely places; but what a delightful career for a man of indolent habits, and sufficient obtuseness of feeling, to wander through that beautiful country, where the sun always seems to shine, sure, if not of a welcome, of supper, bed, and breakfast, where he would.
The golden light of the setting sun was flooding the river and the wooded hills, when we came away, our host and hostess pointing out to us sadly a noble English oak tree on their lawn, that the white ants had riddled through and through, reducing it to touchwood. We hurried back, entering once more, as we neared Perth among a crowd of returning cars, buggies, and bicycles, a haze of its soft red dust, while from its hills the city itself was wrapped in a mysterious dull grey twilight.
On one of our last days at Perth we paid a visit to the Parliament House. Only the back is finished, and is impressive in its simplicity of white freestone columns. The designs for the front are very effective, the interior simple and well proportioned. While as for the UpperHouse it is as luxurious as the council chamber of a medieval Dutch town hall. We observe in passing that they provide remarkably agreeable hot buttered toast there.
Our host on this occasion was an ex-Minister of Education, from whom we learned many interesting facts about the social and economic development of Western Australia. He was especially enthusiastic on the importance and good results of cadet training, which he had done much to promote. In the case of schoolboys of twelve to fourteen years old it consists mainly of physical training calculated to produce better development. This training carried out by the school teachers is given for not less than fifteen minutes a day, the boys learn marching, drill, and either first aid, swimming, or miniature rifle-shooting. Teachers are trained for the purpose of giving this special education in Government Schools of Instruction, where certificates of proficiency are conferred; but the whole subject of the complete and admirable system of Australian military training is dealt with in another chapter.
Soon after our arrival we were overtaken by rumours of European war, almost incredible, except that Europe seemed so remote. Then came the news that Germany had declared war on Russia and France. Great Britain, it was said, wouldstand aloof. Even so the news was sufficiently serious, and telegrams on the Perth post office were eagerly scanned. It was not till quite the end of our visit that definite intelligence arrived that England had joined the cause of the Allies, and even then nobody realised it in the least.
Our last day came all too soon, warm and sunny, when we made the short journey from Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle. The war news seemed more real, when we saw a German tramp held up in the harbour, with the guns of the forts trained on her. The big Orient liner was lying alongside, and we boarded her with many regrets at what we were leaving behind, for we had to say good-bye to many friends, and our cabin was filled with flowers, sweet violets, and the heavy scented boronia, of which Western Australia is so proud. At last we started on the four days’ voyage to Adelaide, and it was not till we reached Northern Queensland that we again encountered that atmosphere of primitive freshness and novelty, that we were leaving behind. So we left Western Australia, with its warm-hearted, generous people, its vast, almost untouched resources of primeval forest, and rich soil, its social problems, on which the visitor is incompetent to pronounce, problems acute in the oldworld, making themselves felt even here, especially that seemingly irreconcilable one of the interests of the Labour man and the Liberal. Irreconcilable so it seemed to us, for the Labour man may be clear-sighted, but he cannot afford to be far-sighted, because, as he himself would put it, he can’t afford to wait.