CHAPTER VIIADELAIDE
Wehad been warned to expect cold and rough weather, if anywhere, in the great Australian Bight, but like everything we had ever been told about Australian weather, the prophecy was fallacious. The Tuesday in August on which we sailed from Fremantle and the four following days of the voyage were fine, calm, and sunny. We skirted a coast bound by gneiss rocks, rounded, ground, and weather-worn to smoothness, with immense breakers dashing their foam up the face of the cliffs. Except the beautiful harbour of Albany, it is a most inhospitable-looking coast.
On the third day out a wireless message from Perth warned the captain to alter his course and to moderate the ship’s lights at night so as to disguise her. It was a significant suggestion, that the War, the outbreak of which took place while we were at sea, but in which we hardly yet believed, was a matter of grim earnest. Otherwise the voyage was uneventful. We reached Adelaide, sliding in through glassy water, withland on either side, and numbers of diving birds swimming round us. After the inevitable delay of disembarkation that seems so unnecessary to the impatient traveller, we at last got ashore, walked through the Customs, merely an amiable formality, and took the train for Adelaide, which is at some distance from its harbour. The line runs through salt marshes, dotted with pink mesembryanthemum in flower. Then come trim suburbs with English names, a Cheltenham among them; presently the train appeared to be running through the streets of a big city, and we had arrived at Adelaide station.
NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.
NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.
NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.
The different capitals of the Australian states are as unlike each other as possible, and Adelaide is especially distinctive. This graceful garden city has none of the rawness of our dear Perth. She has, on the contrary, an established air. The hotel at which we stayed might have been in any large town in the world, except for a certain friendly loquacity on the part of the staff, and a trifling indifference to details characteristic of Australia.
The first impression of Adelaide is a delightful one. She is a city of space and light and air, with broad, tree-planted streets and fine buildings; in fact, more like the Australia we had imagined, because less unlike England, than the West. Thecathedral with its twin spires dominates the whole from rising ground. The city is laid out in straight lines, separated by parks from its spreading, growing suburbs, the whole place is green and restful.
In the afternoon of our arrival we were motored round the city and its suburbs, and a closer acquaintance deepened this impression, for we passed through avenues of plane trees and saw English plants growing in the gardens. Rising ground revealed the lovely situation of Adelaide and gave a view of the city as a whole, scattered among her trees and gardens, girdled by green hills rising abruptly from its environs, with the grey Pacific spread out to infinite distance beyond. The cloudy, hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home.
Of course, there was a great deal that was unfamiliar: here were hedges of olive, thick-set and cut like box, other hedges were made of theSouth African box-thorn, and everywhere the sides of the roads were yellow with a pretty pale oxalis, regarded by the inhabitants as a noxious weed and called Sour Sod. There were many vineyards, and sheep and lambs feeding, for South Australia is largely a pastoral state. The development of pastoral industries has been an important element in her general prosperity. The pastoral settler gauged the capacities of the land and paved the way for agricultural and closer settlement. South Australia now has a larger acreage under cultivation in proportion to the population than any other state, and the annual returns from pastoral industries amount to nearly £4,000,000. In 1912 between two and three million pounds’ worth of pastoral products were exported, including sheep, cattle, horses, frozen meats, skins, hides, tallow, and wool.
South Australia was declared a province under the British Crown in 1836 by Governor Hindmarsh in the reign of William IV, so that the state has a history stretching back over a period of nearly eighty years, during which time she has progressed rapidly, and at the time of our visit was actually enjoying great prosperity after a series of good seasons, though we heard on all hands in Adelaide that there had been two dry springs and rain was badly wanted.
The climate is mild, the high temperatures that occur in summer are mitigated by the absence of humidity, and extreme cold in winter is unknown. Sheep, cattle, and horses live out of doors all the year round and thrive on natural herbage, so that neither artificial feeding nor housing is necessary, and the cost of production is thus greatly reduced. It is superfluous to enter here into figures showing the purposes for which the area of the state is leased or alienated, but beyond the limits of agricultural settlement more than 143,000 square miles are held by Crown lessees as sheep or cattle runs. Formerly the principal part of South Australian wool was shipped to London, and it was not till within the last forty years that local wool auctions attained importance.
Agriculture is determined by the rainfall, which varies from 10 or 11 inches in northern and inland districts to 30 or 35 inches in the south and in the more hilly regions. Within these widely varying conditions almost anything can be grown from corn to grapes, nearly every kind of cereal, fruit, or vegetable. But economically all the conditions of agriculture are very widely different from those at home, for it must be taken into consideration that the wages of farm labourers are about double those paid inEngland, and the cost of plant and implements about 50% more. Wheat predominates in the value of all crops grown, for while it is estimated that the total value of all crops, including fruit, amounts to £18 per head of the population, the value of the wheat crop for grain and hay is over £13 per head. The production of hay in Australia is intimately associated with the cultivation of cereals, as the greater bulk of this fodder is composed of wheat or oats. The Year Book returns for 1911–12 show more than two million acres under wheat cultivation with a total production of over twenty million bushels, a low average compared with other countries, but against which must be set the exceptionally low cost of production brought about by conditions of soil and climate.
One peculiarly local industry is the growth of wattle for its bark, which is utilised for tanning leather. The industry is a lucrative one. At from five to seven years old, when they are fit to strip, the trees yield from one ton an acre, and the market price of the bark is from £5 to £8 a ton.
But we must again insist that in trying to estimate the position of agriculture in Australia the different labour conditions have to be taken into consideration. In the first place it is possiblefor a man owning a team of eight or ten horses and the latest and best machinery, to do all the work on a holding of from 200 to 240 acres of wheat himself, with some extra help at harvest time, so extensive is the use of labour-saving machinery—multiple furrow ploughs, for instance, 12 or 14 furrow twin ploughs on the lighter land, and 8 to 10 horse cultivators. This being so, it can be easily seen that there is no surplus of skilled labour, for under such conditions a capable man very soon saves enough to begin farming on his own account, especially as he can get cheap land on easy terms. This, of course, applies to Australia generally; at harvest time, though the demand for labour is great and the pay high, thoroughly efficient men are not to be had. The same thing is true of dairying, so that the farmers are actually reducing their herds to numbers that can be conveniently managed by their own families with the aid of milking machines.
WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE.
WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE.
WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE.
At the same time the Labourers’ Union has drawn up a “log” of prices and hours of labour, and requires its acceptance on the part of the farmer, who would be willing enough if the supply of labour were efficient. Economists question whether, if these conditions, including the regulation of hours, were enforced, the result produced might not be an increased adoption of grazing, where hardly any labour is required.
In the pastoral industry all conditions of labour and living are fixed by the Arbitration Court, and good accommodation is provided for shearers. Among farmers, on the other hand, though good food is always provided, the men often have to sleep in machinery sheds. Here, as everywhere else, labour is dependent not merely on supply and demand, but on desirable conditions of employment, and it is extraordinarily interesting to see our tentative efforts in the direction of Wages Boards, and the regulation of employment, reproduced in the form of the finished article in the Commonwealth, which had no great mass of vested interest and tradition to oppose to a generous system of Labour Legislation. It must be remembered, however, that Australia can hardly yet be considered as a manufacturing country, though her industrial development has been so rapid in recent years, that the total value of manufactures already amounts to more than a quarter of the whole production of the country. It is calculated that the value of productions from all sources per head of the population exceeds that of any other country.
The Australians meanwhile, seeing the course which the future development of their countryis likely to pursue, have taken time by the forelock, and in order to obviate the recurrence of the disastrous conditions in the Old World have inaugurated an elaborate system of Labour Legislation calculated to safeguard the interests of working men and women in all branches of occupation. Such measures as Wages Boards, Conciliation and Arbitration Court Systems, a minimum wage under the Factory Acts, an eight-hours day, early closing, and holiday regulations, are accomplished facts all over Australia, though their constitution is not uniform in the different states.
A Government Labour Exchange was established in 1911 to bring employer and workmen into communication. This does not, of course, include professional and clerical labour. All the departments of Public Service, including the railways, apply to the Labour Exchange for workmen, and if the work lasts for less than two months the men’s fares are refunded to them.
Of course, not all Australians see the social development of their country in the same rose-coloured light. The social reformer and the moral enthusiast are seldom business men; to such the question appears in a wholly different aspect—in terms of material profit and loss.
Each state has its own industrial problems, andthe question of water supply occupies the attention of all who are concerned with the development of South Australia, for the only area in the Commonwealth having an average annual rainfall of less than five inches, the Lake Eyre region, lies within the limits of this state. Throughout the more closely settled part of the state the difficulty has been met by the Government by the construction of reservoirs and the distribution of supplies.