PART IIIVICTORIA
CHAPTER IXCOLLINS STREET—MELBOURNE
Onthe day we reached Adelaide the train that took us from Port Adelaide to the city slipped by an encampment of tents, those of the naval division; and on the day we left Melbourne we saw the recruits for Australia’s first contingent swing past us along Collins Street. Splendid they looked: young and strong and confident. The cars and motor omnibuses bunched up by the pavement, and the people hung out of the windows to cheer as they went by. I remember I suddenly found myself without a hat and the tears running down my cheek, when the last of them disappeared in the dust, the crowd closing in behind them. There was only a fortnight or so between that first glimpse at Adelaide that war had begun, and the assurance that Australia had grasped what was to be her share in it, when she sent her boys on the way to camp through Collins Street.
Collins Street. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, Melbourne will always be expressed tous in terms of Collins Street. It is a wide street of tall buildings, and it photographs well. It has not grown up haphazard. It is rectangular; and it exhibits Melbourne’s ideal of doing the thing well, and of doing it in an official way. No street in London is very like it, though Melbourne has more in common with London than any other city we have ever seen. There is the same nucleus of business and trading, shopping and luxury; the parks almost, but not quite, set in the middle of things; and trams and suburban lines linking up nearer suburbs (with High Streets of their own), and more distant ones with large houses and their gardens, and more distant ones still where the houses are cheaper. It has an official residence for the Governor-General, set, as Buckingham Palace is, in a green park; and it has a river though we will not press the point of any resemblance in it to the Thames. In short, if you were to name anything in London to us—Regent’s Park or Tottenham Court Road, the Mansion House or the Natural History Museum, St. Pancras Railway Station or the Reform Club—we believe we could find you something of the kind in Melbourne. They have even a Tate Gallery, and it has pictures which might have been the choice of the Chantrey Bequest.
One word more about Collins Street, and then,having served its purpose as a simile, we may leave it. It is a London street, the artery of an organism much smaller than London, so that it is a composite. It has shops and clubs, hotels and banks, and nearly all are square and solid. It is as wide as Kingsway, but less uniform than that thoroughfare will be; as busy as Cheapside, but less heterogeneous; as popular as Regent Street, but one of less specific attractions; and the one characteristic of it which is unmistakable is that it is the principal street of a big city. That is what Melbourne is. It is a city, a city where money is made, and big business goes on. It is to Melbourne and to Collins Street that you must come if you are to talk to the men who are planning and financing and ordering the Australia of the future.
There is a Melbourne of another kind, just as there are many Londons. There is Melbourne of the University, nestling in its gardens and secure in the strongest foundation a University can have, the solid research of its professors and teachers. It would not thank us for any forced comparison with the ineffable charm that the years and memories have brought to our own older Universities; but it has their air of unself-consciousness and breeding.
There is Melbourne, too, which sets thefashion; and which, if the word were not so detestable, forms the “society” of the capital. But “society,” so misused a word elsewhere, is more vague in its application in Australia than elsewhere. Government House is the vortex about which it eddies; and perhaps cards for Government House garden parties, or receptions, or invitations to Government House luncheons and balls may be the fount of as much rivalry and as many heartburnings as in the oldest capitals of Europe. Certainly Government House maintains a ceremoniousness which is in extraordinary contrast to every other usage in this land of democracy. Ladies curtsey to the Governor-General’s wife and to the Governor-General, as if they were of Royal blood, instead of the representatives of Great Britain. The Governor-General goes out to lunch attended by an aide-de-camp; nobody would go to a reception at Government House in anything other than the most official dress he was entitled to wear; nor would any lady go in anything that was a stitch less than the best of her dresses—for Government House is the Court. And yet ... one day when one of us was lunching at the Melbourne Club,11the Governor-General came into the luncheon room and sat down at our round table, with his aideand a friend, and the other lunchers at the same table, who all more or less impartially went on with their own conversation or exchanged a word or an answer with the Governor-General, were an editor, a doctor, two business men, a lawyer and a geologist. There was somebody else whose profession I have forgotten, but the luncheon party was very typical of the social life of Melbourne, and typical, too, I think, of what is the most vivifying and vigorous thing in Australian intercourse and converse.
In England, not altogether as a consequence of our social conventions, though they are the chief thing, the people of one social circle know very little of one another; and doctors, lawyers, artists, or literary or scientific men, merchants, men in commerce or finance, tend to limit their intercourse to those of the same profession as themselves. There are exceptions to this rule, of course; and it grows less rigid. But in Australia such limitations hardly exist at all. If you have a job of any kind, in letters, or politics, or science, or commerce, or trade, and are doing it well; and if you are a man of intelligence—then you stand on your merits, not on your social position, and you are of the same standing as anyone else. A few years ago in an English novel written by a lady of talent and insight, a dukeis made to say, as almost his last utterance on his death-bed, “We big-wigs have a good time.” Such an incredible observation would appear even more fatuous in Australia than in Eaton Square; for there are no “big-wigs” in Australia.
It would be hard to say who or what takes their place in such a democracy: talent perhaps; ability in such public affairs as bring a man into relation with European politics or with the home country, though in politics or affairs men do not stand apart from their fellows as they do over here. In England, or in any European country, the men of affairs are known to their countrymen chiefly by their photographs. How many people, for example, in England have ever seen Sir Edward Grey? But in Australia the public men are not photographed; they are known to everybody and are spoken to by everybody. The only exceptions are the Governors. If they are men of great ability, a limited divinity hedges them, but they are the only people thus fenced in, and the fence can be seen through if they are not first-rate. If there are no big-wigs in Australia, the land is knee-deep in critics.
In the absence of any deeply separated social circles in Melbourne, there is a social life of unbounding vitality and capacity for enjoyment. During our stay there, despite the outbreak ofwar, a great deal of ceremonial festivity was taking place, so that abundant opportunity was given for surveying Melbourne in its ball-dress at Government House, or in its silk hat and morning coat at official garden parties. One impression left on the mind and the eye was that these things were sufficiently uncommon and sufficiently enjoyed for no one to leave them out if they could attend them. I have a recollection of good-tempered struggles for hats and coats at the City Museum and Library (where a conversazione was held), such as obliterated every other impression—even the impression of that massive and graceful City Library with its domed roof and white arcading; or of the serried multitudes coming and going from the supper rooms. There was the hunt for the motor-car, too ... in a sudden night wind that brought stinging dust from the north ... and there were the throngs of ladies quite cheerfully sacrificing their satin shoes as they walked along the streets to the cars, sometimes to the street cars. For if you go home by street car in Melbourne it makes no difference to your social standing.
Gay, cheerful, social, hospitable Melbourne. It is full of memories of kindnesses, of hospitality, of dinner parties, of gay and—forgive the blighting phrase—of that cultivated converse whichour better instructed grandfathers called “good talk”; of houses which were luxurious and homes which were deeply comfortable—and of one house, to which, however long and tiring the day, we always came back as those who come back home.