PART IISOUTH AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER VIA BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Ina poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.
What was it the Engines said,Pilots touching—head to head,Facing on the single track,Half a world behind each back?This is what the Engines saidUnreported and unread.
What was it the Engines said,Pilots touching—head to head,Facing on the single track,Half a world behind each back?This is what the Engines saidUnreported and unread.
What was it the Engines said,Pilots touching—head to head,Facing on the single track,Half a world behind each back?This is what the Engines saidUnreported and unread.
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching—head to head,
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?
This is what the Engines said
Unreported and unread.
Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storiedEast:—
All the Orient, all CathayFind through me the shortest way.
All the Orient, all CathayFind through me the shortest way.
All the Orient, all CathayFind through me the shortest way.
All the Orient, all Cathay
Find through me the shortest way.
That parable will find a new application (will have found, perhaps, we should say) in the meeting ofthe engines on the track which is to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and would be entitled to add others concerning Afric’s sunwashed lands, for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland. But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within itself.
The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn, were older thanmankind, and if by some accident of social progress its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. No tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world. But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam, to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best, man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of enchantment in the bush; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and here—you could see him at the beginning—he was carving wheat-lands and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to the markets of the East.
The locomotive from the East, with puffs which politeness had hitherto repressed, would yield the point about antiquity in order to show that in the more modern period the East had done very well with its time. On the progress of Melbourne and Sydney it would not enlarge; suffice it to point out the advantages of Adelaide.
It lies between the hills and the sea, a trap for sunbeams; a garden city sweet with almond blossom in spring, tree-shaded in summer. A girdle of parks is about its comely waist, and beyond them lie suburbs, where the houses all have room to breathe. In the towns of the old world the houses are on the top of one another, and the people too. In Adelaide expansion takes place laterally, stretching out always to the encircling range of hills; and the houses are one-storied. The city is linked with its suburbs by radiating tramlines; and here one may pause to interpolate an anecdote. Some years ago, when the writer was in Naples, he was journeying by one of the trams which runs round the rim of Naples’ incomparable bay. On the garden seat in front of him were two Americans, who looked with him at the lovely vision, and said one of them: “Well, I’ve been most everywhere, and seen most everything, but I’ve never seen anything to compare with——” The writer leanedforward to catch the anticipated eulogy on the view. “But,” concluded the American lady, “I’ve never seen anything to compare with our car service at Seattle!”
That is what the locomotive from the East would say about the car service at Adelaide, which links up the spreading homesteads of the periphery with the nucleus of handsome buildings, official, municipal, educational, commercial, at the centre of the city. Adelaide is a city within a park, surrounded by a garden suburb, and that is as good a definition as one can find of it. It is handsome within its city limits, taking a pride in its big buildings, the University standing among lawns, its handsome private houses, its broad streets, its general air of competence; but outside them, beyond the parks, one would rather call it charming. The motor-car is bringing its changes to Adelaide as to other places in the world. Just as in London a generation ago the merchants and the well-to-do City men built big houses at Streatham and Dulwich, but now are moving out to Ascot or Sunningdale, so in Adelaide the prosperous are now building towards Mount Lofty and the hills—though the gradients here are trying even to the hard-driven Australian motor-car. The fringe of suburbs is therefore occupied by what in England weshould call the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class—or may we say a professorial class?—than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying that Adelaide represented “culture” in the Commonwealth; but that is unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs, interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, andhe produced a representation of “The Board of Irish Agriculture sowing the Seeds of Progress in Ireland.” It was a picture which was full of remarkably fine drawing, as one might expect from one of the best two draughtsmen in Britain, and the nude figure of the lady distributing seed (on the left of the canvas), as well as the two naked babies in the middle, and the black-clothed missioner on the right, were all admirable. But what did it mean? Most English critics were silent on this point, and nobody seems to have troubled Mr. Orpen to explain himself, for, as Wilde wrote to Whistler, “to be great is to be misunderstood.” However, the picture was bought for the Adelaide Art Gallery, which is rightly anxious to collect work of the younger artists, and made no mistake in choosing Mr. Orpen as one of the most brilliant among them.
When, however, the picture was hung at Adelaide, the people gasped. Then they wrote to the newspapers. Then artists wrote to the newspapers. Some of them sympathised with the public bewilderment. One of them, the best of Australian water-colourists, bludgeoned the public for their ignorance in not appreciating the colour and drawing of the masterpiece; but he did not insult the picture by saying what it meant, and that was what the public wanted toknow.... Probably the discussion would be going on yet, but the War put an end to it, and the picture in 1915 still adorned the Art Gallery; and we hope it may continue to do so, though it was rumoured that Mr. Orpen had offered to substitute something less recondite. However, this anecdote will perhaps illustrate the vividness of the interest which Adelaide takes in artistic and intellectual movements. It is an interest which may be perceived in its active University, a University that has contributed several first-class men to English Universities, and is no less perceptible in its society which reproduces very closely the social atmosphere of an English University town such as Cambridge. The resemblance becomes closer still if the comparison is made between Adelaide’s flowering and tree-shaded suburbs and the residential environs which stretch away from the University town at home.
Such is Adelaide. Beyond and outside it, and on the farther side of the tree-covered barrier of hills is rural South Australia, which, if one were to indicate on a map, one might shade off to the northward as the population grew less dense and the region of widely separated sheep stations became more prevalent. As the herbage grows more scanty and the water supply more precarious, the sheep stations themselves becomelarger and fewer, till they give place to desert. Perhaps the greatest surprise to a European visitor is the kind of land which in the more distant stations, where the rainfall sinks very close to the margin of double figures per annum, is called pasture land. It is khaki-coloured and scanty, and one would imagine that only a persevering sheep could find anything on it to eat. Industry is certainly demanded of the sheep, for the phrase of three acres and a cow is altered in Australia to five acres to a sheep. When the rainfall sinks the sheep has still farther to travel for its daily meal; when it fails, the back block sheep farmers see their sheep die by the thousand and ruin approaching.
Nowhere does the rainfall become a factor that can be neglected, and South Australia was suffering from drought in the year 1914, when we visited the state; but though the extremity of scarcity had not been reached, there seemed to eyes accustomed to English well-watered pastures, hardly any water at all. From the summit of Mount Lofty, whence one could so easily see the vast shield of the sea, there were also pointed out to us nearer patches of water shining like dull steel in the hollows of low hills. These were the reservoirs, basins filled by streams which we called brooks. These storage reservoirsare the device which South Australia is developing to counteract drought; and we visited a new one in course of construction among the hills to the north-west of Adelaide.
That was the day on which we visited Mr. Murray’s sheep farm, a mere trifle of forty miles from Adelaide. Before leaving the subject of the reservoir, which was interesting from the engineering design of its dam, then being thrown across the gap of two hills—a difficult and masterly piece of work—one may give some idea of the size of the basin by remarking that Mr. Murray, who lived some ten miles away, had protested against the first plans. The reason was that when the reservoir became filled it would have come flooding up to his front door. A very pleasant front door it was too, belonging to something that was part manor-house, part farm, and the counterpart of which might have been found in many an English county. A long, low house with windows meant to shade large, cool rooms, a wide hall, with pictures and polo sticks and photographs—photographs of famous sheep—and a side table gleaming with silver—the cups won as prizes. In front of the house roses and flowering borders and a lawn—on it playing a collie and a tame kangaroo. Beyond, the orchard garden. And not a sheep in sight.
Far better as a picture, our host and his tall sons on the stone steps to welcome us; and in the pretty drawing-room—the drawing-room of a Victorian house at home—the hostess and her daughter. You might see them both any summer’s day at Hurlingham, or Henley, or at Lord’s when the Oxford and Cambridge match is being played.
However, our purpose was to see sheep. Could this be a sheep farm? Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the landscape—as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a flock of wild cockatoos—and though that may seem nothing to you who read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild anything that one has never before beheld except captive. There were flocks of green and red and blue parrots too, and the laughing jackass perched on the tree-stumps. But about the sheep?
They are there; no doubt about that. An Anglo-Australian whom we know at home once confessed to us that the only blot on life in that southern continent of free air and sunshine wasthat there was too much sheep in the sheep-rearing districts—there was nothing else to talk about. And at this point we recall an anecdote told to us by Dr. E. S. Cunningham, the editor of “The Melbourne Argus.” There was a Colonial Conference in England some years ago, and he and some of the others who came to it, Mr. Deakin among them, went back to Australia across the United States. One night in the Far West their train was held up by accident, and they stopped at the hotel of some wayside station. After supper, as they sat round the red-hot stove of the hotel parlour, some of the citizens of the township blew in for their evening conversazione, and hailed the opportunity of conversation with strangers.
They quickly found that the strangers were Australians, and as quickly turned the conversation on to the comparative advantages of the two continents.
“I suppose now,” said one of them, “that you reckon to have a few sheep in your country. We have sheep here too. Some. Now what size holdings do you put up down there?”
Mr. Deakin, to whom the question was addressed, paused reflectively and said: “Well, I don’t know that I’m well posted about sheep; but I believe my friend has some knowledge ofthe subject. Cunningham, what was the size of that farm that Colonel Burns got rid of last autumn?”
“I can’t quite tell you the size,” said Dr. Cunningham, after assumed cogitation. “It was pretty big. There were about a quarter of a million sheep with it.”
The American looked from one to the other, and expectorated at the stove in a discontented manner. After a minute or two he started in again.
“We get a good figure for our stock hereabouts,” he observed; “we breed for quality. I guess wool is your strong suit. Now what about is your figure per sheep over there?”
Again Deakin referred to Cunningham, the authority.
“What was it Murray of Adelaide was asking for that merino ram of his, Cunningham—it was called Lion II, I believe?”
“I don’t know what he was asking,” returned Cunningham swiftly, “but I can tell you what he got for it. He took eleven hundred guineas.”
The American looked from one to the other and swallowed hard.
“Thunder!” he said. “Give me cattle!”
* * * * *
Well, we didn’t see the quarter of a millionsheep, and Mr. Murray’s thousand-guinea ram lives only in portraiture in the hall of his farm; but we did see some of the famous herd of which Lion II was the congener. They had been rounded up for us, about fifty of them, in one of the shearing yards; and most attractive animals they were. Their thick merino fleece was about five inches deep, like soft fibre, and their thick necks were in folds—concertina folds, as they are called. They have been bred to this type, and their peculiar scientific interest is the information which they afford to the explorers of Mendelian principles of the permanence of the so-called “factors of heredity.” But to the practical stock-breeder their immediate interest is the vast amount of wool they yield. Mr. Murray said (if memory is not at fault) that they each yielded about fifteen pounds’ weight of wool at a shearing.
Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage. It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep farms—especiallyin the back blocks, where the life is wilder, the herbage scanty, the seasons precarious—are interesting enough, though here we cannot dwell on them. What does remain as the recollection of Mr. Murray’s sheep farm is that of a hospitality and a generosity which are so natural that they are never ostentatious, but which, long after the day and hour have gone, warm the heart with the memory of them.