"Greeting! my birthstains have I turned to good;Forcing strong wills perverse to steadfastness;The first flush of the tropics in my blood,And at my feet success."
"Greeting! my birthstains have I turned to good;Forcing strong wills perverse to steadfastness;The first flush of the tropics in my blood,And at my feet success."
It showed an appreciative, social spirit—that sort of Australian spirit that leads to calling each other names, etc., at meals.
The next proof of his being an Australian was for him to deny, through one Henry Lawson, that he sent the slur. A friend of mine, however, has seen the "birthstains" message in his handwriting, and, furthermore, knows where it now is.
But tuft-hunting Sydney society obligingly pushed the close-cropped heads back inside the cupboards and tried to marry their daughters to the Australian who had caused their ancestors to feel restive to the point of obtrusiveness.
As he became more and more Australian, Lord Beauchamp made a delicate concession to society snobbery. He issued blue and white tickets whenhe entertained. It was a nice differentiation of the status of his guests. Seidlitz-powder functions they were called, but the recipients of both blue and white went for all the disturbing elements.
And the matrons still pursued Lord Beauchamp with their daughters. Eventually they ran him out of the country.
As is usual with Australians, once he went to England little more was heard of him. He married there, however—that, of course, was cabled, and Australian snob papers have since had domestic details, including the birth and christening.
Whenever I have felt sympathetic with Australia it has been on the score of what it has to put up with from the cable man and the London correspondent. She can't shake off her old Governors, and she also has the relatives of those in gubernatorial state inflicted upon her. For instance, when Lord Brassey was falling out of, off, and under things in Victoria,[A]an additional family misfortunewas cabled. His brother, while playing tennis, was hit in the eye with a ball. Victorian society liked it; it gave the opportunity to write condolences and have the Government House orderly ride up to its front door and leave the acknowledgment.
When the Australian pater-vulgarius makes a rise in the world his daughters start to teach him etiquette. If he blows his nose in the way we expect Gabriel will announce himself one of these mornings early, it is "bad form," and he may not even know his friends of adversity. Fortune makes him acquainted with well-fed fellows—at his own board—to whom he is most affable. If he would keep silent and let his money do the talking his daughters would be less fidgety. It must be an awful thing to try to regulate one's behaviour by a book on etiquette, and, but for his bound and hide, the torture of the new-rich Australian with a family would be worse than vivisection. But he has bound and hide. God is good to him.
But the family take the altered circumstances seriously. They become finickety on the matter of social distinctions. Had their father kept a shop they cease to remember the fact, and shopkeepers in general are altogether "beyond." So is now also the reception of a suburban mayoress. For has notthe head of the house been made an M.L.C., bringing them into contact with vice-royalty. It is as often as not of the slightest, but the newspapers only publish a list of "those present."
It is the same when these women are gathered together ostensibly in charity's cause. Charity begins at snobbery in Australia. Let the wife of a Governor but take the chair, and the institution in need of funds is "deserving" from the moment the announcement goes forth.
Max O'Rell saw it all. Hear what he said: "Colonial society has absolutely nothing original about it. It is content to copy all the shams, all the follies, all the impostures of the old British world. You will find in the Southern Hemisphere that venality, adoration of the golden calf, hypocrisy and cant are still more noticeable than in England, and I can assure you that a badly cut coat would be the means of closing more doors upon you than would a doubtful reputation." This was really another way of saying Australia is a land of doubtful reputations.
Everybody in Australian society is better than everybody else, and everybody can give full andparticular reasons why (including dates). The position is obvious—everybody is trying to hide what everybody else knows, and is prepared to make even better known should occasion offer.
This is a natural consequence of money being the "open sesame." It does not matter how the money may have been acquired. The sons and daughters of pawnbrokers, for example, loom large in Melbourne society to-day. And butchers become squatters. This, above all, the money must have been made; society starts the nouveaux riches from that point. Money covers everything—except the women at evening entertainments.
The masterly inactivity of the Australian is something to marvel at. He is, of course, very tired, but how he manages to get along without doing any kind of work from early morn to dewy eve throughout the circle of the golden year I must confess knocks me kite high. It's not that he dislikes work. He is really very fond of it—in the abstract.
This is borne out by an account of Sydney business methods published in an evening paper of that city in the form of an extract from a commercial traveller's diary. It is most illustrative:—
"MONDAY.—Called to see Mr. Beeswax, of the firm of Beeswax and Bullswool, in the hope of placing a big line of saddlers' ironmongery with him. Mr. Beeswax sent out word that he wanted something of the sort, but that, being Monday, he was busy clearing up business left over from the Saturday half-holiday. Asked me to call again.
"TUESDAY.—Called again. Mail day. Mr. Beeswax couldn't see me. To call to-morrow.
"WEDNESDAY.—English mail arrived late, and letters only to hand to-day. Mr. Beeswax busy with English letters. To call to-morrow.
"THURSDAY.—Called again. Mr. Beeswax gone to Arbitration Court to fight his employees. May be in again; may not. Most likely not! I went to the Arbitration Court and waited. Beeswax was fined £100 for selling wooden dolls and toothpicks in contravention of the 951st clause of the Amalgamated Wooden Dolls and Toothpick Makers' Union log. I decided not to approach him for an order to-day.
"FRIDAY.—Called again just before twelve. Cab was waiting outside. Just as I was shown into the room, Mr. Beeswax was putting on his hat. I said, 'About that saddlers' ironmongery!' He said, 'D—— your saddlers' ironmongery! Who won the toss, did you hear?' Then he jumped into a cab, and said, 'Cricket Ground!' and drove off.
"SATURDAY.—Only half a day. No hope of seeing Beeswax, or anyone else for that matter. Decided to go to the Cricket Ground myself and join the crowd whose prosperity during the week enables them to enjoy themselves on Saturday free from care. I have no cares—no money either. Next week there is a public holiday for the election,a levee, and another cricket match, so I don't suppose I shall sell much saddlers' ironmongery just for a while. Australia is such a busy place."
The only thing I doubt about this is the persistence of the commercial traveller. I have seen a good deal of that flamboyant person in my travels of Australia, and the conclusion I formed of him was that he was not out to do business so much as to circulate the latest risque story, criticise the management of railways and hotels, explain the European situation, and generally to make the rustic gape and feel discontented. He is the great Australian "bounder."
Every Australian who isn't in the Civil Service aspires to be a business man. Art and matters of temperament are side lines, so to speak. Primarily, it is the business faculty that is developed in all lie-downs of Australian life. It is generally as office boy that a start is made. The position of office boy means that young Australia is paid ten shillings per week to look through the "situations vacant" column in his employer's paper every morning, and apply for all positions advertised at 15s. per week by other firms, said applications to be written on his employer's notepaper. If he doesn't get another place quickly he knows he'll be sacked, for nobody keeps an office boy in Australia more than a week. Indeed, his record has been sung in verse thus harmoniously:—
Monday, hired;Tuesday, tired;Wednesday, fired.
Monday, hired;Tuesday, tired;Wednesday, fired.
One week you see the business man in the making a messenger at a chemist's shop. Next week he is carrying reporters' "copy" from meetings to the sub-editor of an evening paper. The week after that he is taking tickets at a picture show. The following week he will be delivering circulars down drain pipes. Then he will put in two days sweeping up the hair about barbers' chairs in a saloon and brushing customers up to the level of the elbows where the bits of hair are not. He will next take a spell at driving a cart, and after that go bill posting at night. At this work he will become acquainted with a theatrical manager, and will abandon it to go on with the populace in melodrama until he gets a job working a lift. He is by this time a fully qualified clerk. At the age of twenty he applies for admission to the police force. All Australians do that, apparently under the belief that it's the only position that will enable them to keep out of gaol.
At twenty-five the Australian thinks it's about time he fixed on some occupation. "I have had a large and varied experience," he now writes when applying for a billet. It is immaterial to him what appointments are offering; he answers the lot. He will manage a station or a tea-house or take aprivate secretaryship to a Minister of the Crown or test eyesight for an optician. He doesn't mind taking the message to Garcia—not he. He likes it to be by way of a racehorse, however.
When he's fixed up in an occupation he thinks will suit him, the Australian gets the sack. His employer finds him absolutely useless. He has not the habit of industry, and he is incapable of sustained effort of any kind. Ask him (if he is in a produce firm) the price of butter as quoted in that morning's paper, and he won't know. But he can give you the betting card at Tatt.'s without hesitation. He is indifferent to everything connected with the business of his employer. He knows that if the worse comes to the worse he can sleep out.
Australians who think of going to another country with the idea of making a sleepihood should inquire fully as to the climate.
The Australian policeman never knows anything; it's no use asking him the time even.
This gives some idea of police protection, and what goes on in Australia:—
"SENSATIONAL ROBBERY."£600 WORTH OFGOLDSTOLEN FROM A POLICE STATION.
"The Inspector-General of Police has been notified by the Superintendent at Albury that a sensational robbery has occurred at Tumberumba, in New South Wales, and that something between £500 and £600 worth of gold dust and retorted gold had been stolen from the local police station."
"The Inspector-General of Police has been notified by the Superintendent at Albury that a sensational robbery has occurred at Tumberumba, in New South Wales, and that something between £500 and £600 worth of gold dust and retorted gold had been stolen from the local police station."
And from the same paper the same week:—
"WHILE THE CONSTABLE SLEPT.
"At an early hour this morning the house of Constable ——, a constable attached to Redfern Station, was brokeninto. The constable had gone on duty at an early hour in the morning, and about 3 in the afternoon went to bed in his residence at Young-street, the other members of his family having gone out. Everything was properly secured, and it did not enter the constable's head that anyone would have the hardihood to break into his premises. Some time between 4 and 5 o'clock, he got up, and went downstairs, and was astonished to find that the house had been broken into and robbed while he slept. Entrance had been effected by the kitchen window, the woodwork of which had been smashed."
"At an early hour this morning the house of Constable ——, a constable attached to Redfern Station, was brokeninto. The constable had gone on duty at an early hour in the morning, and about 3 in the afternoon went to bed in his residence at Young-street, the other members of his family having gone out. Everything was properly secured, and it did not enter the constable's head that anyone would have the hardihood to break into his premises. Some time between 4 and 5 o'clock, he got up, and went downstairs, and was astonished to find that the house had been broken into and robbed while he slept. Entrance had been effected by the kitchen window, the woodwork of which had been smashed."
The Australian criminal is the most clumsy scoundrel in creation. He leaves enough clues behind him for a jury to get to work on right away. But unless he happens to leave his name and address a cracksman working on a fair sized crib is never caught. Most murderers, with the exception of those who gave themselves up, are at large in Australia. This last remark does not refer to cases of murder followed by the suicide of the perpetrator. A list of the undetected crimes of Australia would cost too much to print.
The Australian is a born loafer. Go you north, south, east, or west in his mortgaged land, and in proportion to the distance you travel, so does this truth broaden upon you—the truth of his loafing propensities.
He is also a parasite. The big Australian parasite feeds smaller parasites, and soad infinitum.
Nationally the Australian has been a borrower by choice. He is the spendthrift, ne'er-do-well, who is always a drain on the old man's purse. He has from the start been getting remittances from John Bull in the guise of loans, which, like Micawber, he redeems by more loans.
He has the borrowing habit bad.
The result?
If the Australian wants to develop something, a mine, say, he makes a bee line to the member of Parliament for the district, and through his pernicious office enough is squeezed out of the milch-cow government to sustain him until he can hawkwhat he has round London. He seldom has any money himself, and when he has he prefers not to risk it. The role of promoter suits him best. He gets his profits out of his flotation, and impudently stands in with the "paid-ups." As often as not this latter trick is to give verisimilitude to hisbona fides.
His name is associated with the untamed feline on the London market just now.
His private ideas about finance are reflected in public accounts, particularly in the States that have local government or irrigation boards. Sufficient is it here to indicate his trend and point the baneful influence—the antithesis of exalting to the country.
There is said to be honour among thieves, and on theprima faciecase thus made out, I cannot bring myself to call the Australian business man a thief. Americans have a term for a despised class of their community, "Suckers" they call those who comprise it. In its worst sense the term fits the Australian. Wherever some sporadic energy is exhibited, there do you find the suckers.
The sucker is chiefly found in big cities built on borrowed money and by boom swindles. Thither flock all who have foresworn honest toil, and the disinclination to work, as has been already observed, is innate of the Australian.
The sucker fastens on industry wherever it is to be found, and if a district threatens to thrive, a big town full of suckers arises to drain the profits, and thus is the producer, who, in Australia, economically is the country, impoverished. He and the primary industries never get a chance. Things are foisted upon him that he does not want and is not in a position to pay for, and he can't move without giving some sucker a commission. The commission is generally for doing something, which, if he had any sense, which he hasn't, the producer could do for himself. So it happens that cities and towns are over populated by suckers, who buy drinks for the producer with the latter's money, and do ditto for him who purchases what has been produced (drinks again at the producer's expense).
And all this the reprehensible politician merely calls centralisation. If he were less reprehensible, he would acquaint himself with the state of things and then set about remedying them. The figures would astound a statesman. Think of it: the population of the Commonwealth was last census 3,773,248, and 47 towns absorbed 1,859,313 of the number! The increase per cent. of the population, further, was only 1.71, while the cities are continuously absorbing the rural dwellers. "Debts," remarks Coghlan, "have grown at a much more rapid pace than population."—[Statistical Account of Australia.]
The sucker curse is daily becoming more acute in Australia. It so happens that the young Australian whose father is trying to make a farmer of him registers a resolution that he will be a sucker. With justification, no doubt, he regards his father as a fool. (All Australians regard their fathers as fools.) The fool-farmer's son starts his sucking, therefore, as a commission agent, and goes on the election committee of the surplus Australian politician standing in the "country interest," and whose watchword is "settle the people on the land." The sucker certainly does his best to settle the people on the land, but not in the sense that the humourless politician utters the shibboleth.
It so happens that the Australian couldn't, even if he wanted to, say, "This is my own, my native land." That is, of course, with any degree of truth. For the Australian has long since put the country in pawn.
Instead of evincing any lofty sentiment, however, the Australian is generally to be heard cursing his country, and a good number of him get away from it the first opportunity the good God gives them. And small wonder. It is a land of burlesque. It is built on entirely wrong principles. The mountains are all round the coast, and they keep the rain from going inside. The consequence is that there is always a drought in the interior, which same remark applies also to the Australian himself.
"It's a good place to live out of," says the ignominious Australian, if you ask him anything about it.
In his dunderheadedness he can't see that he has fenced out enterprise, and is fast legislating himself out of the country. The emigration figures of Australia represent those of the inhabitants who canscrape a couple of hundred pounds together in order to escape the national debt, the suckers, and the reprehensible politician.
When it was proposed that Australia should borrow the money in England to give England a Dreadnought, one of the State Premiers was interviewed on the subject. He sounded the depths in patriotic sentiment by remarking, "It would be a good advertisement!"
It is only in a Mr. Alfred Deakin peroration or that of some other silver-tongue that you hear of Australian patriotism. Silver tongue, by the way, is a mere euphemism; there is a more direct and much shorter Saxon synonym.
If Australia were a great country, it would have the natural corollary, a great man. But it has never produced one.
Sir Henry Parkes once proposed to erect a mausoleum for the illustrious dead of Australia, but the hopelessness of getting eligible corpses caused the idea to be abandoned. There are, however, in Australia many unexplained monuments. Among the latest was one in Brisbane, raised to a deceased Rugby football player. Will the Australian ever get any sort of sense of proportion?
But a people, I suppose, must first of all have love of country before it gets a standard of measurement. If a plebiscite were taken it would be foundthat the memory of Edward Kelly is far more revered by the citizens of this mean country than that of any other citizen. This national hero was familiarly known as Ned Kelly. After a series of misunderstandings with the police, he died suddenly one morning.
The individual Australian, be it here remarked, does not consider the collective Australian much class, and the Australian who has travelled has a sneaking disregard for his compatriots. If he has spent two months in London, he returns an ape Englishman. So far as loose clothes and cheap mannerisms will carry him he is a Londoner. It is a noticeable fact that he imitates the most inane of insular types. The more howling the particular London ass of the period, the more sincere the Australian flattery of him. This needs no comment.
And when this two-months-in-England idiot returns to Australia some gushing she-Australian will say to him—
"Oh, Mr. Absent Two-Months (Printer, don't forget the hyphen), I can tell you're an Englishman. You're so different from the Australian."
At this Mr. Absent Two-Months will smile smugly, conscious of the higher appraisement.
Then he will commend her for her discernment in words.
"Well—er, I was born out he—ah," he will say, "But, you know, I—er have lived in England—haw!"
She just dotes on Englishmen. She likes the way they turn their trousers up at the bottoms.
Then they start. He will agree with her in sweeping depreciation of Australia and all who live in it, and he will tell her what a jolly country England is. She will sigh sympathetically to the cad, instead of calling in the dust-bin emptier to pole-axe him. It would be a more patriotic extreme.
Now how could this kind of woman kindle the spark of patriotism in her children, assuming for the moment that she was prepared to bear them? How could she instil love of country? She has no passion for things Australian. Her mother never adopted the country for a start. She was one of those wistful creatures who called Old England "Home," and her children learnt it right enough.
And these Australian women are now lending a voice in the country's affairs. The word voice is used deliberately. It is about the only thing the Australian will lend the country.
I've been assured by fellow countrymen exiled in this land that if you take an Australian into your club he'll put his hand in his pocket and ask you what you will have to drink. That, of course, is just a little demonstration, meaning that he feels perfectly at home.
The Australian clubs take on all sorts of names, but the same atmosphere pervades the lot. In some clubs are men who have been members for years who couldn't tell you where the reading-room was. They only know the way to the bar.
But to return to the atmosphere of Australian clubs, I am assured by friends that it is engendered of a rank and common suspicion that one member is going to endeavour to borrow money from another. One feels the constraint in the air at once, and no one gets jolly and hilarious in consequence, but just "cunning" drunk. A man can't escape the borrower in Australia—and he gauges the standing of a club by the magnitude of the loan a member suggests.
A visitor to an Australian club can never be sure as to whom he is going to meet. If a tailor happensto be in a fair way of business he probably makes the members of some club feel uncomfortable every time a glass door swings open. Pinero said something derogatory about solicitors in clubs. They're in all Australian clubs. I have heard of a solicitor taking revenge out of an Australian who had been dodging service of a writ, issued from the said solicitor's office, for weeks. But the Australian guessed the boy with the writ was on the pavement and evaded the solicitor's stare by putting a comic paper between him and it. One also meets the dentist in most Australian clubs.
Some of the developments of the literary club are peculiar to Australia. For example, on the selection committee of the Johnsonian Club, Brisbane, is a man whose greatest literary effort was the announcement to a gasping audience that "There were no cases set down for hearing at the Police Court this morning." In the same club are many who could not tell you who Boswell was any more than some members of the Melbourne Yorick could tell you what Hamlet killed behind the arras. If you asked after midnight the most literary of them they would, as one voice, say, "A blood-red mouse."
I have been at some loss to know what makes a person eligible for membership at one of the many Australian city clubs. But enquiry has brought to light some "pilling" episodes. I have known afather pilled for membership of a club and his son go through all right. But the father had educated the son up as a snob. He dressed better than his governor and sponged on him. I have often wondered if the old chap knew what a compliment the members of the club paid him in deciding he was not fit to associate with his son.
The languid swell element has invaded all Australian clubs. Publicans' sons most do congregate in them when people who work for a living are out after a crust. These youths take mental exercise reading the theatrical gossip and social columns of the weekly snob papers. They are walking encyclopædias of useless information, and may be trusted to make fools of themselves on all occasions.
They experience a great joy in pointing out to foolish little girls in the street a man in the public eye as So-and-So, "a honorary member of our club." So-and-So, probably an imported actor, however, is blissfully unaware of his advertiser's existence.
These Australian clubs metaphorically tumble over each other to have a distinguished visitor to toady to, and to get a little of the reflected glory they will sign chits for his drinks till all's blue, if he happens to be sufficiently hoggish to keep pace with them.
In the absence of any intellectual powers, the Australian clubman's idea of thoroughly entertaining a guest is to get drunk with him. To put a man to bed—take his boots off and all that—is the height of his hospitality.
Some Australians in their cups to-day will wax reminiscent on the days when "the nights we used to have at the old Bandicoot Club."
There is an expression in Australia, "Blind as a bandicoot." It's at variance with natural history, but most sayings are in conflict with fact in Australia. Truth there dwells at the bottom of an artesian bore.
The man on the land in Australia is represented by two classes, the squatter and the cockatoo farmer. Why the latter is so called I am at a loss to know. He never has a feather to fly with. The squatter is more birdlike. He puts on a lot of "wing," and some of him go so far as to flout a crest.
Many of the squatters of to-day in Australia are the descendants of cattle "duffers," as their nondescript herds amply testify. A fine portly legislator of the present time has a couple of well-stocked stations, and generally looms large in Australian landscape. One day, before he became smug, a neighbour of his caught him with an unbranded calf in his yard, and cried, "Heigh! That calf is not yours!" "No," he called back, "but it will be as soon as the iron is hot!"
I wouldn't like to be an Australian squatter for many reasons. That is, of the old type. There are a few importations of recent years—men with clean breeding and clean money—from England. They're all right. But they are not representative of the class. As a class squatters are illiterate, and anexemplification of the poet's mock logic that "The man who drives fat cattle must himself be fat"—particularly about the head. They are used chiefly as members of the different Legislative Councils, where they obstruct liberal land laws with much vehemence and bad grammar. They are in the main responsible for the slow settlement of Australian agricultural lands by their relentless harassment of the selector at every point. The result is a trend towards land monopolies. New South Wales illustrates the case. The evidence and finding of the Lands Scandals Commission showed that a Minister of the Crown in New South Wales accepted enormous bribes to perpetuate this state of things; there have also been land scandals in Victoria and Queensland. In that State 24 men or companies hold 44 million acres between them, and hold this preposterous area so tightly that when Australians complain that it is unfair to judge the country's indebtedness on a population basis they should remember that this sort of thing debars immigration: it rather accentuates the borrowing plight, by causing emigration.
The squatter encourages pests, not people, to settle on the land. It was a squatter who introduced sparrows into Australia, and rabbits, and Scotch thistles, and docks, and the bot fly; also swine fever. A squatter's son is a chip off the old blockhead. When he's about twenty he's sent toEngland for a brush up, and he either becomes an absentee or returns to help make Australian cities more vicious. As a rule he acquires a beautifully discriminative taste for whisky, and what time he is sober races horses on the most approved spieling method. There was one of him in the Sydney Equity Court recently, who said he had been drunk for eight years, and that the whole of that time was a blank to him.
The evening papers chronicled how many times he had delirium tremens, and how many times he had fits, and how as Vicar's warden he took up the collection in the country church and breathed whisky fumes on the congregation. He sat on the Bench—drunk: he played polo—drunk: he was captain of a volunteer corps—drunk: he read family prayers—drunk: he started races—drunk: he sat on the hospital committee—drunk: when he couldn't do these things he was dead—drunk.
But to the cockatoo. There is little to be said of him. He spends most of his time growling. He would have you believe that his title deeds are in a lawyer's office in perpetuity as security for loans, while the local grocer invariably has a lien over his crops. He is, as a matter of fact, mostly well to do, but the way he lives it is to be hoped will never in its sordidness be known to the other half of the world. His wail for cheap railway freights and seed wheat ceaseth not, and though he has learnt tocall himself the backbone of the country he is really a national calamity. In the back country he is little better than his dog.
Francis Adams says his heathenism is intense, and that everyone in the bush is at heart a pessimist. He has almost lost the power of speech, and his jaws move with difficulty when he attempts it. Henry Lawson, an Australian, tells of the intelligence of the bushman at his highest development in a study entitled "His Colonial Oath." He writes: I recently met an old schoolmate of mine up country. He was much changed. He was tall and lank, and had the most hideously bristly red beard I ever saw. He was working on his father's farm. He shook hands and looked anywhere but in my face, and said nothing. Presently I remarked at a venture:
"So poor old Mr. B., the school master, is dead?"
"My oath!" he replied.
"He was a good sort?"
"My oath!"
"Time goes pretty quickly, doesn't it?"
"His oath (colonial)."
"Poor old Mr. B. died awfully sudden, didn't he?"
He looked up the hill and said, "My oath!"
Then he added: "My blooming oath!"
I thought my perhaps city rig or manner embarrassed him, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, spat, and said, so as to set him at his ease: "It's blanky hot to-day. I don't know how you blanky blanks stand such blank weather. It's blanky well blank enough to roast a crimson carnal bullock, ain't it?" Then I took out a cake of tobacco, bit off a quarter, and pretended to chew. He replied:
"My oath!"
The conversation flagged here. But presently, to my great surprise, he came to the rescue with:
"He finished me, you know?"
"Finished? How? Who?"
He looked down towards the river, thought (if he did think) and said: "Finished me edyercation, yer know!"
"Oh! you mean Mr. B.?"
"My oath!—he finished me first-rate."
"He turned out many good scholars, didn't he?"
"My oath! I'm thinkin' about going down to the training school!"
"You ought to—I would if I were you."
"My oath!"
"Those were good old times," I hazarded. "You remember the old bark school?"
He looked away across the siding, and was evidently getting uneasy. He shifted about and said: "Well, I must be going."
"I suppose you're pretty busy now?"
"My oath! So long!"
"Well, good-bye. We must have a yarn some day."
"My oath!"
He got away as quickly as he could....
The Australian bushman has, what is generally known as a "rat"; in fact, the lunacy of Australia is most alarming. "There seems little doubt that insanity is slowly but steadily increasing in the States," remarks Coghlan, on the Commonwealth. He is only working on the figures asylum returns show. If only the idiots of the backblocks were included, the mad rate per thousand in Australia—now in excess of that of England—would stagger humanity.
Everyone in Australia is in imminent peril of a title. Nobody is safe. There is no saying whose turn it will be next. When he gets up in the morning the first thing the Australian does is to look at the paper and see if his name is among the list of those knighted or otherwise decorated. The distribution seems to run like a sweep consultation. So many K.C.M.G.'s, so many C.M.G.'s, and so on. Then they put the names of all the people of Australia into a hat and draw for them.
There is no other way of explaining how the people who have titles got them, or why. In only one instance on record is there a proper fit. It is the particular case of a Sydney publican who sells threepenny beers with a free "counter lunch." He was made a C.M.G. The humour of the lottery once more. It is most amusing to anybody from the old country to see funny little men "Sirred" in Australia.
People whose luck is so much out that they can't draw a title make shift in the meantime with a hyphen. It is just as well that strangers know this for the purposes of answering invitations. Neverforget the hyphen in Australia. No "family" is without it. In the early days Brown was hyphenated to Smith with a gyve.
The Australian titled person is mostly under-educated and over-fed. He is of no particular use except to company promoters, who put his name on the front page of a prospectus. Sometimes he opens a bazaar. He prefers, however, eating at complimentary banquets tendered to anybody whose fellow townsmen think justifies a gorge.
The prodigality with which the people responsible hand out titles to Australians is no doubt part of the scheme which sprang from the mind of William Charles Wentworth, the originator in the country of "that fatal drollery called representative government." Wentworth was known as "the shepherd king"—the titular craze again. There was also in Australia a bushranger king. Hall, who was shot by a policeman, was so titled by the New South Wales Premier of the times, Hon. (afterwards, of course, Sir) John Robertson. Hall owned a station.
But to return to Wentworth's scheme. It was to found "a colonial aristocracy," a House of Peers—"a replica of England rather than America." Martin in his "Australia and the Empire" chronicles the folly. "The subject," he wrote, "had been for years maturing in his (Wentworth's) mind; he even expounded his views on this question of anAustralian House of Lords in a long-forgotten article in the pages of an English magazine...." Yet on this point of creating a brand new colonial aristocracy he failed miserably. The commonest street orator in Sydney could raise a ready laugh by giving a list of the expectant "nobility." Robert Lowe opposed it in the House of Commons, and his criticism had all the weight of colonial experience, while a young Sydney tradesman, by name Henry Parkes, as Dr. Lang described the Premier of New South Wales, first rose to public notoriety and favour by his diatribes against this feature of Wentworth's great measure.
The young Sydney tradesman afterwards drew a knighthood himself, and didn't send it back to the title lottery department of the Colonial Office.
There are certain fat people in Australia who are scant of breath through pursuing the House of Lords' will-o'-the-wisp. Desperate have been the efforts exerted.
The progeny of the innumerable crop of pompous low-order knights and colonial-made Gentlemen in Australia does not benefit to any enviable degree. Living up to a hyphen is bad enough, but when it comes to an order it invariably means an inheritance of debts, ending in passe daughters becoming manicurists (an occupation not respectable since the gay Lord Quex), and the sons up-country police-court practitioners, or £100-a-year civil servants. Oneven footing with the low-order knights are the "honourables." They approximate to Wentworth's House of Peers, membership of State Legislative Councils carrying the title. The "honourables" guinea-pig mainly for a living. The title also means Government House entree, and rating at functions where there is recourse to precedence. Wives and daughters thus get their hands on the social lever, and so, later on, catch, with great adroitness, the overworked reception smile of Governors' clever consorts. Clever because it must often be so hard to refrain from laughing outright.
I should like to share some of the fun at the various Government Houses after a reception.
It is rather rough on them, though, not to be able to enjoy the comedy while it is in progress. Seldom can they. There is, however, a time on record when they did to the full—so did many others who had a "Burke's Peerage" on their library shelves. The Duke of Buccleugh was cabled to have sailed for Australia. "A title!" cried some. "A Duke!" gasped other Australians. Society was agog. But it was only a very well-bred bull shipped for stud purposes.
Is it any wonder that "the commonest street orator" can raise a laugh when Australian titles are mentioned?
From a close observation of Australian restaurants I have come to the conclusion that the Australian does not eat his food—he wolfs it. He's not very particular either what he eats. (In Queensland earth is in his dieting scale). What he chiefly wants is something to chew, and he usually bites off more than he comfortably can.
He's argumentative at the breakfast table, and the less he knows about a subject the more he'll say. One of him wanted to argue with me only the other morning on this very subject of eating. The argument turned on the word "dinner," and he let his porridge get cold while he went for a dictionary. "To dine," he said, with his mouth full, "is to 'take dinner,' and according to this dictionary that is 'the chief meal of the day.'" That's just it—the Australian regulates it by size; he cannot distinguish between a meal and a dinner.
Delicate glass, spotless napery, flowers, and above all sparkling conversation—those larger delights!—he does not encourage. He is a mere gross feeder. I am talking now of the man who can afford thesethings (even the employment of a conversationalist), not of the sixpenny "Dining" rooms, of which Australia is the home. How horrible these "dining" rooms are on a hot day! You can smell them two streets off. If you are brave enough to look in you will see what you usually go to the zoo at 4 o'clock to watch.
There is no restaurant in Australia where you can get a meal suited to the climate, and as for "home" meals, well, if an Australian asks you to his house to dine don't go unless you're an ostrich. Cooking among Australian women is a lost art. The Australian girl goes in for "accomplishments" only. If she is ever called upon to cook anything she uses the frypan.
If I ever set up business in Australia it would be in three "lines"—frying pans, false teeth, and patent medicines.
Everything is washed down in Australia with tea. It is a dangerous beverage as it is made there, in witness thereof are the clayey complexions and dyspeptic noses of the women. Why they don't drink wine, the natural beverage of the country, I never could make out until I tasted the vintages. But they are improving. Some foreigners are making very decent wine in Australia just now; but the Australians won't drink it until it is exported and returns again to the country with a French brandon it. The same remark applies to most things in Australia. They don't manufacture anything. I once dined with a squatter in Queensland, and there was not an article of furniture in the room that had been made in Australia, and not a thing on the table, except the vegetables, but was imported. The table linen, the glassware, the knives, the crockery—all were imported. The wine was imported, so was the salmon, and the coffee, and his "Missus's" cat was Manx. And yet there wasn't a thing in the room but the raw material could have been produced in the country, right down to the condiments.
When I went into the Public Library at Sydney and asked for the catalogue of the Australian poets I thought the attendant, in complying, had handed me the Federal electoral rolls. He said, however, that it was all right. There are just about as many people anxious to make the poetry of the country as there are to make its laws, and among them all they have made a mess of both. Parkes, addressing a public meeting, once said, "I would rather be a third-rate poet than a first-class politician." Somebody interjected: "Well, aren't you?" I thank God when I think of the few awful hours I spent with the Australian muse (or, more correctly speaking, bemuse) that I have read very little Australian poetry. Nevertheless I have read enough to enable me to arrive at a definition of what really constitutes a right to be called a poet, and it is: Any person of either sex who can write in metre without being laughed at. In applying this golden rule it will be seen that there are no poets in Australia except the alleged humorous versifiers.
Sir Henry Parkes, deceased, is generally referred to in the Australian Press as poet, politician and patriot. I haven't the time to inquire into all theother things, but I did spend an hour with his "Fragmentary Thoughts" and "Stolen Moments." They are well worth perusing, and I think everybody ought to read those sympathetic lines "To a Beautiful and Friendless Child; aged four years." The child was aged four years; it is not "an early poem," which fact I thought it just as well to mention before quoting the opening stanza: