The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rambles in Australia, by Edwin Sharpe Grew and Marion Sharpe Grew

Transcriber’s Note

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RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA

MILLS & BOON’S
RAMBLES SERIES

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Rambles in Australia.

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KARRI COUNTRY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

Frontispiece.

RAMBLES
IN AUSTRALIA

BY
EDWIN & MARION SHARPE GREW
AUTHORS OF “THE COURT OF WILLIAM III”
“THE ENGLISH COURT IN EXILE: JAMES II AT ST. GERMAIN”
“RAMBLES IN HOLLAND”

WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND A MAP

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.

Published 1916

TO
OUR AUSTRALIAN HOSTS
IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
OF MUCH KINDNESS

PREFACE

This little book aims at giving such general impressions of Australia as could be gleaned during a visit lasting from July into September, and including some time spent in each state. We have tried to convey some idea of the aspect of the country itself, with its brilliant sunshine, great plains and trackless forests; of the social atmosphere of warm-hearted hospitality; of its economic problems and democratic legislative experiments. These last are so essentially Australian, that it seemed impossible to omit some reference to them, but they hardly fall within our scope, and are only lightly touched upon. Figures and facts quoted are taken from official handbooks and pamphlets.

With regard to the illustrations, those of Western Australia were provided by the kindness of Mr. Gibbs, of the Lands Department at Perth, and Mr. L. V. Shapcott, Premier’s Office, Perth, who was good enough to take special photographs for us. For those of South Australia we have to thank Mr. Vaughan of the Lands Department.

At Melbourne the Secretary of the admirably organised Government Tourist Bureau was kind enough to have the views of Victoria specially printed for reproduction. For the views of New South Wales we have to thank the Hon. Dugald Thomson, and for those of Brisbane the Secretary of the Government Tourist Bureau for Queensland. Lastly, our grateful thanks are due to Captain Muirhead Collins, Permanent Secretary of the Australian Commonwealth in London, for his great kindness in reading the proofs and for much valuable criticism.

If Rambles in Australia leads even a few readers to wish for a closer acquaintance with, and a better understanding of, this great country of which we are so ignorant at home, it will not have been written in vain.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I
WESTERN AUSTRALIA

MAP OF
AUSTRALIA
to illustrate
“RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA”

George Philip & Son L^td

Mills & Boon L^td

RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: THE LAND OF THE UNLATCHED DOOR

Opposite to us was Australia. During the long days of the voyage across the bleak South Indian Ocean it had seemed no more than a vague area on a map, small, as all countries and even continents are, compared to the interminable stretches of the sea. But the voyage was ended now, and Australia, first no more than a blur on the horizon, and then solidifying into a shore with green trees, had now become resolved into an island with a lighthouse; and now into a harbour with wharves and quays and a background of houses behind the sheds and derricks. There was a train puffing in the distance; and here fussed a launch bringing with it people from the shore....

Quite suddenly the Blue Funnel Liner which has had the accustomedness of a home to us for all these weeks, shrinks to the aspect of a ship, of no more importance to us than a passenger train; and impatience seizes us to be off. There is the land, alluring in a glow of sunset barred with feathery clouds ... there’s a shore breeze calling, let us go!

So much for the emotions of arrival. They are quickly submerged by occurrences which are no less stubborn in the poetic moments of reaching a new land, than at any other time. The Blue Funnel Liner had been behind her time, and had not wired her subsequent gain of a few hours; our arrival had been expected, and was to have been made the occasion of a greeting by the Government of Western Australia to the members of a scientific mission on board. Western Australia’s first greeting was to have taken the form of a garden party at Government House, Perth; and as the invitations had been distributed over hundreds of miles of a wide country weeks before, no postponement had been possible. The garden party was being held—in our regretted absence—and the Port Medical Authorities, not to be done out of their festivity, had gone to it. So there Western Australia was—at our garden party, and there peering at the land of promise were we.

Hours went by. Those of us who had hastened over lunch and wrestled impatiently with trunks and hold-alls that be they attacked ever so early never can be packed at leisure, wandered about the decks, finding that they had lost their friendliness with their deck chairs, and had become as little homelike as a railway platform. The deck-steward, who had become merely a deck-steward instead of philosopher and friend, recovered some of his old standing by telling us that we were to have an early dinner on board, after all. But it was an empty meal. We so much desired to be gone. And at last we were. The sunset had faded, the swift dusk had deepened into night, when at last we went down the gangway and stood in Australia.... It was Australia, though beneath our feet were the planks and rails of a wharf. The French have a proverb that at night all cats are grey. This wharf, might it not have been the wharf at Liverpool or Tilbury? Not quite. There was the Southern Cross overhead; and in the warm darkness there was a something—something that was not England.

The party that had been so long companions split up and were scattered. The writer of these lines became for an hour or so more single than any of them, for business took him at once into Perth, where he had to find Reuter’s Agency. So looking back, and sorting out his recollections, he remembers first the friendly host that met him and walked to the railway station at Fremantle; and after that the Swan River shining in the starlight as the train crossed it; and after that nothing but the soft Australian night stealing in through the open carriage windows and seeming to come through whispering trees—until the train drew up at the lighted terminus of Perth. And Perth? In the darkness it was much like any other town at which one should arrive at night. Not like Paris, where, as a Frenchwoman in Bâle once said to us, at ten o’clock “Ça commence,” nor yet like London, where, in times of peace, the streets are still open-eyed. But not unlike a provincial town; with some shops still brightly lighted, though most of them and the office buildings, are shut; a town with lights, but not lit; and with streets that are kept awake only by the street lamps. Through one such street I tracked down the office I sought, receiving much friendly aid by the way; and finally arriving at it in company with the publisher’s clerk of the Perth newspaper.

That is another outstanding recollection: the publishing office with two clerks, one rather sleepy, the other painstakingly deciphering an obituary notice which a small girl had brought in. When he had at last made it out, and felt that he could leave the office for a few minutes in charge of his companion, he put on his hat and said he would come with me. So he did. As a matter of history his kindness was unavailing, except to make me feel that Australia was filled with friends, for the office we wanted was vacant. So back I went through the gaunt streets and on to the railway station, where I was too new to the country to disregard the notice that smoking was not allowed on the platform; and presently the train was again taking me back to the suburb of Cottesloe Beach.

This was a country railway station, evidently. Just like one at home, to the two lighted shops just outside, and the white road stretching up a hill in the starlight. The road up which I was directed was dotted with houses wide apart; with shaded lamps which I could see through the shrubs; and now and again a piano tinkling. It was very still. At last I found the house I sought. Very white, with trees about it, and a windmill for its well; and windows lighted for the stranger. No; not the stranger, but the unknown, welcome guest. The gate in the wooden fence was swung back; there was a light in the hall; and the hall door was wide open, though the hall was empty. And that was how I thought then, and have always thought of Australia. It is the “Land of the Unlatched Door.”

CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It behoves visitors to Australia to realise that they will have a good many things to do for themselves that they have never done before, and that the conditions of travelling, for instance, are very different from those in Europe. To begin with, the station porter is absent, and everyone has to carry his own hand baggage, for in a country, where labour is very scarce and very highly paid, there are no loafers ready to scramble for odd jobs, even at a port. What cannot be carried ashore by the passengers is left to be dealt with, frequently much to its detriment, by agencies whose representatives come on board for the purpose and convey it, or some of it, to its owner’s destination. Stray packages, providentially arrive in time to go on to the next stopping-place with their owner. This applies not only to landing, but to railway travelling; so that it can easily be arranged for by those who are prepared in advance.

It was quite dark when we went ashore, and it is the oddest sensation to land in an unknown country after dark. We had been told on the boat that the station was at a distance of ten minutes’ walk, but in the absence of cabs and porters its whereabouts was problematical. We therefore deposited our bags and awaited events.

Then out of the obscurity a man came up with some hesitation and asked us our names. It was our host, who had been guided to us in the dark by some occult sense, for we were unknown to each other except by name. He greeted us heartily with the kindly solicitude of an old friend, took possession of us and the larger share of our hand baggage, and carried us off to the station.

It was our first experience of an Australian welcome and Australian hospitality; that hospitality, which for unaffected kindness and generosity, can surely have no counterpart on any other continent. The hospitality that makes a guest free of all his host’s possessions, that grudges no time or trouble in his guests’ interest, and that is bestowed in the spirit not of a giver, but the receiver of a benefit. As we walked towards the train the ground seemed curiously soft, as if we were walking ankle-deep in dust. It was not till next day that we found that this part of Western Australia consists everywhere of loose yellow sand like that by the seashore. The night was very mild after the keen sea air, and encumbered with bags and our heavy coats, we arrived at the station in time to see the train go out, and waited for the next one in a large empty booking-hall. At last the little train rattled in, and we started. We crossed the broad Swan River, above which a crescent moon was hanging, and Venus shone with the luminous brilliancy of southern skies. One of us went on to Perth: the other descended at Cottesloe Beach.

Here the station fly was waiting. It was shaped like a French diligence and drawn by two ruminative old white horses. The driver, surprised and startled at the apparition of a fare, climbed down, and lit a candle inside the fly, the light of which disclosed white lace curtains at the windows tied up with red ribbon. A few minutes jolting drive, and we were at our destination, and, jumping out, plunged immediately into soft, deep sand, before the entrance to a large one-storied house, its corrugated iron white-painted roof shining in the starlight as if it were covered with snow.

Our hostess, who had waited dinner for us an unconscionable time, had neither allowed that, nor her welcome to get cold in the interim, and took us to a room sweet with the scent of a great bowl of wattle, and a bunch of very large, deep purple violets—a room that seemed strangely quiet after the long-heard straining and cracking of the timbers in our cabin. Here our sleep was lulled only by the fitful creaking of the little windmill in the garden.

The charming house in which we stayed at Cottesloe Beach was typical of nearly all West Australian houses. It stood, as even the smallest workman’s cottage stands, in its own grounds detached from its neighbours’, a roomy bungalow with a broad verandah running right round it. The verandah is an essential, all-important part of a West Australian house. The family sleep in it all the year round, using the bedrooms merely as dressing-rooms; they live on another side of it during the day.

In the country suburbs the houses are built on piles to protect them from the attacks of white ants. White ants can eat everything except jarrah, a hard red eucalyptus wood, which has been tried for paving London streets. The foundations of all the houses are formed of jarrah piles; on the top of every pile is put an iron saucer, and on this again is erected the superstructure of the building. The iron saucer is indispensable, and, “capping the pile,” takes the place of laying the foundation-stone. The white ants can neither penetrate it, nor run outside it, for they won’t come into the light.

An immense corrugated galvanised iron water-tank stands beside every house, and most of the larger ones have their own windmill for pumping up water.

All the gardens were gay with flowers in this beautiful climate, even at the end of the winter. Masses of purple kennedya,[1] a showy climbing plant with a small pealike flower, hung from a high wooden fence surrounding our host’s house. Geraniums grew like shrubs, and a magenta bougainvillea was a curtain of colour.

We arrived in Australia with the wattle; the mimosa sold in London shops can give but little idea of its trees, shining like cloth of gold among the grey eucalyptus, and outlining the streams. It is comparable to our hawthorn, though it is not in the same way a harbinger of spring, for the mild and flowery winters have no terrors. Australians are immensely proud of their wattle. They never lose an opportunity of commenting on its beauty, and just as no two Irishmen can agree on the exact identity of the Irish shamrock among a variety of small trefoils, so wherever you go in Australia a different variety of mimosa is pointed out as the “true” Australian wattle.

One soon takes as a matter of course the brilliant unvarying Australian sunshine, but on our first walk the day after our arrival, it seemed as if we were wandering in a land of limelight; its hard dazzling white brilliance appeared artificial and unreal. There seemed to be an absence of chiaroscuro, and of atmosphere, the clear-cut distance gave an illusory impression of nearness, annihilating perspective; the eucalyptus with their light, springing branches, sparsely covered with long, narrow leaves, give little shade. From pictures and photographs one is led to suppose that Australian scenery is not unlike that of England. It is wholly and entirely different, not only in its atmospheric effect, and in the more uniform and heavier colouring of its foliage, but every individual plant is unfamiliar. Australia, one may say, roughly speaking, is one vast forest of eucalyptus or gum tree. The gums have many varieties, far too numerous for the traveller to distinguish, from the slight pale trees that are not unlike a silver-barked birch, to the soaring giants of the karri forest, with their smooth white stems; but whatever the variety, the prevailing tinge is a bluish grey. Sometimes the forest or “bush” has been cleared away to make room for orchards, and crops, or towns, or grazing land; sometimes acres of trees have been “ringbarked,” as it is called, a rapid and cheap way of clearing land, by cutting out a ring of bark so that the tree dies, and only a skeleton forest remains, letting in light and air to the soil. But the “bush” is never very far away. It seems to be only waiting to close in again, and swallow up once more what has been so laboriously cleared. West, east, north, and south, the gum tree predominates, though the bush varies in the nature of its undergrowth, which in the tropics becomes rich and beautiful.

The general effect of Australian landscape to English eyes produces an impression of austerity. It is never friendly, perhaps because of the general absence of water, the sombre wooded hills, the vast dun plains, have something aloof and forbidding.

It would be difficult to find anything in life more stimulating and delightful than the first walk in a new country, where every sight and sound is unfamiliar. Strolling along the soft, hot sandy road that first morning, past the low-verandahed houses, each with its wooden palisade, its windmill and big grey water-tank, we came to rising ground overlooking the Swan River. Behind were the low deep blue hills of the Darling Range, and the broad river lay glassy in the heat of the sun, blue as the Lake of Geneva on a summer’s day. Its wooded banks run out in little spits of land with white sandy foreshores, one or two small white-sailed boats were floating idly on it, and some water-fowl swam on its unruffled surface. The foliage of the gums with which its banks are covered is dark and uniform in colour, and had the massive effect of our trees in autumn, before the leaves have begun to turn. The air was heavy with the scent of some white-flowering shrub, the stillness was unbroken except by the note of a magpie; the place seemed a paradise. So it must have looked to the first settlers, the first pioneers, who stood, as we stood, looking down on it. It left an ineffaceable impression, and we never again saw anything more beautiful than that view.

Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers. We were a month too early, but even so we saw many strange and beautiful varieties. They are more numerous here than anywhere else in the world, even now many have not been classified. The most characteristic are as unlike as possible to our delicate evanescent wild flowers at home; strongly growing, determined, having adapted themselves, by becoming wiry or leathery, to all exigencies of heat or drought. The banksia, for instance, looked as if a fir-cone had suddenly burst into bristling pink flowers; the hard cone of it is called by the natives a “mungite,” and is used to kindle fire. Some unobservant person once told the West Australians that their birds were all songless, their flowers all scentless, and being naturally self-depreciatory, they have quoted it ever since. The bird-notes are very beautiful and clear in quality of tone; the note of the magpie will at once occur to the most casual observer, to quote only one instance. Old Dampier, in 1699, on his first landing in Western Australia was struck with “the small birds, all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes.” He mentions too, being observant, as befits an explorer, “the small flowers growing on the ground, that were sweet and beautiful,” and where else is there a better description of the eucalyptus “sweet-scented and reddish within the bark,” and “with long narrow leaves ... on one side whitish and on the other green.” But the “racoons” (kangaroos) which were so numerous as to be easily caught, and were “very good meat,” are now but rarely to be seen, where he first sighted them.

Cottesloe Beach, our headquarters while we were in Western Australia, is a pleasant seaside suburb, with, as its name suggests, an immense beach of finest white sand, lapped by smooth waters and protected by Rottnest Island from ocean storms. The cliffs of Rottnest Island, showing yellowish in the bright sunshine, with the white needle of the lighthouse sharply defined are the first sight of land as ships approach West Australia.

The half an hour’s railway journey to Perth runs through other little garden suburbs, for all Australian towns straggle out for many miles into the country, and cover a very large extent of ground. Space is unlimited, and nobody’s domain large or small, need elbow that of his neighbour. The little train on its narrow gauge railway rattles past roads of one-storied houses, standing on their piles; each with its verandah, and sloping iron roof, each surrounded by its palisaded garden, with its purple kennedya, its pink geranium and wattle, each with its inevitable tall grey iron water-tank; somewhere about there is sure to be an array of the ubiquitous kerosene tin, utilised either as a pail, a basket, a flower-box, or all three. We saw them used to form chimneys, even to construct a raft. These suburbs have an air of having loose ends left hanging out. It is all so new; there is no time to attend to details when time is so essentially money. So bordering the low fences are rough undergrowth and gum trees and banksias, and coarse wiry grass—the beginning and the end of the bush.

CHAPTER III
PERTH: A PARADISE FOR THE WORKING MAN

The city of Perth is in a transition stage. Scattered over the low hills of the Swan River, its situation is magnificent, and its climate superb, but it is as yet only partly built, or rather it is undergoing the gradual process of rebuilding. As the municipality becomes more wealthy, handsome houses are replacing temporary structures, so that imposing white official buildings alternate with makeshift affairs hurriedly run up in earlier days, when need was urgent and money was scarce. Perth is, then, on its way to becoming a fine town, and its public buildings are being constructed from simple designs in good taste.

PERTH, FROM “THE NARROWS.”

But what most impresses the new-comer from Europe in Australian towns is not the buildings, but the people. Here is no miserable sordid fringe of the poor and wretched. In this happy country there is no poverty. Its people are well fed, well clothed, well housed, well-to-do. Whatever her problems, and they are many and difficult, and not to be lightly pronounced upon by the casual visitor, it is the glory of Australia that she has no poor.

It appeared to us, especially in the West, that a characteristic type is developing; lean, loosely hung, wiry, with eyes deep-set from the strong sunlight. In odd contrast to European towns, men everywhere preponderate over women in the streets. Perhaps because of its newness, the attitude of the other states to Western Australia is still a little patronising. Western Australians themselves are fully conscious of this, they on their part always talk about “the East” in tones of desire: “I hope we shall go to the East next year,” is often heard in Perth. At first we thought they meant China or Japan, but we soon found that in Western Australia “the East” means Melbourne or Sydney. They stand for London or Paris, and one lady said plaintively: “If I have a nice dress, when I go to see my sister in ‘the East,’ she says, ‘You didn’t get that made in Perth.’”

Perth, however, is looking forward. She knows the time will come when she can compete fearlessly with her elder sister the capital of “the East.” Meanwhile she has achieved the acquisition of the most attractive zoological gardens of any Australian city. They are small, but charmingly laid out, the animals left free to roam about in their own little grassy paddocks. The pleasant shady walks are lined by the pretty Cape lilac, which in July is bare of leaves, but covered with clusters of yellow berries, very decorative in effect. These gardens lie on the far side of the Swan River, and a ferry-boat plies across its shining blue waters. Numbers of black and white water-fowl swim alongside, diving below and bobbing up again, or settling on a row of posts that run out from the shore, each one like a little black and white carved ornament. The gardens are a few minutes’ walk from the landing stage. We found them charming, the darker evergreens everywhere lighted up by patches of golden wattle. The kangaroos and wallabies feeding in their little enclosures hop up and put gentle inquiring noses into your hand.

Perhaps it is because the little wild Australian animals are so pathetically confiding that they are becoming extinct. The authorities do all they can to preserve them, but it appears to be inevitable, though deplorable, that the native wild animals of Australia, charming little inoffensive creatures, are becoming rarer every year, in spite of large reserves or national parks, where everything is left untouched in its wild state. Unfortunately some of the most interesting cannot be kept in captivity. This applies, for instance, so we were told, to the koala, or little tree-bear, and to the curious duck-billed platypus, a little animal covered with a wiry brown fur, with the bill of a bird, and something of the habits of our river otter. The gardens possessed a one-eyed alligator that caught pigeons in its mouth with astonishing dexterity, and swallowed them whole in two gulps; and some fascinating cranes with beautiful vermilion legs, that danced as gracefully as any ballerina. Our own visit to the gardens was pleasantly concluded by tea, which an Australian lady was hospitably dispensing to ourselves and some other English visitors.

Tea is a most important feature of Australian life. Tea comes in with the maid and hot water in the mornings, and tea is drunk at breakfast; “Morning tea” is a settled social institution. We were invited to it on several occasions, it is served at eleven o’clock. Tea next appears at or after lunch. Afternoon tea is a matter of course everywhere; but it comes in again at or after dinner, and is very often drunk the last thing at night. One would think so much tea would undermine the strongest constitution, but it is made very weak with a great deal of milk. Australians themselves feel that their indulgence in tea-drinking is rather excessive but they account for it by saying that “In the bush you cannot get anything else to drink,” and neither seek nor offer other explanation.

It was at this Perth tea-party that we first saw the brown heavily scented “boronia,” for which West Australia is famous. The tables were decorated with that and the delicate pink Geraldstown wax flower. Boronia has a small chocolate-coloured flower, yellow inside, and is so sweet that its scent is overpowering in a room or on a dinner table. The genus was named after an Italian botanist. There are many varieties in Australia, which, to the uninstructed eye, do not in the least resemble each other. Boronia megastigma, the West Australian variety, is used for the manufacture of scent, and is cultivated for sale; it is one of the most characteristic spring flowers.

We were not long in discovering that Western Australia, whatever course its future development may take, is at present a paradise for the working-man. Nowhere else is life made so pleasant and easy for him in such matters as housing and education; nowhere else are his children given such facilities for making their way in the world in their turn. To begin with, education is provided free of cost, from the primary school to the University. In the primary schools boys are given manual training, and girls are taught cooking and domestic economy. Special facilities are provided by the Government to meet the needs of scattered settlers in the bush remote from centres of population; wherever it is possible to assure an average attendance of even ten children within a radius of three miles, schools are already established. The Education Act even takes into consideration the case of isolated families, where the muster of children is less than ten; the department pays £7 a year for each child on condition that the parents find a suitable teacher, and will supplement this grant, so that he may have a minimum of £30 a year over and above the cost of his board and lodging.[2] In effect the Government pays part of the salary of a private tutor. It can be easily imagined that the education grant must be a very heavy one, in proportion to the population. It amounts, in fact, to about £1 annually for every individual in the state.

From the primary schools children are drafted into the secondary schools, when they are able to profit by the advanced standard of teaching. There are also technical schools, where trades are taught, and a training college for teachers.

We visited one of the intermediary schools, the Perth Modern School, as it is called, at Leederville, a suburb between Perth and Cottesloe Beach. We found a handsome red brick building, looking like a Nonconformist college in one of our older Universities. In the large, well-kept grounds there is room for football, tennis, hockey, and a gymnasium is provided in a detached building.

The school is admirably constructed for its purpose, the classrooms opening out of a large central hall. We were unexpected and unannounced. In the course of our researches in pursuit of the headmaster we were impressed with the excellent discipline and tone of a school in which the children’s attention was not to be distracted by the presence of strangers glancing into their classrooms in passing. The teachers, masters, and mistresses, all wore university gowns. The headmaster, alert and enthusiastic, showed us over his spacious, airy school-buildings, including the well-equipped laboratory and the department of domestic economy. Western Australia does not neglect the practical side of its children’s education, and here the girls are taught dressmaking, millinery, and cooking. The dining-rooms of the staff, and those pupils whose homes are at a distance, had the air of a well-appointed restaurant, with its small tables daintily set out with clean linen, and fresh flowers brought by the children. We noticed among them what looked like a small edelweiss, the Australian “flannel flower.”

The period of education at these intermediate schools consists of a four years’ course lasting from 12 to 16. A “Leaving Certificate” on the completion of the four years’ course must be obtained by examination to enable the student to pass into the University. Some students are drafted into the Training College for Teachers, or, after the four years’ course is finished, students may stay on at the school to study special subjects. We were impressed with the appearance of the children. They were healthy, well-to-do, and attractive; their manners were frank and without self-consciousness.

One of the older girls, who was deputed by the headmaster to show us the way to the station, would have compared favourably with any English schoolgirl of the same age. Her father had visited England, “and you have no sand in England,” she added, half incredulously, “and father could not make them understand about the sand here.” She came from up-country, and was able to tell us that two handsome large grey and black birds with a singularly limpid note were “rain birds.” She also pointed out to us two large castor-oil trees, and told us that the magpies, predatory, knowing-looking birds, which are to be seen everywhere in Australia, are called “break o’ day boys” in the country, because, like our cocks, they call the neighbourhood.

It is only quite recently that Western Australia has acquired its University; it is in fact of such new foundation, that, like some of Perth itself, it is still housed in temporary buildings. Its professorial staff is appointed, and it confers degrees, but the scene of its labours is at present in a number of classrooms beneath a corrugated iron roof, opposite the charming gardens of Government House—Australia is very good to its governors in the matter of houses and gardens. But Perth is developing with great rapidity, and a probable permanent site for the University is already talked of, on the banks of the Swan River, in the National Reserve or King’s Park.[3]

If working-men are liberally treated by the state as regards education for their children, they are treated no less generously as regards housing accommodation.

One afternoon we visited, in company with the State Premier, some of the houses the state builds for working-men. The bungalows were built on the Western Australian plan on piles; one-storied verandahed houses each in its own palisaded plot of ground about a quarter of an acre in extent. Outhouses, including a washhouse, were at a little distance from the main building. The houses were pretty and picturesque; they were constructed of coloured “sand” bricks, made of cement and sand, and had corrugated iron roofs. They vary in type, and the intending purchaser can see the plans and make his own selection according to his taste and means. Those we visited were situated on the pleasant outskirts of Perth, with a view over the Swan River. We went over several in the course of construction, and then made our way to a street of occupied houses. We left the motor-car behind here, for the roads were of soft sand like a sea beach. The sand was held together by a low-growing plant, a kind of mesembryanthemum, locally known as “pig’s face.” It has very thick, succulent leaves and an attractive flower like a large primrose-coloured thistle. Sheep or cattle will eat it, and it is almost independent of moisture. We visited some new-comers who had lately taken one of the houses. The owner was a member of the Legislative Council, and had recently left the goldfields to come and live in Perth; for Western Australia holds that it pays its legislators to legislate, and requires of them whole-hearted devotion to the service of the state for their £300 a year salary. He had already made his garden. The front lawn was sown with grass and sanded over, and he was busied in making a vegetable garden in the sand, in which early spring flowers were showing even then.

Inside, the rooms were large and well furnished, the bedrooms opening on to the broad, shady verandah that faced what would eventually be the lawn. As we drove away the Premier pointed out a small wooden house in a tiny plot of ground—that, he said, is all a man can do without state aid for the same money.

As to the financial part of the scheme, it is regulated on no principle of extravagant philanthropy, but is conceived on a sound commercial basis, to repay the Government the interest of 4½% on the capital expended. The payments of the tenants are calculated on a basis of 5%, with a rebate of ½% on punctual payment. The land on which their houses stand is inalienable, that is, at the end of ninety-nine years it reverts to the state, and in the meantime the owner cannot dispose of it except to the Government, who will take it back on a valuation, allowing compensation on improvements, or making deductions from the original cost on depreciations. To be eligible as a tenant a man’s income must be under £400 a year, and he pays a small deposit. The most expensive houses vary from £600 to £700. The tenant’s weekly payments, which may be spread over a period of thirty years, eventually make the house his own; but his payments may vary in accordance with his means, and he can make his house his own at any point by paying off the balance. No wonder that with such inducements to linger in the neighbourhood of a town, men should shrink from the harder, more vigorous life up-country. Yet it is “up-country” men that Australia wants, to clear, sow, and till her rich, fertile soil; with enterprise and energy to win certain fortune, and courage to face the initial hardships and loneliness, which bring their own reward.

With all her natural advantages Western Australia’s development is only a matter of the last twenty years. Like most of the rest of the continent, she has an inhospitable and forbidding coast. The Dutch knew of the existence of a southern land or, “Terra Australis,” before the end of the sixteenth century, and Dutch captains sailing from the Cape to Java and the East Indies not infrequently found themselves within sight of a desolate and unknown coast, which they gradually charted, till it was mapped in outline from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cape Leeuwin. It was not, however, till nearly the end of the century that the first Englishman landed in Australia, when Captain Dampier, commanding the “Roebuck,” navigated the western and north-western coastline in 1699, and was not encouraged by what he saw there.

Sailing from the Downs in January with fifty men, and twenty months’ provisions, Dampier sighted the low, even shores of Australia in August of the same year, and entered Shark’s Bay, as he called it. He and his men went ashore, but sought in vain for water on that waterless coast, digging wells, but to no purpose. A hundred years later, in 1803, the continent was circumnavigated by Matthew Flinders, who suggested that “Australia” should be substituted for the Dutch name of New Holland.

Still nearly another century passed away before Western Australia begun to grow and prosper. In 1826 Major Lockyer was sent from Sydney, with troops and a party of convicts, to occupy King George’s Sound on the south coast, where the Port of Albany stands to-day, and a few years later the Swan River Settlement was formed in the neighbourhood of Fremantle and Perth; but these first beginnings of the colony were unpropitious, and it languished till the discovery of gold brought the first great influx of population, and with it the consequent demand for agricultural produce, which at last gave an impetus to Western Australian development.

Slowly the outside world began to realise the immense possibilities of this great territory, which occupies about one-third of the whole continent, and has an area eighteen times that of England and Wales. Within its fertile and beautiful interior, stretching from the temperate to tropical zones, were found districts well fitted for raising cattle and sheep, for agriculture, and fruit-growing and the cultivation of vines. Vast primeval forests of valuable timber cover many square miles, while the discovery of coal and other minerals accompanied that of gold. Western Australia is no less fortunate in its climate than in its natural resources: over the greater part of the state it is equable and pleasant without violent extremes. The dry season lasts into April; the greater part of the rainfall, which varies in different districts of the state from 40 to 10 inches, taking place between May and September.

CHAPTER IV
IN THE BUSH

One great source of wealth to Western Australia are the karri forests, covering thousands of square miles. Karri is a kind of eucalyptus closely allied to the better-known jarrah, one of the hardest woods in existence. It has been used at home to pave the streets of London. In all but one respect karri is as good as jarrah, its only point of inferiority is that it cannot be employed for underground purposes, while jarrah can be left under water for twenty years without being any the worse for it. Karri has to be specially prepared—“powellised” is the technical term—and that is an expensive process. Otherwise it is almost impossible to tell the two woods apart, except by the ash after burning.

Western Australia asserts that its karri trees are the tallest in the world, though Victorians make the same claim for the giant gums of Gippsland. So far these Gippsland trees have been proved to be the tallest in Australia. The official measurements are: height, 326 feet 1 inch; girth, 25 feet 7 inches; measured six feet from the ground.[4] Their dimensions are surpassed by the Californian redwood, which have been found attaining a height of 340 feet; but whatever the actual measurements, the effect of the immense height of the Australian trees is everywhere imposing enough to warrant competitive statements concerning it.

Remote from all habitation, the difficulties in the way of felling and transporting the karri are very great, and the Western Australian Government have in consequence established some state sawmills about two hundred miles up-country, in the heart of the primeval, uncleared forest. It is the nucleus of a new township called Big Brook. Australia has not shown herself altogether felicitous in her nomenclature, for generally it is neither original nor descriptive, except where native names have been adopted, which, if not euphonious, have a meaning.

We had the good fortune to be in Perth on the occasion of an official visit organised by the Government. Australian trains always run at night, and so avoid much tedium and loss of time. After an early dinner, we started from Perth at 7.30 for Big Brook in a special train.

The line, like all Western Australian railways, was laid on a narrow gauge, with the result that the carriages jolted and rocked like a small boat in a storm. An odd little characteristic feature of West Australian travelling is that at the end of each carriage is suspended a canvas water-bag, with a cup attached to it. They are also seen hanging in verandahs, impressing on the stranger that he is in a dry and thirsty land, where water is always precious.

One of the advantages of the Western Australian climate is that the nights are cool, though the spring sunshine was intensely hot. Whoever organised this Government visit to the sawmills had a very high standard of comfort, for from first to last it was most admirably arranged. We were a small but very pleasant little party, and met and talked in the friendly Australian way, in each other’s compartments. About nine o’clock a light supper was brought round, and we soon after went to bed and fitfully to sleep under a mountain of rugs. Whenever the train stopped there was a loud chorus of frogs from unseen swamps.

We were called next morning by the conductor bringing us tea, and later, while we were dressing, he came round with fruit. We woke to find ourselves already in the depths of the forest among the soaring white trunks of the karri, the early sun tinging their smooth trunks with red. The line had been recently made, and the sleeping cars were very heavy, so we proceeded slowly. There was very little sign of life; we could almost feel the great deep silence of the forest, moist, and fresh, and cold, in the frost of early morning, for it lies 400 feet above the sea level, and the temperature was very different from that of the dry sandy plains of Perth. At long intervals solitary wooden houses stood in little clearings, with grave-eyed children before the doorway, shading their eyes to watch the unfamiliar passage of a big train. More seldom we came upon a scattered village of tents, roughly put up like a gipsy encampment, pitched among the damp undergrowth. There was something pathetic in the deep isolation of these pioneers, though the near neighbourhood of the railway made their lives almost metropolitan, compared with those of many Australian settlers.

As we drew nearer to our journey’s end, we passed an occasional small clearing, where the yellow sandy soil had already been planted with apple trees for the fruit growing, which is one of the industries of the future for Western Australia; or patches of forest had been ringbarked,[5] and left to die, after the cheap but wasteful method of clearing in use. Visitors to Australia cannot help being impressed with the waste of timber, which seems appalling to an inhabitant of an over-populated northern country, where everything grows slowly, and every inch of wood has its economic value. They are too ready to rush into print, or public pronouncements, on a subject of which only prolonged residence in the country, and a more than superficial study of its economic problems, could enable them to judge. In the first place the cost of transport is prohibitive, or means of transport may even be non-existent; and secondly, in a new country time is money. Great tracts of forest all over Australia are ringbarked and left to rot. In the Government sawmills at Big Brook, the debris of the great karri trees is lost. There is wholesale waste, wholesale destruction of timber going on in Australia, the least intelligent observer cannot fail to mark it, but time is literally money in Australia. “We can’t afford to wait,” said one of the leading statesmen of Western Australia, commenting on the waste of timber at Big Brook. “We sacrifice five pounds to gain twenty,” said one of the shrewdest and best-informed officials of Victoria.

By the common process of ringbarking, dead trees are left standing over great areas of forest land, vast white skeleton armies, a strange and desolate sight. If the land is to be used for arable purposes, the trees have to be removed; but for pasture, when the trees are dead, and can no longer deprive the grass of nourishment and moisture, they remain standing for years, till in time with the process of the seasons, and the attacks of insects, the hard wood decays and crumbles away. Thus the destruction of forests goes on in order to provide timber for building; for fencing, mining, fuel, as well as for commercial purposes of export, or to improve, or create, arable or pasture land. In Western Australia besides, green timber is cut for fuel, in the neighbourhood of the goldfields, because of the scarcity of coal, but natural reafforestation is usually allowed to proceed. However, when all these necessities are admitted, there has been a deplorable waste of timber, the want of which is already felt in settled districts; and it is hoped that further wanton destruction will be prevented, and replanting will be undertaken by all the states. Official opinion is becoming alive to the importance of the question to the future history of Australia. Victoria and New South Wales are doing some planting, but South Australia is the only state in which forest plantation is being carried on on a large scale.[6]

The railway ended abruptly in a large clearing in the forest about fifteen miles from the coast and two hundred miles from Perth. The air was that of a keen autumn morning, and we climbed down from our carriages, for there was of course no platform, feeling stiff and chilly, to find breakfast waiting for us in a big wooden hall, with a great fire blazing in the kitchen, which opened out of it, the most cheering and comfortable sight in the wilderness. These halls are a feature of backwood settlements in Australia; they are utilised for all social and business purposes, and are the common meeting ground of the community. In this instance the landlord leased the building from the state, and provided meals for the men employed in the sawmills. He invited us to inspect his pleasant kitchen, the floor sanded with sweet-smelling, deep-red sawdust. At the back he was putting up bedrooms in small detached one-storied wooden buildings. Big Brook with its keen, pure air, the sweet, clean scent of the fresh-sawn wood, and all round, the illimitable forest, mysterious and impenetrable, would be an ideal resting-place, if anyone in Australia were ever over-worked.

But meanwhile breakfast was waiting for us, a never-to-be-forgotten breakfast of good coffee, hot rolls, porridge, new-laid eggs, and chops the tenderest in the world, the product of the local sheep. Fig jam, with which it concluded, was excellent. Figs grow readily in Western Australia, and produce abundant crops of fruit. They were very noticeable at this time of year, as they were the only deciduous tree.

After breakfast we visited the whole settlement, which of course was built entirely of wood. In the school, in a bright, cheerful classroom, a master was conducting the tiny classes of well-dressed, rosy-cheeked children. Opposite the school was a billiard-room, where the men could meet in the evenings; there was also a bank, and a post office. We were impressed by the splendid physique of the men; they were as agile as cats, muscular and supple; and these qualities were necessary, for the work is very dangerous from the moment the axe is laid to the root of the tree. The logs are of immense weight, they bound and crash down the incline to the back of the mill, when they are unloaded from the truck, and fly asunder with great force when they are sawn. The log, or trunk of the tree is first sawn in two longitudinally, and is then again cut into smaller and smaller slices, till it becomes planks. The saws are graduated, becoming more and more fine. The task of keeping them true is an accomplishment of great delicacy, it is one man’s work; he corrects deviations in the metal with a hammer, judging them entirely by eye.

In the neighbourhood of the sawmill all the air is filled with flying sawdust, and the sweet scent of the freshly sawn wood. The dust falls to the ground in deep red masses, the flying chips look like scraps of raw meat, but the rich colour fades when they dry. The process of preparing the karri wood for use is at present a very expensive one. The planks have to be stewed in order to preserve them. They are put for this purpose into immense tanks of molasses, and left seething there to harden. It is hoped that scientific experiment may evolve a less costly method. After going over the mills we were taken up a little railway line into the forest to see a tree felled. We sat on benches on trucks behind the engine, which carried a supply of wood for its boiler, for the cost of bringing coal up to Big Brook would be quite prohibitive. Even the boilers that work the mills are fed with wood. The engine was run by a magnificent-looking old stoker with a white beard and the air of a patriarch. When we scrambled off the trucks on to the soft, rich earth of the forest, we had to wait to let a bullock team go by, twenty-four of them pulling one log with a big metal “shoe” on the end to prevent its digging into the ground. The passage left a deep slide in the red earth. The bullocks are bound together in twos by very uncomfortable-looking, heavy wooden yokes, and their progress is punctuated by frightful yells and cracking of whips from the drivers.

FELLING KARRI.

We had not far to walk; the sun was now almost oppressively hot, and the steamy atmosphere was full of the rich, moist smell of the damp earth and the undergrowth. The woodcutters, who fell these immense trees, are so skilled that they can gauge the exact spot on which they will fall to within a few inches; such accuracy is a matter of life and death in tree-felling. When we arrived on the scene the great trunk of the karri was already sawn through by two men working on a kind of little platform erected round it. For an instant the slim, white tree tottered, while we held our breath, then it began to fall slowly, at first with a crackling sound; finally it came crashing and tearing its way among the neighbouring trees, followed by a shower of leaves; there was a sound as of the firing of a big gun; all the earth trembled; it seemed, as if the whole vast silence of the forest was shaken. A second tree that we saw felled measured one hundred and fifty-eight feet to the first fork.

The woodcutters are paid by the load that the bullocks draw, the bare trunk of the tree when its branches have been lopped off. We were told that they can make as much as £6 a week. The cost of living does not amount to much more than 25s. a week for a single man, as he can board sumptuously at the Hall for 22s., and the price of lodgings is about 1s. 6d. This leaves a considerable surplus, and in Big Brook there is no means of spending money. In consequence, men occasionally go off to the nearest town when they have amassed a small capital, and stay there till it is all spent, and they have nothing to show for it. They work eight hours a day, and everything is regulated by contract. They are of various nationalities, but all of magnificent physique. While we were waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to the bullocks. Soon after we began the return journey we passed through a belt of jarrah, the still harder kind of eucalyptus that we had only seen in the form of piles; the trunks were reddish instead of white like the karri.

We saw also for the first time a common feature of the Western Australian bush, the curious “Black Boys,” called in Queensland “grass trees.” They look like a knotted dead trunk with bulrushes growing on the top in thick bunches. Sometimes the trunk is forked, and there are a pair of odd bushy heads on one black misshapen trunk.

The bush in this part of Australia has little diversity. The keen air of the early morning had made us very hungry, in spite of so substantial a breakfast, and we were not sorry to reach Jarraduck, the settlement in the forest where lunch was waiting in another large wooden hall. The long tables were decorated with masses of golden wattle and purple kennedya. Lunches of this kind, and we sampled very many, are always just alike, varying only with the resources of the neighbourhoods,—lots of flowers and a warm welcome, plates of assorted cold meats, of which turkey is an almost inevitable ingredient; elaborate sweets, of which one is always an excellent trifle, and fruit of the district, in this case the small, sweet, thick-skinned local orange.

The refined-looking, sweet-faced landlady seemed inappropriate to the rough surroundings. “We shall just stay here till we can better ourselves,” she explained. A few more hours brought us out of the forest, there were more clearings, homesteads became more frequent, the red soil was freshly ploughed for oats, orchards began to take the place of the eucalyptus, with apple trees not yet in blossom, and orange and lemon trees covered with fruit. The country became hilly, and half-castes were at work in the fields, shock-headed, and unintelligent-looking. We had left the bush behind, and were now in the region of an older settlement, the fruit-growing district of Western Australia. Fruit-growing is becoming one of the most important factors of Western Australian industry, and it is hoped that it will prove an even greater source of prosperity, because a more permanent one, than the gold that cannot last for ever. The climate, and much of the soil in the South-West are admirably adapted for all kinds of fruit-growing. The apples are excellent, so are the oranges, pears, plums, apricots, and peaches, strawberries and gooseberries, all of which are grown successfully. Fruit-growers, who have taken care in selecting a holding where the soil and conditions are favourable for their crops, have not long to wait before reaping their profits, as six-year-old apple trees have been known to produce from £50 to £60 an acre. It is important also to select a fruit for growing that will travel and keep. In 1913 there were still more than 88,000 acres suitable for the cultivation of fruit or vine-growing, subdivided into convenient blocks and waiting for selectors.

Bridgetown is the centre of the fruit-growing district of Western Australia. Motor-cars were waiting to show us the neighbourhood, and we started in the golden light of the late afternoon sun to see something of the country. It was our first experience of Australian motorists. To enjoy motoring in Australia one must have an adventurous disposition. Except in the neighbourhood of large towns the roads are very rough; indeed, the long droughts make it impossible that they should be otherwise. The soft, dry soil crumbles away, the light dust is stirred up by every passing vehicle, leaving deep ruts, so that the same road is often on different levels, and a car runs along at a sharp angle, with one wheel poised on the edge of a rut, and the other in a hollow. Practised drivers achieve this difficult accomplishment with much skill and the minimum of jolting, but even so, the car often takes flying leaps. So we started on an apparently breakneck career, holding tight on to the sides of the motor, and dashed up and down hills that an English motorist would have hesitated to look at, red and rutty as a Devonshire lane in winter. We never knew the name of that kindly motorist, who so gallantly risked his own and our lives, not to mention his machine, in showing us as much as possible of the surrounding country before the light faded. He was one of the many, many unknown friends who did us some passing kindness on our rapid journey, leaving only a warm memory behind it. Hail and farewell to each and all of them!

The country-side was very beautiful, more English, and less unfamiliar-looking, than anything we had yet seen, with steeply undulating hills and valleys, springing young green crops, and orchards, with apple trees whitened against some parasitical scab, or oranges and lemons. The comfortable homesteads had a more finished and abiding air than anything we had yet seen; for Bridgetown, as our host explained to us, “is a very old settlement—sixty years old!” It even possessed a tiny stone church, which gave it a pleasantly homely and established air. We crossed the beautiful Blackwood river by a picturesque wooden bridge where the river flows through a deep gorge up which black and white wild duck were sailing. In the fading glow of the sunset the country looked still more English, for the groups of gum trees that crowned the hills were indistinguishable, and the evening light seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of calm contentment over the thriving country-side, as of a day’s work well done. We ran through the little scattered township, to the Freemason’s Hotel, at which our friend the motorist deposited us, and vanished into the dusk.

OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK.

As we went in out of the darkness one of our fellow-travellers brought us a specimen of the pretty, curious “kangaroo paw,” a flower that looks as if it had been cut out of bright red and green moss, whose buds take the exact shape of a kangaroo’s little foot. After dinner we strolled along the broad, silent country road, leading out into the deep stillness beyond, broken only by the barking of the village dogs, and the croaking of unseen frogs. The men of the neighbourhood loitered in the light of the shop windows, kindly looking and highly curious. We met at Bridgetown a Government official at the head of the Fruit-growing Department. He told us that this corner of South-Western Australia, a district as large as the state of Victoria, was the finest soil for fruit-growing in the whole state. The industry was of very recent growth, the first trial shipment was only made ten years ago, but since 1907 the trade had been established upon a commercial basis, and the export of apples was greatly increasing every year in quantity.

Western Australia has also successfully exported grapes, but unfortunately the manufacture of wine is now on the decline. A very delicate and pleasant chablis is produced there. We tasted two kinds, a pale, and a warmly coloured golden chablis. They compared favourably with the light wines of Italy, and though like them, they would probably lose all their character and flavour after being fortified for export, they could be grown for home consumption. The explanation of the decline given to us at Bridgetown was that since Federation, and the abolition of inter-state customs, growers cannot afford to mature their wines sufficiently to compete with the longer established trade of the Eastern states. It is hoped that raisins and currants may be produced, and the climate is also suitable for the growth of olives; the evergreen trees would serve the further purpose of affording shade for the cattle. Our return journey was made successfully and uneventfully, and we slept soundly, only awaking occasionally, to find ourselves being shot to and fro like shuttles in a spinning mill; and arrived home to breakfast at Cottesloe Beach.

CHAPTER V
AGRICULTURE AND GOLD

It was 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 the home 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.[7] The 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 grey of 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 Western Australia, 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. So that 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 of subterranean 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 acre within 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.

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 a rabbit, 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 ten miles 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-class gipsy 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.

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 have even 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 early settlers 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 road to 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 Upper House 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, would stand 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 old world, 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.

PART II
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER VI
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

In a 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 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 storied East:—

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 of the 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 than mankind, 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 leaned forward 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 we should 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, and he 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 to know.... 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 become larger 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 reservoirs are 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 was that 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 of the 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 million sheep, 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—especially in 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.

CHAPTER VII
ADELAIDE

We had 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, with land 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.

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. The cathedral 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 the South 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 in England, 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 possible for 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.

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 country is 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, and the 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.

CHAPTER VIII
COMPULSORY TRAINING AND SOCIAL LIFE IN ADELAIDE

Adelaide, when we reached it, was like the rest of the Australian continent, celebrating the declaration of war by a tremendous outburst of patriotism; the whole place fluttered with little flags, Union Jacks were on every bicycle or cart or motor-car, loyal crowds were assembling at street corners. We in England have no conception of the depths of feeling that our fellow-countrymen in Australia have for “home.” It embraces all those who come out there on a visit, so that instead of strangers in a strange land they feel like a dear and welcome friend returning to his own people. By the evening the occasion had been felt to be so momentous that the youthful male population, with whom the streets were crowded, had celebrated it in some cases to excess, and this was the sole occasion on which we saw anything approaching to intemperance while we were in Australia, or on which the population forsook its habitual and universal beverage of weak tea. That they were carried away by enthusiasm was all to their credit. Trained to military service from his school days every Australian realises, as few Englishmen have yet done, the importance of self-defence, and the obligation of every man in the country to take his share in it.

We have much to learn from Australia, but in no respect more than in her admirable system of universal military training. We have already mentioned her cadet training in schools. When a boy reaches the age of fourteen he becomes a senior cadet, and a general military training is added to the physical training that is already part of his school curriculum. At the beginning of the year in which he reaches his fourteenth birthday he has to be registered, and his registration papers are sent to the Area Officer, under whose jurisdiction he now passes. This officer sees that the boys go up for their medical examination; after passing this, a boy is measured for his uniform, and allotted to his company in the senior cadet battalion of the area. The average percentage of rejections after the medical examination is only seven and a half. The senior cadet is now subject to military discipline and becomes part of the military system of the country. He has to attend four whole-day drills of at least four hours, twelve half-day drills of two hours’ duration, and twenty-four night drills of one hour’s minimum duration. Boys who are still at school may be formed into special companies. It is an important feature of the system that all the companies in a battalion area form one battalion independently of the numbers involved, for the battalions are training, not fighting, units. The training for senior cadets consists of physical drill, company and some battalion drill, field training and musketry. An excellent provision secures good work on the part of the cadets. At the end of each year’s training an inspection takes place, and all who fail to satisfy the regular officer responsible, lose the value of their year’s work, as the Act requires an additional year’s training for each failure of the inefficient.

Ammunition and uniforms are supplied free. In his fourth year of training the senior cadet must satisfy the medical officer of the training area of his fitness, those falling below the standard are certified in their record books as “exempt.” In the third stage of his training, from eighteen to twenty-six years old, the young Australian becomes a member of the Citizen Forces. This system is gradually superseding the older militia, which prescribed a period of three years’ training only, and consequently attains so much the more an efficient military standard. The training is arranged as far as possible with a view to the convenience of the men, who are only obliged to be absent from home during a short period spent in camp every year. Parades are held on holidays, Saturday afternoons, or in the evening. In some districts Sunday training has been advocated and has raised considerable opposition, but Brigadier-General J. G. Legge, C.M.G., commanding, at the time of writing, the Division of the Australian Forces in Egypt, in an article on Australian Defence,[9] reminds his readers that “not so many centuries ago it was the law of England that every able-bodied man should practise with the bow at the village butts on Sunday after church hours, and why not now on Sunday afternoons? This would get over the difficulty with employers quite well.” Pay is given for attendance at parades in the Citizen Forces.

Under the universal training system all start as privates, and each rank competes for promotion to the one immediately above it. But it must be remembered that in Australia, as in other new countries, there are no sharply drawn class distinctions, there hardly exists an idle class, and to quote Brigadier-General Legge once more: “Brains and practical proficiency alone will carry weight with units such as we now have to lead and discipline in Australia.” There is no room in that happy land for the promotion of influential incompetence.

The Australian system is working smoothly and well, and presents the spectacle of a trained and disciplined people, far indeed removed from militarism, yet with a corporate sense and a deep and zealous patriotism. Almost equally important is the fact that the Australian Government makes ample provision for all munitions of war and equipment for its forces.

It is with the boys that every country must begin. “I believe this,” wrote Lord Methuen,[10] “to be the proper solution for the national defence of this country.... It is to be noted that each colony has adopted compulsory cadet training as its foundation. We worked on Lord Kitchener’s admirable Australian scheme in forming the Citizen Army in South Africa.... The physique and discipline of our nation will gain enormously if the lad is trained from the age of twelve till he reaches eighteen.... Let the nation accept the principle and the details can be made to fit in without any difficulty.”

With regard to Education South Australia is, in one respect only, the least progressive of the states, for it has fixed the minimum age at which children may be employed in factories at thirteen, as compared with fourteen elsewhere. Victoria leads the way with a minimum of fifteen for girls. On the other hand, the state has been a pioneer in dealing with destitute and neglected children. The Chief Secretary of the Government appoints a State Children’s Council composed of men and women. Its work is conducted on the most enlightened methods. The children, whether, as in most cases, they are boarded out, or in institutions, are judiciously looked after and provided for, till the boys have reached the age of eighteen, and the girls of twenty-one years. The work, whether paid or unpaid, of the large staff of assistants in urban and country districts, is given alike “ungrudgingly and in the spirit of the volunteer,” says Mrs. Margaret Wragge, a member of the council. Thus the state is providing with foresight for the useful careers of every one of its future men and women.

In the matter of general education the system is that in force elsewhere. Primary education is free and compulsory, there is an elaborate system of training for teachers, who are given every facility for self-improvement. Technical education is provided for by the “School of Mines and Industries.” The Adelaide University is of comparatively old foundation, as it dates from 1874. It has been fortunate in receiving generous endowments from local benefactors, and has handsome spacious buildings. The name of the late Sir Samuel Way, the Chief Justice, and a prominent, active citizen, will always be associated with the progress of the University.

* * * * *

As we have said, Adelaide is girdled with hills, of which the most important is Mount Lofty, and part of this high ground has been set aside as a national reserve, a park in perpetuity for the community; a large area left in its natural state, to show what Australia once was to the children’s children of the first settlers.

WATERFALL GULLY, BURNSIDE, NEAR ADELAIDE.

The drive up the hills is not an easy one, for the road ascends steeply and the ground falls sharply away. The view over Adelaide grows more and more beautiful with every few feet of the ascent, as the semicircle of hills, with their valley and city, and the illimitable expanse of ocean are spread out below. The reserve is a vast area of sloping green lawns, more or less thickly covered with trees. Growing among the gums were the curious shea-oak, and the still more curious wild cherry, whose stone grows outside the fruit; the wattle was here only bursting its yellow balls into flower. We saw a clump of the pretty drosera or sundew, and a quantity of small purple orchids not unlike our blue squills in shape and size.

All kinds of birds live in this retreat: especially the Australian magpie with his odd conventual air, and the white cowl and black frock that make him look like a Dominican friar.

The magpies are sociable birds, friendly and companionable. They are, besides, greedy and carnivorous. An Australian lady, who was acting as our hostess on this occasion, told us she had once seen a magpie swallow three mice in succession, and sit afterwards ruminating over their digestion with the three tails hanging down from his beak.

There, too, was the laughing jackass, or to call him by his musical native name the “kookaburra,” who resembles in shape and colour a large untidy jay. We heard for the first time the sweet note of the Australian thrush, and saw several redheaded parrots. The road led into a beautiful wooded glen, a favourite place for picnics.

Picnics are a great institution in Australia, and to avoid the dangers of bush fires little open-air hearths are made in such places as these, with an iron rod across them and hooks for hanging the “billy” to boil the water for the weak tea that is the invariable accompaniment of all meals. There is always plenty of dry wood in that dry climate, and generally a little shelter is put up, with a rough table and benches, sometimes a tank for rain water, but this, when it is there, has a way of being rusty. On this occasion time demanded our return, for we were lunching with one of the University professors, so we came back to the city that is only less pastoral than its hills, and were deposited at our destination by the kind new acquaintances, who had devoted a long morning to us.

Our hosts lived in a charming bungalow on the side of a hill, the garden was full of early spring flowers, jonquils and other bulbs. Their guest house was detached, as it were, in a little garden of its own, which seemed a particularly pleasant way of entertaining one’s friends, giving a sense of freedom both to visitors and hosts. In the drawing-room was a big bowl of camellias, which flourish in the open air in Australia. Our host and hostess came of one of the oldest Australian families; that is, their daughter told us her grandfather came over in 1837 and her grandmother three years later. Life was a hard thing in those days. To begin with, there was the six months’ voyage in the old sailing ships. In their early days of married life they had no food except salt pork and damper, or a kind of bread made without yeast, which is very nice on a picnic, but would be trying as a staple form of food. On Sundays they had rice boiled in water and raisins. “My grandfather used to be so hungry that he once shot a sitting magpie.” It must, even so, have been a meal of bones and feathers.

There was something patriarchal about this pleasant, cultivated household. The settlement which the earlier generation had won from the bush remained in the family, and the descendants of its servants still served them. After lunch we were taken off to tea in the hospitable Australian way to some friends of our hosts’ who were giving a tea-party. Their house lay at some distance from the town, with its back to the hills. It was approached by a park much like an English park, with eucalyptus for oaks and magpies for rooks, and the house itself was much like an English country house, and an English tea-party, with great bowls of roses and violets in the drawing-room.

It would be difficult to find anywhere a lovelier situation than the slopes of these hills, facing the far-distant sea. The entrance to the drive was heavy with the scent of stocks, and gay with masses of red geranium, a bougainvillea covered with purple flowers hung over the flight of steps, and below the garden lawns, on which the large, handsome black and white Australian wagtails were hopping about, orange trees displayed their golden fruit and glossy leaves against a background of almond blossom, and ripe limes and grape fruits.

As it was only about three miles back into Adelaide, with a good road and a fine evening, we proposed to walk home to our hotel, as we had had no exercise since we had left England. The suggestion, however, was considered so entirely impracticable as to be not worth discussing. It was merely waved aside, and the whole time we were in the country we were impressed by the fact that Australians never seem to walk. They motor, they have excellent tram services, but except up-country they don’t seem to ride. An older resident at Adelaide lamented that there were actually so few young men who could ride in the district, that their numbers were insufficient to keep up the local Hunt Club.

OSTRICH FARM, SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

We left Adelaide on a warm sunny August day. The long, long railway journeys from one state capital to another are made by night. The trains are dusty, the scenery monotonous, so that the tedium and discomfort are by this means minimised as much as possible. Of course, there are beautiful tracts of country, that the railroad passes through, but in a land where the eucalyptus is everywhere the prevailing form of vegetation, and water is rare, monotony is inevitable. On leaving Adelaide the main line towards Melbourne runs through charming park-like country, with green lawns and trees and deep gorges. The train climbs the Mount Lofty range with delightful glimpses of the sea, and an ascent punctuated by peculiarly sulphurous little tunnels, reminiscent of those on the Apennines.

Afterwards we crossed a spacious pastoral country dotted sparsely with homesteads, peaceful in the great calm of the luminous evening, then the swift dusk fell and blotted out all. At Murray Bridge we paused for dinner, in the old-fashioned continental way. Dinner in railway stations in Australia is simple and expeditious, and in our experience invariably excellent. It is thrown at the traveller by a miscellaneous assortment of young women, who fall over each other in their hospitable anxiety to get through the menu in time. That, however, did not suffice, for having hastily despatched our soup and the very good turkey, which is always a standing dish in Australia, and trifled with a sweet, we were summoned back to the train. Here we observed in passing along the corridor to our own carriage a bulky-looking passenger disgorging from his pockets large quantities of the dessert, which we had had no time to eat, and which he had adroitly commandeered. He was bulging with it, in fact, and was now proudly exhibiting a selection of it spread out on the opposite seat of the carriage—five oranges, three apples, and some bananas. Seeing our eye upon him he offered us a share of the spoils, as a species of hush money in kind. Oranges and apples and bananas are delicious in Australia; the dry soapy things sold for bananas in London give no idea of what a pleasant form of food a fresh banana can be.

He is no traveller who cannot sleep on any occasion under any circumstances, even in a rattling and draughty train. After a good night we woke up next morning to see an immense grassy plain stretching away to the horizon on either side. Cattle and sheep were feeding, and there were patches of plough land. For the first time the “bush” had retreated to a respectful distance.

PART III
VICTORIA

CHAPTER IX
COLLINS STREET—MELBOURNE

On the 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 to us 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 the fashion; 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,[11] the Governor-General came into the luncheon room and sat down at our round table, with his aide and 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 duke is 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 of war, 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 which our 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.

CHAPTER X
SOCIAL LIFE IN MELBOURNE

The country surrounding Melbourne was far more populous than anything we had yet seen. The land was very flat, and the plain was extremely bare, even denuded; there was hardly a tree to be seen on the great expanse; scattered over it were innumerable little yellow boulders, thousands of them. Sometimes they had been laboriously collected and heaped up to form walls. These are the recollections which the approach to the Victorian capital by railway from the west leaves in the mind. The entrance to Melbourne itself is much like that to any other great seaport. The masts of the ships showed above the houses, the air was cool and fresh, and invigorating after the night in the train. Melbourne was in fact the coldest place we visited in Australia, but even here heavy winter clothing such as one would wear in an English winter is unnecessary in that dry air and brilliant sunshine.

Our hosts had sent their car to meet us, and we spun out of the station yard into a city of immensely wide straight streets, sometimes rather sharply ascending and descending, with handsome tall buildings, some of which had a quite venerable air; the cathedral of St. Paul’s, for instance, is grimy with age. From a local station people from the suburbs were pouring out to their day’s business, as if it were a London terminus, and there was little to distinguish them in general appearance from the London morning throng. We gleaned a rapid impression of gardens and parks and open spaces, and after crossing the Yarra River, arrived in the pleasant green hilly suburb of South Yarra, where we were to stay. The car drew up at a large bungalow in a sloping street of bungalows each in its own garden. A broad verandah ran round the one-storied house; at the entrance to the garden a pepper tree had been cut back and a rose trained over it. These lovely trees, with their grey fern-like foliage and strings of red berries are very common in Australia, but they are untidy things in a garden, with obstreperous roots. Geraniums were in flower even here, and a pink camellia bush.

THE RIVER YARRA, 48 MILES FROM MELBOURNE.

The door was flung open by our hostess almost before we had had time to ring the bell. We had arrived unseasonably early in the morning, rather chilly, rather tired, with that uncomfortable, unkempt sensation attendant on a hurried toilet in a rocking train, breakfastless, very hungry, and it is only on such an occasion that the whole-hearted warmth of an Australian welcome can be appreciated at its true worth, a welcome no less generous to strangers than to recovered friends. Our host and hostess in Melbourne had never seen us before, yet not only were we made to feel as if we belonged there, as if their house was a home in which we had the claim of longstanding friendship or relationship, but though they were both very busy people of many engagements, their car was placed at our disposal during our visit, and they themselves made use of the very efficient Melbourne tram service. Perhaps this extraordinary and generous kindness, which we met everywhere, differing only in degree, not in kind, exists in Australia as nowhere else.

It is sometimes spoken of as Colonial; and so in the best sense it is. We had some foreshadowing of it at the Cape. Here certain of the passengers had a collective invitation to a motor drive round Table Mountain by the members of the local automobile club. A day’s entertainment was planned by them, but owing to contrary currents our boat was late. We only had a few hours to spend there. It was between seven and eight o’clock in the morning when we went on deck, and our host for the moment, a boy of about seventeen, came up smiling and helped us into our fur coats. “Are you always as nice as this to strangers?” we asked. “You’re not strangers,” he said, with genuine surprise, and even a little hurt. And it is that feeling that makes colonial travelling such a delightful experience. Even the conductor on the train will bid you a cordial farewell and hope you will enjoy yourself. England must seem a cold place to Australians when they come to it on a visit. We once heard some travelled Australians discussing this very point. After lavishing hospitality on his English visitors the Australian comes to London, and perhaps meets his former guest at a club. After some few minutes’ conversation he says, “When are you going back?” and adds, “Ah, I hope I shall see you again before you go!” and that is all.

On the afternoon of our arrival in Melbourne, we went to a tea given by the Women’s Union at the University. Australian women are in a very superior position to their British sisters; they have the vote, and their share in political life takes place quite unobtrusively and as a matter of course. Women’s suffrage was adopted in Victoria comparatively recently, and the state is now governed by the vote of all those over the age of twenty-one who have not been convicted of felony. Consequently there is no aggressive “Women’s Movement,” though women have their own separate clubs in all the large towns, and do useful and active work both in connection with public bodies concerned with their interests, and in political organisation. We were frequently asked with surprised incredulity if the newspaper reports of suffragette activities at home were not wholly untrue or at least greatly exaggerated. To women in peaceful possession of the vote, the exasperated fuss on both sides about conferring what seems to them so simple and obvious a benefit was wholly incomprehensible. It appears that in Australia it has had very little effect on the balance of parties except that of strengthening the Labour vote to some extent.

An active and experienced citizen of Melbourne has recorded his own conviction that the measure “has produced little or no change for better or worse in the general course of legislation. It has not purified public life in the sense in which the term is generally used; it has not enabled women to obtain adequate treatment in the subjects they are specially interested in. It has in my opinion made but one substantial alteration—the capacity of women to organise political associations has been demonstrated repeatedly, and the interest of women in public affairs is in conspicuous evidence.”[12] Working women are, however, already in a better position in Victoria than in any other part of the world. As long ago as 1873 an Act was passed forbidding the employment of any female for more than eight hours in any day in a factory. Nowhere is the factory worker, whether man or woman, better looked after as to his wages, personal safety, health, and moral surroundings than in Victoria.[13] A little over 33% of all the women in the state are employed in factories, earning an average wage of 17s. 4d. a week.

In any comparison of labour conditions at home and in Australia it must be borne in mind that though foodstuffs cost about the same, imported manufactured goods of all kinds are dearer. The higher wages are not therefore proportionately greater in purchasing power. They have, however, been much affected by the institution of Wages Boards. These were first established in 1896 with the definite object of raising the wages of women employed in the clothing trade, especially the sweated home workers. The measure had the immediate effect of raising wages in this trade. The Boards, which are composed of equal numbers of employers and employed, elect a neutral chairman, discuss all the aspects of the trade, and fix a minimum wage accordingly. The system has now been gradually extended to practically all urban industries, in which wages have in consequence steadily risen. The Wages Board, says the Chief Inspector of Factories, “has now come to be regarded pretty generally as the most nearly perfect system of fixing fair wages and conditions that has yet been devised.”[14] It is a cardinal principle of the Victorian system that, having provided the workers with the means of securing a fair living wage, it takes no cognisance of strikes. It is claimed that the Victorian method has had the result of preventing strikes.

But to return to the Women’s Union tea at the University. Our hostesses were representative of Melbourne’s social activities, and it was a pleasant and interesting festivity, as well as an introduction to the University, the centre of Australian intellectual life. The University has done much to leaven Melbourne society, and has been fortunate in securing first-rate men, not merely in point of scholastic attainment, but in an equally invaluable social refinement. A splendid growing country like Australia should have only the best we have to send, whether as teachers or governors, nothing less is worthy of her deserts and importance as a factor in the empire. The University is the coping-stone of the educational machinery of Victoria, where the whole of the primary and secondary education is in the hands of the state, with the exception of certain schools owned by religious corporations. There is an admirable system of small rural schools, and teachers earn promotion by good work done in them. There are also a number of technical schools and Agricultural High Schools—an interesting development—one of which we visited.

The University Buildings stand in tree-planted grounds, with the imposing Wilson Hall in the foreground. It is used principally for social purposes and for examinations, and is an ecclesiastical building, like a large college chapel, spacious and well proportioned. In front of the open doors stands an immense Moreton Bay pine, one of the handsomest of Australian trees, evergreen, like all the native vegetation, large and shapely with glossy dark leaves. It is so called from the beautiful Queensland bay on which Brisbane stands, where it grows in great profusion. On the lawn beyond, two great black swans were feeding, looking oddly incongruous. The various schools have their main lecture rooms and laboratories grouped round an artificial lake in the middle of the grounds. Residential denominational colleges are erected on grants of land within the University precincts. One of them, the Methodist College, we visited through the kindness of the wife of the President, who showed us over the buildings.

It was vacation, and all was swept and garnished, but we saw the little chapel, the dining-hall, library, and the men’s rooms. All was very pleasant and comfortable, with fine views over Melbourne, and all was as unlike as possible from the dreamy, stately old halls where our English boys go and learn to be luxurious and extravagant at home, and also learn other things which after all cannot be learnt elsewhere. We were present at the conferring of some honorary degrees at the University. It was a gay and picturesque scene, with the doctors’ scarlet gowns on the platform; and what we missed in the ancient academic atmosphere that gives to such functions their impressiveness at home, was compensated for by the lively interest and enthusiasm of the visitors by whom the hall was filled. The ceremony was incidentally memorable from the fine enunciation and beautiful voice of the Professor who presented the candidates to the Chancellor.

After the degree ceremony we went on to the Town Hall, where the Lady Mayoress was giving a tea-party. Mayors and Mayoresses are very important people in Australia; they are lavish in their entertainment of strangers, and are the centre not only of the civic life of a town, but often of its social life as well, the two things being usually indistinguishable. The Melbourne Town Hall is worthy of a great city that is the seat of government, and the rallying point of all the different phases of life on the continent. One sumptuous council chamber is decorated with Australian woods, many of them very beautiful, the central panels of black wood especially, which were delicately variegated like the back of an old fiddle.

The same day we went to an evening party at Federal Government House. Melbourne is the seat of the Federal as well as of the State Government; and the balls or receptions at Government House bring together what in a less democratic country one would call the society of the state. Society in Melbourne is very cultivated and agreeable. It is more settled, more homogeneous, more cosmopolitan than elsewhere in Australia, so that here, if anywhere, one loses the sense of a new country, which is at the same time part of its charm. The women and girls in Melbourne are also prettier, and more prettily dressed than elsewhere, and it makes a cult of charming-looking, elderly, white-haired matrons, wearing the dignity of their years becomingly. Not that pretty women and girls are not to be found everywhere, but Melbourne has a colder, more bracing climate, and is more in touch with the outside world. Two facts that tell in complexions and clothes.

CHAPTER XI
BALLARAT

Nobody has seen Australia who has not seen a goldfield, and though with a certain reluctance, for the way was long and the trains unprovided with restaurant cars, we decided to visit one from Melbourne, whence, as one counts distance in Australia, they were easily accessible. The choice seemed to lie between Bendigo and Ballarat; they were equal as far as we were concerned, but there was something about the name of Bendigo that expressed a smug prosperity, while Ballarat suggested something of the unbridled spirit of adventure and undisciplined audacity of the pioneer. We elected in favour of Ballarat. We started very early in the morning, as you have to do in Australia if you want to get anywhere, feeling full of enterprise and prepared for any hardship. There had been a riot in Ballarat, they told us, quite a serious affair, with military intervention. The line to Ballarat runs at first through the flat country that we had already traversed, covered with the odd little yellow boulders, which a well-informed passenger now assured us were formed of lava. There had been a lava flow all over the plain in some former geological period, he said, and the lava had gradually broken up into these little yellow boulders. The line then crosses the Bacchus Marsh Valley; this neighbourhood is the centre of the milk and butter trade, and china clay is also found in the district. Farther on we passed through the beautiful Werribee Gorge, remarkable for having been “eroded through glacial conglomerate into the underlying Ordovician sediment,” a well-informed passenger hastened to explain to us. While we listened respectfully an immense bird appeared hovering, lonely, majestic, above the gorge. “Aquila audax,” cried the too well-informed passenger eagerly; the largest known eagle. “How do you spell “Hordax?” inquired a lady. This tacit reflection on his pronunciation so discomfited him that he retired to another carriage, and we proceeded on our way unenlightened.

No sooner were we within sight of Ballarat than all our hopes of adventure were dashed; instead of the mining town that we had expected with little rows of corrugated iron huts, and miners in wideawakes and shirt-sleeves, what we did see was a cloud of white dust driving along a road, and behind it a town like any other town, containing, as a guide-book informed us, a “Hospital, Orphan and Benevolent Asylums, Women’s Homes, Mechanics’ Institute, with Library, Fine Art Gallery, Banks, Commercial Houses, two Town Halls, three theatres, forty churches, School of Mines and Museum, Agricultural High School, State schools, six iron-founderies, a brewery, a flour and two woollen mills, boot and other factories...!”

We were fifty years too late. We had come to see Ballarat, and we were shown it by a kind and hospitable stranger to whose care we had been consigned for the purpose. There is a tremendous fund of local patriotism in Australia. Everybody is very proud of their own town, for the simple reason that they have seen it grow and helped to make it. They have a paternal or proprietary interest in it. In Ballarat they are most proud, and justly so, of their principal street, Sturt Street, called presumably after the pioneer who named that wonderful hanging scarlet and black flower “Sturt’s desert pea.” Ballarat lies on the side of a hill, and Sturt Street, very wide and planted with trees in the centre, slopes sharply away through and out of the city towards a green hill that rises abruptly, and is framed, as it were, by the street.

Ballarat, we found, was gradually relapsing into what it had originally been, an agricultural centre. It was in the year of Queen Victoria’s accession that six prospectors, seeking good pastures for their flocks, reached Mount Buninyong, and looking westward saw a rich expanse of well-watered country that was soon settled as sheep runs, with its centre at Buninyong. It was not till 1851 that gold was first discovered in New South Wales, and the Melbourne authorities, alarmed at the consequent exodus of population, offered a reward of two hundred guineas for the discovery of gold in the state of Victoria. In July a man accidentally discovered gold in felling a tree at Buninyong, and a further search revealed the presence of gold in immense quantities on the site of what is now Ballarat. In those early days, “The Roaring Fifties,” as they were called, diggers hastened to Ballarat from all parts of the world, including New South Wales itself, for gold in such quantities had never been seen before. The whole neighbourhood became a vast encampment of tents and huts, and the peaceful sheep-farmers were forced to migrate.

The Government sought to enforce order among the cosmopolitan riotous crew of diggers. Licences were issued for a fee permitting them to work within certain specified limits, and the violence used in enforcing this rule in 1854 produced a riot among the diggers, who opposed armed resistance to the police and Government soldiers at what was known as the “Eureka Stockade.” Order was restored after some bloodshed, but the ringleaders went unpunished, for public opinion was on the side of the diggers. The gold licences were withdrawn and the grant of parliamentary representation soon brought about more civilised conditions, or, in the words of the local guide, “Thus these early years of revelry and devilry have faded and dissolved into the far-famed golden city of the south, the garden city of Ballarat.”

That was sixty years ago. The greatest output of gold for any one year in Victoria occurred in 1856, and amounted to nearly £12,000,000 in value; for many years afterwards the mines yielded annually more than five millions sterling. It can be easily seen that the discovery of gold had a very great influence on the prosperity and development of the State and the disposition of its cities. Ballarat and Bendigo, for instance, are respectively the second and third cities in Victoria. As the extraordinarily rich surface alluvial deposits of gold were exhausted, mining was carried on at lower depths, involving greater expenditure of plant and machinery, and producing smaller profits. But in Ballarat, both east and west, there is a profitable field for further development. After having been well fortified with lunch, our host of the day took us off to see a gold mine.

We motored through the handsome main street of Ballarat, noting with surprise the number of very large and important drapers’ shops, with their impressive expanse of plate glass. They were all having what they called “clean up sales,” and we wondered how a population of about 42,000 could possibly support them, till our chauffeur, who was also the owner of the car, explained that Ballarat was the metropolis for the whole surrounding agricultural neighbourhood of the mines. On the way we passed through old Ballarat, the driver jumping a gutter with surprising skill. Old Ballarat is a wonderful, ramshackle-looking place, run up anyhow in the early days of the gold rush, when fortunes were made in other ways besides digging, and a “pannikin of rum” fetched an ounce of gold. It had the air of Earl’s Court after the season, when the exhibition is shut; the houses were of all shapes and sizes, and the arcades over the pavement were the only concession to convenience.