richest districts in Victoria. Here he was shown what claims to be the
second largest dairying factory in the Commonwealth. It is run on
co-operative lines, and makes, in addition to such products as butter
and cheese, large quantities of dried milk, a comparatively new
preparation, for which increasing demand is springing up in all parts of
the world. It is an enterprise to which all may wish good luck, as a
long step toward solving the important problem of rendering milk easily
transportable, without loss of essential properties.
In entering, and again in leaving Colac, the train passed quite close to
a number of low conical hills and circular lakes, remains of
comparatively recent volcanic action, which has given the soil over a
wide area properties that enable it to grow Spanish onions in
extraordinary profusion. In a favourable season, fabulous profits are
made out of this crop. One man, with twenty acres, in one year cleared
L1,800, of which L1,200 was net profit, after paying all cost of
cultivation and harvesting. The Prince also saw some of the outlying
trees of the famous Otway forest, home of the blue gum and blackwood
timber used not only in Australia but also in America and Europe for
decorative work.
In Colac, the streets had been elaborately decorated. Flags covered
alike the stone and reinforced-concrete houses of business, and the
brick and wooden residences. The accommodation of the place had been
supplemented for the Royal visit, by encampments of tents, one large
marquee flaunting the imposing title of the "Cafe de Kerbstone." Choirs,
in Welsh and Scottish costumes, serenaded the procession. There was much
cordial cheering, especially about the shire-hall, where the civic
address was read.
The next halting-place was Camperdown, another farming centre, where
again a surprisingly large gathering of country folk had assembled to
welcome the Prince. Motor-cars, often of the most expensive British
makes, in which the owners had come from their holdings, stood about in
the streets. The Royal party here transferred to motors, in which the
Prince drove out to the residence of Mr. Stuart Black, one of
Australia's great landholders, descendant of settlers from Tasmania, who
opened up this part of the country some eighty years ago. These settlers
bore many distinguished names, including those of the Gladstone family
and the MacKinnons.
The following day His Royal Highness went by train to Ballarat, past a
fine stone memorial to members of the neighbourhood who had fallen in
the great war, subscribed for by the residents of the district, and
designed by Mr. Butler, of Sydney. The route lay through undulating
agricultural country, past big heaps of white, pink, or yellow tailings,
which mark the sites of now worked-out gold-mines. Some of the fields
around were pitted with what looked very much like shell-holes, dug by
early prospectors for the gold that made Ballarat famous. The Prince
found the last-named place a prosperous market town, with substantial
public buildings, and quantities of marble statues, dating from the days
of easily made fortunes in the 'seventies. It contains also wool, and
other factories, including that of Messrs. Lucas and Company, for the
production of underclothing, with which the Prince became acquainted
under circumstances worthy of the creditable history of this firm.
During the war, some five hundred girls employed by Messrs. Lucas
conceived the idea of planting an avenue, in which each tree should be
connected with the name of one of Ballarat's large contingent of
fighting men at the front. At the head of this avenue, which is now a
dozen miles in length, a substantial masonry Arch of Victory has been
set up. The Prince opened this arch in the presence of the entire
establishment of the Lucas factory, which presented him with an
embroidered set of underclothing--yellow silk pyjamas, to be exact--in
the making of which every employee of the firm had taken part.
Rain had been falling heavily, but the girls faced it cheerily at the
head of their avenue, many a tree of which bore the flag that told that
the soldier it commemorated had been killed. The presentation was made
to the Prince by two ladies, one of whom was Mrs. Lucas, the founder of
the firm, which she had started on a very small scale, at a time when
the miners were beginning to desert the Ballarat goldfield, leaving, in
many cases, families behind them. Mrs. Lucas gathered these families
around her, and by a system of profit-sharing, attached them to her
firm, which is now well known throughout Australia.
This was not the only function at Ballarat. The Prince also received an
address standing out in the rain, on a platform in the main street, in
the midst of a crowd so large that those in the rear could neither hear
nor see very clearly what was going on in front. As the result, both the
reading and the reply to the address were much interrupted, a patriotic
cornet on the outskirts playing "God Bless the Prince of Wales" part of
the time while the Prince himself was speaking. The Prince got hold of
his audience, after two false starts, however, and to such purpose that
the latter part of his speech was listened to with an interest that the
rain, which plastered his hair and flattened out his collar, appeared to
enhance. The cheering at the end was most hearty. The crowd did not
disperse when the speeches were over, but waited in the rain until after
the completion of a further ceremony, which took place inside the town
hall, where the Prince shook hands with numbers of returned men and
nurses. He was again loudly cheered when he came out and got into his
car _en route_ to the train to Melbourne.
The rain that was so insistent during the visit to Ballarat was of
dramatic importance to the country at large. It broke a long and serious
drought, extending over an enormous area--a drought so severe that we
passed, on the road to Ballarat, way-worn sheep that had been driven
three hundred miles in search of fodder and water. They were browsing,
on their homeward way, on one of the farmer's stock-routes which
traverse Australia from end to end. These cattle-tracks are generously
bordered by pastures fenced off from the surrounding country, so as to
conserve food for flocks and herds in movement.
Two days later, just three weeks from Australia's mid-winter, the Prince
crossed, by train from Melbourne, the chill slopes of the Great Dividing
Range, which separates the basin of the Murray river, flowing westward
through central Australia, from that of the streams which pour their
waters southwards to the coast. On the way, he received addresses at
Kyneton and Castlemaine, once gold-mining camps, now not less prosperous
dairying and woollen-working centres, the entire countryside turning out
to receive him. Thence the train climbed down to a pleasant plateau on
which stands Bendigo, city of flowers and dry, healthful breezes, and a
centre of large and still exceedingly productive quartz gold-mining.
Enormous heaps of grey "mullick" shale, and yellow and white tailings
here stand amongst beautiful avenues of shady eucalyptus trees, and
substantial buildings of stone and brick. One of the cheeriest civic
luncheons of the tour was a feature of the day--the Mayor toasting the
Royal guest as Duke of Cornwall, Prince of the "Cousin Jacks," to whom
the development of the Bendigo gold industry is so largely due. A
novelty also appeared on the triumphal arches in the streets, which, in
place of wreaths and patriotic texts, carried whole bevies of the
prettiest girls the city could find. These arches had been built in the
form of bridges connecting the porticoes on one side of the street with
those on the other. The girls occupied the middle and dropped flowers as
the Prince passed in his car.
Intensive small culture is so successful about Bendigo, that we were
told as much as L300 has been made out of an acre of tomatoes in a
single year. Bendigo may thus look forward to a future of agriculture
when her reefs are exhausted. Gold-mining brought her population, but
her fields and gardens will probably keep it.
Later in the afternoon the Prince, accompanied by the Prime Minister, in
overalls, descended the shaft of one of the gold-mines that amongst them
keep the mints of the country busy turning out sovereigns that bear on
the reverse the effigy of the kangaroo. The Prince thus made the
acquaintance of the gold industry which has played so dramatic a part in
the history of the Commonwealth. The output has been falling off
gradually since 1903 when the value produced was over sixteen million
sterling. It still averages over ten million sterling annually however,
and is likely long to remain a very important source of wealth.
It was on this expedition that newspaper men accompanying the tour had
their first opportunity of becoming acquainted with a number of
distinguished Australians with whom they were so fortunate thereafter as
to travel extensively. I have already mentioned that the Rt. Hon. Mr.
William Hughes, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, was one of them, his
outspoken frankness and caustic humour illuminating and diverting long
stretches of the railway journeys. Another member of the Commonwealth
Government, closely associated with the tour, was the Hon. Mr. Pearce,
Minister of Defence, who was supported, whenever the Prince was in naval
ports, by the Hon. Sir Joseph Cook, Minister for the Navy, and
Rear-Admiral Grant, Senior Member of the Naval Board, authorities who
were able to afford the Prince first-hand information about the training
and equipment of the forces that have given an account of themselves at
once so memorable and so recent. Major-General Sir Brudenell White,
Commonwealth Organizer of the visit, Brigadier-General H. W. Lloyd,
Brigadier-General Dodds, Commodore J. S. Dumaresq, were also outstanding
figures of the party. The Commonwealth arrangements, extensive though
they were, represented only a small portion of the organization
connected with the Australian part of the tour. Every State had also its
own organizer, besides numerous committees--committees for decoration
and illuminations, reception committees, committees for dinners and
dances, school committees, committees to guide and instruct the British
Press. These last-named bodies, to whom the debt of the visiting
newspapermen was considerable, consisted not of delegated correspondents
but of the editors and proprietors of the leading journals themselves.
These gentlemen also took upon themselves the duty of making known
throughout each State the story of the Prince's doings, thus giving to
the business of publicity the best and most influential brains
available, and placing at the disposal of the Overseas pressmen a
constant reference to experience and local knowledge of the utmost
value.
[Illustration: JUTLAND DAY AT MELBOURNE]
[Illustration: WITH AUSTRALIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN]
With the Commonwealth Prime Minister an ex-Labour member, and with
Labour Governments in power in several of the Australian state
legislatures, no one can visit Melbourne, seat of the Commonwealth
Government, without coming up against some of the industrial problems
and prospects in this country. It has already been mentioned that, at
the dinner given to the Prince by the Commonwealth Government, in
Parliament Buildings, Mr. Frank Tudor, leader of the Labour Party in
opposition to Mr. Hughes' Government, warmly seconded the toast of the
Prince's health. I repeat this fact, as it seems to be indicative of the
general attitude of Victorian labour towards the Royal visit. The
British pressmen had the opportunity of meeting some of the Labour
leaders, amongst them Mr. E. J. Holloway, Secretary of the Melbourne
Trades Hall, and Mr. D. L. MacNamara, Labour Member of the Victoria
Upper House. They are men of moderate views, while full of schemes for
bettering the conditions of labour on this continent. Mr. MacNamara is
the author of proposals, now forming part of the Australian Labour
Party's platform, for revising the Commonwealth constitution, upon lines
designed to make the will of the people supreme. He would abolish
existing State governments, and divide the States into provinces
administered by councils exercising only such functions as might, from
time to time, be conferred upon them by the Commonwealth Government,
the Upper Chamber in the latter to be done away with, thereby leaving
the lower Federal House a free hand to put through legislation
beneficial to the masses. This scheme, whatever may be its intrinsic
merits, is rather of theoretic than practical interest, as there is not
much probability of any proposals for increasing the powers of the
Commonwealth Government being accepted by the States, which are after
all in paramount authority for the time being. It is nevertheless
important as showing the constructive nature of problems with which
Labour men in this part of Australia concern themselves. Mr. Holloway's
activities have been chiefly connected with organizing proposals for the
immediate advantage of workers, reducing their hours of work, and
increasing their pay. Australian labour is watching developments in
England, and a tendency is growing to substitute friendly round-table
conferences between workers and employers for the less elastic processes
of strikes and lock-outs which have so often been resorted to in the
past.
There was no lack of evidence in Melbourne to show how closely the
community, as a whole, is affected by the new distribution of political
power. Smoke-room assertions that industry was being destroyed by the
frequency of strikes need not be taken too seriously, since the manifest
prosperity of the crowds and the well-ordered activities of the
factories did not at the time confirm any such mournful supposition. It
is apropos to mention, however, that in Melbourne places of business
much capital is locked up in purely emergency apparatus for doing
without such public utilities as water-supply, electricity and gas,
these arrangements being designed to enable industry to continue during
periods of municipal inactivity, a fact which is certainly significant
of the frequency of strikes in the past. Another noticeable feature is
the far-reaching nature of the activities of the unions. In the
sub-editorial rooms of the leading newspapers may be seen labour forms,
to be filled up even by men holding well-paid appointments upon the
staff, giving detailed particulars of hours of duty, overtime and
emoluments.
Friendly personal interest, rather than anything deeper, was perhaps
apparent in what some of the Labour men said about the Prince. Friendly
personal interest was always there, however. Even those who were
inclined to ascribe the wonderful reception in the streets to the Prince
being "a good sport, and well advertised," readily admitted the
desirability of the British connexion, and their own cordial wish to
keep up old relationships in this new land. At the time of the Prince's
visit correspondence appeared in the Melbourne Press on the subject of
alleged Catholic lukewarmness in regard to Royalty, and it must be said
that political trouble in Ireland has not been without its echo of
difficulty in Victoria, though the extent of anything of the kind might
be very easily exaggerated.
The wonder is, however, not that isolated exceptions should be found,
but that, with all the divergent political ideals, and conflicting
social conditions, necessarily met with in a large city of such recent
growth as Melbourne, so generous a measure of warm-hearted loyalty
should have been manifested, loyalty in which all sections of the
community, including Labour, showed themselves to be in warm accord.
XIII
NEW SOUTH WALES
Towards the end of the visit to Melbourne it became plain that the
tension of repeated functions and strenuous journeys had begun to tell
upon the Prince. He held out manfully, but was clearly overtired. This
was by no means surprising, at all events to any member of the tour
party, for all had begun to feel a strain which fell in a degree vastly
multiplied upon His Royal Highness.
That well-informed journal, "The Melbourne Argus," referring to the
matter, said: "When the programme was arranged, before the arrival in
Melbourne, the opinion was expressed in these columns that it was
proposed to place too great a strain upon the Prince, and since his
arrival it has become every day more evident that human strength is
unequal to the tasks which have been set. The Prince has not made any
complaint, but has most generously and courageously met all engagements.
Only those in close association with him know the expenditure of nervous
force which this conscientious discharge of duty has entailed."
Eventually the programme was altered so as to give H.R.H. an additional
week in Melbourne, free from public engagements. The hope that he would
rest, however, was not in any literal sense fulfilled, as he spent his
holiday in riding and golf, hardly less tiring than the public functions
which the doctor had forbidden him. His staff were lucky if, after a
long day spent in the saddle, he could be persuaded not to dance into
the small hours. This strenuousness is characteristic. In the _Renown_
he spent much of his spare time exercising on deck or playing squash
racquets. A mile run was his not infrequent preparation for a long day
of public engagements. It is an attractive habit, but in the case of one
subjected as the Prince is, at short intervals, to emotional as well as
physical strain it hardly carries the recuperative benefit that it might
in ordinary circumstances. The rest in Melbourne, such as it was,
enabled him to carry on throughout the remainder of the tour. He seemed
occasionally to take every ounce out of himself, but he "carried on."
Melbourne's send-off, when the Prince ultimately left to proceed to
Sydney, was, if possible, even more demonstrative than its reception
when he arrived. Nine aeroplanes, soaring round the Ionic columns of
Parliament Buildings, as dusk was falling, created the first stir in the
immense crowd which waited along the road he was to take. Presently
distant cheering was heard gradually coming nearer, as his car made its
way from the Moone Valley racecourse, where he had spent the afternoon,
to the top of Collins Street, where the official portion of the route
commenced. Slowly the procession extricated itself from the mass of
people who rushed up to say farewell, and assailed his car with
offerings of flowers and wax Kewpie dolls for luck. A real horse-shoe,
tied up in ribbon, was thrown by an admirer unable to get near enough to
present it. It was perhaps owing to the good luck it brought that it
dropped harmlessly into the bottom of the Prince's car. Eventually, the
procession was able to go forward along a barricaded lane kept by the
police in the middle of the street. In this space children raced
alongside, and a ripple of waving hats and handkerchiefs kept pace with
the cars as they advanced, while the evening air rang with cries of
"Good-bye, Digger": "Come Again!" interspersed with clapping and
cheering. The Prince stood upon the seat of the car waving his hat
through some miles of these demonstrations.
On the wharf at Port Melbourne a farewell address was presented by the
local authorities beneath a gigantic arch inscribed "Australia Is Proud
of You." Here the State Premier and other notables attended, also a
guard-of-honour of the Royal Australian Naval Brigade. The reverberation
of boots upon the wharf, as the crowd rushed afterwards to catch a last
view of the Prince as he went up the gangway of the _Renown_, drowned
the sound of a fife and drum band, operated by ladies in MacKenzie
tartans, which banged on cheerfully alongside.
The _Renown_ sailed at daylight, escorted out of harbour by a flotilla
of Australian destroyers. The voyage was along a hilly shore for the
most part covered with forest. The first port of call was in the wide,
sheltered harbour of Jervis Bay, the Dartmouth of Australia. Here Sir
Joseph Cook and Rear-Admiral Grant, with Captain Walters, Dr. Wheatly
and other senior members of the Naval College, received the Prince, who
inspected a smart guard-of-honour of cadets, and was subsequently shown
over the institution, which is well arranged and up to date. The
buildings include airy dormitories, comfortable study rooms, convenient
lecture halls, commodious laboratories, and spacious gymnasium and
gun-room, and are built round a roomy grass "quarter-deck," on which the
cadets in the course of the afternoon handsomely defeated the best Rugby
football team that the _Renown_ could produce. Nothing could exceed the
pleasantness and wholesomeness of the atmosphere of this fine naval
training college. The life by the cadets is an open-air one, and a more
healthy and promising body of youngsters it would be impossible to find
anywhere. They are being given a sound education amongst surroundings
calculated to impress upon them the beauty and attractiveness of the
land whose service they are about to enter. The harbour, at the foot of
the college playing-fields, is to be the port of entrance to the federal
territory of Canberra. The site of the new capital itself is only some
seventy miles inland, a distance which is thought nothing of in this
country of magnificent spaces. A railway has been surveyed to connect
the two places, and a corridor of federal territory had been marked out,
so that the entire line, including the port, may be out of reach of any
state influence.
The Jervis Bay College is a step in the direction of making the fine
fighting ships, which Australia already possesses, independent of the
help of the Mother Country. Boys are growing up there who will hereafter
command them, and perhaps build the big naval graving docks, that are so
badly wanted in Australian waters, to enable the modern battleships of
Great Britain to reinforce effectually those of Australia in any trouble
that may arise in the Pacific.
"What do you think of our harbour?" is as inevitable a question in
Sydney as "What do you think of America?" is in New York. It was soon
countered by the demand of the blue-jackets on the _Renown_, "And what
do you think of our ship?" but its relevance was easy enough to
understand, when, in the misty dawn, of what was mid-winter in
Australia, but might have been a fine June day in England, we reached
the high rocky headlands which guard the entrance to these wonderful
inland waters.
A flotilla of war-vessels, including two Australian cruisers and a
number of destroyers, escorted the Prince's ship into an aquatic
amphitheatre. On all sides were beautiful wooded promontories sloping
down to the edge of still pearly water. The slopes were studded with
home-like villas, each gay in its own garden. Bays and inlets made
shaded alleyways in all directions from the central expanse. Slowly the
battle-cruiser threaded her way through the deep water marked but by
buoys into the inner harbour. Hundreds of decorated motor-boats and
dozens of double-decked ferry-steamers crowded round, each one of them a
cheerful bouquet of brilliant parasols and fine-weather millinery.
Well-groomed men, opulently dressed women, and smartly turned out boys
and girls, on one boat after another waved handkerchiefs and Union
Jacks, clapped, cheered, laughed, and sang. Brass bands banged out the
National Anthem, and the usual petition to the Almighty to bless the
Prince of Wales. The Prince waved and smiled in return, from his eyrie
above the bridge, while fresh boats raced alongside, and continually
restarted the hubbub.