Eight Hours Day in Melbourne--The Australian Born--
Australians and the Mother Country--The Governor--_The
Sydney Bulletin_--The Englishman in Australia--Australian
Journalism--The Theatres--The Creed of Athleticism--The
Future.
It is many years since I saw a sight which so pricked and stirred my
blood as the final episode of the procession of Eight Hours Day in
Melbourne. The day was wintry and dismal. Early rains had threatened
the dispersal of the patient crowds which lined the roads; the pavements
were muddy and the sky was lowering. The march of the trades bodies did
little to dispel the gloom of the day for the one onlooker concerning
whose sentiments I am authorised to speak. The vast crowd gave each
trade a reception as it passed, and sometimes the marchers passed below
the Treasury windows and cheered the governor. There was plenty of
noise and enthusiasm, but I was unawakened until the tail-end of the
procession came. Two brakes drew up below the governor's standing-place,
and some score of grey-bearded men rose up in these vehicles and waved
their hats with vigour, whilst the whole orderly mob roared applause at
them and Lord Hopetoun himself clapped his hands like a pleased boy at
the theatre. All the men in the two brakes were elderly and grey-headed,
but as far as I could see, they were all stalwart and able-bodied, and
the faces of a good many were bronzed with years of sun and wind. Over
the leading vehicle was suspended a strip of white cloth, and on this
was painted the words, “The Pioneers.” These men were the makers
of Victoria, the fathers of the proud and populous city which lay
widespread about us. There is no need to be eloquent about Melbourne.
Too many people have sung its praises already. But it is one of the
cities of the world; it has a population of over half a million; it has
its churches, its chapels, its synagogues, its theatres, its hotels; it
is as well furnished in most respects as any other city of its size; and
these grey men yet staunch in body, bronzed and bright-eyed, were among
the beginners of it. When I first visited Melbourne I was introduced to
a man who, between the present site of the Roman Catholic Cathedral and
the present site of the Town Hall, had been “bushed” for a whole day and
lost in the virgin forest. I knew already how young the city was, how
strangely rapid its growth had been; but I did not realise what I knew,
and these elderly strangers' bodily presence made my thought concrete.
That beautifully appropriate and dramatic finish struck the same chord
of wonder, but with a fuller sound.
* These Antipodean notes, dealing with the conditions of
some twenty years ago, have lost nothing of their vivid
interest by the lapse of time, and illustrate in a
remarkable manner the process of history being made for the
world, while it hardly has time to wait.
The city is commonplace enough in itself, but the Victorian, quite
justifiably, refuses to think so. Men come back from London, and
Paris, and Vienna, and New York, and think Melbourne the finer for
the contrast. In reality, it is very very far from being so; but it
is useless to reason with patriotism and its convictions. The men
of Victoria run devotion to their soil to an extreme. I was told an
exquisite story, for the truth of which I had a solemn voucher, though
it carries its evidences of veracity and needs no bolstering from
without. An Australian-born--he came of course from that Gascony of the
Antipodes which has Melbourne for its capital--visited the home country.
An old friend of his father was his cicerone in London and took him,
amongst other places, to Westminster Abbey, and “There, my young
friend,” said the Englishman, when they had explored the noble old
building, “you have nothing like that in Australia.” “My word,” said
the colonial export, “no fear! You should just see the Scotch church at
Ballarat!”
The tale is typical. I would tell it, in the hope that he would find it
an _open-sesame_ to many things, to any fair-minded and observant
man who was going out to Victoria. It is a little outrageous to the
stranger, but in it the general public sentiment is drawn in grand
oudines, magnified many times, but not in the least caricatured. The
patriotic prejudice goes everywhere. It lives at the very roots of life.
Truthful men will tell you that London is vilely supplied with cabs in
comparison with Melbourne. They believe it. They will tell you that
the flavours of English meats, game, fruits and vegetables are vastly
inferior to those they know at home. And they believe it. To the
unprejudiced observer Melbourne is the worst cabbed city in the world,
or amongst the worst. A gourmet would find a residence in Australia a
purgatory. For my own part, I have learned in a variety of rough
schools at whatsoever meat I sit therewith to be content. In matters of
gourmandise I am content wi' little and cantie wi' mair.
But, Shade of Savarin! How I relish my morning sole, after two years
banishment from that delicious creature! How I savour my saddle of
mutton! What a delightful thing I now know my English strawberry to be!
But to the New South Welshman my doctrine is a stumbling-block and to
the Victorian it is foolishness. Mr Sala preached it years ago and the
connoisseurs of the Greater Britain of the south have never forgiven
him.
Another patriotic delusion is the glorious climate. The plain fact is
that there is no such thing as a climate. They take their weather in
laminae, set on end. You walk from the tropics to the pole in five
minutes. A meteorological astonishment lies in wait at every corner of
the street. It blows hot, it blows cold, it scorches, it freezes, it
rains, it shines, and all within the compass of an hour. Yet these
wonderful Australians love their weather. Other people would endure
it. They brag about it. I think they must be the happiest people in the
world.
By the way, I must qualify, before I forget to do so, the judgment
expressed above with respect to the Australian table. I tasted in
Adelaide a favourable specimen of the wild turkey, and I believe it to
be the noblest of game birds. Its flavour is exquisite and you may
carve at its bounteous breast for quite a little army of diners. And
the remembrance of one friendly feast puts me in mind of many. Is there
anywhere else on the surface of our planet a hospitality so generous,
so free and boundless, as that extended to the stranger in Australia? If
there be I have not known it. They meet you with so complete a welcome.
They envelop you with kindness. There is no _arrière pensée_ in their
cordiality, no touch lacking in sincerity. This is a characteristic of
the country. The native born Australian differs in many respects from
the original stock, but in this particular he remains unchanged. You
present a letter of introduction and this makes you the immediate friend
of its recipient. He spares no pains to learn what you desire and then
his whole aim and business in life for the moment is to fulfil your
wishes. Your host will probably be less polished than an Englishman
living in a like house and boasting an equal income, but his _bonhomie_
is unsurpassed. I used to think there was nothing like an English
welcome. Australia has killed that bit of English prejudice.
This very openness of welcome, the sincerity of heart in which your host
stands before you, is the means whereby the traveller first learns to
be dissatisfied. He has come out with his own judgment of things raying
from him in all directions--a very porcupine of pre-conception. He is
not merely persuaded that the colonies are loyal but he is certain they
are loyal after his own conceptions of loyalty.
So long as he encounters only the old folks he will find his
pre-conceptions flattered, but he will not go long before he meets
a member of the A.N.A. (which letters being interpreted signify the
Australian Natives Association), and then he must be prepared to be
astonished beyond measure. In a while, if he be a man of sense, he will
begin to see how natural the position of the Australian native is, and
then he will cease to be astonished, though he may still be grieved.
The society is large and powerful. It includes within its ranks a great
number of the most capable of the rising men and the younger of those
already risen. Speaking broadly, its aspiration is for a separate
national life. It will “cut the painter”--that is the phrase--which
ties it to the old ship of state. In its ranks are many who love the
old country and reverence its history and traditions, and these an
Englishman only remarks with a readier excuse for what he must esteem an
error. But there are others, and the melancholy fact, too long concealed
or slighted, is that they are many and growing in numbers, who hate
England and all things English. There are many, not stigmatised as
dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English
history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a
fantastical crank, it is a movement growing yearly in strength. I have
seen men keeping their seats in serious protesting silence when the
health of the Queen has been drunk at public banquets, and have found in
private converse that hundreds approve their action but do not follow
it because they dislike to be thought singular. The out-and-out
journalistic supporters of the country vilify the mother country as
a whole. They belittle its history and besmirch its rulers. Loyal
Australians pooh-pooh these prints and entreat the stranger within
their gates to believe that they are despised and without influence.
The stranger has only to travel to learn better than this. The strongest
current of Australian feeling is setting with the tide of growing power
against the mother country.
That this statement will excite anger and derision in the minds of many
Australians is certain. They live entrenched in the flutters of their
own opinion, and are blind to the fact of the power which is mustering
against them. They are as little instructed as to what is going
on around them as we are at home, and our ignorance of our great
dependencies is shameful and criminal. Our colonial governors, from some
of whom we are supposed ourselves to learn something, and many of whom
have been men of especial capacity, do not come in contact with the
crowd. Lord Carrington saw more of the people amongst whom he lived than
any governor before him, and I had from him a single story of a man of
the country who expressed in drunken Saxon his opinion of existing forms
of government; but the tale was jocularly told and was not supposed to
have any importance. It could have had no importance to one who found it
a single instance, as a governor would be likely to do. A governor sees
smooth things. All sorts of people (except the working sort) frequent
his receptions--the fashionable classes, who are far more loyal to
England for the most part than the English themselves, their fringe, and
then the wealthier of the tradespeople. It is proven every day that a
democracy is the happiest hunting ground for a man with a title. The
very rarity of the distinction makes it more precious to those who value
it, and the titled governors of one of our great colonies occupies
a position which is vastly higher in public esteem than that of his
fellow-noblemen at home. He is the local fount of honour. To sit at
his table, and to be on terms of friendship with him is to gratify the
highest social ambition. He is the direct representative of the Crown,
and the people who desire to associate with him must not have views
which are inimical to existing forms of government, or, if they hold
them, they must keep them carefully concealed. The governor responds to
the toast of his own health and talks of those ties which bind and must
bind the mother country to her children. His hearers are at one with
him, and cheer him with hearty vigour. Absence from the dear old land
has made their hearts grow fonder. Their loyalty is perfervid. Everybody
goes home in a sentimental glow and the native born working-man reads
his _Sydney Bulletin_ over a long-sleever and execrates the name of the
country which bore his father and mother.
The journal just named is very capably written and edited. The brightest
Australian verse and the best Australian stories find their way into
its columns. Its illustrations are sometimes brilliant, though the high
standard is not always maintained. And having thus spoken an honest mind
in its favour I leave myself at liberty to say that it is probably the
wrongest-headed and most mischievous journal in the world. People try to
treat it as a negligible quantity when they disagree with it. But I have
seen as much of the surface of the country and as much of its people
as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and
everywhere have found it influential. For some time past it has been
telling blood-curdling stories of the iniquities of prison rule in
Tasmania, with the tacit conclusion that nothing but the power of the
working classes makes a repetition of these atrocities impossible.
It compares the Russian Government with the English, and compares it
favourably. It loses no opportunity of degrading all things English as
English. England and the Englishman are as red rags to its bull-headed
rage. Of course, its readers are not all sincere, though doubtless some
of them are. Vast numbers of people who do not agree with it read it
for its stage and social gossip; but there is a class of working-men
who take its absurdities for gospel, and it is one of the factors in
the growing contempt for the mother country which is noticeable amongst
uninstructed Australians.
Another and more potent factor is supplied by Englishmen themselves. I
have never in my life known anything more offensively insolent than the
patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling Cockney extend
to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him. I have seen
an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own table, and set
everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists
are necessarily inferior to home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of
thing. Nobody finds himself feeling more kindly to the race which sends
out that intolerable kind of man.
“Met a girl the other day,” says the eye-glassed idiot, beaming
fatuously round the table, “little colonial girl, don't you know. She'd
read George Eliot. Never was more surprised in my life.” And this to a
company of Australian ladies and gentlemen bred and born.
This kind of person has his influence, and on that ground he is to be
regretted. The students of men and manners find him as good as meat and
drink; but we cannot all be Touchstones, and perhaps, on the whole, it
would be well if he were buried.
Yet another and a still more potent factor is found in the habit which
prevails amongst English fathers and guardians of sending out their
incurable failures to the Colonies. “You shall have one more chance,
sir, and it shall be the last. You shall have £100 and your passage out
to Australia. This is the last I shall do for you. Now go and never
let me see your face again.” So the whisky-bitten _vaurien_ goes out
to Melbourne, has an attack of delirium tremens aboard ship, finds
his alcoholic allowance thenceforward stopped by the doctor's orders,
swaggers his brief on the block in Collins Street, hangs about the bars,
cursing the colonies and all men and all things colonial in a loud and
masterful voice, to the great and natural contentment of the people of
the country, pawns his belongings bit by bit, loafs in search of the
eleemosynary half-crown or sixpence, and finally goes up country to be
loathed and despised as a tenderfoot, and to swell the statistics of
insanity and disease. The most loyal and friendly of Australians resent
this importation. The uninstructed and untravelled native accepts him as
a pattern Englishman, and the satirical prints help out that conclusion
in his mind. There is no signboard on the Australian continent that
rubbish of this sort may be shot there, and the English tendency to
throw its waste in that direction has never been regarded in a friendly
spirit. We gave them our convicts for a start and now we give them our
most dangerous incapables. They do not like this and will never be got
to like it. At the Bluff in New Zealand people show the stranger the
southernmost gas-lamp in the world. It is the correct thing for the
stranger to touch this in order that he may tell of the fact thereafter.
The traveller may take the spirit of Sheridan's excellent advice to his
son, and _say_ he has touched it, but as a rule he takes the trouble
to go down and do it. I was escorted for this festal ceremony by a
resident, and leaning against that southernmost lamp-post was a Scot
in an abject state of drunkeness, and as Stevenson says of a similar
personage, “radiating dirt and humbug.” Nigh at hand was another
drunkard, sitting pipe in mouth on an upturned petroleum-tin, and the
two were conversing. “Et's a nice letde coal'ny,” said the man against
the lamp-post, “a very nice lettle coal'ny, but it wants inergy, and it
wants interprise, and it wants (hie) sobriety.” He spoke with a face
of immeasurable gravity, and I laughed so that I forgot to touch the
lamp-post.
There are countless little matters which help the growing distaste for
English people in the Australian mind. Our London journals for the most
part leave us in profound ignorance of the colonies. We see now and
again a telegram which is Greek to most of us, but we get no consecutive
information about our kindred over seas.
The colonists are perhaps curiously tender to the feeling of the mother
country and they resent this indifference. It is difficult to express
the varying sentiments of a community, but in many respects the
Australia of to-day resembles the America which Charles Dickens saw on
his first visit. There is an eager desire to ascertain the opinion of
the passing English visitor, and this exists inexplicably enough even
amongst the people who despise the visitor, and the land from which he
comes. They ask for candour, but they are angry if you do not praise. A
good many of them, whilst just as eager for judgment as the rest, resent
praise as patronage. It is certain that, in a very little while,
this raw sensitiveness will die away, and leave a feeling of national
security, which will not need to be shored up by every wanderer's
opinion. At present the curiosity for the traveller's opinion is a
litde embarrassing, and more than once I was reminded of a drawing of
Du Maurier's in _Punch_ where a big man standing over a little one
declares: “If any man told me that was not a Titian I would knock him
down, and I want your candid opinion.”
There is a stage of national hobbledehoyhood and Australia has not yet
grown out of it. Vanity, shyness, an intermingling of tenderness and
contempt for outside opinion, a determination to exact consideration
before yielding it--all these are characteristics. The working man is
surly to the man who is better dressed than himself, not because he
is naturally a surly fellow, but because he has not yet found a less
repellent fashion of asserting independence. I shall come to the
consideration of the great colonial labour question by-and-by, but the
attitude of the working man is curiously consonant with the monetary
characteristics of the land he lives in. Labour is growing towards such
a manhood of freedom as has never been achieved elsewhere. It, too, has
reached the hobbledehoy height and has all the signs which mark that
elevation, the brief aspirations, the splendid unformed hopes, and the
touchy irascibility.
I have said what I can to justify the dislike of England, but have by
no means exhausted the explanations of the fact There are explanations
which do not justify and the most important of all seems to me to come
under that head. The greatest danger to the contented union of the
Empire is the protecting of a selfishness so abnormal as to excite anger
and impatience. But since anger and impatience are the worst weapons
with which it is possible to fight, it will be wise to lay them by,
and to discuss the question unemotionally. Australia is governed by the
working man. The working man has got hold of a good thing in Australia,
and he has resolved to keep it and, if he can, to make it better. He has
got it into his head that the one thing to be afraid of is the influx of
population. He takes no count of the fact that all the wisest men of
the country admit the crying need of people--that labour everywhere is
needed for the development of giant resources. His loaf is his, and he
is quite righteously determined that no man shall take it from him.
He is not in the least degree determined that he shall not take away
another man's loaf; but that is a different question. England is the one
country in the world which can, under existing circumstances, or under
circumstances easily conceivable, seek to send any appreciable number of
new people into the colony. Therefore England is to be feared and hated,
and any scheme which may be promulgated in favour of further emigration
is to be resisted to the uttermost. Men talk of war as the answer to an
attempt to deplete by emigration the overcrowded labour markets of the
home country. No public man who sets the least value upon his position
dares discuss this question. The feeling is too deep-rooted and its
manifestations are too passionate. The scheme propounded by General
Booth afforded an opportunity for a striking manifestation of this fact.
Long before the nature of the scheme was known or guessed at, before any
of the safeguards surrounding it were hinted, it was denounced from
one end of the country to the other. It is not my present business to
express any opinion as to the feasibility of the plan. The point is that
the mere mention of it was enough to excite an intense and spontaneous
opposition. Australia will never, except under compulsion, allow any
large body of Englishmen to enter into possession of any portion of her
territories. The ports for emigration on a large scale are finally and
definitely closed.
The population of Australia is 3,326,000. These people have an area of
3,050,000 square miles from which to draw the necessaries and luxuries
of life. Suppose it be allowed that one half the entire country is not
and will not be habitable by man. Australians themselves would resent
this estimate as being shamelessly exaggerated, but the supposition is,
so far as the argument goes, in their favour. Take away that imagined
useless half and every man, woman and child in the community would still
have very nearly half a square mile of land if the country were equally
divided. It is evident that the populace is unequal to the proper
exploitation of the continent Let them multiply as the human race never
multiplied before and they must still remain unequal to the task before
them for many centuries. The cry raised is that of “Australia for the
Australians.” Well, who are the Australians? Are they the men of the old
British stock who made the country what it is, or the men who had the
luck to be born to the inheritance of a splendid position, for which
they have not toiled? It is the honest simple truth, and no man ought to
be angry at the statement of it--though many will be--that Australia
was built up by British enterprise and British money. It is a British
possession still, and without British protection, British gold, and the
trade which exists between it and Britain, would be in a bad way. Looked
at dispassionately, the cry of “Australia for the Australians” seems
hardly reasonable. The mother country has a right to something of a
share in the bargain.
The argument would be infinitely less strong if the Australians were
using Australia. But they are not. The vast Melbourne, of which Victoria
is so proud, holds half the population of the colony, and produces
little or nothing. Melbourne is the city of brass plates. There are more
brass-plates to the acre in the thoroughfares which diverge from
Collins Street than could be found in any other city of the world.
The brass-plate, as all the world knows, is the badge of the
non-producer--the parasite, the middleman, agent, call him what you
will--the man who wears a tall hat and black coat, and who lives in
a villa, and lives on and by the products of the labour of others. As
society is constituted he is an essential when he exists in reasonable
numbers. In Melbourne his numbers are out of reason. For almost every
producer in Victoria there is a non-producer in the capital. In the
early days men went into the country and set themselves to clear and
till the soil. That impulse of energy has died out and a new one has
succeeded it which is infinitely less profitable and wholesome. The
tendency is now towards the city. The one source of permanent wealth
is neglected, and commerce and speculation occupy the minds of men who
fifty years ago would have raised mutton and wool, corn and wine. With
every increase of growth in the great city there is a cry for rural
labour to preserve the necessary balance of things. The call is not
listened to or answered, and Melbourne is a hundred times more abnormal
than London. London deals with the trade of the world, and a good half
of its population could not be dispensed with. Within its limits five
and a half millions do the business of a hundred millions. In Melbourne
half a million do the business of another half a million, and the
country necessarily suffers. No student of social economy can deny the
position, but the working man will have it otherwise. He is the ruler
of Australia and the destinies of a people, pointed out by nature for
greatness, are stationary in his hands. He is worth studying, however,
and to convince him may mean the salvation of a continent. There, as
here, the working man is the victim of a prodigious blunder--a mistake
so obvious that the on-looker wonders at his blindness. A month or two
ago he was in the thick of a struggle which was everywhere called a
fight with capital. The real battle, however, was never with capital for
a moment. The one engagement--and it ranged all along the line
for months--was between organised and unorganised labour, between
the unionists and non-unionists. Wherever a working man of the union
declared against the conditions imposed by the employer, a working man
outside the union accepted those conditions. The capitalist changed
his staff--that was all. The unionists were thrown permanently out of
employment in large numbers, and when at last the strike fizzled out,
their leaders made a melancholy proclamation of victory, which deceived
nobody, not even themselves. The unionist clock in Australia has been
put back a year or two. It is probable that the men will know with whom
they have to fight before they are again lured into conflict. It is an
old adage that much will have more. The Australian working man is the
best fed, the best paid, the best housed, and the least worked of all
the workers of the world. In the great towns house rent is dear, much
dearer than it has a right to be in so new and so wide a country.
This is the consequence of the rush for secularisation and the
ensuing neglect of the resources of the land. Clothing is dear as the
consequence of protective imposts. The Australian working man is a
staunch protectionist, being somehow persuaded that it is essential to
his interests that he should suffer for the benefit of his only enemy,
the middleman. There are hundreds of restaurants in the second-rate
streets of colonial towns where you may see painted up a legend, “All
Meals--6d.” For that small sum a man may have a sufficiency of hot
or cold beef or mutton, bread, tea and a choice of vegetables. I can
testify from personal knowledge that the meals are well cooked, well
served and plentiful. I have eaten a worse luncheon in a London club or
restaurant than I found at one of these eating-houses in Sydney and have
paid five times the price, although it has to be confessed that for
five times the price one _can_ get a finer meal. More wholesome or more
plentiful fare no man need ask for.
Well, as I have said, much will have more. The working man has got his
whole programme filled up. There is one vote for one man, and about that
fact almost the whole land is jubilant--though the practical good of it
may as yet be a problem. The aspiration expressed in the old quatrain is
fulfilled.
“Eight hours work,
Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep,
And eight 'bob' a day.”
The Eight Hours movement has been crowned with success, and there is a
magnificent annual procession to commemorate it. It is announced that a
movement is to be set on foot for the further reduction of the hours
of labour. Six hours a day has to be the limit of the future. The comic
journals, or to speak by the card, the journals which study to be comic,
prophesy four hours, two hours, and then no hours at all; but these
celestial visions are out of the working man's eyeshot.
Here and there an individual may be found who, being entrusted with an
irresponsible power, would not desire to use it tyrannically. But since
corporations are never so moral, so high-thinking so forbearing as
individuals, corporate bodies tend always and everywhere to the misuse
of their powers, and demand constantly to be held in check by some
influence outside their own. The working man of the Antipodes is told
so often that all the power (as well as all the freedom and the honour)
lies in his hands, that he is disposed to do strange things.
But a mere glance at the history of two phases of the great strikes
which have lately shaken Australian society may be of service.
In New Zealand, where, under conditions similar to those of Victoria,
New South Wales and Queensland, the labourer has grown to think himself
more worthy of his hire than anybody else could possibly be, the fight
between unionists and non-unionists, with capital as an interested
spectator, began on a curiously trivial question. A firm of printers
and stationers in Christchurch were ordered to reinstate or discharge
an employee. The firm declined to obey the mandate of the union, and
an order went forth from the representatives of the latter body to the
effect that no one belonging to any of its branches should handle the
goods of the obdurate company. This was all very well in its way,
until the order touched the railway hands, who are in the employ of the
government. The union appealed to the railway commissioners to remain
“neutral” and not to carry the goods of the offending firm. The
commissioners responded that they were the servants of the public; that
it was not part of their business to recognise the quarrel, but that
it was their business to carry for any and every citizen who did not
infringe their rules. The representatives of the union renewed their
appeal for “neutrality.” Why should these domineering commissioners take
the side of capital and fight in its interests? The commissioners again
wrote that they were the public carriers, that they had no right to
refuse to work for any law-abiding citizen, that they had no place or
part in the quarrel, and intended simply and merely to do the duty for
which they were appointed. The din which arose on this final declaration
was at once melancholy and comic.
Here was the government lending all its power to crush the working man.
Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the
old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated
ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was
a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess
neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we--the working
men of New Zealand--asked for? We asked that the government should hold
our enemy while we punched him; and while they traitorously proclaimed
their neutrality, they refused this simple request for fair play.
Therefore are we, the working men of New Zealand, naturally incensed,
and at the next election we will shake these worthless people out of
office, and we will elect men like Fish, who know what neutrality really
means!
The Hon. Mr Fish was one of the labourers' faithful. The palpable
interference of the Commissioners wounded him profoundly.
The more recent strike of the Queensland shearers has afforded
opportunity for a display of an equal faculty of logic and
reasonableness. The shearers, at loggerheads with the squatters,
proposed to arrange their differences by arson. They threatened openly
to fire the grass upon those vast northern plains where fire is the
thing most to be dreaded amongst many and terrible enemies. They not
only threatened but they carried their threats into effect in many
places; and but for the exceptional rains, which mercifully interfered
between them and their purpose, they would have created scenes of
boundless desolation. Here again a government has no sense of fair-play.
Troops were sent to watch the shearers' camps and to prevent active
hostilities. A natural thrill of horror ran through the country at this
autocratic and unwarrantable act. Here at the Antipodes we have
founded a democracy, and in a democracy the government motto should
be nonintervention. The unionist workmen roared with indignation at
countless meetings. Why were not the shearers allowed to settle
the dispute their own way? Why were the poor men to be threatened,
intimidated, bullied by armed force? A continent cried shame. When, in
that eight hours' procession to which I have already twice referred the
shearers' deputation rode by, they were received with rolling applause
all along the line, and a free people cheered the victims of oppression.
In the middle of all this madness it was good to see that the greatest
of the democratic journals had the courage of honesty and spoke its mind
plainly. The _Melbourne Age_ is a very wealthy and powerful journal, but
it risked much, for the moment at least, in opposing the mingled
voices of the populace. Excited leaders of the people denounced it in
unmeasured epithets, and the crowd boo-hooed outside its offices in
Collins Street, but the writers of the journal went their way unmoved,
as British journalists have a knack of doing.
I find here an opportunity of saying the most favourable word I can
anywhere speak for the Australian Colonies. The Press is amongst the
best and most notable in the world. The great journals of Melbourne and
Sydney are models of newspaper conduct, and are nowhere to be surpassed
for extent and variety of information, for enterprise, liberality,
and sound adhesion to principle, or for excellence of sub-editorial
arrangement, or for force, justice, and exactness in expression. It is
not only in the greater centres that the Press owns and displays these
admirable characteristics. Adelaide, Brisbane, Dunedin, Christchurch,
Auckland, Wellington have each journals of which no city in the world
need be ashamed; and when the limitations which surround them are taken
into consideration their excellence appears all the more remarkable and
praiseworthy.
It is not unnatural perhaps that a man trained in English journalism and
having worked in every grade of it should esteem it highly. But allowing
all I can for personal prejudice and striving to look impartially upon
it and its rivals, I am compelled to think it far and away the best
in the world. In Australia the high traditions of the parent Press are
preserved, and among many strange and novel and perplexing signs one can
but gratefully and hopefully recognise the splendid enterprise and the
lofty sense of public obligation which guide the youngest school of
journalism in the world.
In one respect Australian journalism surpasses English. We have nothing
to show which will at all compare with the _Australasian_ or the
_Leader_; but it is easy to see that they and similar journals of other
cities (which are all worthy of the same high praise) are established
excellences to local conditions. These great weekly issues give all the
week's news and all the striking articles which have appeared in the
daily journals of which they are at once the growth and compendium.
They do much more than this, for they include whatever the gardener,
the agriculturist, the housewife, the lady of fashion, the searcher of
general literature, the chess-player, the squatter can most desire to
know. They provide for 'all sorts of tastes and needs, and between their
first sheet and their last, they render to their readers what we in
England buy half a score of special journals to secure. The reason for
their existence is simple. There is not population enough to support
the specialist as we know him at home, and an eager and enquiring people
will be served.
The first unescapable belief of the English traveller is that the
Australian is a transplanted Englishman pure and simple. A residence of
only a few months kills that notion outright. Many new characteristics
present themselves. To arrest one of the most noticeable--there is
perhaps no such pleasure-loving and pleasure-seeking people in the
world. I wish now I had thought of securing trustworthy statistics with
respect to the number of people who present themselves on the colonial
racecourses within the limit of a year. It would be interesting to know
what proportion of the population is given over to the breeding and
training of horseflesh and the riding of races. The Melbourne people
exult--and not unjustifiably--in the Melbourne Cup and on the spectacle
presented at its running. That spectacle is quite unique as far as I
know. Neither the Derby nor the Grand Prix can rival it for its view of
packed humanity, and neither can approach it for the decorous order of
the crowd. Is it Jane Taylor who tells the story of an English village?
I am not quite sure, but I remember the genesis. You must have a church
to begin with. For a church you want a parson and a parson must have a
clerk. From this established nucleus grows everything. In Australia they
begin with the race-course. This statement is not to be accepted as a
satiric fable, but as a literal fact. Nearly two years ago, travelling
in the Blue Mountains--miles upon miles away from everywhere--I came
upon a huge board erected in the bush. The board bore this inscription,
“Projected road to site of intended race-course.” There was not a house
visible, or the sign of the beginning of a house, but half-an-hour
later, in apparent virgin forest, I found another board nailed to a
big eucalypt. It had a painted legend on it, setting forth that these
eligible building sites were to be let or sold. The solemn forest stood
everywhere, and the advertisement of the eligible building sites was
the only evidence of man's presence. It was for the benefit of future
dwellers here that the road to the site of the “intended race-course”
had been “projected.”
Again there are more theatres and more theatregoers to the population
than can probably be found elsewhere. The houses and the performances
are alike admirable. Like the Americans, the Australians endure many
performances which would not be thought tolerable in England, but they
mount their productions with great pomp and luxury. Whatever is best in
England finds an early rendering in the great cities, and for serious
work the general standard is as high as in Paris or in London. The
Princess Theatre in Melbourne has given renditions of comic opera which
are not unfairly to be compared, for dressing, _mise-en-scéne_ and
artistic finish to those of the Savoy. The general taste is for jollity,
bright colour, cheerful music. Comedy runs broader than it does at
home and some of the most excellent artists have learned a touch of
buffoonery. The public taste condones it, may even be said to relish it
to _finesse_. The critics of the Press are, in the main, too favourable,
but that is a stricture which applies to modern criticism in general.
There is a desire to say smooth words everywhere and to keep things
pleasant.
Outside the southernmost parts of Victoria Australia has a climate, and
the people can rejoice in midnight picnics. In the glorious southern
moonlight one can read the small print of a newspaper. The air is cool
after the overwhelming furnace of the day. The moonlight jaunts
and junketings are characteristic and pleasant, and they offer an
opportunity for the British matron who flourishes there as here--heaven
bless her--to air her sense of morals in letters to the newspapers.
The creed of athleticism speaks its latest word here. The burial of poor
young Searle, the champion sculler of the world, was a remarkable and
characteristic sight. That he was a great athlete and a good fellow
seems indisputable, but to the outsider the feeling excited by his early
and mournful death looked disproportionate. Every newspaper, from the
stately _Argus_ down to the smallest weekly organ of the village sang
his dying song. He was praised and lamented out of reason, even for
a champion sculler. The regret seemed exaggerated. At his funeral
obsequies the streets were thronged, and thousands followed in his
train. It was mournful that a young man should be struck down in the
pride and vigour of his strength. It is always mournful that this
should be so, but it is common, and the passion of the lament provoked
weariness. The feeling was doubtless genuine, but it might possibly have
had an object worthier of a nation's mourning.
Another fine athlete and good fellow is Frank Slavin, the prize-fighter.
I have acknowledged a hundred times that I belong to a lost cause. My
sympathies are with the old exploded prize-ring. Righdy or wrongly, I
trace the growth of crimes of violence to the abolition of that glorious
institution. I want to see it back again, with its rules of fair-play,
and for its contempt for pain and its excellent tuition in temper and
forbearance. I am an enthusiast, and being almost alone, am therefore
the more enthusiastic. But I grew tired of the wild exultation in
Slavin's prowess, the mad rejoicing over a victory which meant less than
it would have done in the days which I am old enough to remember. In
Australia better be an athlete than almost anything, except perhaps a
millionaire.
Take the average native and ask him what he knows of Marcus Clarke, of
James Brunton Stevens, of Harpur, Kendal, or the original of Browning's
_Waring_. He will have no response for you, but he will reel off for you
the names of the best bowler, the best bat, the champion forward,
the cunningest of half-backs. The portraits of football players are
published by the dozen and the score, and the native knows the names and
achievements of every man thus signalled out for honour. In England the
schoolboys would know all about these people, but in Australia the world
at large is interested. The bank clerk who has a recognised position
in a football team enjoys professional privileges which another may
not claim. His athletic prowess reflects upon him in his business. His
manager allows him holidays for his matches, and is considerate with him
with regard to hours for training.
From all this one would naturally argue the existence of a specially
athletic people, but the conclusion is largely illusory. The worship of
athleticism breeds a professional or semi-professional class, but it is
surprising to know how little an effect it has upon the crowd of city
people who join in all the rites of adoration. The popularity of the
game is answerable for the existence of the barracker whose outward
manifestations of the inward man are as disagreeable as they well can
be. The barracker is the man who shouts for his own party, and by yells
of scorn and expletives of execration seeks to daunt the side against
which he has put his money or his partisan aspirations. When he gathers
in his thousands, as he does at all matches of importance, he is
surprisingly objectionable. He is fluent in oath and objurgation,
cursing like an inmate of the pit. This same man is orderly enough at a
race meeting and takes his pleasure mildly there.
The barracker and the larrikin are akin. The gamin of Paris, grown up
to early manhood, fed on three meat meals a day, supplied with plenteous
pocket money, and allowed to rule a tribe of tailors, would be a
larrikin. The New York hoodlum is a larrikin with a difference. The
British rough is a larrikin also with a difference. The Australian
representative of the great blackguard tribe is better dressed, better
fed and more liberally provided in all respects than his _confrere_ of
other nations. He is the street bully, _par excellence_, inspired to
this tyranny by unfailing beef and beer. When Mr Bumble heard of Oliver
Twist's resistance to the combined authority of Mrs Sowerberry and
Charlotte and Noah Claypole, he repudiated the idea of madness which
was offered as an explanation of the boy's conduct. “It isn't madness,
ma'am,” said Mr Bumble, “it's meat.”
There is the true explanation of the larrikin. He is meat-fed and is
thereby inspired with ferocity, Darwin, if I remember righdy, tells of a
sheep which was gradually accustomed to a flesh diet. Its wool began
to take the coarseness of hair and the mild beast grew savage.
The fore-runners of the larrikin were never very sheep-like in all
probability, for if one could trace his pedigree, it would in most cases
be found that he is the descendant of the true British cad. But he has
improved upon the ancestral pattern and become a pest of formidable
characteristics and dimensions. The problem he presents has never been
faced, but it will have to be met in one way or another before long.
The stranger is forced to the conclusion that magistrates are absurdly
lenient. I recall a case of some few months ago where a gang of well-fed
ruffians assaulted an old man in Flinders Street, Melbourne. The attack
was shown to have been utterly unprovoked, and the victim's injuries
were serious. Three of the most active participators in the sport were
seized by the police and were each sent to prison for six weeks, A
sentence of six months, with a brace of sound floggings thrown in, would
have gone nearer to meet the exigencies of the case; but there is a
widespread objection to the use of the cat, the argument being that it
is wrong to brutalise these refined young men by its application. The
same spirit of false sentiment exists in England, but in a less marked
degree.
Crimes of violence are of exceptionally frequent occurrence and it
is still felt necessary to punish rape by the imposition of the final
penalty.
The democracy is determined to test itself completely and female
suffrage seems to be within measurable distance. It is conceivable that
it may have a refining effect, and that it may act as a curative, though
the experiment is full of risk. The one-man one-vote principle, together
with the payment of members of the legislative chambers, has not, so
far, achieved the happiest conceivable results. The parliament of New
South Wales is occasionally notorious as a bear-garden. The late Mr
MacEhlone (who once informed the Speaker that, when he encountered
outside an honourable gentleman, to whom the ruling of the chair
compelled him to apologise, he would “spit in his eye “) has a worthy
successor in the presence of a Mr Crick. Sometime ago Mr Crick was
expelled by an indignant house, wearied of his prolonged indecencies of
demeanour, but his constituency sent him back untamed and rejoicing--his
mission being to prove that the Ministry was composed of thieves and
liars. The miserable charges dwindled into nothing; but one at least
of his constituents is persuaded that the debates, as printed in the
newspapers, would lose so much of sparkle if Mr Crick were banished
permanendy from the house that the breakfast enjoyment of the public
more than atoned for his presence there. The women are notoriously
deficient in humour, and it is possible that, when they come to vote,
the reign of Mr Crick and his like will be over.
The best hope which lies before Australia at this hour is the federation
of her several colonies. Her determination to keep her population
European can hardly fail of approval, but the immediate work to her hand
is to consolidate her own possessions. The attempt to find material for
six separate parliaments in a population of three and a half millions
has, it must be confessed in all candour, succeeded beyond reasonable
expectations, but concentration will be of service. There will be a
laudable rivalry between the colonies which will result in the choice of
the fittest men, and a combination parliament will be a more useful and
dignified body than has yet been assembled within colonial limits.
But this is one of the smallest of the results to be anticipated. The
ridiculous tariff restrictions which now harass individuals and restrict
commerce will pass away and with them the foolish hatreds which
exist between the rival colonies. At present if one desire to anger
a Victorian he has only to praise New South Wales. Would he wound a
Sydneyite in the fifth rib, let him laud Melbourne. There is a dispute
pending about the proprietorship of the Murray River. It lies between
the two colonies and New South Wales claims it to the Victorian bank.
When it overflowed disastrously a couple of years ago, an irate farmer
on the Victorian side is said to have written to Sir Henry Parkes,
bidding him come and pump the confounded river off his land, and
threatening to agitate for a duty (by the gallon) on imported New South
Wales water. The dispute is nothing less than childish, but I have the
personal assurance of the leading statesman of New South Wales that he
is perfectly satisfied with the position. It is probable that he sees
in the existing riparian rights a chance for a concession which may win
concessions in its turn. The Victorians are imminently dissatisfied and
would seem to have a right to be so. Federation is on all accounts to be
desired, but it has yet to be fought for, and will only be gained with
difficulty. Wise men long for it, but the petty jealousies of rival
states will hold it back from its birth-time as long as delay is
possible. How infinitesimally small these jealousies are nothing short
of a residence in the land can teach anybody. Wisdom will have its
way in the long run, but the belief of the veteran leader of New South
Wales, that he will live to see the union of the Australian colonies, is
a dream. It is a dream which only his political enemies will grudge him.
The wide and varied resources of the country, and the ups and downs
which men experience, breed a merciless courage which in some of its
manifestations is very fine. During my first stay in Melbourne the
waiter who attended to my wants at Menzies' Hotel brought up, with
something of a dubious air, a scrap of blue paper, on which was written,
“Your old friend------.” I instructed him to show my visitor in, and a
minute later beheld the face of an old companion, a little more grizzled
and wrinkled than I had last seen it, but otherwise unchanged. When we
had shaken hands and he was seated, I found that he was dressed like
a common labourer; and in answer to my inquiry he told me, bravely and
brightly, that he had fallen upon evil times. “I should like a glass of
champagne, old man,” said he when I asked him to refresh himself, “and
a square foot will run to enjoy it.” We talked away, and he told me of a
history of success and failure, and at last he explained the purpose
of his visit. He wished to hear the three lectures I was advertised to
deliver, and he had come to ask me for a pass. “I shall not disgrace
you, old boy,” he added, “I have been down on my luck for a couple of
years past but I am not going to stay where I am, and _I have kept
my dress clothes_.” I do not know that I ever saw a finer bit of
unconscious courage, and the incident gave me a certain faith in the
spirit of the colonies which has never left me. There is a gambling
element in it no doubt but the ever present sense of hope is a great and
valuable thing. It finds such a place in a new country as it can never
have in an old one. The English gentleman who in England had fallen to
be a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water would never have “kept his
dress clothes.” He would have known that he was permanendy under,
but here the British pluck had rational hope of recovery, and on that
rational hope survived and even flourished.
And this leads me back to that question of the self-confidence of the
Australian-born colonial with which I started. Hope looks so sure, that
what Australia wants and has not it seems self-evident in a little while
she will have. And so she might if she would go the right way for it,
and instead of keeping three-quarters of her sparse inhabitants in
towns, would take the work that lies before her nose and subdue the
land and replenish it; and instead of shutting the gates deliberately on
rival labour, would draw the stranger to her coasts and pour population
on vast tracts of land which now lie barren and unproductive, but only
wait for the hand of man to break into beauty and yield riches.
In a hundred ways timidity would have been criminal, but when one sees
in what direction courage and hope have led the way, and to what
effort they have prompted, a little over-confidence looks pardonable.
Everywhere the colonists have worked for the future. They have made
railways and roads which will not be fully used for many and many a day.
Their public buildings are made to last, and are of dimensions nobler
than present needs can ask for. Generations to come will laud the wisdom
and the generosity of the men of the last fifty years. In certain places
there is an admirable spirit of emulation amongst private citizens who
have set themselves to beautify the towns in which they live. This is
very notable in Ballarat, where it has grown to be an excellent fashion
to present the town with statues. Should that fashion continue and
should the same spirit of local patriotism prevail, Ballarat may grow
to be the Athens of the Southern Hemisphere. The plan is a little large
perhaps, but it is in the colonial fashion, and one would willingly
believe in the chances of its ultimate justification.
The unborn generations will have to thank their predecessors for some
of the loveliest blessings of the world. Every town has its gardens, the
property of the citizens. Those of Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide are
extensively beautiful. But more beautiful than the grounds themselves is
the inscription which I found at the gates of the loveliest of them
all. I wish I had the _ipsissima verba_ of it, for it seemed to be
characterised by an admirable simplicity and directness. The sense of it
is this,--
These gardens belong to the public and the owners are
requested to protect their property.
There to my mind speaks the true voice of democracy, and that
inscription afforded me the pleasantest spectacle I saw in the course of
my two years pilgrimage through the Australias.