This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Despatching the wool-packs]
ON THE WALLABY
THROUGH VICTORIA
* * * * *
BY
E. M. CLOWES
* * * * *
ILLUSTRATED
[Picture: Heinemann logo]
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1911
* * * * *
_Copyright_, _London_, _1911_, _by William Heinemann_
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
This is not supposed to be a national or political history of Victoria.
When I was asked to write something about the country which has extended
its hospitality to me, and given me bread and cheese—sometimes no cheese,
it is true, and more often than not no butter, but still always bread,
and an ever-increasing appetite—I must confess I felt frankly scared.
There is a very good, if somewhat vulgar, expression in use out here,
which speaks of anyone who attempts what is beyond them as “biting off
more than they can chew.” And the thought frightened me. There seemed
to be so many people who had lived all their life in the country, and
were therefore much more capable of writing about it than I could ever
possibly hope to be.
However, I found that other “fools rushed in,” who had been here for even
a shorter period than myself; who had never participated in any way in
the true life of the country, or depended on it for their own life, which
after all teaches one more than anything else ever can about a place. I
may not be an “angel,” I thought, still I know it, which is one point in
my favour; and, after all, eight years can scarcely be described as a
“rush.” Besides, every proverb and popular saying seems to be balanced
by another which is completely contradictory—and while it may be true
that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” it is also true “that
lookers-on see most of the game,” and perhaps score somewhat in the
freshness of their impressions and in their facilities for comparison.
As it is I can only write about Victoria as I know it. There are many
mistakes that I may have made through my inability to see all sides of a
question; but they are at least honest mistakes, and not the deliberate
misstatement of facts, from which Australia has so often suffered.
Of course, there are numberless phases of life out here which I have
never even touched: my nose has been too close to the grindstone, while
life has resolved itself for the most part into a mere struggle for
existence. Still, that very struggle has brought me into touch with real
people, and with the many grades of society which are to be found here as
elsewhere, in spite of all the theories of democracy.
I have edited a woman’s fashion paper, of sorts, and was dismissed
because—I confess it—the compositors were quite incapable of reading my
writing. I have written short stories and articles; I have decorated
houses, painted friezes, made blouses for tea-room girls, designed
embroideries for the elect of Toorak, even for the sacred denizens of
Government House. I have housekept, washed, ironed, cooked. Once I made
a garden, drew out the estimates, engaged the men, bought soil and
manure, shrubs and plants, laid out a croquet-lawn, delved, sowed and
planted shrubs which, now threatening to become trees, perhaps represent
the best result of all these years of continuous labour. Palpable
results, I mean, for the other results, the enlarged outlook, the
humanity, the pathos, and the friendship, with which the memory of them
is crammed, form, after all, an asset which is by no means to be
despised.
Still, when I recollect that I have been here for more than eight years;
and that even now less than ten times that number of years has actually
passed since the natives ceded to Batman, for knives, and beads, and
looking-glasses, the present site of Melbourne, and much of the
surrounding country, I am filled with the most abject shame at my own
achievements and unlimited admiration for these people, so often
dismissed by the ignorant at home and abroad as only “colonials,” who
have built up such a town as Melbourne and such a country as Victoria is
to-day.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
I. EARLY DAYS IN VICTORIA 1
II. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE 12
III. MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE 40
FOR THE GANDER”
IV. THE WORKING-MAN AND THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD 71
V. THE WORKING-WOMEN OF MELBOURNE, AND IN 117
PARTICULAR THE CHAR-LADY
VI. VICTORIAN YOUTH 146
VII. ALIEN LIFE 173
VIII. THE AMUSEMENTS AND THE ARTS 199
IX. RURAL LIFE, MOUNTAIN, AND FOREST 229
X. OF THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE, AND OF MELBOURNE 253
GARDENS
XI. PRIMITIVE VICTORIA 276
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
DESPATCHING THE WOOL-PACKS FROM A VICTORIA _Frontispiece_
STATION
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF MELBOURNE AND ON THE _Between_ 34 _and_
YARRA 35
DAIRY HERD AND SILO _Facing_ 46
BRINGING WHEAT TO STATION ,, 60
MILKING-TIME ON A DAIRY FARM ,, 64
BUCK-SCRAPING ,, 88
HOMESTEAD AND BULLOCK TEAM ,, 92
WOOL-PRESSES ,, 102
CUP DAY AT FLEMINGTON RACECOURSE, MELBOURNE ,, 208
LOADING FRUIT ON THE MURRAY AT MILDURA ,, 234
RING-BARKED TREES AND MAIZE ,, 240
A BUSH GIANT ,, 242
A HAELESVILLE GULLY ,, 248
EXCAVATING AN IRRIGATION CHANNEL ,, 264
AN ABORIGINAL CLIMBING A TREE ,, 300
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS IN VICTORIA
THE first landing in Victoria was purely involuntary, a vessel having
been wrecked in 1797 on Furneaux Island, in Bass Strait, the supercargo,
a man named Clarke, and two sailors—the only people saved out of a total
of seventeen—making the Victorian shores, and by some incredible means
reaching Sydney. Six years later an attempt was made to colonize what
was then known as Port Phillip, by means of a convict colony, and a penal
expedition of nearly 400 persons, 300 of whom were convicts, were sent
out under the charge of Captain Collins. But water was scarce, the
weather in the bay was stormy, and the blacks distinctly hostile; the
whole outlook seemed so gloomy that Collins, who must have been pretty
well distracted between the blacks on shore and the seething discontent
of the convicts on his ships, applied for—and at last, after three months
of unutterable misery in Port Phillip, received—permission to remove to
Van Dieman’s Land, one of the very few children who accompanied this
wretched party being John Pascoe Fawkner, who, thirty-two years later,
assisted in the foundation of Melbourne.
Among old Victoria celebrities John Batman was one of the best known.
Batman landed at Geelong in 1835—the site of the present town having been
first discovered by Mr. Hamilton Hume and Captain Hovell, who, with a
servant and six convicts, had, in 1824, set out overland from New South
Wales with the intention of reaching Westernport. After having by some
means ingratiated himself with the natives, Batman proceeded up the bay
to what is now known as Williamstown, where, again conciliating the
blacks, he induced them to consent to a treaty, under which he received
some 600,000 acres of fine pasture-land in return for beads, knives,
blankets, and looking-glasses; after which, having explored the river, he
entered in his diary the Yarra Falls as being the most likely place for a
village.
Soon, however, Batman’s sovereignty was to be disputed by Fawkner, who
entered Port Phillip Heads a little later during the same year, with the
_Enterprise_ and a handful of prospective settlers. At the Indented Head
Fawkner and his party were met by some of Batman’s men, who informed them
that their master was owner alike of the bay and of the rivers, Batman,
it appears, taking his part well as one of the first of Australian
braggadocios. Still, this high-handed attitude appeared likely for
awhile to succeed, for Fawkner obediently sailed northward, touching at
the places which are now known as St. Kilda, Brighton, Mordialloc, and
Dromana; finally, finding no satisfactory landing-place, he anchored in
Hobson’s Bay, whence the Yarra was entered in a boat, and the present
site of the Customs House determined on as a settlement. Next day the
_Enterprise_ herself was towed up the river; the settlers, with ploughs,
grain, fruit-trees, building materials, and provisions, landed, and the
city of Melbourne was founded in 1835. Only seventy-six years ago, and
yet there are people who, having seen Melbourne as it is now, find their
chief cause of complaint against the Australians in their lack of
enterprise and general slackness.
To people such as these the present Victorian town of Wonthaggi, beside
the State Coal-Mine, must have seemed to have sprung up with the
astounding, challenging air of a “Jack-in-the-box.” At the time I write
this infant prodigy is five months old, and boasts some 3,000
inhabitants, streets, shops, three newspapers, four churches, a
skating-rink, and a theatre, though as yet no hotel. There is what is
called a “Hostel,” which may procure a licence or may not—it depends on
the powers of the Wowsers. Meanwhile, the only obvious way of obtaining
a drink is from a beer-cart, with a two-gallon licence. Needless to say,
there are other less obvious ways, many and devious, to judge by the fact
that five keepers of sly “grog-shops” or “Pigs,” as they are popularly
called—who were lately hauled up by the police, despatched a circular
letter to all the business people in the township, asking that a fund
should be organized for their defence—this being, I suppose, what the
philanthropists call “an appeal to our common humanity”; though what
response it met with I do not know.
In its first beginnings Melbourne was slower certainly than Wonthaggi.
Materials and tools for every sort of work were more difficult to obtain,
while it was pretty well a year before any goods ordered from England
could arrive—four months each way being a good average passage by the old
“wind-jammers,” with a further delay for preparing and packing ready for
shipment.
After a little while Batman’s party of settlers from Indented Head also
moved northward, and encamped at the back of Fawkner’s settlement, where
St. James’s Church and the huge rabbit-warren known as St. James’s
Chambers have long stood. Two years later Sir Richard Bourke, Governor
of New South Wales, visited the new colony of Port Phillip, and planned
out more definitely the towns of Melbourne, Geelong, and Williamstown. A
resident magistrate was appointed, and in 1851 the colony was declared to
have a separate and independent existence under the name of Victoria, the
certainty that one can have nothing without paying for it being
exemplified by the fact that, with separation, came also the birth of
public debt in the new colony.
In 1840 took place the only really organized attempt made by the blacks,
round Melbourne, to rescue their country from the whites, an abortive
enough attempt, beginning with a large corroboree about nine o’clock one
evening, and an over-liberal allowance of rum. Two hundred black fellows
were taken prisoners, and marched to Batman’s Hill, where there was a
rough prison in the form of a stockade, where they were placed, with a
strong patrol guard all round them; these were packed off next day in
boats, and let loose in the dense scrub where St. Kilda and Prahan now
stand, as it would have been no joke to support 200 prisoners in those
days, when flour was selling at £80 the ton, and meat at 1s. 6d. the
pound—the white population, which in 1836 consisted of 143 men and 35
women, having by that time risen to 10,291 persons, and constituting a
great drain on the resources of the new colony.
Soon, however, as the stock began to increase by leaps and bounds, meat
became cheaper and living less difficult. The early settlers, however,
used to have to work day and night to evolve some sort of order on their
holdings, to live themselves, to clear their land, and at the same time
to increase their flocks. An old lady told me once of the struggles she
and her husband had in the early days, before they could get any proper
bush shelter up on their run, when the ewes lambed too early in the
season, while the nights were yet damp and cold. Her husband or the
shepherd used to go round at night and collect armfuls of what they
called “green-bobs”—freshly born lambs—and, after roughly cleansing them,
insist on their being taken into bed, under the blankets, with herself
and her children. Not—as she declared—that she ever raised any real
objection; for she had the sense to know that all their lives hung on the
existence of these poor little weaklings, and was only too proud to find,
a few months later, when the flock came to be ear-marked, that it had
more than doubled—partly, no doubt, as the result of her mothering. And
yet no one has ever thought of canonizing women such as this! Can you
picture it—the one-roomed house, with rough log walls, mud-plastered, and
roofed with bark; the log fire on the open hearth, with the kettle slung
above it, ready to warm milk for the young lambs, who lay on sacking
before the fire, or shared the bed—where the mother and children lay
together, heads and tails? The wild Australian wind outside—and what a
wind, gathering in its gallop across miles of open country, and pushing
and blustering in at the door, as the farmer thrust it open with his
foot, his arms full of the tiny, trembling creatures, on whom his future
depended. And all around the endless stretch of the unknown land.
Something of the dangers and the loneliness being possible to gather from
the matter-of-fact recital, by “A Pioneer,” of the finding of the body of
a dead man who had been “bushed,” and died of thirst, to which he adds
this statement: “I buried him where he had been found, as I had
previously buried others who had perished under similar circumstances,
crossing these plains from one station to another in the middle of the
dry season.”
Gradually the old identities, people who remember days such as these, are
dying out in Victoria; while so few personal histories have been written,
and so few letters preserved, that the life and characteristics of the
gallant early settlers seem more than likely to sink into oblivion.
Mr. Joseph Tuckwell, who died in Melbourne only a very few months ago,
could tell some fine yarns when the spirit moved him. As far back as
1851 he was Inspector of Police in Hobart—a position that was by no means
a sinecure in those days. Later, when the gold rush in Victoria started,
he joined the police force there; then, in 1860, went to Dunedin; and a
little later became Governor of Auckland Gaol—his reminiscences dating
back to the times before he had sailed for Australia, when he had
witnessed the burial of George IV. in St. George’s Chapel. Another link
also with the early days passed away, only a month or so back, in the
person of one of the last of the convict chaplains of the old Port Arthur
Settlement; his wife, who is still living, being the daughter of John
Price, the Inspector-General of Convicts, who was murdered in 1857, and
niece of the great John Franklin.
It is interesting to remember that in those early days Victoria was a
country with no old people. Lately I was talking with some old maiden
ladies, who told me that, as children, they had never seen an old man or
woman; and that when they first went home with their parents, in 1876,
they were terror-stricken by the aspect of their old Scotch grandmother
in her white mutch, whom they could not dissociate in their bewildered
little minds from the wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.”
They had lived in those days just beneath the Dandenong Range, fifteen
miles out of Melbourne, and speak now of the terror the escaped and
liberated prisoners—of course, there were no real convicts in
Victoria—used to be to them and their mother; the Botanical Gardens being
then in the making, with gangs of prisoners employed upon them and upon
the roads, working in small groups, watched over by officials with
muskets.
It seems curious that, though Portland was settled at much the same time
as Port Phillip, no one ever seemed to have thought of installing the new
capital there, in spite of its truly magnificent bay. In 1836 Major
Mitchell, who was the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, with a party
of convicts, having followed the course of the Lachlan and Lower
Murrumbidgee, crossed the Murray, climbed to the summit of Mount Hope,
and saw stretched out before him a sweep of wide and promising pasture.
Moving onwards to the south by south-west, he crossed this green and
pleasant land, passed another range of mountains, which he named the
Grampians, and thus reached the south coast of Discovery Bay, meeting at
Portland with the famous Henty family, who two years earlier had
established themselves there, with servants, sheep, horses, and cattle,
that they had brought over with them from Tasmania. These they used to
good purpose in trade with the whalers and scalers, who, indeed, were the
first white inhabitants of Victoria, having run up rough temporary stores
and other buildings at intervals along the coast, the principal traders,
before the coming of the pastoral Hentys, being William Dutton—Dutton
being now a well-known name in South Australia, though whether the family
is the same I do not know—John Griffiths, and two brothers named Mills.
Portland suffers from no natural defects, and is simply prevented from
taking its place as one of the best and busiest seaports by the fact that
Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, in which it is situated. Equally
ridiculous sentiments or regulations, I do not know which, ordaining that
all goods from South Australia—Mount Gambia, the centre of one of the
richest portions of that state, being only 73 miles from Portland—shall
be transferred over 300 miles to Port Adelaide for shipment. Here is
something, one would imagine, where Federation might be of real use, and
the Montague and Capulet sort of feeling, which makes such a state of
affairs possible, be mitigated, if not completely squashed.
I have never been to Portland, but am always hoping to go, for I am told
that it is one of the most charming and old-world spots in Victoria.
Moreover, it possesses one of the most beautiful and natural harbours
possible—the finest in all Victoria, Westernport coming second, and
Melbourne nowhere at all, for it is only by constant dredging, deepening,
and general tinkering that the Melbourne Harbour is a harbour at all, and
not a hill. As it is the harbour charges are necessarily so exorbitant
in Melbourne that Tasmanians are already congratulating themselves on the
fact that it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good; and that when
ships get larger, as they seem likely to do, Hobart will be the only port
where they can lie, the depth of water, right up to the quay, being some
72 or 73 feet, sufficient for any ship ever likely to be launched to
float in at ease; so that Hobart may really become in time the
distributing centre for the whole of the Commonwealth. And there all the
time is Portland, of which Victoria can make no use, simply because it is
not her capital, and she is not far-seeing enough to cultivate a second
string to her bow; while South Australia can make no use of it either,
because she would rather that her produce should be hopelessly
depreciated in value by miles of useless haulage, than risk parting with
one iota of trade to a sister State. Truly it is like the trivial
etiquette of a provincial English town, where the butcher’s wife is not
on calling terms with the baker’s wife—or that immortal ballad of the two
men on a desert island, who would die of hunger and thirst rather than
speak when they had not been introduced.
Oddly enough, it is not only in regard to its own affairs that Victoria
seems incapable of realizing more than one town to each State or county;
for, in spite of many protests, it still ships—with very few
exceptions—its entire frozen produce to London, completely ignoring the
other large and important English ports, and necessitating a most
unnecessary amount of handling and extra freight charges in the
distribution of its exports. Surely there is nothing so completely
conservative as a democratic country can prove itself to be in some
matters; a reversion to the original type, I suppose for, after all, the
progenitors of the greater number of these Australians left England at a
time when Toryism was at its height.