SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE
FROM the moment that the ship touches this shore—no, rather from the
moment that the pilot boards her—a whiff of something, at once strange
and stimulating, seems to fill one’s lungs and quicken one’s brain. The
Australian pilots are a notably fine race—the younger men, those who have
been born in the country—the finest type, perhaps, that it has as yet
produced, with a breezy optimism, an immense faith in the land of their
birth, and true affection for the Old Country, their very love for and
dependence on the connecting seas helping, perchance, to annul any petty
differences or jealousies; so that it is indeed well for all that they
should be the very first to greet us in the new world to which we are
come.
From Colombo one sails eastwards to Australia, so far east that one
almost reaches the west in more senses than one. There are Trade Winds,
and there are counter Trades, as we know; and if Australia owes her
climate and her fertility to the warm, teeming East, mentally, in the
tastes and outlook of her people, she is still altogether Western; so
markedly so, indeed, that, in Melbourne in particular, one is at times
seized with the whimsical idea that it has something to do with the roll
of the earth, and that we may yet be slid into the very lap of America,
ending by being far more completely akin to that democratic country than
to the slow-moving, monarchical methods of England.
One must look back to one’s first clear-cut, vivid impression of a new
country to realize how unnumbered are the differences, even under the
many apparent likenesses, to which after a little while one becomes so
used. In Melbourne the stevedores and dock-hands, who throng the ship
and quay the moment she is docked, are almost as incredibly different
from the same class in England as they are from the swarming blacks of
Colombo. They are for the most part bigger and broader-shouldered; they
look far better fed. They walk with a vigour and spring—indeed, with a
sort of swagger—moving more from the hip than the English dock-hand, and
less with that weary lurch of the shoulders which marks him as a creature
of infinite labour and privation; while, above all, they are
extraordinarily clean.
I shall never forget my first impression of these men—the brilliant blue
sky, the blazing sun, the great swinging cranes, and the dexterity with
which they handled the enormous masses of iron-rails, etc., which we
carried, apparently with so little exertion, and absolutely no
bullocking; while many of them were in spotless white overalls,
delightful to look upon. I had arrived out from England in a
sailing-ship, long overdue, owing to a succession of adverse winds, and
in consequence water had run very short, so that washing with anything
but sea-water was a quite impossible luxury. Our ship was clean, for our
crew had toiled nobly with paint and varnish and holystone; and the sails
were washed and bleached white by the sunshine and storm of many months
on the open sea, far from smoke or dust. Still, I believe that we all
felt horribly grimy as the tug towed us to our place at the quay; while
I, for one, was longing for a Turkish bath; and that as soon as possible,
for no ordinary amount of washing as I felt would, or could, be of any
use. So that perhaps, on the whole, there was a double reason for the
extraordinary cleanliness of the Melbourne dock-hands striking me as it
did at the time. Still, that first impression has never faded, and, to
this day, I regard the Australian working man—the worker, not the waster,
I mean—as the cleanest in the whole world.
Some people, as I am well aware, are minutely clean in their persons,
making it, indeed, a matter of religion, while some are clean in their
raiment, but seldom both. Certainly the more completely a man is
clothed, the more likely is it that he—or his clothes—are incompletely
cleansed; his own mind, which I presume governs the washing of his body,
and his wife’s mind, which governs the washing of his garments, seeming
unable to work in unison. But, though the Australian labourer is quite
completely clothed, and so white as to show dirt as easily as anybody—I
mention this fact for the benefit of those who persistently regard him as
black and naked—he and his wife appear to have somehow solved this
question between them. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that
he is better paid, and his wife is better fed than most wives of working
men in the Old Country. And, then, the pipes do not freeze; while in
even the tiniest three-roomed house there is usually a bath and a
shower—though sometimes only in the scullery or back kitchen—with water
laid on. And, after all, in a hot country cleanliness is not that affair
of infinite toil that it is in a cold one; there is usually a day or so
each week, even in the wettest weather, when there is enough sunshine to
dry the clothes out of doors, so that one is saved the necessity of
slinging them in lines across the kitchen, to drip on to the children’s
heads, and lie in sullen grey pools on the floor. Yet there is the dust,
which is beyond all words, and the flies, so that it is not all quite
plain sailing, after all. Still, though the Australian workman has many
little ways which at first rub every atom of your fur up in the wrong
direction—he is bumptious, he is cock-sure, he is condescending; “I don’t
mind if I do” is his one form of accepting any proffered favour, while a
shrug of the shoulders and the “My troubles” are his response to any
advice or sympathy you may offer—he is also essentially clean, in other
ways apart from those that I have mentioned. Besides this, he does not
cadge for tips; indeed, he more often than not resents the offer of
money. “What’s that for?” he will ask, with a glance at the proffered
coin that makes you blush to your very boots.
I’ve had a hard-worked lodging-house servant refuse a well-earned tip
more than once. “Lord bless you, I ain’t going ter take yer money;
you’ve enough to do with it!” has been said. Not long before I left the
country I took lodgings down at the sea, to recoup from a long illness,
with a carpenter and his wife and family of small bairns. When I left,
the man walked to the station, carrying my bag for me, and as we shook
hands on the platform, entreated me, in his wife’s name as well as his
own, to come down and stay with them, if I was hard up or ill, for as
long as ever I liked, and not to worry about the money. “For if there’s
enough for us, there’s enough for you, providing you don’t mind our rough
ways,” he added; “and don’t you go on working again till you’re fair worn
out; for as long as we’ve a bit or a sup, or a roof over our heads,
you’re welcome to a share.”
On the other hand, these people will be merciless to the humbug, to
anyone who is mean or idle. They know their own value; “Business is
business,” as they say. They will give freely enough, but they will not
submit to be haggled with or underpaid; and why should they? I have
worked shoulder to shoulder with them for eight years, and I never wish
to work with better people. Their absolute indifference, except where
they really like or respect a person, their crudity, their common sense,
their shrewdness, is like a tonic. And thus, in spite of Mr. Foster
Fraser’s assertion that the Australians can only exist by the constant
effusion of fresh and virile blood from the Old Country, I must still
believe that, for any elaborate ideals and ethics of over-civilization
which we take with us to this new country, we receive in return very much
more, certainly individually, than we have ever given; while in respect
to the question of virility, Mr. Fraser must, I feel, have very largely
judged Australians from the towns, and the undergrown shop-boys and
factory-girls that he has seen there. After all, if we stay a little to
ponder over what he regards as the degeneracy of these people—and it can
only be the town people of whom he speaks—I think we shall realize that
it is all only part of the natural order of things; that the more
completely a plant belongs to the outdoor world, to the wilds and open
places, the more it will suffer by transplantation to the vitiated air,
the smoke and dust, of the city. Some day Australia may produce two
types, as England does—the city type, with, in spite of its anæmic
appearance, a quite immense vitality, and the country type, heavier,
slower, and more robust. In the meantime, all these narrow-chested boys
and precocious, over-developed girls who at night line the pavement of
Swanston Street are really the inevitable result of a period of
transition. Most likely when their parents were born there were no
streets at all, as we now see them; while their fathers and mothers were
such people as Walt Whitman must have had in mind when he wrote, saying:
“I see the makings of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air,
and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
The parents of these weedy boys and girls—who seem, like Jonah’s gourd,
to spring to an untimely maturity—were, maybe, conceived and born in the
open air, and toiled for their daily bread under conditions of hardship
and danger such as we can scarcely realize. A people who lived in vast
open spaces, the immensity and loneliness of which very few European
minds can grasp, and yet who were dowered with such an abundance of air
and sunshine that it is little to be wondered at that their progeny wilt
as they do in the towns. And, after all, there is one persistent and
saving quality about them: they hark back again to the open; their hearts
are never really at one with the cities. The young boys and girls flock
there, and love it for a while; but as they mature they begin to long
beyond words for the country. Every little shopman, every successful
artisan and his wife, cherishes, with few exceptions, the one ambition—to
have a tiny place in the country, to farm a little, keep poultry, grow
fruit, and live in the open. People settled for life, as one might
imagine, in comfortable homes in Melbourne will give up everything—in
what can but seem the most surprising fashion to those who have not got
that touch of the wild, or the patriarchal, in their blood—and start
afresh. Sometimes they are well over fifty years of age before they can
feel free to please themselves. But even then, confident in the
knowledge that all the youngsters are out in the world doing well for
themselves, they will fly to the country and begin all over again in a
little two-roomed iron-roofed shanty, where the bush still remains to be
stubbled up, growing as it does to the veranda step, and the water has to
be carried half a mile, while the only possible chance visitor is an
occasional opossum on the roof, or black snake in the bed.
Yet for all this the Bush, which somewhere deep in their hearts has been
calling to them all their lives, draws them at last irresistibly to its
bosom; so that they will dare anything to be near it, to hear the
laughing-kachass at their very door, and see the wild wattle-bloom in
flower.
To us who have grown used, through many generations, to the life of the
cities, such behaviour seems incredibly mad. We forget how very, very
new the whole country still is; how it was won and watered by sheer
sweat, and how the people love it all the more because of the life and
youth that were lost in its making—love it because it is so near to them,
so completely in their blood that the glint of stars through the
weather-boards of a bush shanty is a better sight to weary eyes than any
wall-paper that even the genius of Morris has evolved.
But I have wandered far from the ship with her furled sails and my first
impressions of the new country: the coming and going of Custom-House and
Health Officers, the bustle, the sunshine on the quay, and, above all,
the curiously homelike Cockney drawl, which is so marked a characteristic
of the Australian of to-day, all of which has amalgamated together in my
mind, into a vivid and clear-cut picture. It is all very well to write
as if I precipitated myself bodily and instantaneously into the hearts
and homes of the people, for I did not. I liked them as little as they
liked me. And that was very little, for it was a long time before I
could be brought to realize that any relation of England could find any
possible virtue to be proud of excepting that relationship. That the
whole country, indeed, was not a sort of benevolent, though ignorant,
country cousin, touchingly anxious to hear all about the head of the
family, and be taught the true value of life by any of its scions. As a
matter of fact, I had conceived a very clear mental picture of Australia
as a burly, farmer-like person, with one hand outstretched in welcome,
the other filled with desirable billets of all sorts, which awaited some
new-comer, with that wide outlook possible only to one who has rubbed
shoulders with the oldest civilization, the completest culture. It took
me, indeed, months to realize that what is old, and to our minds
completely well established, may be suspected of blue mould. Also that
the only relation, likely to be of any use to the impecunious newcomer,
is that “Uncle” whom I have discovered to be as outwardly ubiquitous and
inwardly suspicious and grudging as in England. Finding, therefore, that
everything was going on much the same as though nothing very exciting was
expected; and that Australia, as a nation, did not seem to be awaiting me
on the quay with open arms, I hustled my few belongings through the
Customs, took a cab—the most medieval institution in Melbourne, a sort of
closed waggonette, and incredibly rackety—and drove up to a Coffee
Palace, which had been recommended to me as cheaper than an hotel.
These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer,
the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of
men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to
be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the
same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also
there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I
could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a
fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are
given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness
of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I
hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of
a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers
and his felt hat well at the back of his head.
“That there,” he responded, jerking his thumb in the direction of a
gallery, where a few of the languidly select were draping themselves over
the rail—“that there’s where the toffs grub, and there aren’t nothing
served there not under two bob; but that there”—and he moved his thumb in
the direction of a door to the right, from whence was streaming an
endless succession of people, still chewing or, one stage later, picking
their teeth—“that there’s where the blokes go: two courses fur a bob.”
He was very polite, and he delayed his pressing business with his teeth
to give me the fullest information possible, even to the affair of the
“serviette,” as he called it; but he did not take off his hat. The
Australian is an inwardly chivalrous person—most wonderfully so,
considering how his female belongings have elbowed him off the pavement.
He never speaks of—or to—us with that sort of tolerant sneer with which
the Englishman tries to pass off the humiliating fact that he was born of
woman—that for him a woman’s hands had performed the first, and in all
probability will perform the last, offices. But he does not part easily
with his head-gear.
The first day, as I went down from my room in the lift, I remember
distinctly a man getting in with a big lighted cigar in his mouth and his
hat on his head. As he did not attempt to remove either, I fixed my eye
on him with a stare that was meant to be significant. I was a snob in
those days, though I did not realize it, till later on a working man
asked me why I was so fond of talking of “common people.” “It’s the one
thing I don’t rightly like about you,” he added, quite candidly and
without malice. I have, I hope, been better since; anyhow, I have never
forgotten what he said, or the aspect of affairs which his words opened
to me. Well, all that the man with the hat and cigar did was to smile
and make some remark about the weather, perfectly undaunted by my
freezing glances. Then, as I still glared, his face dropped in a
curiously hurt and childlike manner. At last, evidently realizing where
my gaze was directed, he took off his hat, examined it thoughtfully, and,
seeing nothing wrong, put it on again. Then he took out his cigar,
looked at it curiously, replaced it in his mouth, and gave it a
reassuring puff, as if to say it was certainly all right—so what could
there be for me to stare at?
Then suddenly I remembered the chambermaid and the pearls and all the
other differences, and nodded and smiled my thanks as he stood aside to
let me step first out of the lift; for they will always do that, if
possible—it is one of the odd contradictions of them.
As to the chambermaid and the pearls, which, to start with, reminds me of
a story I heard of a girl up at a way-back hotel, whose name was Pearl.
Some rowdy young larrikin, drinking among a crowd of associates, inquired
if she was “the pearl of great price”; to which effort of wit she
responded, with the greatest composure, that, on the contrary, she was
“the pearl that was cast before swine”; for the progenitor of the
untaught Australian brought a goodly share of mother-wit with him from
London, in addition to his indelible accent.
I was curled well up under the bedclothes on that first morning, with the
sheet over my head, to try and keep out the glare. All the beds in
Melbourne seem to be placed facing the light, and blinds are regarded
apparently as a mere useless luxury. But I sat bolt upright in sheer
amazement when the chambermaid first addressed me, with some palpable,
but quite good-tempered jealousy in her voice:—
“My word, but you do look comfy!”
As there were no blinds to be drawn and no tea had been ordered, she just
stood there and smiled into my astonished face, with her hands on her
hips, swinging easily from toe to heel and back again. She wore a neat
black dress and apron, with a minute suggestion of a cap, all quite
orthodox, but, in addition, she also wore a pearl necklace, formed of
several rows of imposingly large and artlessly artificial pearls. As I
caught sight of this, my feelings changed, for she was clean and smiling,
while the necklace appeared to my eyes as a symbol and sign of all the
extraordinary differences for which I must be prepared in the new world.
“You told me to call you at seven sharp,” she remarked, a note of
aggression creeping into her voice, “so you needn’t be looking shirty at
being woke. An’ you didn’t order no tea nor nothing.”
“Indeed, you were quite right to call me. Thanks very much. And I don’t
want any tea, thank you; only a little hot water.”
“What! ter drink?”
“No, for washing.”
The girl gave a wholly surprised stare, then jerked her thumb in the
direction of the door.
“Bath-room, third turn to the left, first to the right.”
For a moment I stared back stonily; then I remembered the pearls, and
thanked her, adding: “It is only just seven, isn’t it?”
“The very tick when I opened that door. My word, but you’ve got nice
’air when it’s down like that. I like dark ’air, I do. The worst of
light ’air”—and she strolled to the looking-glass and examined her own
elaborately dressed amber locks complacently—“it’s toney enough, I do
allow; but you do ’ave to keep it clean, and no mistake. Now, then, if
you wants a bath, you’d best look nippy, for there’s a run on ’em this
time o’ morning. Look ’ere! I tell you what do,” she went on, with
sudden friendliness; “I’ll pop along and turn it on for you while you get
into your wrapper. My word, but that’s pretty, ain’t it? I like them
delainey stuffs. Now, don’t you be long. I’ve twenty rooms to see to, I
’ave. But it must be awkward like in a new country. Different from
England, ain’t it? A bit more go-ahead, eh?”
“How did you know?” I asked in amazement, conscious of having removed
every scrap of label from my luggage.
“Know?” echoed the chambermaid scornfully. “Why, any kid ’ud know
that—it’s sticking out a mile!”
There are, of course, hotels in Melbourne, two moderately good and
immoderately expensive, ones, and several smaller fry. But it is in the
Coffee Palaces that the ordinary people congregate, and it is from the
ordinary people, after all, that one can best judge of a nation; the
highly educated—I will not say intellectual—and leisured classes being
much the same anywhere. Therefore it is in one of the Coffee Palaces
that I would advise anyone to stay who really wishes to study the life
and character of the Australians. There comes the shrewd commercial
traveller, who, in such a scattered country as this, is a person of wide
experience, with by no means the safe and easy road before him that is
trodden by his English compeers; while from him you are often able to
draw some of the clearest and best-balanced judgments of the whole trend
of the country and people that it is possible to obtain. Here, also, are
the visitors from other States, with, perhaps, not too much money to
spend, and the New Zealander and the Tasmanian, the country cousin, the
cocky farmer, and the small squatter, gathering most thickly at the time
of the Agricultural or Sheep Show, or during that great week when the
race for the Melbourne Cup is run.
The places are, of course, as their name implies, teetotal. If you want
anything stronger than tea or coffee, or a soft drink, you give the money
to the waitress, who sends out for it. But it is a lengthy progress, and
one which all your neighbours seem to regard with such an intense
suspicion that usually you content yourself with the truly national
drink—tea. In the days of one’s youth one used to be told that tea and
meat combined would inevitably turn to leather in one’s tummy. In
Melbourne I feel that it must be the internal organs themselves which
have turned to leather, so that there can be nothing more left to be
feared, and one can even, after a while, drink tea and eat oysters at one
fell meal with impunity. Of course, a good many children have succumbed
to the united effects of boiled beef and tea, which is really the
national food. But, then, it all conduces to the survival of the
fittest, and until people will condescend to learn the art of vegetable
growing, especially in drought-stricken districts, from the despised John
Chinaman, it is as well to be prepared for the worst. The tea is usually
drunk very strong and sweet, and most often without milk, many
Australians having a deep-rooted suspicion of any fluid, even remotely
appertaining to that cow which made their young lives such an intolerable
burden to them. The workman, the artisan, the labourer, and dock-hands
carry their tin billies, and a portion of tea twisted up in a piece of
paper, out to their day’s work with them; and in the towns there is
always a gas-jet or a fire to be found at which someone will let them
boil the water. The swaggies and the wandering army of station hands,
the shearer and harvester, they, too, carry their billies in one hand, as
inevitably as they carry their swag—their blanket and store of flour, and
mackintosh sheet or bit of oilcloth. And for them there are dry,
fragrant eucalyptus leaves and twigs—inflammable as tinder to the least
spark from flint and steel—to boil their water over; the very fact of its
having to be boiled, and therefore insuring some measure of safety from
typhoid germs, being one of the best possible excuses for the universal
popularity of tea, particularly among such wanderers, and dwellers in
country districts.
One of the first difficulties that confronts the new arrival in Melbourne
is that of suitable lodgings, when he shall have tired of hotel and
Coffee Palace. I know I walked innumerable streets and answered
innumerable advertisements, before I began to realize that those lodgings
with one or two bedrooms, a sitting-room, and privately served
meals—probably presided over by an ubiquitous ex-butler and cook—which we
regard so completely as a matter of course in England, are almost unknown
in Australia, and so scarce and expensive as to be an impossibility,
excepting for the very wealthy. Either a place was frankly a
boarding-house, or one was termed a guest, and expected to have meals
with the landlady, her family, and occasional friends; once I remember at
an up-country lodging the “friend” being an Assyrian pedlar—certainly the
most interesting person I ever met there—while someone who could play the
piano or recite, and was generally of a friendly turn of mind, was
greatly to be preferred.
I shall never forget my first bewildering day in search for lodgings. As
each front-door was opened I was met by the same mingled whiff of cabbage
and linoleum, the same complete indifference as to whether I took the
rooms or left them; the same superb air of merely letting rooms at all
out of charity, or as a sort of careless hobby; also, incidentally,
because, by some odd chance, the house happened to be too big for its
occupants. Indeed, this reason was so inevitably offered to me that in
time I found myself receiving the odd impression that all the
lodging-houses had sprung up, gourdlike, to their present proportions the
very night after the lease had been signed. The question of attendance,
too, seemed to be always a vexed one, and, in most cases, even by extra
payment, quite out of the question; while the very idea of separate meals
was received with a sort of horror, as if anyone who wished to feed alone
must contemplate awful orgies of an unutterable description. For the
most part the beds were big, the charges bigger; the washing-basin and
the slaveys who opened the door incredibly small—that is, with the
professional boarding-house keeper. There seemed no possible
reconciliation between the small maid and the small basin, for there the
question of attendance came in—though one landlady did vouchsafe the
information that her maid “slopped the room” every morning. But it
seemed as if the relations between the big bed and the big rent might,
and indeed were, expected to be equalized if I did not mind “sharing my
room with another young lady,” in one case my possible hostess’s
daughter.
I shall never forget my horror when this idea was first mooted to me, nor
how, in my confusion, I protested that I “had never slept with another
woman in my life.” On which the horror was transferred to the face of
the prospective landlady, who retorted that—“if I was that sort, I might
go elsewhere.”
These are the people who flood the daily papers with glowing
advertisements—perhaps that landlady would say: “And these are the people
who answer them.” But still I would have you beware, for they are false
as their fringes—luckily, almost as palpably so. Once, I suppose, they
held any temporary dweller in Melbourne irrevocably in their clutches,
but since the Land Boom—“the Boom,” as it is always called—which, in
spite of all its horrors, had a most potentially humanizing effect on the
people, a few capable gentlewomen have taken the work of the landladies
into their own hands, and comfortable, well-ordered, truly home-like
boarding-houses are springing up, which threaten to oust these
pre-historic harpies from their lairs.
The streets of Melbourne are, to my mind, the most tiring I have ever
known. They are so straight, so uncompromising; Collins Street alone
presents such an endless vista as one gazes up it that I remember, in
those first days, feeling as if I would like to take it up in my hands
and twist it into some unrecognizable form—warp it and bend it. Straight
from west to east, side by side, run several such streets, the principal
ones of the city, crossed again at right angles by others every bit as
straight—all without a single saving grace of curve, of sheltering
crescent, or tree-shaded square, so that when a hot north wind blows it
rushes across the interstices of these streets like a hot blast from a
furnace, eddying thick clouds of yellow dust—filled with the unutterable
debris of the streets—furiously round each corner. There are some really
most remarkably fine buildings, but the city is not yet sufficiently
complete to show them to advantage or in any harmonious whole, and they
look, on the whole, rather ungainly among their humble
neighbours—squashed in, in an apologetic manner, between them. During
those early days of my life in Melbourne, when the first fascination of
newness had faded and I had not yet begun to know the true meaning of the
city, the place impressed itself on my jaded mind, with photographic
clearness, as an individual without eyelashes, staring unblinkingly,
showing a face with no half-tints, no delicacy; and, though possessing a
sort of humanity, as all big towns do, yet quite without a soul. Indeed,
I believe that this is really the truth, and that the soul of the town is
wanting because the hearts of the people, in spite of the manner in which
they flock to the big cities, are really all the time in the open
country, the strongest proof of this being perhaps found in the growth of
the suburbs, which push their way ever further and further afield, and in
the fact that very few people indeed—having no inborn love for the life
of the town as so many of us have—live in the city itself if they can
afford to do otherwise.
During the day, indeed, this absence of soul is but little realized, save
when the hot winds and dust carve a heavy furrow down the centre of every
brow and call into being a thousand criss-cross wrinkles. But at night,
or on Sabbaths or holidays, the town is strangely empty, even more so
spiritually than actually. On such days in old-world cities, it always
seems to me as if the quiet dead were abroad, wandering lovingly round
the shady squares—with their sober-faced houses—and the flagged paths of
churchyards, the secluded seats, the ancient archways and narrow silent
streets; articulate in the twittering of sparrows or the coo of pigeons,
lost at other times in the roar of traffic.
But here it is different; the souls of the dead are all away in the
primal forests or Bush that they loved, while the living are off to the
mountains or sea—train-load upon train-load, many of them away at the
first streak of dawn, leaving the parsons lamenting from their pulpits
over an array of empty pews. I once went to Sunday morning service in
St. James’s Church, which is known as the “Old Cathedral,” and found
eleven fellow-worshippers there. And yet I believe the instincts of the
people are true; that the sea, with its white sands, its cliffs, its
rocks, and wonder of virgin Ti-tree, teach them more than any number of
sermons could do. What thoughts the Ti-tree alone gives rise to! Pagan
perhaps, yet all sublime. With the wild forest-myrtle it is the most
human tree that could well be imagined. Such twisted trunks, such
curious entwined limbs, such delicate flowing foliage! It is as if Pan,
the great god Pan, still real and vital in this wide world, had chanced
on a flock of nymphs at play along the shore, and embodied them thus as
they turned to fly with outstretched arms and flowing tresses; or Neptune
himself translated them to trees as they slipped from his embrace.
[Picture: A bird’s-eye view of Melbourne]
[Picture: On the Yarra]
When the sea is so near and the wonder of the Ti-tree and the mountains,
and the forests, with their giant gum-trees, and the deep gullies of
ferns, cool and fragrant on the hottest days, perhaps, after all, one may
consider that God has built temples to His own liking, and that the
dreary little brick churches and tin tabernacles of the country districts
are as little wanted as the more imposing structures of the town; while
the crowds who flock each Sunday and holiday away from the dusty city
into the open country have indeed chosen the better part.
That the young people make love openly and shamelessly in the
railway-carriages or on the beach; that they are loud and larky and
irreverent, does not matter at all; there is really less room for shame
where there is shamelessness: and then as a living proof of what these
rowdy boys and girls develop into there are the uncounted young families,
father, mother and children, clean and smiling and prosperous, scattered
in intimate little groups over every holiday resort within an hour’s
reach of town. After all, in spite of “certain writers of our own day,”
there is nothing very wrong with a country where the artisan—who, after
all, is its backbone—can afford so much fresh air and freedom, so many
health-giving holidays; and, in addition, can show such a cheerful
helpmate, such a well-nourished, well-dressed little brood, as can the
Australian artisan. There is rather an apt old saying, which it might
not be amiss for some of us older people to lay to heart in discussing a
State that is mainly the work of three generations, such as Victoria, and
that is:—“They that can _do_, and they that can’t criticize.”
Every principal street in Melbourne seems to be possessed of a poor
relation—meagre, dreary, and more or less unpresentable. There is
Collins Street, for instance, wide and majestic, and—may I say?—awful in
its unbroken length, leading straight up to the Houses of Parliament, and
yet not emblematical, I hope, of that other wide and straight path that
leadeth to destruction. Keeping step with it all the way, dim and
narrow, noisy and bustling, in the shadow of its skirts runs Little
Collins Street. Then there is to the right, still looking upwards
towards the seats of the mighty, Flinders Street and Little Flinders
Street; to the left, Burke Street and Little Burke Street—the haunt of
John Chinaman—Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street, and so on; the
transverse streets that cross them alone being free of these poor
relations. “The most irrelevant things in Nature,” as Charles Lamb calls
them. Indeed, I wish that more of the streets were without them, or
that, at least, they did not run in such unbroken continuity—that one
might tear the middle out of them in places, as one does out of a French
roll, and form a hollow, instead of a block. Even in the place of a
single warehouse, here and there, to have a little open space, a few
trees—the city-loving plane or large-leaved maple—and a seat or two, so
that the unnumbered city clerks and warehousemen might have some little
open place and some greenery in sight of which to eat their lunch.
Melbourne is rich in public gardens of rare beauty, while in the
Botanical and Fitzroy Gardens there are kiosks where one may get a meal
served in the open. But they are all too far from the centre of the city
to be of much use during the short hour or half-hour allowed for lunch;
while for all the tiny people whose fathers are caretakers, or whose
mothers are charwomen, in the very heart of the town, they are indeed a
far journey, fraught with untold dangers.
For many years I lived and worked in a great mass of buildings, offices,
single rooms, and chambers, rather to the west of the town, starving for
the breath of a tree, the sight of a little greenery within easy reach;
even the Flag-Staff Gardens, the nearest in that direction, being a good
twenty minutes’ walk away. Then, to my joy, I discovered the little Old
Cathedral, packed away among warehouses and offices, with its tiny
garden, its patch of green sward, its few shady trees, and its herbaceous
borders, where there grew a blue flower, whose name I do not know but
which I imagine belonged to the borage tribe, of the intensest blue I
have ever seen. There were other flowers, of course—geraniums and
nasturtiums and dahlias, I believe—but it is the blue alone that lives in
my memory, for, like Thoreau, I feel that there is something intensely
exhilarating “even in the very memory of blue flowers growing in
patches.”
After a while this little garden came to make a real difference in my
workaday world—to represent such a true oasis in a desert, which was
sometimes all despair, that I can but wish there were more such
breathing-places in the midst of the bustling city world. St. James, of
course, added very considerably to the glamour of the garden in this
case; impressing me, as it always did, with a curious air of antiquity,
breathing out more of the atmosphere of the old world than any other
building in Melbourne. I use the word “curious” because, after all, it
is only some seventy-four years old, though it has taken upon itself an
air of reverent age, enwrapping itself about with an atmosphere of
brooding peace, quite unviolated by all the fury of getting and spending
which goes on around it. Perhaps it is the fact of its being surrounded,
as it is, by such a medley of youth and vigour that gives it this
precocious air of venerable age; like the eldest of a large growing
family it has reached a sedate maturity very early in life, as one counts
the lives of churches. Indeed, it is more than mature, and English
nostrils sniff up greedily from within its portals the only possible
odour of mould and mustiness to be found in Melbourne. Dear old church!
The services are orderly and reverent, but in the high tide of work days,
when it is empty, but—all praise to its Rector!—never shut during
business hours, it and its little garden preach to us the best possible
sermon on that one text which, English and Australian alike, we all want
reminding of in these busy days, bidding us “study to be quiet.”