MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE FOR THE GANDER”
WHEN I was a girl I remember many times hearing my father say that he
would rather mount a lady on a young, well-broken horse than on an old
hunter; that they knew too much, that they had mastered the art of
falling soft, and preferred their own way to that of their rider. As a
housekeeper, I know I would rather have an absolutely untaught young girl
as a domestic than one who held her own views as to how everything was to
be done; equally fearing and disliking any new innovation which might
possibly mean extra work. For the same reason, if I was a politician, I
would rather have my lines cast in a new country, not yet pot-bound by
traditions. England seems at times to hover, literally paralyzed,
between the devil of:—“They say” and the deep sea of:—“Has been.” I
recollect that in the old days at home a ploughman was ordered to run his
furrow along a special field from east to west. I can see now the odd,
clouded look of bewilderment which came into his face as the order was
given to him; then the drawing down of the long upper lip, the set of the
obstinate chin, when his protestation that it “wur allus ploughed t’other
way” were received merely by a smiling repetition of the command.
Finally, his utter bewilderment when the—to his mind—unanswerable
argument that it had “allus been ploughed that way, when ferther wur a
lad, an’ gran’ferther wur a lad, an’ the owd meyster wur alive,” was met
in the same manner.
The merest yokel in Australia could see no reason at all in an argument
such as this. Here the people revel in change. They are ready to try
anything, and, if one plan fails, another is at once experimented with.
Sometimes it may be rather like the progress of a bull in a china-shop,
but still it is progress, and the people here find it very difficult to
realize the mind of a country which takes up the attitude of a man
refusing to change his shirt for fear that he should suffer some chill or
discomfort in the process. In the article on the Sydney Congress in the
_Times_ of May 24, 1910, the difference between the two countries in many
political matters is very plainly stated:—“There is nothing more
extraordinary in Free Trade propaganda than the lame contention that we
must continue upon a ruinous course because a new policy will involve
initial difficulties. That argument is laughed to scorn in Australia.
The Australian fears no difficulties. The spirit which leads men to face
and overcome obstacles is in his blood. His history and condition are
one long record of triumphing over difficulties, and he cannot understand
why the complexity of framing a tariff should be urged for a moment in
England. He thinks, like many Englishmen, that the historian of the
future will contemplate with amazement the spectacle of the Dominions
seeking closer unity, while the Mother Country remains coldly repelling
their advances.”
A question one very often hears asked in Australia, usually as a joke or
sort of catch-phrase, is:—“Where do I come in?” But there is no joke at
all about the state of mind which such a question implies. I have often
heard new chums say very nasty things about what they call the
“self-seeking nature of the people”; and they will point out—when the
distinction between the old and new country are being discussed—all that
Australia owes to England, how she depends on her for naval protection
and for her very life as a nation. But, still, something more is
expected from the modern mother than merely boxing the ears of all the
other children who interfere with her progeny, and, after all, the
obligation is not entirely one-sided. Even if we forget the ready help
which was given in the time of the Boer War, we ought not to forget that
in Australia many thousands of people, that England confessedly could do
nothing with, have been remade into men and women, who—with their
children—have gone to the making of a very fine people.
In many ways Australia is more loyal to England than she is to herself.
Among private people there always seems very little preference given to
Australian-made goods alone, but a very great deal to all goods made by
English-speaking people, though naturally those in authority intend to
protect their own manufacturers first. Out here Imperial Preference is
not a party matter, and in these days to come across even one important
question in politics, where the good of the entire country alone is
considered, seems like opening a window and letting into a stuffy,
gas-heated atmosphere a stream of pure air; while it is for this reason
that the defeat of Mr. Deakin—during the last election—has not upset the
whole apple-cart, as such a Labour victory would inevitably have done in
England.
There is no doubt, I believe, that Australia, as a whole, is in favour of
Imperial Preference. At the Sydney Congress, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart
were frankly for it, and though the three great Chambers of Sydney,
Melbourne, and Adelaide remained neutral, none of the State capitals
voted against it, while most of the smaller Chambers were most openly in
its favour.
That some of the Chambers were neutral is not to be wondered at. Already
Preference rates are extended to 294 items of British goods, coming under
the Preferential tariff and paying on an average 24 per cent. less duty
than foreign goods of the same kind; the total rebate on British goods in
Australia in 1908 reaching the sum of £828,000. Foreign exporters are
not blind to what the Australians are doing for their fellows, and in one
instance a special discount was offered, equivalent to the amount of
Preference given to British-made goods, while every sort of effort has
been made to undervalue or dump foreign goods at less than their market
value. And yet it is the British manufacturers who have most
persistently tried to hoodwink the Australians, English cotton materials
having been actually sent to the Continent to be printed and dyed, then
back to England to be packed and shipped off as Preferential goods.
Now the stipulation has been made that goods commanding Preference must
have not less than 25 per cent. of their value represented by English
labour, the tolerance and moderation of the rule speaking well for the
patience of Australia, though it certainly does not speak well for
English manufacturers that there should need to be any such regulation.
It is like having to compel a man, to whom you are paying ten pounds a
week, to contribute ten shillings for the support of the wife, who keeps
his house in order, cooks his food, and rears his children.
But this is not the only grievance that Australia has against English
manufacturers; an even more fatal one is that they simply cannot get what
they want. For some years I was working in Melbourne at house-decorating
and fitting. My business took me among wholesale and retail tradesmen
and importers of furniture, hardware, draperies, carpets, tiles, and the
hundred and one items that are needed for the fitting up of a modern
dwelling, and from one and all came the same complaint. They could not
get what they wanted from the English manufacturers. Goods were not true
to sample; there were not a sufficiency of one sort, and, when more was
applied for, the buyers were either frankly told that they could not have
it, or a different class of goods was sent in its place. Mr. Hamilton
Wicks, the British Trade Commissioner, has spoken pretty plainly about
the difficulties which Australian houses find in getting their orders
properly attended to in England, however much they may wish to be loyal
to the Empire. Often it is a case of:—“Oh, anything is good enough for
the Colonies; they are used to roughing it out there!” or, perhaps, less
flagrant, but none the less irritating, there is an absolute lack of
knowledge as to the requirements in Australia; a pig-headed refusal to
see that many articles needed here—particularly agricultural
implements—are of a necessity quite different from those in use in
England. “Give Grandam kingdom, and thy Grandam will give you a pear or
apple or a plum,” says England, “and do not be impertinent enough to
quibble about its being a trifle overripe or blighted.”
To the people at home who assert—as I have often heard them do—that
Australia is a completely self-seeking country, I would recommend a short
study of Australian commerce—even of Victorian commerce alone—and of the
statistics showing the imports of the last few years, a very brief
perusal of which will be sufficient to prove that an infinitely larger
amount of Australian money is spent in England, and other parts of the
Empire, than in any foreign country. In 1908 Australia spent in imports
from British Possessions, including India, £36,319,781, as against
£13,479,492 in those from all other countries, including the United
States.
In 1904–1908 the proportion of goods imported from England and other
British Possessions averaged 72.93 per cent., and from all other
countries, including America, 27.7 per cent.—could England itself show as
fair a record?
Again, though in 1908, £1,305,602 were spent on German imports by
Victoria alone, the value of Victorian goods exported to Germany reached
£2,015,536, so that the obligation was by no manner of means all on one
side.
[Picture: Dairy Herd and Silo]
Mr. Foster Fraser has two great faults to find with Australians—they are
slack, and they are few. Oddly enough, while continually reverting to
the thinness of the population in the country districts, he finds
fault—to take only one of the many instances—with the fact that the
output of butter is nowhere near as great in Australia as it is in
Denmark. Denmark, a made country! A country that has been perfecting
its dairying industry for years! Why, I remember when I was quite a
small child—and that was a long while ago—that the cooking butter used to
be brought in little kegs from Denmark—to a pastoral country like
England, too! Little Denmark, which, including Iceland, has a population
of 2,708,470, with a density of 49.94, as against the immense continent
of Australia, with its population, according to the last census, of
4,275,306. Why, Denmark, including Iceland, covers an area of but 55,306
square miles, and Victoria, the smallest state in Australia, 87,884. Put
2,708,470 people—the population of Denmark—into it to start
dairy-farming, and then comparisons may become merely odious, and not, in
addition, ludicrous. As it is, Victoria alone exported to the United
Kingdom, in 1908, butter to the value of £868,068, and that’s “none so
dusty,” as her own people would say; while the amount of butter actually
consumed there was valued at £1,250,000, and cheese, both consumed and
exported, at £100,000.
It seems as if I was “barracking” for Australia as against England, but
very far from that. Though I have lived in Australia for years, and
though it has helped me to a wider, fuller life than I ever knew before,
England is my own country, and still holds my heart. And yet, when one
hears, as one so often does, sweeping and wholesale condemnations and
criticism—or, perhaps worse, faint praise—given without any realization
of what a country really is, and how it has reached the position it now
holds, it seems only honest that those who have gained their living
through that country, to whom it has afforded friendship, shelter, and
consideration, should speak of it as they have found it. A sort of
friction seems inevitable between parents and their grown-up children,
but the fault is not always and altogether on the children’s side—and, in
any case, the friction is only intensified either by interference or
well-meant attempts at rearrangement. Australians hate alike
interference and pity. If you sympathize with a man or woman out here,
it is ten to one that they will inform you that they can do their “own
lying awake at night.” Once when a miner died up West his mates put up
above his grave these words as a text—and, in truth, there are many
worse:—“He did his damndest; angels could do no more.” But, then, the
world in general is much like the ultra-tidy housewife of whom Oliver
Wendell Holmes writes “that if the Angel Gabriel did come down from
heaven, she would be complaining of him, that he dropped his feathers
about the house.”
Australia is so much overgoverned that it is really a wonder the broth is
not spoilt between the multitude of cooks. It seemed bad enough before
Federation, but it was nothing to what it is now, and one wonders that
there is anyone left to govern. How long the state of affairs will go on
which permits the expense of two Government Houses, and a superfluity of
officials, I do not know. It seems, indeed, as if everybody must have
been too busy to bother about it, and that the State Governorship
remains, like many another archaic institution, simply because so many
more intricate complications engage the attention of the people.
Luckily for Australia, the separate functions of her two Houses of
Parliament—the Legislative Assembly, or Lower House, and the Legislative
Council, or Upper House—are more definitely defined than those of the
House of Commons and the House of Lords are at home—or have been till
just lately. Still, Australian politics represent a tangled web to the
new chum, and one which I have had very little time or opportunity of
studying. I scarcely know, indeed, how I ever got started on the subject
of Preference, but as the chapter somehow began itself in that way, and
as this book is most likely to be read by people at home, who, by some
chance, may happily know even less about the matter than I do, a few of
the leading points of the game may not come amiss.
Frankly, I confess that the first day I was present at a debate in the
Legislative Assembly I was reminded of nothing in the world so much as
the trial scene in “Alice in Wonderland”:
“‘No, no,’ said the Queen; ‘sentence first—verdict afterwards.’
“‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the
sentence first!’
“‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
“‘I won’t!’ said Alice.
“‘Off with her head!’ said the Queen; but nobody moved.
“‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice. ‘You are nothing but a pack of cards.’
“At this all the cards rose up into the air and came flying down upon
her.”
The question in the House at that time was, if I remember rightly,
something to do with the duty on cloth caps made in Tasmania, and it
really seemed astounding that so much excitement could be got out of such
a little thing. Everything anyone said was frankly contradicted even in
plainer words than “stuff and nonsense!” Everybody seemed to speak at
once—or, rather, shout in a vain hope that they might be heard above the
babel—and personalities of all sorts were freely indulged in, either to
be completely disregarded or replied to by more abuse; often, I must
confess, rather wittily put; while, should any orator succeed in shouting
down his fellow, even then his troubles were far from ended, his every
peculiarity being ruthlessly registered by the Press. The other day I
came across an amusing and most characteristic notice of the New South
Wales Premier in the _Bulletin_, from which I cannot resist quoting,
affording as it does a very good example of this freedom of speech:
“McGowan will no longer be able to complain of getting too little
newspaper space. He will get enough; but the Lord help those who have to
‘take’ him, and preserve them from charges of misreporting. For McGowan
is the most slovenly speaker in the world. If he’s not, I’d like to
shoot the other. Half his sentences are never finished, and his remarks
trail round and round his subject like a snake in a hen-coop looking for
the exit. His constantly repeated gag is—‘The point I want to make, Mr.
Speaker, is this.’ Then he suddenly discovers that he has mislaid the
point, or left it at home, or in the tram, or somewhere, and while he is
trying to recollect what he did with it, he fills in time by rounding off
a flock of sentences which he left unfinished earlier in the evening.”
And again:
“The haste of the Fisher Government to do things lately moved Alfred
Deakin to describe its proceeding as ‘quick-lunch legislation.’ Poor old
Alfred’s variety was ‘fasting man’ or ‘dry-crust legislation.’ You sat
down at the table and looked at Alfred’s political bill-of-fare. In
about three years a dead waiter came, and you ordered chops. The waiter
departed slowly in a state of decay, and fell into dust before he reached
the door. Then you stayed around, through geological periods, till
Judgment Day, and, looking down from the battlements of heaven, you saw
Alfred’s cook still chasing the sheep through perdition. Truly there was
no quick lunch about the Deakin methods! In his restaurant the dropped
soup took six months to reach the floor, and, as likely as not, you saw
Alexander the Great at the next table, for time didn’t matter there.”
One politician who reached the limit in the matter of political
amenities, and who has died very recently, was Mr. J. H. Graves. The
abuse, the satire, and the damning with faint praise, the awful
disclosures, and the still more awful insinuations, that Mr. Graves
indulged in, were a perfect nightmare to the House of his day, all the
more to be dreaded from the fact that he never spoke at random, that all
his shafts were at once winged and barbed by truth, and their course
directed by a sure and certain knowledge of the tenderest portion of his
writhing victim’s conscience. People said, and, I believe, with truth,
that J. H. Graves kept a carefully compiled Doomsday Book, containing the
history of every member of the House, with every possible detail of his
every mistake and misdemeanour, and all the mistakes and misdemeanours,
the scandals and family skeletons, of his progenitors. A speaker in the
House cannot be summoned for libel; all that can happen is that he should
be called upon to apologize for anything particularly insulting—and Mr.
Graves was ready to apologize with cheerful alacrity. There was always
plenty more in that fatal book. It is said that Mr. J. L. Purves, by
whose death the Australian Bar has lately lost one of its most brilliant
members, once got hold of the original book and burnt it; and that,
though another was begun, it was so much less voluminous and
comprehensive, members ceased, from that time onwards to feel cold
shivers running down their backs when Graves’s glance fell upon them; and
so much of his power was lost, though in a dispute with another man, who
came from the same county as himself, this second book was actually
produced in proof of its existence.
“I have never been guilty,” thundered a member recently, in a fine fury
of indignation, “of going to the telephone and impersonating another man,
and using the information obtained against him in Parliament under the
cloak of privilege. But I must say the honourable member for — stands
here self-convicted of that action.” I have not the faintest
recollection of what it was all about, but it is characteristic; while
the title “honourable,” as it is here used, strikes me as rather a
meaningless survival in a democratic country. “Hi don’t call ’im the
’onourable,” I once heard an emphatic political opponent declare. “Hi
calls ’im the ’orrible.”
“Cabbage-grower!” someone shouted at some public meeting where Mr. Bent
was making a speech. “Well, there’s no question about that,” retorted
the late Premier beamingly; “the question is, did I, or did I not, grow
good cabbages?”
The odd thing is that out of all the schoolboy chaff, and the apparently
hopeless babel of mere words, such good measures can be evoked. It is
somehow like flinging a medley of unappetizing-looking scraps into a
casserole, and, rather to one’s own surprise, evoking a good soup—when
all the scum has been removed.
The State Governor, as the Victoria Year Book remarks bluntly, is only
expected to exercise his judgment in assenting to, or dissenting from, or
reserving of, any Bills passed by Parliament, and the granting or
withholding of a dissolution—either of which measures will, for the time
being, render him equally unpopular—or the appointment of a new Ministry.
Apart from this, his whole duty consists in looking nice and behaving
prettily, while by far the most arduous part of the position rests upon
the shoulders of his wife. If I was going to choose a new Governor for
Victoria—which somehow no one has even thought of asking me to do—I
should not even want to see him, though my interview with his wife would
be long and arduous. She must dress beautifully, for she is of little
use unless she wears things that other women can copy; but she must give
herself no airs, while the complete frankness of the criticism which she
will meet with may be gathered, with some amusement, from the following
description of a garden fête at Storrington, the State Government House:
“The visitors were so eager for the frivol that they arrived before
schedule time (3.30). Motors and carriages were politely dissuaded from
entering the gates, while Aides peeped unhappily round the pillars of the
veranda, and sent agonized messages upstairs. But the Carmichaels were
getting into party duds as fast as they could. They had been opening the
motor-drive out to Toorak at 2.30, and the lady’s return home and quick
change into a dream of a lilac gown had all to be compressed into the one
brief hour. When at last the pair came out, the dress—a trailing
circumstance of nonchalant coolness—was received with murmurs of
admiration. Someone has been redrawing the lines of the Carmichael
lady’s figure; it has the new slenderness necessary for the new
dressing.”
The ideal Governor’s wife must be of the bluest possible blood—nothing
insults a democratic country like playing down to it in the matter of
nobodies—and yet she must forget all the class distinctions she has ever
known. She must remember everybody, entertain royally, and spend
lavishly. There was once a superlatively mean Governor, with a
superlatively mean wife, in Victoria, and they will never be forgotten;
it is a fault that the people here are not prone to themselves, and which
they simply will not tolerate in those whom they consider handsomely paid
to cut a dash. I never saw but one public-house called after that
particular Governor, and this, in itself, is significant—besides, even it
is in a mean back street.
When the Ministry finds it is unable to disentangle itself, when it has
not a proper working majority, or is defeated on any matter which it
considers vital, then the Premier, instead of tendering his resignation
and asking the Governor to “send for” a leading member of the
Opposition—as would be the case were he defeated in Parliament or at the
polls—asks the Governor for a dissolution, the terms of which are very
carefully dictated to him, though at other times he acts mainly on the
advice of the Executive Council.
In the Executive Council there are eight salaried Ministers. Four at
least of these must always be members of the Council or Assembly, but not
more than two of the Council or six of the Assembly; while upon accepting
office a Minister vacates his seat in Parliament, though he may return to
it without being re-elected. The Council—or Upper House—consists of
thirty-four members, being divided into seventeen electoral provinces,
each of which returns two members. The member of each electorate who
receives the largest number of votes retains his seat for six years, if
there is no General Election, the other members retiring after three
years.
In the Lower House there are sixty-five members, single electorates being
provided for each seat. Universal suffrage is in force; all persons
natural-born or naturalized, and untainted by crime, are on the general
roll, and plural voting is not allowed. A member of the Assembly
receives certain allowances for his expenses, at the rate of £300 a year.
This is, I suppose, given that professional or working men may feel free
to devote themselves exclusively to a political life, and be relieved
from all other business anxieties. In England it may seem quite a lot,
but it appears to me—considering the really large incomes to be made in
Australia by a thoroughly able man in nearly any business or
profession—that it is not enough. It pays the working man, hand over
hand, to go into Parliament, for it is not likely that he would make as
much at his own job, however good he was at it. But a capable lawyer,
say, or doctor, upon whose mental training large sums have been spent,
will earn far more than that if he is any good; and certainly, if he
cannot manage his own affairs, he will not be able to manage those of his
country. So that a successful man, particularly if he is married and has
a family to bring up in the same way in which he himself has been brought
up, would have to be peculiarly unselfish—almost culpably so—to
relinquish his profession for a Parliamentary career. I suppose it would
be impossible that members should be paid in proportion to their former
earnings and their status in life, but, after all, that would be the
fairest thing, and insure the best type of man.
Apart from personal expense, the election expenses of a candidate for the
Upper House are fixed at £400, and those of a candidate for the Lower
House at £150, while there are strict regulations regarding the manner in
which this sum should be spent—viz., in printing, advertising,
publishing, issuing, distributing addresses and notices; and on rolls,
stationery, messages, postage, and telegrams; on hiring halls and holding
public meetings; on the expenses of committee-rooms; on a scrutineer, one
only at each booth; and on one agent for any electoral province or
district.
Although the power of the Victoria Parliament has necessarily been
considerably curtailed since Federation, all matters to do with the
internal development of the State are still in its hands; while, apart
from Customs and Excise, it retains the power of taxation for State needs
and the Public Debt, the State railways, Crown lands, mining and factory
legislation; while to the municipalities have now been accorded the Water
Supply Trust, the Tramway Trust, and Mining and Land Boards; while the
Postal System, all Custom and Excise Duties, and all affairs of Foreign
Policy, are under the control of the Upper House.
Any income over £200 a year is subject to income tax in Victoria, with an
exemption of £100 up to £15,000. Incomes derived from personal exertions
are taxed 3d. for every pound of the taxable amount up to £300; up to
£800, 4d.; up to £1,300, 5d.; and up to £1,800, 6d.; over that, 7d.; the
incomes derived from property being taxed at double that amount—the
tax-collectors seeming to be possessed of a considerable amount of
insight. Certainly no one has ever so much as suggested to me that I
should pay an income tax, though I am doubtful as to whether this should
be taken as a compliment either to myself or my publishers; while I must
confess that I have felt at times rather hurt that no one in authority
has credited me with possible brains to the extent of over £200 a year.
A short study of the Victorian Land Tax seems to give one a singularly
vivid picture of the country, being arranged, as it is, on a basis that
would be out of the question at home, for the tax is levied, not on the
mere size of the property, but on the amount of sheep that it will carry.
Land that will carry four sheep or more to the acre is valued at £4 per
acre; land carrying one and a half sheep—which half not being
specified—£3; one sheep per acre, £2; under one sheep per acre, £1. All
estates above 640 acres, and valued, by this means, at over £2,500, are
taxed at the rate of 1¼ per cent. upon their capital value, after
deducting an exemption for £2,500—exemption only being allowed on one
estate for each owner.
The railways are the property of the State, the first railway-line in
Victoria having been opened in 1854. Apart from a few suburban lines,
for many years every thought was concentrated on directing the railways
towards the mining centres, and very little attention was given to any
but the gold producing areas. But gradually, as people began to return
to their farms and sheep-runs, and the agricultural possibilities of the
State again seemed worth considering, the numbers of railway-lines began
to increase, and during the twenty years which followed 1874 no fewer
than 2,498 miles of railway were constructed and opened for traffic,
since which only 348 miles of line have been added, chiefly in the
wheat-growing districts of the North-West.
The whole system of Victorian railways, with its staff of some 13,000
men, is managed under Parliament by three commissioners only—an odd
exception to the general overgoverning that occurs in most public
affairs.
[Picture: Bringing wheat to station]
People are always travelling in Victoria, seldom staying at home for even
a single day’s holiday, while they think no more of going to Sydney for
the inside of a week than the average Londoner would of going to
Brighton; and it is amusing to remark that the number of passengers
carried over the lines in the year 1908 represented sixty journeys a year
for each man, woman, and child in the State—though, of course, there are
many people who will take three or four different journeys to separate
suburbs in one day, to balance the lonely dwellers in the back blocks who
have never been in a train in their lives. Still, the average of 150,000
passengers coming and going at Flinders Street Station alone, in one
single day, seems to me a very large one.
For the purpose of administering the Land Act, Victoria—and it must be
remembered here that I am speaking of State, and not of Federal,
affairs—is divided into seventeen districts, in each of which is a land
office and officer. These districts include 3,316,727 acres of pastoral
Crown land, exclusive of 6,412,500 acres of Mallee land—the entire Mallee
covering 11,000,999 acres. This spare land is graded into first, second,
and third class land, auriferous and pastoral land; the greater part of
the first-class land, with sheltered valleys, suitable for vineyards and
orchards, being in the Buln-Buln area, the soil of which is mostly
volcanic, and of a warm chocolate brown.
A great many of the large estates in Victoria are being subdivided into
farms, the squatters being under compulsion to sell a certain proportion
of their property. The Land Branch has now acquired forty-nine
properties, which it has subdivided into 1,203 farms, and 589 allotments
for workmen’s houses—the question as to who the workmen are to work for
apparently not having been very seriously considered—while shortly the
Werribee Park Estate of 23,214 acres will also be available.
One knows, of course, that Victoria must be more thickly populated. But
one cannot wonder that squatters whose fathers have acquired vast areas
of land, who have built dwelling-houses, fenced and planted, invested
money in stock, and, in fact, devoted the whole of their life to the care
and the improvement of their properties, should feel aggrieved at seeing
them taken away from them, chopped up into small holdings, and allotted
to men who have never done anything towards the furtherance of the export
and import trade, or the gain and credit of their country. Still far
above this, it must be most galling of all to have shipload after
shipload of emigrants brought out to occupy land which the squatters feel
belongs to them—morally, as well as actually, if land ever did belong to
anybody, wrested from the wilds as it has so often been by incredible
labour and risk of life.
Progress seems always to involve a trampling underfoot. It is a Moloch
whose chariot-wheels spurt blood at every turn. Many of the Victorian
landowners are not only indignant, they are genuinely aghast; heart-sick
at the deprivations of the Land Board, their grievance being aggravated
by the undoubted fact that there is still a great quantity of land which
is literally no man’s ground, as far as settlers are concerned. I heard
one story of a very well-known family in the Western district, the
founders of whom, a Scotchman and his wife and two children, journeyed up
from Melbourne by waggon, in the days when the whole country was infested
with dangerous blacks, and, finding a pleasant, fertile pastureland in
the Western country, with rich volcanic soil, well watered, determined to
settle there.
It was necessary, however, for the man to go back to Melbourne for
implements, provisions, and stock, and all the other necessities of life.
If they all went someone might come and snap up the land; in any case, it
would be a long and weary journey with the bullocks, and he could get
there more quickly and easily alone on horseback. So the waggon was made
into a temporary house, and, with ammunition and food enough to last till
her husband’s return—which at the quickest would not be before a month
were well passed—the woman, an English gentlewoman, with her two tiny
children, settled down to hold the land against the possible
encroachments of other white settlers; above all, to hold her own life
and that of her children against the more than probable onslaught of the
blacks, and all the horrors of which they were capable. Some day, for
the good of Australia and the Australians, the history of such people
ought to be written. Yet it is to land so won and so held that every
casual “rouse-about” or street loafer feels that he has a perfect right.
One can in some ways understand the feeling against large landowners
better in England, where space is so limited; where people literally heat
into anarchy with being packed so closely together; where land was
acquired, for the most part, centuries ago, and the proprietors are nice
and clean, alike of blood or sweat. But out here it is different. Old
men remember the hand-to-hand fight with the desert; the danger, the
almost incredible difficulties of transport; and, above all, the
self-sacrifice and privation of the women whose sons now hold the land.
[Picture: Milking time on a dairy farm]
It is not the Land Board that one condemns; they are doing what they feel
is best for the country, and perhaps will be best for the new settlers,
when they have shaken down into their places, though one can but believe
that, in the end, the man who is industrious and far-seeing will
inevitably acquire more and yet more of the land which the thriftless
muddler finds himself unable to manage, when large estates will gather
again like snowballs. But it is the average man in the street who talks
as if the squatters had done nothing but wallow in luxury for centuries
that makes one so mad.
In many of the dairying districts owners of large estates have
voluntarily sub-let a great part of their land, and set up butter
factories, to which their tenants bring their milk. In the old days all
the butter not required by a farmer’s own household would be bartered at
the local store for groceries and clothing, the farmers’ wives getting a
poor return indeed for it during the spring, when it was a drug in the
market; and to such as these the central butter factories have proved a
veritable boon, adding enormously to their comfort, and minimizing their
labour. In some instances the farms are leased, and the tenant pays
rent, but in others the landlord stocks the farm and provides all the
implements, while the tenant supplies the labour, and proceeds are
divided; one great advantage accruing to the small farm being that the
factories pay for the milk either weekly or monthly, while the market is
absolutely sure. Every day the tenant-farmer drives up with his
milk-cart to the factory door; the milk is taken in and weighed; it is
then analyzed, and the value, according to the percentage of cream, is
credited to his account; while he drives off with the separated milk—due
to from the day before for his poddy-calves—all his responsibility as
regards the milk being at an end. Do they use the term “poddy-calves” in
England? For the life of me, I cannot remember. Anyhow, it means a calf
fed on the same system as a modern baby, this bottle-feeding of young
calves being a serious item in the manifold work of a dairy farm.
A Victorian butter factory is a delightful sight. The scrupulous
cleanliness, the huge tanks of cream, the vast churns at work, and, above
all, the great swiftly-revolving disc of wood upon which the butter is
worked. Delicious stuff it is, too, a rich, deep, natural yellow colour,
and fresh flavour; infinitely superior to the ordinary home-made product,
where the cream is often kept too long, in the effort to collect enough
to be worth the churning. Already Victorian butter has reached Great
Britain, Germany, Japan, Corea, Arabia, Cape Colony, Natal, Portuguese
East Africa, German East Africa, Dutch East Indies, Malay States,
Philippines, Reunion, Hawaii, Fiji, and Mauritius—and when I think of the
butter we used to have, some ten years ago, when I was in the last-named
island, I feel that it and many hundred similar places, have something to
thank Australia for. I will not venture to name the country that the
tinned abomination, which was sold there under the name of butter, came
from, but it was like nothing so much as what the old Oxfordshire
ploughmen used to call “dodments,” to “sloime with dodments” being, in
their vernacular, the equivalent to “greasing a cart-wheel.”
Oddly enough, Victorian farmers do not take kindly to breeding pigs. I
believe, if I ever became an agriculturalist, that would be the one line
I should take up, though, as far as I know, I never heard of a woman
pig-farmer. However, the assertion that Gilbert White makes in his
“Natural History of Selborne” that the progeny of one sow amounted to 300
has always fascinated me, and it seems strange that, with the large
increase of all other industries in Victoria—particularly of dairy and
fruit farms—the number of pigs has actually fallen, though the prices
they fetch are higher than they ever were before. Here, at least, should
be a chance for the Irish emigrant further than that of “sitting on the
gate.”
A friend of mine once told me that he was driving through a country
district with the parish priest, when they passed an old Irishman engaged
in this historical occupation. The priest, drawing rein, mentioned some
wedding, at which he had lately officiated, expressing his regrets that
he had been obliged to leave directly the ceremony was over, and inquired
of the old man whether they had a good supper, and plenty of fun after
it.
“Sure, yer Reverence,” answered Paddy, his face wreathed in smiles—“we
did that. And lashins and lavins ther wur. Buther on bacon!” Lashins
and lavins! And so there ought to be for the pigs in the dairy
districts, judging from the statistics, which assert that the output of
separated milk in the State is 1,385,000,000 pounds, leaving sufficient
after every calf in Victoria has been fed to produce 40,000,000 pounds of
pork. There’s “buther on bacon fur yez!”
In the early days, apart from gold, wool was one of the chief productions
in Victoria, as in New South Wales. During later years, however, it has
been surpassed by the combined industries of dairy produce and grain.
Still, there are 14,000,000 sheep in the State, mostly merinoes,
producing some of the finest wool in the world, particularly the sheep
from the bounteous Western district, where the family of
Macarthurs—Captain John Macarthur, nearly a hundred years ago, having
introduced the first merino sheep from Spain and Great Britain—still
flourish, or did flourish when I was last in that part of the world,
before the craze for chopping up estates became the vogue. I remember
being shown little samples of wool by an old squatter and told the
different sort of sheep from which they were cut, then made to shut my
eyes, and learn to name the varieties from the feel alone. I would have
made a good wool-sorter, he said; and, honestly, I believe it would be a
fine trade for women, with their delicate sense of touch.
That special station had been magnificently fenced and guarded from the
wind by acre upon acre of gum-tree plantations. There had been a great
bush fire just before I was last there, which swept for miles across the
open country, destroying or injuring many of the old man’s treasured
plantations, and even scorching the creepers off the solid, square-built
stone homestead. Every man, woman, and child on the place had worked
like fury to stamp it out, and just saved the home; but, beside the
fencing and younger plantations, any number of sheep were destroyed, and,
I believe, the wool-shed also. Then, a year or so later, just as the
shearing was finished, there came a sudden late spell of hard frost and
killed 10,000 of the sheep. So a station-owner’s life, even in these
days, is not all beer and skittles, as the man at the street corner
thinks; and who will make fences and plant trees when the country
districts are all a patchwork of small holdings, each owner trying to get
a fortune out of his own special little lot? It’s a vexed question all
round, but somehow it seems there ought to be enough to pay Paul without
robbing Peter.
What a dry chapter! The _Bulletin_ would say it was written by a
“Wowser”—a Wowser being an advocate of everything dry, of temperance and
all the virtues, who expresses his opinions in such a manner that the
good he advocates appears as offensive as he is himself. The Wowser is
quite a common species in Victoria, and has even been known to crop up
among the highest dignitaries of the Anglican Church.