TASMANIA
I write this in one of the “farthest south” towns of the globe. Hobart
is twenty-five hundred miles below the Equator, with nothing but ocean
between it and the frozen lands of the Antarctic. It is now the end
of April, late in the fall in this topsy-turvy land, but the grass is
as green as in old Ireland in June, and, although Mount Wellington,
back of the city, has a coat of snow, the sheep are everywhere feeding
out-of-doors, and it is as warm as Ohio in May.
As I look around me I cannot realize that this is Tasmania, the country
I studied about years ago as Van Diemen’s Land. I had read of the cruel
treatment of the criminals sent out to it from England. I knew it was
an island somewhere between the South Pole and Australia. I had an idea
that it was bleak, bare, and inhospitable, the jumping-off place of
creation, and it seemed that to visit it would hardly be worth the time
and expense.
I have changed my opinion. Tasmania is the Switzerland of the southern
Pacific, and one of the most healthful and beautiful lands of the
globe. It is a heart-shaped island, with its top less than two hundred
miles from Australia and its point toward the Pole. At the southernmost
tip the Pacific and the Indian oceans meet. Tasmania is all mountains,
valleys, and glens; with waterfalls and lakes, forests of fern trees,
trout brooks, and hunting parks. Its coast is deeply indented with
fiords and harbours, and the tourist bureaus have made it a great
health resort. The whole country is spotted with boarding houses and
hotels, and during the summer months, from December until May, it is
swarming with visitors. One can go almost anywhere by motor, coach,
horseback, or rail, and always have good company. There are also many
tourists on foot.
Although more than twice the size of Belgium, Tasmania has only about
two hundred thousand people, compared with Belgium’s seven millions.
Hobart, the capital and largest city on the island, has about fifty-two
thousand. It lies on a fine harbour in a nest of hills on the banks
of the Derwent. Back of the river rises a mountain, the rocks of
which look like the pipes of an organ. The town is well laid out in
checkerboard fashion; it runs up hill and down and here and there takes
a jump out into the country.
I went from one end of the city to the other one day on a street car.
The people of Hobart pride themselves on having the first electric
railroad line in their latitude. The cars are not like any we have in
the United States. They were made in England and look as though they
had been pounded out by a crossroads blacksmith. They are enormous
double-deckers, and their sides are plastered with advertisements. I
rode on the roof right under a great steel bow, which, pressing against
the overhead wire, takes the place of our trolley. I timed the trip and
found we made speed only when going down hill. Most of the time our
motion was a succession of spasmodic jerks, as though the electricity
were afflicted with fits.
Near Hobart was Port Arthur, the chief penal colony of the old Van
Diemen’s Land. Its site can be reached by a short sail down the Derwent
River. Some of the convict buildings are still standing, and one can
get a guide there who will describe the terrible punishments that drove
many of the prisoners to suicide. They were flogged, tortured with
dripping water, and loaded with heavy chains. They were kept in dark
cells, were made to pull railway cars, and were subjected to all sorts
of inhuman treatment. Many of the best families in Tasmania today are
descendants of these convicts. Some of them will acknowledge their
ancestry, but if one asks them the crime for which their forebears
were transported each will invariably reply that it was for stealing
a loaf of bread. It would have taken a good-sized bakehouse running
steadily to supply the many loaves said to have been stolen by these
early Tasmanians. Transportation of criminals ceased in 1853, and all
the arrivals since then are people who have come of their own accord.
To-day the number of crimes is no greater than in other parts of the
Empire. Indeed, the Tasmania of to-day is rather pious than otherwise.
The majority of the people are either immigrants or the descendants of
immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, or Australia.
[Illustration: Unlike continental Australia, Tasmania has a moist
climate. This has given the island dense forests of eucalyptus and
other woods which furnish railroad ties and paving blocks to her sister
states.]
[Illustration: Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, lies on the south coast
of the island between the great hills on both sides of the Derwent
River. Its harbour is second only to that of Sydney.]
[Illustration: Tasmania deserves its name of the “Apple Isle,” for it
annually exports many shiploads of apples to the mainland and London.
The orchardist often makes a profit of upwards of $200 an acre.]
The Hobart museum is a Mecca to students of ethnology, for here is
preserved the body of the last of the aborigines. When the island
was a penal colony there were still a number of the original blacks,
but they were so corrupted by escaped convicts that they became a
menace to the whites. In 1830 a drive of three thousand Europeans was
organized against them and all who survived were finally exiled to a
dreary, windswept island in Bass Strait. Here their health suffered
because they were forced to wear clothes, which they never took
off, no matter how filthy they became. The poor creatures were also
the easy prey of the sealers and escaped criminals that came now and
then to their place of exile, and at the end of fifteen years only
forty-four survived. A woman, Truganini, the last of the race, died
at the age of seventy-three, in 1876. Her skeleton is in the museum
and the scientists come here to study the skull. The native Tasmanians
belonged to an even more backward race and stage of civilization than
the aborigines of Australia.
The island state deserves its name of the “Apple Island.” It is a
voyage of more than a month by sea from Hobart to London, but apples
are sent to England every year by the shipload in refrigerator
steamers. The annual crop now amounts to more than two million bushels
and brings in close to two and a half million dollars. It would
surprise our orchardists to see how close the Tasmanians plant apple
trees. They set them out ten feet apart, instead of twenty or forty
feet, as with us, and I am told that as many as six hundred bushels are
sometimes gathered from a single acre. The trees begin to bear in their
third or fourth year and keep on bearing for twenty-five or thirty
years.
Tasmania ships much green fruit to Australia. It raises quantities of
pears, plums, cherries, and currants, and in recent years has been
exporting several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jam, not only to
the United Kingdom, but to South Africa, France, and even to the United
States. By the law of the Commonwealth every jar of jam or marmalade
exported must bear a label stating that it was made in Australia.
Tasmania, which had built up a reputation for her preserves before the
federation of the states, does not like this law, for it seems to give
all the credit to Australia. The jam makers get around it by printing
their labels with the word “Tasmania” in large letters and “Australia”
in smaller letters.
These people are excellent farmers and their crops are usually good.
The wheatfields cover only about twenty-two thousand acres, but the
average production is more than eighteen bushels per acre, which is far
ahead of the yield in the other Australian states. Large quantities of
barley and oats are grown.
This island ranks with Vermont as a place for breeding fine sheep. It
has many sheep worth upward of a thousand dollars apiece. They are sold
to the mainland states and the countries of South America, pedigreed
rams often bringing as much as five thousand dollars each. The land
holdings are smaller than in Australia or New Zealand, so that the
Tasmanian sheep breeders can therefore take better care of their stock.
This is a great turnip country, and in this part of the world a good
turnip country is a good sheep country. There are fields about Hobart
that have produced as much as sixteen tons of turnips to the acre, and
in northeastern Tasmania twenty-five tons have been grown on an acre.
Until 1872 the minerals of Tasmania were practically unknown, but in
that year on Mount Bischoff, in the northwestern part of the island,
tin mines were opened which have proved to be the largest tin mines
of the world. They paid their first dividend in 1878, and are still
yielding large profits.
Another big mineral property is that at Mount Lyell, which was
discovered in 1881. It was first worked as a gold mine, but was
afterward found to contain copper and silver. When these ores were
smelted the results were so gratifying that the original company was
reorganized with a capital of about four and a half million dollars, a
railroad was built from the mines to the smelting works, and within a
short time the company had five smelters treating eleven thousand tons
of ore a month. This company paid its first dividend in 1897 and by the
middle of the year following it had distributed more than a million
dollars to its stockholders. It now pays out many thousands a year in
salaries and wages and is making money right along from its copper.
I have made some inquiries about lands, both mineral and agricultural,
and I find that all the best land has been taken up and that farms and
city property bring almost as much as in the United States. For years
one trouble with Tasmania was the fact that its lands were held in
big blocks by rich men who would not sell. But now, under the closer
settlement laws, the Minister of Lands may acquire, either compulsorily
or by agreement, private land in any part of the island to be leased to
settlers. The land taken over by the government is divided into farm
allotments, the value of which may not exceed twenty thousand dollars.
These are rented on ninety-nine-year leases. Unfortunately, the
government is not yet rich enough to buy up many of the large estates.
One of the troubles about taking up government lands is the dense
growth of timber which must be cut down before they can be used. The
climate here is moist and the undergrowth is thicker than in most parts
of our country. Much of the timber is eucalyptus, but there are also
beeches, dogwoods, oaks, and other hard woods. There are millions of
acres of virgin forests, some of which are now being cut to furnish
railway ties to other Australian states and to South Africa.
The cost of living is as high in Tasmania as in the other Australian
states, but wages are lower. The best paid labourers are the skilled
iron and electrical workers, and they get a maximum of only thirty
dollars a week. As to clerks and bookkeepers, they are poorly paid, and
there are few clerical positions open. Domestic servants are in demand
and their wages are fair.
The Australians of the mainland seem to consider the people of Tasmania
as slow as the New Yorkers do the Philadelphians. They have a saying:
“Don’t send a live man to Tasmania; send flowers.” I have heard it said
that the island used to be peopled by women, children, and graybeards;
for as soon as the boys reached man’s estate they crossed Bass Strait
to Victoria or New South Wales. This, however, is no longer true;
Tasmania is waking up, and its people think it has a big future as a
manufacturing centre for all Australia. Its numerous lakes and rivers
can furnish abundant water power at low cost and the development of
its hydro-electric resources is going forward rapidly. All kinds of
electrical appliances, which are regarded more or less as luxuries even
in the large cities of the mainland, are conveniences of every-day life
in many small towns of Tasmania.
[Illustration: Thursday Island is the commercial centre for all Torres
Strait. About its deep harbour has grown up a clean, well-regulated
town, the home of representatives of all the peoples of the South
Pacific.]
[Illustration: The youngest of these island maidens has to go through
several months more of suffering before she can appear with her
complete blouse of tattooing. The design must be pricked in with a
thorn driven under her skin.]
[Illustration: Experienced men claim they can tell by the appearance of
the outside of certain oyster shells that they contain pearls. Natives
are not allowed to open such finds, which are reserved for the white
overseer.]
The state government has already built a hydro-electric power station
at Great Lake, about sixty miles north of Hobart. This delivers thirty
thousand horse power to the Electrolytic Zinc Corporation, whose works
are the largest of the kind in existence. It also supplies a big
carbide-manufacturing plant as well as power for Hobart’s street
cars and lighting system. Woollen mills, a big chocolate factory, and
other industrial plants will get their power from this station. So
will Launceston as soon as the transmission line from the lake to the
northern city is completed. Launceston has its own power plant but this
does not give sufficient current for its needs. Ultimately the capacity
of the Great Lake power house will be raised to seventy-two thousand
horse power. Other projects are planned, for Tasmania’s hydro-electric
resources are estimated at more than two hundred thousand horse power.
There is even talk of transmitting some of the power from the island by
cable to the mainland.