A SOUTHERLY BURSTER--WESTERN VICTORIA.
The day after their return to Melbourne, our friends were treated to an
entertainment which, as Harry said, "was not down on the bills." It was
what the Melbourneites called a "southerly burster," a storm which is
peculiar to Australia, and particularly to the southern portion of it.
They had already experienced showers of such force that the gutters of
the streets were filled to a depth of a foot and more, and sometimes the
whole street was covered. Most of the street crossings are bridged so
that the water can run away with comparative ease.
The water at such times flows with terrific force. Men attempting to
cross the gutters, who make a misstep, are lifted off their feet and are
instantly swept down by the current, and in case they should be carried
under one of the crossings they are liable to be drowned.
We will listen to Harry as he described in his journal their experience
with a southerly burster.
"When we arose in the morning," said Harry, "the weather was delightful
and we thought it would be a fine day for an excursion. There was not a
cloud in the sky and the breeze was blowing from the northeast. A
barometer hung in the hallway of the hotel, and Dr. Whitney remarked, as
he came out from breakfast, that it was falling rapidly. A gentleman
who was standing by his side heard the remark and said:--
"'I think we are going to have a burster; that is the way it usually
begins. If you have any engagements to go out to-day and they are not
absolutely imperative, you had better postpone them.'
"Ned and I overheard what he said and wondered what a burster was. We
said nothing, however, as we expected to find out by practical
experience.
"All through the forenoon the barometer continued to fall. The sky
remained clear until a little past noon, and the wind blew gently from
the northeast as before. Suddenly we saw a white cloud rolling up from
the northeast and spreading over the heavens until they were completely
covered. Masses of dust came with the wind, which increased in force for
a time and then lulled a little.
"Suddenly the wind went around to the south and blew a gale, yes, a
hurricane. It started off at about thirty miles an hour, but before it
ended its visit it was blowing fully seventy miles an hour, at least
that is what the papers said next day. I am told it sometimes reaches a
velocity of one hundred miles an hour, and has even been known to exceed
one hundred and forty miles. These tremendous winds do a great deal of
damage. They drive ships ashore or overwhelm them at sea; they devastate
fields and forests and level a great many buildings.
"The barometer fell rapidly in the forenoon, as I have mentioned; it was
the thermometer's turn in the afternoon. The mercury stood at about
ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the forenoon, and it remained
so until the wind chopped around to the south. An hour after the change
of wind it stood at seventy degrees, and an hour later at fifty. I am
told that it sometimes drops thirty degrees in half an hour, but such
occurrences are unusual.
"This is a good place to say that sudden changes in the temperature are
very common in Australia, and that the change from midday to midnight is
far greater than any to which we are accustomed in the United States.
When we have a change of twenty or thirty degrees in a single day we
regard it as unusual. What would you say to one hundred and ten degrees
at noon and fifty degrees at midnight? This is quite common in the
interior of Australia and not at all infrequent on the coast.
"The thermometer runs very high in this country, and it is not at all
rare for it to indicate one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred and
thirty degrees Fahrenheit. One traveler has a record of one hundred and
thirty-nine degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-two in the
sun. I am told that in South Melbourne the thermometer once made an
official record of one hundred and eleven degrees in the shade and one
hundred and seventy-nine degrees in the sun.
"So great is the heat of the sun at midday that travelers generally try
to avoid it if they can do so. It is the plan of most people who travel
on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, to start before daylight, and keep
going until nine or ten o'clock. Then they halt and rest until three or
four o'clock in the afternoon, when they move on and continue until late
in the evening. Of course, the railways are not run on that principle,
as the locomotive is not supposed to be affected by the outside
temperature.
"But I am getting away from the southerly burster. The wind blew like a
hurricane. It kept up this rate for about three hours, filling the air
with dust so that we could not see across the street. Though the doors
and windows were tightly closed, the dust found its way inside the house
and was present everywhere; every article of furniture was covered with
it.
"We found it in the food, we found it in our beds, and the next day when
I opened my trunk to take out some articles of clothing, I actually
found that the dust had worked its way inside in a perceptible quantity.
One of the waiters of the hotel said, that always after a burster they
found dust inside of bottles of mineral water which had been tightly
corked up to the time of opening. I am inclined to doubt the truth of
his assertion, particularly as he offered no documentary evidence to
confirm it.
"Along towards night it came on to rain, and, oh, how it did rain! It
poured as though the flood gates of the skies had all been opened at
once. It rained not only cats and dogs, as the old expression has it,
but lizards, scorpions, snakes, and I don't know what else, at least it
did figuratively. The gutters of the streets were filled, and then we
were able to see how easy it was for a man, and especially for a child,
to be drowned in them. I have seen it rain hard in a good many places,
but am sure I never saw it rain harder than it did at the end of that
southerly burster.
"I remarked as much to a gentleman whose acquaintance we had made in
the hotel, and he answered:--
"'Oh, nonsense. That is no rain at all.'
"'No rain at all,' I answered. 'Do you have worse rains than this in
Australia?'
"'Why, certainly we do,' he replied. 'I have known it to rain so hard
that this would be a sprinkle by comparison. I remember the 25th of
February, 1873, when nine inches of rain fell here in Melbourne inside
of nine hours. An inch of rain in an hour is a good deal, isn't it?'
"Ned and I admitted that it was, and then our informant continued:--
"'I happened to be in Newcastle early in 1871, when they had the
greatest rainfall that I ever saw or heard of in any country. In less
than three hours ten and a half inches of rain fell, and the story was
that it was so thick that the fishes in the harbor could not distinguish
between the rain cloud and the bay, and actually swam up half a mile or
so into the air. One man said that he had a barrel with both ends
knocked out, and the rain went in at the bung hole faster than it could
run out at the ends.'
"I asked the gentleman how long the storm lasted, and he said that
twenty-one hours elapsed between the beginning and the end of it, and
during that time twenty inches of water fell, and the streets of
Newcastle were like small rivers.
"The gentleman remarked, in conclusion, that it was a great pity the
rainfall was not distributed more evenly, both in time and amount, than
it is. Some parts of the coast get a great deal more rain than they
have any use for. The floods destroy a large amount of property, and the
superfluous rain flows away in the rivers, inundating large areas of
ground and doing more harm than good, but through the greater part of
the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground
becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the grasses wither, and the
whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is
no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain
fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent
of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. Cattle and sheep
perished by the million, of starvation and thirst. The production of
grain fell off enormously and the whole country was very seriously
affected.
"Ned asked if no remedy had ever been found or proposed for this state
of affairs.
"A remedy had been suggested, said the gentleman, which would save herds
of cattle and flocks of sheep, but it would not save from destruction
the crops in the fields.
"'What is that?' Ned asked.
"'It is a system of storing water throughout the interior of the country
so as to save the precious fluid when the rainfall is excessive. There
are many places, great numbers of them, where nature has so formed the
ground that the storage of water would be comparatively easy. I have
already begun it on my sheep run, and other sheep owners have done the
same thing. It is an expensive work, but I believe it will pay in the
end.'
"'There are three places on my land where broad valleys terminate at
their lower ends between hills forty or fifty feet high. Now, by
building a dam from one of these hills to the other, I can flood any one
of these valleys to any depth I choose up to the height of the hills. It
was only recently that I finished work at one of these places, and I
have gangs of men busy with the other two. For the present I shall make
my dams thirty feet high, and this will give me at each of the three
places a lake of fresh water with about forty acres of surface area. If
I can fill these lakes every winter with water, I think I will have
enough to keep my sheep through the dry season, after making liberal
allowance for loss by evaporation and in other ways. Of course, such a
system of storing water is only practicable where the owner of a place
has sufficient capital for the purpose. The poor man, with his small
flock of sheep, can hardly undertake it.'
"'Preliminary surveys have been made in places where it is proposed that
the colonial governments should build extensive works for saving water
on a grand scale. The government would be repaid, in part at least, by
selling the water to private landholders in the same way that water is
sold in California, New Mexico, and other parts of the United States. I
am confident that you will see a grand system of water storage in full
operation in Australia before many years.'"
While on the subject of rainfall, Harry asked Ned if he knew where the
heaviest annual rainfall in the world was.
Ned said he did not know, but he thought that Dr. Whitney might be able
to inform them.
The question was appealed to the doctor, who paused a moment, and then
said that "what might be considered a heavy rain in one place would be a
light one in another. In Great Britain, if an inch of rain fell in a day
it was considered a heavy rain; but in many parts of the Highlands of
Scotland three inches not infrequently fall in one day. Once in the isle
of Skye twelve inches of rain fell in thirteen hours, and rainfalls of
five and seven inches are not uncommon. Thirty inches of rain fell in
twenty-four hours at Geneva, in Switzerland, thirty-three inches at
Gibraltar in twenty-six hours, and twenty-four inches in a single night
on the hills near Bombay.
"The heaviest annual rainfall on the globe," continued the doctor, "was
on the Khasia Hills, in India, where six hundred inches, or fifty feet,
fell in a twelvemonth. Just think of it; a depth of fifty feet of water
yearly, and of this amount five hundred inches fell in seven months,
during the southwest monsoons."
"How do they account for such heavy rains?" Ned asked.
"It is accounted for," the doctor replied, "by the abruptness of the
mountains which face the Bay of Bengal, from which they are separated by
low swamps and marshes. The winds arrive among the hills heavily charged
with the vapor they have absorbed from the wide expanse of the Indian
Ocean. When they strike the hills and are forced up to a higher
elevation, they give out their moisture with great rapidity, and the
rain falls in torrents. As soon as the clouds have crossed the mountains
the rain diminishes very much. Twenty miles further inland it drops
from six hundred to two hundred inches annually, and thirty miles
further inland it is only one hundred inches. The same conditions
prevail to a certain extent in Australia. The mountain chains are near
the coast. On the side next the ocean there is a liberal rainfall, but
on the other side, towards the interior, the rainfall is light. As the
clouds charged with vapor come from the sea to the mountains they yield
their moisture freely, but, after passing the mountains, they have
little left to yield."
The burster died away along in the evening, and, though the streets were
wet in many places, our friends went out for a stroll. During their walk
their attention was naturally drawn to the sky, which was now bright
with stars. Naturally, their conversation turned to the difference
between the night skies of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which
had not escaped their observation during their voyage from the east
coast of Africa down to the Equator, and thence in the Southern Ocean.
On this subject Harry wrote at one time in his journal as follows:--
"We found the famous Southern Cross a good deal of a disappointment. In
the first place, it requires a considerable amount of imagination to
make a cross out of it; very much more than is needed to make 'The Great
Dipper' out of the constellation so called in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Southern Cross consists of three stars of the first magnitude, one
of the fourth magnitude, and three of the fifth, and, look at them
whichever way you may, you can't make a real cross out of them, either
Greek or Roman. Before I investigated the subject, I thought the
Southern Cross was over the south pole, but found it is not so. The
constellations of the Southern Hemisphere altogether are not as
brilliant as those in the northern one. If the principal object of a
traveler in this region is to see the heavens, he had better stay at
home.
"An interesting feature of the southern heavens is 'The Magellan
Clouds,' two white spots in the sky like thick nebulæ of stars. They are
nearer to the pole than the Southern Cross is, and are much used by
mariners in taking observations. Quite near the pole is a star of the
fifth magnitude, called 'Octantis,' and this also is used for
observation purposes. It isn't so brilliant, by any means, as the pole
star of the north, which is of the second magnitude; and, by the way,
that reminds me of what Dr. Whitney told me in the desert of Sahara,
that what we called the polar star in the north is not directly over the
pole, but nearly a degree away. The real polar star is a much smaller
one and stands, as we look at it, to the left of the star, which I had
always believed to be the proper one."
Melbourne has a Chinese quarter like San Francisco and New York, and our
friends embraced an opportunity to visit it. They found the shops
closely crowded together and apparently doing an active business. There
were temples, shops, and a good many stores, some of them very small and
others of goodly size. The sidewalks were thronged with people, mostly
Chinese, and they hardly raised their eyes to look at the strangers who
had come among them. Our friends took the precaution to be accompanied
by a guide, and found that they had acted wisely in doing so. The guide
took them into places where they would have been unable to make their
way alone, and where, doubtless, they would have found the doors closed
against them.
The Chinese are very unpopular in Australia and in all the colonies. The
laws against them are decidedly severe, from a Mongolian point of view.
Every Chinaman landing in Victoria must pay fifty dollars for the
privilege of doing so, and after getting safe on the soil he finds
himself restricted in a business way, and subject to vexatious
regulations. John is satisfied with very little and he usually manages
to get it. He is a keen trader and always an inveterate smuggler. He is
very skillful in evading the custom house, and as soon as one trick is
discovered he invents another and his ingenuity seems to be boundless.
One of the industries in which the Chinese excel is that of market
gardening. In driving in the suburbs of Melbourne, our friends observed
numerous market gardens cultivated by Chinese, and in every instance
they remarked that the cultivation was of the most careful kind. John
can make more out of a garden than anybody else. He pays a high rental
for his ground, but unless something very unusual happens he is pretty
sure to get it back again, with a large profit in addition.
In some of the colonies the restrictions are more severe than in others.
In New South Wales the laboring class of white men are politically in
control of the legislature, and have enacted anti-Chinese laws of great
severity. The tax upon immigrant Chinese in that colony is one hundred
pounds sterling, or five hundred dollars. The naturalization of Chinese
is absolutely prohibited, and ships can only bring into the ports of New
South Wales one Chinese passenger for every three hundred tons of
measurement. The restrictions in regard to residence and trading are
very severe. The country is laid out into districts, and in each
district not more than five trading Chinese are allowed to live and
transact business. Steamers and sailing vessels having Chinese stewards
or sailors on board are subject to seizure and fines on their arrival at
Sydney, and so great have been the annoyances to this class of vessels,
that they have been compelled to leave in some other port, before coming
to Australia, all their Chinese employees.
The hostility to Chinese labor in Australia is similar to that on the
Pacific coast of the United States, and in the States of the Rocky
Mountain region. It will doubtless increase as time goes on, as it
increased in the United States, until it culminated in the Chinese
Exclusion Act of a few years ago. Eventually, the Chinese in Australia
will be shut out from all occupations, and expelled or excluded from the
country. A good many intelligent Australians deprecate the hostility to
the Chinese, but when it comes to voting, this class of citizens is in
the minority.
During a part of the gold rush, great numbers of Chinese found their way
to the mines, where they were perfectly contented to work in abandoned
mines and wash the earth, which had already been washed by the white
men. Owing to the prejudice against them and the likelihood of
interference, they rarely took up fresh claims, but contented
themselves with what the white man had left. Even this form of work was
considered an encroachment by the white miners, who frequently attacked
the Mongolians and drove them out at the point of the pistol. Many of
these attacks were accompanied by bloodshed, and if the history of
Australian mining were written in full, it would contain many a story of
oppression, accompanied with violence.
Our friends made a visit to the famous lake district of Victoria, where
they found some very pretty scenery, and from the summit of one hill
counted no fewer than fifteen lakes, some of them of no great size,
while the largest measured ninety miles in circumference. Harry made
note of the fact that this largest lake was called the Dead Sea. It is
said to be not as salt as the famous Dead Sea near Jerusalem, but it is
a great deal salter than the ocean, and no fish of any kind lives in it.
"I asked a resident of the neighborhood," said Harry, "if they had ever
tried the plan of putting fish from the ocean into this Australian Dead
Sea. They said they had done so, but the fish thus transported always
died in a few hours, and the experiment of stocking the lake had been
given up long ago.
"A curious thing that we found regarding the lakes in this part of
Victoria," Harry continued, "is that some of them are salt and some
fresh, and sometimes the salt lakes and the fresh ones are quite close
to each other, and on the same level. We were puzzled how to account for
the peculiarity and tried to learn about it. How the circumstances
happened, nobody knows exactly, but the theory is that the salt in the
salt lakes comes from the drainage of the rocks, and as the lakes have
no outlets, the superfluous waters are carried off by evaporation. They
told us that in summer these lakes sink a good deal below the level of
other times of the year, and when they did so the ground left dry was
thickly encrusted with salt, which the people gathered in large
quantities. The market of Melbourne is supplied with salt from these
lakes, and you can readily understand that it is very cheap.
"Another peculiarity of this part of Victoria is the large quantities of
potatoes that are grown there. The land often yields from twenty to
thirty tons of potatoes to the acre, and an acre of ground for raising
potatoes will frequently sell for four hundred dollars, while it will
rent for twenty-five dollars yearly. Most of the coast ports of
Australia, including the great ones of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney,
are supplied with potatoes from this region.
"The potatoes are among the finest we ever saw. They are large, rich,
and mealy, and when properly cooked they are simply delicious. No other
part of Australia can compete with this district in potato cultivation.
The excellence of this vegetable is supposed to come from the volcanic
nature of the soil. All the country round here was once in a high state
of ebullition, and the lakes I have mentioned are the craters of extinct
volcanoes."