_HOMEWARD BOUND_
I
“_TWENTY YEARS AFTER_”
Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the
morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the
sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world
brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that
our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail
the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the
Ballande liner _St. Louis_.
We had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by
day, and cribbage by night. In the after saloon, an apartment measuring
about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us—three men and the
wife of a mining superintendent in Pam. The miner was one of the good
old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and
the possessor of one of the most luxuriant vocabularies I have ever
had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. One night, I
remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from
her moorings and gone ashore or whether the Kanaka crew had mutinied.
It turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and
was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague
before the quarantine was over. He knew that there had been fourteen
deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and
he was considerably scared. When he told us that the rat was alive I
began to laugh, whereupon he turned the stream of his eloquence upon
me. He literally coruscated with profanity, and the more his adjectives
multiplied the louder I laughed, and only the influence of my stable
companion, a pearl-sheller and diver from Thursday Island, who had been
exploring the ocean floor round New Caledonia, prevented a breach of our
harmonious relations.
When I got my breath and the miner lost his, I explained that the fact of
the rat being alive proved it to be absolutely harmless. It was indeed
a guarantee that there was no plague on the ship. If it had been dead
and the sanitary authorities had got to know of it, it might have got
us another twenty days’ quarantine. Finally, it came out that the rat
had bitten the miner’s toe, and, as he believed, inoculated him with the
plague. I suggested that whiskey was the best antidote for anything of
that sort and so the proceedings terminated amicably.
My friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land
and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too
picturesque to be printable. We had travelled together all the way from
Noumea, and made friends before the _St. Antoine_ had left the wharf.
We had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the
freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. I never travelled with a
better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world I
hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during
that evil time.
I have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship.
I had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won
education and culture of a sort disappeared, and I found myself thinking
the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’
boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse,
blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not
permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. The man who is found
out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering
irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of
such was our conversation on the _St. Antoine_ and the _St. Louis_; not
exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true
description of men and things.
On the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk
and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at
North Head, I said to him:
“Well, I’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into
civilisation again.”
“I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe
civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many
most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously
enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and
I had had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New
Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back
to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which
brings me to my second memory.
[Illustration: The Quarantine Station, North Head, Sydney.]
For nearly a month we had been living on food that a Kaffir in the
Kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on
board the _St. Louis_ we had eaten dirt of many French descriptions.
Everything was dirty. Not even the insides of the loaves were clean. The
galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a
whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of
a starving man. The cook was to match. The steward who waited on us was
willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself
and his crockery. The chief steward on French ships is called _maître
d’hôtel_, and by this title we addressed him. On shore we should have
said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the _St. Louis_ he
was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was
open to judicious bribery.
We had worried through our last dirty _déjeûner_ on board, and
preparations were being made for getting the anchors up. The captain
and the mate had each put on a clean collar, and the chief engineer
was wringing his hands and dancing about the forecastle because the
donkey-engine had gone wrong and only fizzed feebly when it should have
been getting the cable in.
“Well, thank God,” I said to my diver friend, “we shall have a decent
dinner to-night! You are going to dine with me at the Australia. We’ll
have a real cocktail at the bar, only one, for it won’t do to spoil a
precious appetite, then we’ll eat our way through the menu and drink
champagne. Looks like heaven, doesn’t it?”
This is of course only an expurgated version of what I really said. His
reply consisted of a finely embroidered comparison between the Australia
Hotel and the _St. Louis_, calculated to start every rivet in her hull.
Well, we got away from our anchorage and were towed up to Sydney. We took
two of the finest appetites on the Australian continent up with us. We
had that cocktail. We sat down in the dining-room of the Australia at a
table covered with the first clean table-cloth we had seen for a month
and glittering with polished glass and shining silver. The dinner was
as good a one as you will get anywhere between Sydney Harbour and King
George’s Sound—and we couldn’t eat it! We fooled about with the courses,
trying to believe that we were hungry and having a real treat, but it
was no good. We had lost our taste for clean, well-cooked food, and our
palates and digestions were hopelessly vitiated. Course after course went
away hardly touched. We said many things to each other across the table
in decently lowered tones, and ended by satisfying our hunger and thirst
with bread and butter and champagne!
After dinner I renewed my acquaintance with the Doctor and the purser of
the steam-roller _Alameda_, and they imparted the unwelcome information
that the regular liners were not booking any passengers from Sydney lest
Melbourne and Adelaide, Albany and Perth might refuse them admittance,
or, at any rate, decline to take passage in a ship from a plague port.
Moreover, it was possible that Sydney passengers might be quarantined at
every port. Personally, I had had all the quarantine I wanted, and so
I was not sorry to accept the other alternative which was to go across
to Melbourne and Adelaide by train, and thence by a boat to Freemantle.
This would give me time to have a glimpse at Western Australia before
picking up the Messagerie liner at Albany. Unhappily, as I have said, we
ran up against the plague again at Freemantle, and the inevitable delay,
combined with the very leisurely gait of the West Australian trains, made
it just impossible for me to visit the gold-fields without missing my
steamer.
One of the first people to welcome me back to Sydney was my very good
friend and fellow-voyager from Honolulu, the Accidental American, and
with him and his wife I travelled to Melbourne.
After we had passed the customs and changed trains and gauges at Albury
the journey began to take on a new, or, rather, an old interest for me.
Twenty years before I had tramped up through the bush from Melbourne to
the Murray after taking French leave of the lime-juicer in which I had
made my first miserable voyage from Liverpool to Australia. I had halved
the fifteen shillings, with which I started, with a penniless “old chum”
in exchange for his company and experience, and then turned the other
seven and sixpence into about seventy pounds, and, on the strength of my
wealth, travelled back to Melbourne first-class.
Now I was doing it again, and as the express swung past the little
station, which I had reached after an all-night tramp across the ranges,
I found it to be a good deal less changed than I was. Indeed, save for a
few new houses scattered about the clearing, it was just as it was when I
pitched my swag down on a bench before the hotel, put my blackened billy
beside it, and ordered my last breakfast in the bush.
At Melbourne we put up at Menzies, and one afternoon I took my friend
down to Spencer Street to pay a visit to the hotel that I had last
stayed in—the Sailors’ Home. Here again nothing was altered. The very
cubicle I slept in twenty years before looked as though I had only just
turned out of the little blue-and-white counterpaned bed, and outside my
yester-self, to coin the only word that seems to fit, was loafing about
in beerless and penniless idleness “waiting for a ship.”
“There I am as I was,” I said; “how do you like me?”
“Not a little bit, Griff,” he replied in the terse speech of his
fortuitously native land. “I guess if you were to come like that among
the friends you have now you’d look mighty like a dirty deuce in a new
deck of cards.”
The next morning I went over to Williamstown to have a look at the scene
of my old escapade, the only one, by the way, which ever brought me into
unpleasant relations with the police, for in those days breaking your
indentures was a matter of imprisonment. Happily they did not catch me. I
found the old Railway Hotel, known, aforetime to officers and apprentices
as the Hen and Chickens, since it was kept by a dear old Scotchwoman
assisted by four charming daughters with one or all of whom every
apprentice in port was supposed to be in love. It was through the kindly
offices of one of them that I had saved my kit and dodged the police.
I sat in the little parlour on the same sofa I had sat on that memorable
night; opposite was the same old piano on which one or other of our
charmers used to accompany our shouting sea-songs, and there beside it
was the little cupboard in the wall in which my superfluous wardrobe had
been stowed away. Not a thing was altered, I believe the very table-cloth
was the same, and the patch of vacant ground opposite, across which I had
bolted at the penultimate moment to catch the last train to Melbourne,
was still unbuilt on; and there was I, still a wanderer, though of a
different sort, wanting only the old faces and the old voices to be able
to persuade myself that the twenty changing years had begun with the last
night’s dream and ended with the morning’s awaking.
II
_DEMOS AND DEAR MONEY_
No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points
of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must
confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second.
Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was
his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket
and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general
with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes
and the gradual fading of the “golden dreams of trustful twenty,”—or
eighteen, to be more exact.
In those days I was, almost of necessity, a practical democrat living
in a democracy which neither had the time nor the inclination to bother
about politics; but now many experiences in many lands had taught me that
democracy of the political sort is more pleasant to read about than to
rub shoulders with!
America has an aristocracy of blood, brains, and money which looks with
open contempt upon politics, and has no more connection with politicians
than is involved in the payment of bribes by its agents. Australia has no
such aristocracy, and everybody apparently goes into politics. In America
democracy is a political fiction, and the person whom political advocates
and managers call the working man is kept in his place by methods more
or less moral but still effective. The real rulers of the United States
believe, with Bismarck, that popular government of a country resembles
control of a household by the nursery.
In Australia the democracy really does rule. It is the worst-mannered
country that I have ever travelled through, I mean, of course, as regards
the people you are brought into contact with in the ordinary course
of travel. Every man is as good as another unless he happens to be an
official, and then he is a good deal better—in his own opinion, and much
worse in that of the wanderer from other lands.
Of course one meets, as I did, just as charming people in Australia
as you do anywhere else, but these are the exceptions. The American,
as I found him, no matter what his rank in life, was a born gentleman,
kindly and courteous, yet prompt and practical, and just as nice a fellow
whether he was inviting you to a banquet or giving you a shave.
Now, with all due deference to Miss Australia’s many physical and mental
charms and her rapidly increasing stature, I venture to suggest that
she would not be the worse for a few lessons in social deportment. At
present she appears to be rather in danger of becoming the tomboy of the
international nursery. The chief trouble with her seems to be that she is
so desperately anxious not to appear servile that she forgets to be civil.
One cause of this singular lack of manners in the conduct of every-day
affairs may be found in the fact that the vast majority of parents—and
particularly those belonging to the so-called working-class—consider that
the end and aim of their children’s education should be the obtaining of
“a good government billet.” The natural result is the creation of a huge
army of officials who have never had any training in the social ways
of the world, who know little or nothing of business in the wider sense
of the term, and whose education compels them either to do everything
according to official routine or to leave it undone.
The fact is that Australia is beginning to suffer from too much
government. It is the most over-governed commonwealth in the world.
As every old Colonial knows, it is the interest of a large majority
of the voters to have a governmental machine with as many wheels in
it as possible. There is a curious likeness here between the middle-
and lower-class Australian, if I may be pardoned for using such a
heretical word as class in such a connection, and the Frenchman of the
same social grade. To both the highest ideal of personal ambition is
well-paid employment under government with a pension to follow; whence
it comes that both these utterly dissimilar nations are cursed with an
ever-increasing generation of office-seekers whose only object in life is
to live as well as possible out of the taxes.
The Australian Commonwealth is composed of young and lusty nations
which have bred a magnificent race of men and women; but they have also
developed a form of government which is far too broadly based upon
that specious absurdity, the equality of man. In fact, in Australia,
they have gone farther, for another tenet of their political creed is
the equality of women with each other and with men. One of the natural
results of this is that, although the best sort of Australian wife is
almost invariably the political ally of her husband, her housemaid and
her cook and washer-woman, who of course greatly outnumber her and are
much more receptive of the wild-cat theories of the demagogue, have votes
also, and use them—frequently with weird effect. Education, experience,
social standing, and personal character go for nothing. A vote is a vote,
no matter who gives it. In fact this fundamentally hopeless system is
worked out to such a deplorably logical extremity that those women who,
through misfortune or intent, have crossed the borders of what we call
here respectable society have the lodger-vote in Australia. This fact
is, I believe, unique in the records of democracy from the days of Cleon
until now.
It is, of course, only in the ordinary development of human affairs that
such a system of election should not produce the best of all possible
rulers.
Some time after my return to England I wanted to write an article for an
English daily newspaper on the subject of Australian Politics. The editor
declined to have anything to do with it. He thought I was, as they say,
talking through the back of my hat, until I asked him whether he thought
the Australian politician was anything like the men whom he associated
with Downing Street? He seemed to think that they were about on the same
level, I then asked him whether he could conceive Lord Salisbury, Lord
Rosebery, and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain playing poker with travellers and
strangers in a London club, and then having to be telegraphed to by the
said strangers for the money they had lost to them? He said he couldn’t.
I said it was a fact, and so it is. That is the difference between
Imperial and Colonial politics and politicians—from which it will be
seen that there is no comparison to be drawn between the more or less
efficient statesmen whom we manage somehow to get into power in this
country, and the person whom the male and female votes of the Australian
Commonwealth puts into office over there.
Some one once said that any government is good enough for the people
who can stand it. That is true of all countries, and it is so in a
peculiar sense of the empire which all good Englishmen hope will some
day develop out of the newly-made Australian Commonwealth. But before
that happens Australia will have to evolve an aristocracy of some
sort. The old territorial magnates of twenty-five and thirty years ago
have been gradually squeezed out. Some of them, the fortunate ones who
located themselves on well-watered territories, and others who found
minerals under their sheep pastures are still the highest class of
Australian society. The rest have seen their estates eaten into by the
cockatoo selector and the person who went out with an assisted passage
to a free grant of land in the hope of being bought off or selling his
“improvements.” This process almost destroyed the best aristocracy
that Australia could have possessed, and the democratic vote finally
wrecked it, for your true democrat never sees further than the day after
to-morrow.
In fact, his political horizon is usually bounded by the next sunset,
and the natural result has been that the balance of political power in
Australia has been transferred from those who have put brains, capital,
and enterprise into the country, to those who had nothing but votes to
invest—and votes to-day are very cheap in Australia.
The logical outcome of such a condition of affairs is that what the
uneducated and irresponsible majority want they get. It is not a question
of general utility or national prosperity. If the government of a colony
does not do what the more ignorant mass of voters want, that government
has either to give in or get out. As a rule ministers give in that they
may stop in, because places are snug and salaries liberally proportioned
to the labours which earn them.
The observant wanderer picks up proofs of this all the time that he is
travelling, and the most significant of these is found in the very thinly
veiled hostility of the various colonies towards each other. If you are
in Sydney you must not say too much in praise of Melbourne; just as,
when you are in New York it isn’t wise to say too much about Chicago;
or, if you happen to be the guest of a club in San Francisco, you had
better not descant too eloquently on the culture of Boston. Still, in
the United States there is a healthy and unrestrained rivalry between
these and many other cities. There is free trade from Maine to Mexico,
and from New Orleans to Talama. In fact, as an American Senator once
said in defence of the first tariff, America within its own borders is
the biggest free-trading country in the world. For instance, throughout
the length and breadth of the United States you can communicate with
other people by letter or telegram on the same rate. Now, when I got to
Albany, Western Australia, I found that I owed a small account of one and
sixpence to a firm in Sydney. The money order cost me two and ninepence.
Again, all over the civilised world, saving Australia, a Bank of England
note is worth either its face value or little more. It happened that when
I landed in Sydney I had £80 in £10 Bank of England notes. I went to two
or three banks to get them changed, and I found that I could only get
gold for them at a discount of two and sixpence on the £5, or £2 in all.
I then went to the Comptoire d’Escompt, in Pitt Street, and got my £80
changed into English gold for five shillings.
When I came to inquire into the matter further I found that the
Australian banks had entered into a sort of conspiracy to defraud the
unsuspecting traveller who ventures to bring the best paper currency in
the world into the Australian colonies. For instance, you pay a deposit
into the Sydney branch of an Australian bank, you take its notes for the
amount that you may need in travelling, say, from Sydney to Melbourne,
and when you present those notes at a branch _of the same bank_ you
are charged two and a half per cent. for cashing them. In other words,
the bank goes back on its own paper to the extent of five shillings
on the £10-note. This seems bad enough, but my friend the Accidental
American told me of something even worse. He was representing one of
the biggest manufacturing firms in the United States. Their credit was
as good as gold anywhere. He paid a deposit in Auckland into the Bank
of New Zealand, believing that his cheque would be good for its face
value throughout the colonies, but when he tried to draw cheques on the
branches of the Bank of New Zealand in Australia he was charged two and a
half per cent. discount!
I once had a similar experience in the Transvaal, but that was only
what one might have expected under the then governmental conditions, I
was in a hostile country and I didn’t look for anything better, but to
run up against the same swindle in a British colony was somewhat of a
shock. After that, when I wanted any money on my letter of credit, I took
gold because I didn’t see the force of giving English paper at par for
colonial paper at two and a half per cent. discount.
I also noticed that if you complain about this sort of thing in Sydney
they put the blame on Melbourne, and if you are travelling further,
Melbourne puts the blame on Adelaide, and so on, and from Adelaide they
will refer you back to Auckland, while Perth will tell you that it is the
only really honest city in all Australasia.
There is, however, one subject upon which all the Australian colonies
appear to be absolutely agreed. This is the relative importance of work
and play. They mostly play at work and work at play, especially the
officials. Australia seems to me to have almost as many legal holidays
as you find feast-days in Spain, and an Australian would as soon go to
work on a holiday as a member of the Lord’s Day Observance Society would
go to a music-hall on a Sunday, unless, of course, he happened to be on
the Continent. Still there is a considerable difference between the
amount of work which you can get done in the several capitals of the
Commonwealth.
I came home with a man who might be described as the Universal Provider
of Australia, and he told me that he could do more business in Melbourne
in a day than he could in a week in Sydney, or in a fortnight in Adelaide
or Perth. My American friend told me that he could do more business in
the States in an hour than he could do in a day anywhere in Australia.
One reason for this, no doubt, is the climate. “That tired feeling”
is very prevalent, and it affects the native-born much more than the
home-born. In fact, British-born parents at fifty and sixty have more
energy than their sons and daughters have at thirty and forty. All the
conditions in Australia are against indoor work, and in favour of outdoor
play. Hence the new Commonwealth’s physical vigour is considerably in
excess of its mental energy.
Another very serious feature in present-day Australian life is the craze
for gambling. Of course most of us would like to make money without
working for it if we could, but with the Australian this desire amounts
to a perfect passion. Almost every other tobacconist’s shop is the
branch office of a bookmaker, and you can go in and plank your money and
take your ticket without the slightest fear of legal consequences. As
for mining stocks, you scarcely hear anything else talked about unless
there happens to be a horse race, a cycle meeting, or a cricket match
on. This is, of course, only one of the failings of youth, and in some
respects Miss Australia is very young. Still, now that she is growing
up into a nation, she would do well to put something of a curb on her
youthful ardour for playing. Sport of some sort is an essential both of
individual and national manhood, but colonies don’t grow into nations on
race-courses and cricket-fields any more than men can become permanently
wealthy by laying and taking odds, or speculating in futures.
III
_A COSMOPOLITAN COLONY_
It must not be gathered from what I have said in the last two chapters
that it is all play and no work in Australia. There is a great deal too
much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of
making real wealth; but still Australia boasts of splendid industries
which she is working to real and lasting profit.
While I was in Adelaide I renewed my acquaintance with a lady and
gentleman with whom I had come into contact by a lucky chance during
a coaching trip through the Blue Mountains and New South Wales, while
I was waiting for the steamer from Sydney to Noumea. During that trip
which, by the way, is one of the most delightful that you can take in any
of the Five Continents, I made the interesting discovery that they not
only knew me much better than I knew them, but that they had even named
their house after their favourite character in one of my stories. It was
through their kindness that I had an opportunity of realising by personal
experience the wonderful development of what bids fair to be Australia’s
greatest and, in the best sense, most profitable industry. The commercial
fabric of Australia rests upon wool, wine, wheat, and gold, and not the
least of these is wine.
One day I received an invitation to go and spend three days at
Seppeltsfield, which is the centre of one of the largest and most
flourishing wine districts in Australia. Here I became the guest of Mr.
Benno Seppelt, whose father was the pioneer of wine-growing in South
Australia. It was here, too, that I found the most brilliant triumph
in cosmopolitan colonisation that I had seen in the course of many
wanderings.
We went partly by train and partly by a coach, which landed us after
dark on a desperately wet night at a little township about eight miles
from the vineyard. Here, owing to a telegraphic mistake, we found no
conveyance to take us on to Seppeltsfield, so we put up at just such
a bush hotel as I had been wont to sleep at twenty years before when
I happened to have the money for bed and breakfast. The principal
attraction of the hostelry was a bagatelle-table on which Shem, Ham,
and Japheth might have practised. The bagatelle-room was evidently
the favourite lounge of the youth of the township, and the Accidental
American and I passed a most enjoyable hour playing under the instruction
of these gentle youths who would have been considerably astonished if
they had seen some of my friend’s performances on a billiard-table.
Everybody’s business in Australia is also everybody else’s, wherein
Australia does not differ very much from other parts of the world, and
the interest that our audience took in us was almost as flattering as
their absolutely unrestrained remarks on our play were occasionally the
reverse. We began as novices, and gratefully accepted the very freely
given hints as to our shortcomings and the way to improve our game. No
game, played on that ancient gambling machine, ever improved so quickly,
and the talk among our instructors, when they realised that we had been
fooling them, gave me the impression that they really regarded us as a
couple of sharps who had come down from Adelaide with the intention of
cleaning the country-side out.
The next morning the wagonette came over from Seppeltsfield and I
began to have my object-lesson in colonisation. The country here was
very different to what I had seen in the bush at other times and other
places. In fact the bush was bush no longer; all was rolling farmland,
cleanly cleared and well fenced, arable land alternating with orchards,
vegetable-gardens, and tree-belts disposed so as to give due protection
to the young crops and fruit-trees. Everything was trim, neat, and
prosperous-looking. The white houses, surrounded by their broad
verandahs, were very different to the selectors’ cabins which I had seen
up country on my last visit to Australia, and their surroundings were
rather those of an English country house hundreds of years old, than of a
country which forty years ago was uninhabited scrub.
Then came the vineyards. There are between two and three thousand acres
of them round Seppeltsfield, and every acre seemed to me to be as well
kept as an English nursery garden.
This is the history of them, and incidentally of the other wine-growing
districts in South Australia.
As long ago as 1829, which, for Australia, is quite ancient history, a
Mr. Robert Gouger began the colonisation of South Australia. His idea was
to parcel out the land into small lots and offer government assistance
to people who were ready to tackle the task of subduing the wilderness.
He failed to get the amount of capital to carry his ideas into practice;
the government, as governments did in those days, gave him the cold
shoulder, and, for the time being, his projects fell to the ground. Five
years later the South Australian Association was formed. Mr. Gouger was
the principal organiser of it. Then followed more correspondence with
the government, and more of the usual trouble with the circumlocutary
departments, and finally the South Australian Bill was brought before the
British Parliament. One of the chief supporters of the Bill in the House
of Lords was the Victor of Waterloo, and the first ship which landed a
company of emigrants on the shores of South Australia was named the _Duke
of York_. As these lines are being written, the Duke of Cornwall and
York is travelling through the new-born Commonwealth of Australia, as
the representative of the Emperor-King to give the Royal and Imperial
sanction to the youngest, and by no means the least vigorous of the
daughter-nations of the Empire. Curiously enough, too, it happened that
in 1838 Mr. George Fife Angus, Chairman of the South Australian Company,
brought out a company of two hundred German emigrants in a ship named the
_Prince George_.
After them came more Germans, then Frenchmen and Italians, Austrians,
Hungarians, Swedes and Norwegians, English, Scotch, and Irish; the scrub
began to disappear, and the wilderness to blossom, not exactly as the
rose, but as tobacco plantations. The tobacco was a rank failure in more
senses than one. It grew luxuriantly, but its flavour was such that it
was very much more fitted for poisoning the insects which settled on the
vines which succeeded it than for filling those functions which Calverley
has so exquisitely described.
[Illustration: The Storage House at Seppeltsfield, forty years ago.]
[Illustration: The Present Storage House through which nearly a million
gallons pass every year.]
In ’51, when the tidings of the great gold discoveries in Victoria were
drawing fortune-seekers to Australian shores from the uttermost ends
of the earth, the father of my host at Seppeltsfield came into the
Collingrove district and planted a vineyard which was about an acre
in extent. Not even the luckiest of all the argonauts of the fifties
ever pegged out a claim that yielded as much solid and ever-increasing
profit as that little patch of land in the South Australian scrub. In
those days Adelaide was a pleasant little town of about fifteen thousand
inhabitants; the capital of a province containing sixty-six thousand
souls. Now it is a stately city with between forty and fifty thousand
inhabitants, the capital of a colony with a population of four hundred
thousand.
Mr. Seppelt’s acre of vineyard has grown into more than two thousand, and
its produce has increased to eight hundred thousand gallons of matured
wine, to say nothing of vinegar and brandy. Every year two thousand tons
of grapes come in from the vinelands which lie for eight miles round
Seppeltsfield, to pass through the crushers and the winery into the great
vats of the cellars, and thence into the casks in which their juice is
shipped to lands which have never seen the Southern Cross.
After I had been through the whole process of Australian wine-making from
the grape-crushers—Australian wine is not trodden out of the grape by
the same process that still obtains in France, Spain, and Portugal—to the
laboratory in which samples of every kind of wine are tested in order
to make sure that the process of sterilisation is perfect; and after I
had tasted ports and sherries, Madeiras, Hocks, Moselles, and certain
specialities native to the vineyard, I said to my host the evening before
we had to start away in the grey dawn to catch the train at Freeling:
“I have learnt a good deal in the last week, but I want you to tell me
now how you managed to put your wines on to the European market and get a
sale for them against the competition of the French, German, and Spanish
wines which had had the vogue for centuries, their vineyards are all
within five hundred miles of London, for instance, and here you’re ten
thousand miles away. How did you manage it?”
This chapter is not an advertisement of Australian wines in general or
of the products of Seppeltsfield in particular, and therefore I shall
not say everything that he told me, but the nett result came to this:
When the wine-growing industry of Australia began to get a bit too big
for Australia’s consumption, and when it was found that varieties of
European vines produced wines of delicately differentiated flavours, it
became a question where markets were to be found for the products of an
industry which was growing much more rapidly than the native consumption.
When they found the solution of this problem the Australian wine-growers
did one of the best strokes of business that ever was done within the
confines of real business. By real business, I mean honest business.
Those who know a great deal more about the subject than I will see much
more meaning in those two words than perhaps I do. If Australian wine
was going to make its way in the markets of the world it had to be wine;
in other words, those who made it had to rely for their success and
for the interest on the capital and the brains that they had put into
the work upon a reversion to principles as old as the days of Solomon.
They had to make wine from grapes and nothing else. Their rivals in the
European markets had already learnt everything there was to be known
about fortifying and flavouring and chemical essences. They knew how,
for instance, German potato spirit could be turned into seven-year-old
brandy in a few weeks, and how sherry which had never been within a
hundred miles of a vineyard could be made such a perfect counterfeit of
the original fluid that a custom’s expert couldn’t tell the difference
between a cask worth sixty pounds and one worth six. They made many
failures, but in the end they not only got into the European markets, but
actually out-sold the home wine-growers who had had hundreds of years
start of them.
The Australian grape goes into the crusher as grape it comes out as
grape-juice, and as grape-juice it crosses the seas and makes its
appearance in bottles and flagons on our tables. It has been fermented
and sterilised and that is all, and it is not too much to say that,
saving these two necessary processes, when you drink a glass of
Australian wine, red or white, still or sparkling, you are actually
drinking the juice of the grape and nothing else; wherefore it may be
fairly said that the development of the Australian wine industry from
very small beginnings, as, for instance, from that one acre first planted
with vines at Seppeltsfield into the two thousand odd acres of to-day
yielding two thousand tons of grapes and eight hundred thousand gallons
of wine a year, is just about as good a proof as one can get that
honesty is sometimes the best policy even in business.
[Illustration: Grape-crushing by machinery at Seppeltsfield. The Grapes
from which Australian Wine is made are never touched by hand (or foot)
after the process of Wine-making has begun.]
Happily there was no speculation about the wine industry in Australia. If
this were also true of her gold-mines and her wool-crops she would be a
good deal richer and more honestly wealthy than she is.
I have seen French colonists in French colonies, Germans in German
colonies, and colonists of many nationalities under the alien flags of
the South American Republics, where, as a rule, they do a great deal
better than in their own colonies, if they have any, but never have I
seen such a perfect realisation of the ideal of cosmopolitan colonisation
as I saw during my stay at Seppeltsfield.
Day after day we drove out along broad roads through the pleasant
vineyards and farmlands which lay under the ranges that shielded them
from the hot north winds, and every hour or so we pulled up in a village
which might have been picked up by superhuman hands out of Germany, or
France, or Holland, Ireland, Scotland, or England, and just put down
there in the midst of what forty years ago was the South Australian
Wilderness.
My host was a German and the son of a German, and he has nine sons, all
good Australians, true sons of the soil, worthy citizens of the empire
who have found all that men seek to find within the wide confines of the
Pax Britannica.
I have a certain reason for using that phrase. I had just come from a
French colony which, in the national sense, could only be described as
a house divided against itself. There was the conflict between bond and
free, between French and English, Australians, Germans, Jews, naturalised
foreigners, and those who were still wondering which side of the
international fence it would pay them best to sit on, but in the pleasant
country about Seppeltsfield I found all the elements of international
unity and none of discord.
Within that eight-mile radius there was an epitome of Europe. In one
township you might have closed your eyes for a moment of forgetfulness,
opened them again and seen yourself in a German town not very far from
the banks of the Rhine. Having a little German at my disposal, I accepted
the illusion and found myself drinking good lager beer out of the same
old glasses that I had drunk it ten years before in the Fatherland,
and listening to just the same quaintly turned conversation that I had
listened to and joined in during a walking tour down the Valley of
the Weser and over the Hartz Mountains. The houses were built in the
same way, the same beer was drunk to the same toasts and with the same
old-world choruses, and I and the Accidental American played a game for
the championship of England and America on just such a kegel-bahn as you
could find behind any country hotel in Germany. I won because I didn’t
laugh quite as much as my opponent did.
At the end of another drive I found myself in France listening to the
soft speech of the Côte d’Or and drinking the wine of the country which
might have been sent that day by telegraph. A few miles farther on we
were in Ireland. I am not prepared to say that the mountain dew was
actually distilled on Irish hillsides, but it was very like the original
brew, and the brogue was as rich and pure as any that you would hear
between Dublin and Dingle Bay.
Men and women of many nationalities were there, founding their own
fortunes and helping to found those of an Empire of To-morrow,
but everywhere you heard the English speech, and recognised the
self-restraint and the quiet orderly manners of the Anglo-Saxon, for
though these colonists had come from many lands and had known many
different governments they had all come under the influence of that
magical power which the Anglo-Saxon alone seems to possess, the power of
making all men his fellow-citizens and friends if he can once get them
on his own land and under his own flag. In Europe these people would
have been enemies, actual or potential; in their own colonies they would
have been discontented and home-sick, longing only for the day of their
return with a trifling competence; here they were just neighbours working
out their destinies side by side on a soil that was common to all, and
under a rule which is perhaps the most perfect that the wit of man has
yet devised for the welding together of conflicting human interests. If I
could only have brought my good friend the Director of the Administration
of New Caledonia to Seppeltsfield, and taken him for a six days’ driving
tour through that cosmopolitan collection of townships, I think he would
have understood more completely than he did what I meant when I said to
him on the verandah of his house in Noumea the day before I sailed:
“The Latin nations have colonies, but they have not yet learnt how to
colonise.”
[Illustration: A Vineyard at Seppeltsfield, South Australia.]
I left South Australia with a regret that was fully equalled by the
pleasure with which I had taken leave of Noumea, and that is saying
a good deal. From Port Adelaide we trundled round the coast in an
exaggerated edition of the old steam-roller that had brought us across
the Pacific. The only interesting event on the six days’ passage was a
scare which the Accidental American innocently raised by developing a
sore throat and a little swelling of the glands of the neck. Of course
the rumour that he had brought the plague from Sydney went like wildfire
through the ship, and I, as his nurse, was looked upon with undisguised
suspicion. When I brought him up for a stroll on deck just before we
reached Albany our fellow-passengers very kindly gave us half the deck
to ourselves. I had tried to explain that the period of incubation was
twelve days at the outside, and that hence, as we were nearly a month out
from Sydney, we could no more have brought the plague from Port Jackson
than we could have done from San Francisco; but it was no good, and
when the sanitary officers came on board at Freemantle with the news
that the dreaded visitor had got there before us, I think nine-tenths
of the passengers would have been well content to see us walked off to
quarantine.
In the end the doctor passed us without a stain upon our sanitary
character, and our baggage was put into a lighter, tightly sealed up
and battened down, and then fumigated. One of our lady-passengers had a
pet canary in a cage and there was much discussion as to what should be
done with it. Its constitution would not stand fumigation, and yet the
law said that nothing was to go into the colony without either medical
examination or disinfection. I presume the Doctor must have compromised
either with his conscience or with the lady, for the last I saw of the
suspected bird was on the quay, where it was chirping a merry defiance
of sanitary regulations, on the top of a truck load of baggage which had
neither been inspected nor disinfected.
Sanitary officials seem to have the same kind of ideas all over the
world. In Noumea they burnt down the house of the first white man who
died of the plague, but they allowed his furniture to be sold by auction
and spread over the town. At Freemantle they fumigated your steamer
trunk and your Gladstone-bag, but they allowed steerage passengers to
walk off with swags and bundles which might have held any number of
millions of microbes for all they knew.
Western Australia is a very wonderful young country, and when it settles
down to real business and discovers that it is better to get gold than
to gamble in gold shares, it will do great things. It will also be the
better for the abolition of its ridiculous system of protection. Some
parts of it will one day be great fruit-growing districts and by way of
developing these the government impose a big duty on fruit from other
colonies, for instance, Tasmanian apples were selling in Perth and
Freemantle at a shilling a pound, although they can be brought across the
world and sold in London for fivepence. Meanwhile, the Westralian sells
his fruit at artificial prices, having no competition to worry about.
While the import duty enables him to put his prices up fifty per cent.
he is quite content to produce half what he could have done. In fact it
was this problem of protection which kept Western Australia aloof from
federation for such a long time. Some day, when intercolonial free trade
follows after federation, the Westralian will find his new conditions not
quite so pleasant, but a good deal more healthily stimulating.
Westralia is popularly described in other colonies as the land of sin,
sand, sore eyes, sorrow, and Sir John Forrest. Sir John Forrest was one
of the men who discovered it. He is now its premier. He also discovered
the gold-fields; and he has the loudest voice I ever heard even on a
politician. What his connection with his other alliterative titles of
his adopted land have been I could not discover. They are most probably
creations of the luxuriant fancy of other politicians who would be very
glad to have made as much out of the country as he has done.
Westralians are called by other colonials “sand-gropers,” and to this
they reply with fine irony by describing all other Australians as,
“T’other-Siders,” or “dwellers on the other side of Nowhere.” Young
nations are after all very like young children, they all possess the
finest countries on earth and it is only right that they should do so,
if they didn’t think so they would go somewhere else, and so new nations
would never get made.
On the whole I am afraid I must say that the new Australia did not quite
come up to the expectations that I had based on my memories of the old;
but I don’t suppose that fact will trouble Australia any more than the
lack of appreciation of a once distinguished poet and dramatist troubled
the Atlantic Ocean. One thing is certain, no country which breeds such
men and women as you find from Brisbane to Freemantle can help being
great some day; and when Miss Australia settles down a little more
seriously to work she will begin to grow very great indeed.
At Albany I found the long, white, graceful shape of the Messagerie
liner _Australien_ lying on the smooth waters of St. George’s Sound,
and in her I made as pleasant a homeward trip as the most fastidious of
globe-trotters could wish for. I have often been amused by the pathetic
appeals of untravelled Englishmen on behalf of British steamer lines.
Such an appeal usually ends with reflections on the patriotism of British
travellers who patronise foreign ships. The fact is that the boot is on
the other leg. Why are not the British companies patriotic enough to
make their boats as pleasant to travel in as French, and German, and
American boats are? Travellers whose journeys are counted by tens of
thousands of miles want to do their travelling as pleasantly as possible,
and the pleasantest ship to journey in, is the one that has the fewest
regulations. On the Messagerie boats you will find none that are not
absolutely essential to the proper discipline of the ship and the comfort
of your fellow-passengers. While you are on board you are treated as
a welcome guest, and not as an intruder whose presence is tolerated
because your passage money is necessary to make dividends. You are also
looked upon as a reasonable being, capable of taking care of yourself and
ordering your comings and goings within decent limits, not as a child
who mustn’t sit up playing cards after a certain hour, and who is not to
be trusted with the management of an electric light in the small hours
of the tropical night when you can’t sleep and want to read. In short,
the principal reason why experienced travellers prefer foreign lines to
British is simply the fact that they like to be treated as grown men
and women, and not as children or irresponsible lunatics. It is not a
question of patriotism at all, it is one of commercial consideration on
the one side and comfort and convenience on the other.
The first thing we heard when we reached Marseilles was the welcome news
that the tide of war had turned, and Mafeking was relieved.
Our company in the saloon was about half French and half English and
Australian, and a more friendly crowd it would have been difficult to
find afloat. We had had the usual concert the night before, and wound
up with the Marseillaise and God Save the Queen, and when we set up the
champagne for the last time in the smoking-room and drank to B.P. and his
merry men, the only man who declined to join in was, I regret to say, an
Irishman. He was as jolly a _compagnon de voyage_ and as good-hearted a
man as you would wish to meet in a ten-thousand-mile trip; but on that
particular subject he was a trifle eccentric.
When I left the _Australien_ I looked upon Yellow Jack, as I hope, for
the last time, for it ever a man was heart-sick of the sight of a piece
of bunting I was of that miserable little yellow oblong.
The next morning we took our places in the P.L.M. _Rapide_ and went
whirling away over the pleasant lands of Southern France, through Lyons,
Dijon, and Maçon, to Paris and thence to Calais in trains that were well
worthy to run over the same metals as the “South Western Limited,” and
the “Overland.”
Then came the usual bucketing across the Channel, and after that a crawl
of seventy-six miles in two hours and thirty-five minutes in a dirty,
rickety, first-class compartment on one of the alleged expresses of the
Amalgamated Crawlers. The splendid corridor train of the Nord had covered
the hundred and eighty-five miles between Paris and Calais inside four
hours; but that was in France. Still the “boat-express” did at last
manage to struggle into Charing Cross, and I found myself standing in the
familiar Strand once more. The thirty-thousand-mile trip was finished,
and Prisonland with all its new experiences and varied memories was
itself now only a memory.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Since my return, I find that there has been a recrudescence of this
fiscal foolishness in New York with an addition of personal persecution.
By the time these pages are in my readers’ hands the autocrats of the
inquisition will probably have heard something drop. To bully the
American Woman is too large an order even for the Great Republic.
[2] With true French economy the price of the chain is charged against
the convict’s “Succession”—_i.e._ any deferred savings that he may leave
behind him.
[3] _Les Sœurs de St. Joseph de Cluny._
THE END.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
End of Project Gutenberg's In an Unknown Prison Land, by George Griffith