conspicuous than in their public works. Lately, indeed, either money
has not been so plentiful or else the desire of building has been
less ardent, for many buildings have been left unfinished and in
very unsightly plight. But the Post-office _is_ finished, and is a
really magnificent building in its way. On the Legislative Council
and Assembly Chambers an incredible amount of pains and money must
have been expended, though perhaps with hardly adequate result.
The architecture of the public buildings generally, if not always
successful or in the best taste, is on the whole at least as good as
in the average of public buildings at home; though it is disappointing
to find that new requirements of climate have failed to inspire any
originality of style or design, such as one sees growing up naturally
and spontaneously in private houses, whether suburban villas or
station-houses in the bush.
But the institutions of the Museum, the Public Library, the
Acclimatisation Gardens, and the Botanical Gardens, are above all cavil
and beyond all praise. The last two in particular, aided as they are
by a favourable climate, promise before many years are over to equal
anything of the kind anywhere. Last and greatest of all is the great
Yan-Yean Reservoir, which from twenty miles off pours its streams into
the baths, fountains, gardens, and dusty streets of the thirsty city.
Every house has its water-meter, and the price is only a shilling for
a thousand gallons. Without this generous supply the suburbs would in
summer be a Sahara, with a few dismal, almost leafless, gum-trees,
instead of being brightened by pleasant gardens, enriched with English
as well as semi-tropical flowers and fruits. The stiff clay, which is a
quagmire in winter, dries up in summer like a sun-baked brick. Garden
lawns are with difficulty kept green by Yan-Yean water turned on, not
at intervals, but continuously through a perforated pipe. Yet the grass
two or three feet off is quite dry. The water escapes through the first
crack and is gone.
On the other hand, one soon experiences that a Circumlocution-Office is
a Victorian quite as much as a home institution. Goods of all kinds,
including passengers’ luggage, are brought up by railway from each
ship as it arrives, and discharged into a vast shed at the Melbourne
railway station; and as there is now a tariff on most manufactured
articles, nothing is allowed to leave the shed till it has been
more or less inspected. Many hours did it take to select my various
needles from this great bundle of hay, but it was not till my two
saddles turned up that any difficulties were made about releasing
them. On seeing them, a very young clerk in a cloth cap at a high
desk referred me to a white-haired superior official, who shook his
head and refused to let the saddles pass without an order from the
commander-in-chief of the shed, who inhabits an office at its extreme
end. Alas! the commander-in-chief, though the most courteous and
obliging of men (as were indeed all the officials with whom I had to do
that day), pronounced that I must ‘pass an entry’—I think that is the
expression—at the Custom-house. So to the Custom-house, a quarter of a
mile off—the ugliest erection that ever was built or left half-built—I
trudged. Going into a large hall I addressed a clerk, who gave me into
the care of another clerk, who took me downstairs, and introduced me
to a Custom-house agent, and then the real business began. Dictating
to him, I made an affirmation to the effect that the saddles were old
and for my own personal use, which affirmation having been, after one
or two unsuccessful attempts, made in precise accordance with the facts
of the case and duly signed, Custom-house agent, affirmation, and I
walked upstairs to the anteroom, and at length to the sanctum of some
high official, who after gently cross-examining me vouchsafed to append
his initials, whereupon Custom-house agent, affirmation, and I walked
downstairs again to the place whence we had come. I suppose I looked a
little weary—it was a piping hot day—at this stage of the proceedings,
for the Custom-house agent reassuringly remarked that it would not
take more than a quarter of an hour more, a statement hardly verified
by the result. The next step was for the Custom-house agent to make a
memorandum of the nature of my affirmation, to make a number of copies
thereof (I did not count how many, but there must have been at least
five), and to despatch them by messengers, whither or wherefore I know
not, nor why so many, unless they were tentative, in hopes of procuring
a favourable response from one out of many possible sources. Anyhow,
a sealed letter did at last arrive from somewhere; it was handed to
me; I left the building, made for the shed, and delivered it to the
commander-in-chief, who wrote and gave me another missive to the
white-haired clerk, who made it all right with the young clerk in the
cap, who gave me a pass-ticket, which I gave to my drayman, who gave it
to the porter at the yard gate, who allowed the dray to pass, and I and
my saddles were free.
III.
BALLARAT.
Two hours’ railway travelling will take you from Melbourne to Geelong,
over rich, flat, grassy plains, with scarcely a tree, nothing but
ugly posts and rails to break their outline. In summer these plains
must be parched and dreary beyond description; but it is May now, and
the autumn rains have made them green as an emerald and pleasant for
the eye to rest on. Geelong is scarcely worth stopping at, unless to
speculate upon why it is not Melbourne, and Melbourne it, as might
have been the case—so superior in many ways is its situation—if its
harbour bar had been cut through a few years sooner. During two
more hours’ railway you rise gradually, and emerge from a forest
of ill-grown, scrubby gums, upon a large, undulating, irregular
amphitheatre, surrounded by small hills. Seventeen years ago the
locality was scarcely ever visited except by blacks, for it was covered
with bush and unproductive. Now it is Ballarat, the fourth city in
Australia. A strange, irregular, uncouth, human ant-hill it is, with
its miscellaneous cells above, and its galleries beneath the ground.
You may walk two miles and more, from east to west or from north to
south, without getting fairly out of the town. The houses are of all
sorts, shapes, and sizes, generally not contiguous, and the majority
consisting of a ground-floor only. Most conspicuous are the hotels,
and the banks, glorying in stone fronts and plate glass, as befits
their dignity; for are they not suckers at the fountainhead, drawing
the golden stream which, joining other rills, waters the whole world
of commerce? Next door to one of these is perhaps a common log-hut, or
a two-roomed cottage of corrugated iron, or a large shop stocked till
its miscellaneous contents overflow through doors and windows, and are
hung on hooks and pegs outside. Next to this, perhaps, and still in
the heart of the town, may be an acre or two of ground covered with
disgorged gravel and mud, in the midst of which, and at one end of a
great mound twenty or thirty feet high, puffs and sobs a steam engine,
as it works the shaft and puddles the produce of the gold mine beneath.
It is easy to gain admittance to a gold mine, at least if the manager
is satisfied that you are not a spy, and are not interested in the
‘claim’ which lies nearest this one, and with which it probably is,
or will be as a matter of course, engaged in litigation as soon as
the workings of either approach the boundary between them. Boundaries
above ground are productive enough of disputes, but they are nothing to
boundaries under ground. The richest harvest reaped by the Victorian
bar is that of mining; cases and mining Appeals. But there is not much
to see in a mine. Down below I suppose it is not so very different
from a coal mine (for the gold is far too minute in quantity to be
visible), and not much cleaner. The operations at the surface consist
simply in stirring and washing the mud and gravel with water in various
ways till the gold settles at the bottom. But a good big panfull of
some two thousand pounds’ worth of the clean yellow gold is a pretty
thing to see for once.
But the strangest place in Ballarat is an unsightly piece of ground
on the slope of a hill, many acres in extent, which has been turned
over, heaped up, scooped out, drained, flooded, undermined, perforated,
shored up with timber, sifted, scarified, and otherwise tormented as
Mother Earth never was tormented before. It is the remains of the old
surface diggings, almost (if not quite) the first discovered, and the
richest in all Australia, but long since worked out, and now deserted
and dismal. It is a pity that no scribbling digger kept a journal
during the first year or two after gold was found. Generally speaking,
I believe the stories which are told of those days are strictly true.
The reality was so strange, so different from any other condition
of circumstances conceivable in this century, the crowds suddenly
collected were so miscellaneous, and at first so entirely emancipated
from all rule, precedent, or prejudice, that there was enough that was
original and ludicrous without having recourse to exaggeration and
caricature. I believe it is a fact, and no fiction, that a successful
digger had a gold collar made for his dog, that he, like his master,
might put aside his working dress and be magnificent for the rest
of his days. It is a fact that another rode through Ballarat with
his horse shod with gold. To keep a carriage and pair was the great
ambition of a digger’s wife. There was a woman near Colac who lived
in a common log-hut, with nothing but mud for floor, and a couple
of stools and a bench or two for furniture. Outside the hut was the
carriage, under a tarpaulin, and a pair of horses grazed near. For a
year or more she was constantly to be seen on the road to Geelong. Her
son drove, and she sat inside in silks and satins gorgeously arrayed, a
short pipe in her mouth, and the gin bottle reposing on the cushion by
her side.
One day at Ballarat a man rushed up to the police magistrate, his face
livid, and speechless with excitement, so that the magistrate began to
think he had just committed or witnessed a murder. At last he found
words to express himself. He had come upon a nugget so big he could
scarcely carry it, and dared not bring it in alone. Two or three of the
police went back with him to help him, and he brought it in in triumph,
followed by a procession of diggers. And indeed it _was_ a nugget. It
was about as big as a leg of mutton, and much the same shape, white
lumps of quartz sticking to it like so much fat. It weighed a hundred
and thirty-five pounds, and he was offered 5,000_l._ for it on the
spot. He refused to sell it, and took it home to England to exhibit
it. But it proved to be a nugget of expensive habits, and at last was
sold to pay for its keep and lodging, and the finder ended, as so many
finders of great nuggets ended, in poverty and wretchedness, and even
madness.
At Ararat, fifty-six miles beyond Ballarat, the gold-fields remain just
as they were left by the diggers; and the claims are more in working
order and less broken in than at Ballarat. Ararat is now a thriving
township, containing perhaps 2,000 inhabitants. Twelve years ago there
were 65,000 people there, digging or dealing with diggers. When the
‘rush’ began the stream of people and drays was continuous, the noses
of each team of bullocks close to the dray in front of them, for the
whole fifty-six miles, along a track on which, though the district is
a thriving one, you will now hardly meet anything on wheels once in
ten miles. Centuries may pass without obliterating the traces of these
diggings. There is a broad belt of ground, two or three miles long,
pierced by thousands of shafts thirty or forty feet apart, with mounds
of white sand and gravel beside them. Most of the shafts are oval, four
or five feet long, and about two or three wide. Little holes are cut
alternately in the nearest pair of opposite sides, to act as steps for
going up and down. Each shaft is neatly and cleanly cut, and as intact
as if freshly made. All are deserted now; only a few Chinamen remain,
laboriously gathering up the crumbs that are left, and contriving to
live and save money where an Englishman could not subsist.
There were comparatively few men, gentle or simple, in Victoria when
gold was first found who did not try their luck at digging for a
greater or less time. Nevertheless, though so short a time has elapsed,
it is hard to get a true conception of the state of things during
the height of the gold fever. No two men had the same experience.
One will tell you that nothing could be more quiet and peaceable and
orderly than a concourse of men upon a newly found gold-field; that
property and life were safe, and every man so eagerly and excitedly
absorbed in his work as scarcely to take his eyes off it while daylight
lasted, and impatient of nothing except interruption. Another will
say he never stirred after sunset without an open knife in his hand,
and will tell you (no doubt with truth) that hundreds, and even
thousands, disappeared, whether murdered for their gold, drowned in
a swollen creek, or lost and starved in the bush, no one knew or
cared to enquire; for in all that crowd who would miss a lonely and
friendless man? Not that the police, as far as their scanty numbers
permitted, were otherwise than most efficient. In general they were on
the best of terms with the diggers; and only in one serious instance,
the diggers at Ballarat, considering themselves aggrieved, made armed
resistance to the authorities. They formed an entrenched camp and were
not dispersed till as many as a hundred of their number had been killed
or severely wounded. If money came fast, it had to be spent fast too.
Actual famine was with difficulty averted during the first winter. The
country round was drained of supplies; provisions went up to fabulous
prices. The diggers could not eat their gold; and it cost 100_l._ a ton
to bring up flour from Melbourne, for the road was a quagmire like that
from Balaklava to Sebastopol, and ninety miles long instead of seven.
The carcases of the dead draught bullocks were alone sufficient to
indicate the track to one if not to two of the senses.
But it is a mistake to suppose that gold-digging has been throughout a
gambling occupation, offering a few prizes and many blanks, and pursued
only by reckless men. The big nuggets soon came to an end, and on the
other hand experience was gained, and digging became in the long run
a tolerably certain and steady occupation, at which a strong man able
to bear heat and cold, wet and fatigue, could in general make a pretty
steady income, though not often a large one. Many have risen from
comparative poverty to great wealth in Victoria, a few by owning sheep
stations, many by steady devotion to business, some without any real
exertion of body or mind, by the sheer accident of lucky speculations;
but I have never heard of a really wealthy man who became so by digging
for gold. Yet some have gone on persistently year after year, in New
South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand, when one field was worked
out travelling to another. For there was a strong fascination in the
freedom and romance of the life. I have seen the pale face of an
overworked waiter at a large hotel light up with enthusiasm as he spoke
of it. He had left England and come to Australia ill of consumption,
as a last chance to save his life. Idleness did not mend him, he said,
so off he went with the rest to the diggings. The first day his limbs
would hardly bear him, but each day he got a little stronger, till at
the end of four years he had saved 700_l._ and his life. He had been in
very different climates—in New South Wales, Victoria, and Otago—but,
strange to say, heat, cold, and wet only helped to cure him, and he
never even caught cold, he said, as long as he eschewed a house and was
faithful to canvas. Alas! in an unlucky hour he invested his savings
in township land; the place did not succeed, and in a few weeks his
investment was not worth as many farthings as he had given pounds for
it. And it was too late to begin again.
It is over now, the wonderful age of gold, as well as the primitive
pastoral age which preceded it. In place of diggers swarming like bees,
dignified steam-engines draw the gold from the earth, not for those
who toil with pick and spade, but chiefly for that throng of mining
brokers, and idle, disreputable speculators who crowd the pavement
of the Ballarat ‘Corner.’ Few make money by investing in mines. Of
those who do, most have secret information; for there is much trickery
mixed up with operations in mining shares, and hundreds have lost
by them the savings of more prosperous times. Victoria is no longer
the place for men with few possessions beyond youth and energy, and
with an antipathy to a high stool in a merchant’s office. Let not any
brilliant or laborious young Templar doubt but that Melbourne and
Ballarat solicitors, like English ones, have sons and sons-in-law, and
that there, as at Westminster, interest and connexion are useful, if
not essential, handmaids to brains and industry. Romance is at an end;
capital has reasserted its sway, and pride of purse is triumphant. It
needs must be so; and doubtless, on the whole, mankind gains. But it is
difficult to love humanity in the abstract, and tastes and convictions
will quarrel sometimes.
IV.
SQUATTING IN VICTORIA.
It sometimes happens that the commonest circumstances of life in
distant countries are scarcely realised at home because they are
too much matter of every-day experience to be spoken about. I doubt
whether people in England appreciate the fact that the greater part
of Australia is, in its natural state, for eight or nine months in
the year almost entirely destitute of water. To a new comer it sounds
strange to hear an up-country Squatter remark that he has no water on
his run yet, but he hopes he soon shall have. Although more rain falls
in Victoria than in most parts of England during the year, there are
hardly any springs, and few streams except the large rivers, which are
few and far between, which run for any considerable portion of the
year. Why the rain runs off so fast is not thoroughly explained, but
its seems there is an incrustation of the subsoil which prevents the
rain from penetrating to any depth. The creeks, as they are called,
leave water-holes, some of which never dry up through the summer; but
these, also, are far between; and so generally the first business
of a Squatter in new country is to construct tanks to receive the
rain-water from the roofs of his house and outbuildings, which is his
drinking-water, and very good water it is; and the second is to build a
dam from six to twenty feet high across the nearest hollow—for almost
every hollow is a water-course after heavy rain—and in this way to make
a reservoir containing water enough for his sheep to drink all the year
round, and be washed in at shearing time. A dam is as much an essential
appendage to a station as a barn is to a farmyard.
Probably it is this absence of moisture in the ground, and consequently
in the air also, which makes distant objects in Victoria so
marvellously clear, and gives such peculiarly brilliant colour to the
landscape where the conformation of the ground admits of a distant
view. I never saw such brilliant colouring anywhere in Europe. It is
the one redeeming feature, without which the scenery, except in the
mountainous districts, would be tame and dreary enough. The country
is seldom undulating, as in Tasmania. The trees are generally small,
stunted, and diseased, except on the ranges; the plains are almost
destitute of any trees at all, and vegetation is scanty, except in
early spring-time. There is a great plain extending for nearly a
hundred miles westward of Geelong almost without a break, so flat and
(unlike the fen country in England) so destitute of trees or other
objects high enough to break the line of the horizon, that at the
height of a dozen feet from the ground you may any day see a hill—and
not a high hill either—full forty-five miles distant as the crow flies,
looking not dim and misty, but a clearly defined blue patch upon the
horizon.
To most people there is something intolerably desolate and repulsive
in such a plain. Even to those who are most fond of open country it
must be depressing under certain circumstances, notably during a
rainy fortnight in winter, or on a hot-wind day in summer. But there
is something indescribably grand and enjoyable in the continual
contemplation of so vast a landscape. When the sun is high it is an
expanse of turf, green in winter and brown in summer; but as the
afternoon advances, earth and sky become faintly purple, and crimson,
and golden; the colours deepen from half-hour to half-hour, till the
sun sinks into its bed of turf in a gorgeous blaze of splendour.
There are several shallow lakes upon the plain, some very large, and
most of them salt. Coming suddenly upon one of them one evening from
behind some little sand-hills which concealed it, the margin for some
hundred yards in width dry and coated with mud and brine, no human
being or habitation visible, and the full brilliance of the setting sun
lighting it up, the scene was (except for the absence of mountains in
the distance) singularly like the landscape in Holman Hunt’s picture
of the ‘Scape-Goat.’ It is a pity that this kind of scenery is spoiled
by cultivation. Cut up into little pieces, a plain loses its vastness,
while its monotony is increased.
It is a pleasant life to have a station up the country (but not too
far up), at least for a man not over gregarious in his habits and
tastes, and whose mind is not set on those pleasures of town life
which seem to possess the greatest attractions for the majority of
mankind. It may be ten or twenty miles to the next station, or nearest
doctor, or post-office, or church: and the owner of the next station
may happen to be illiterate and uncongenial, the doctor generally
intoxicated when sent for, and the post-mistress so lonely and dull
that it is a necessity to her, poor thing! to read your letters and
communicate their contents to her friends. But nobody thinks much of
distance; there are plenty of horses, good or bad, and by going a
little further afield you may be better suited. Then people journeying
up the country drop in occasionally for a dinner and a night’s lodging.
If the visitor is at all presentable he is entertained with the best
the house affords. If he is a stock driver, or shepherd, or labourer,
he is entertained at the overseer’s or the men’s hut. There are rather
too many such visitors sometimes; nobody is ever turned away, and there
are idle fellows pretending to be in search of work and refusing it
when it is offered them, who go from station to station living upon
the Squatters. The house is generally comfortable enough nowadays,
usually built partly of bluestone, partly of wooden slabs, and with
only a ground floor, a single sitting-room, and a great deal of broad
verandah, which answers the purpose of a sitting-room in fine weather.
People are beginning to take pains with their gardens, and there is
generally a fair supply of vegetables to help down the mutton. There is
always good bread, and damper has long since vanished from civilised
regions. Near the house is the overseer’s cottage, and a little way
off is the men’s hut. The latter is usually only a log hut, made of
boards; it contains two rooms, a day-room and a dormitory, and looks
comfortless enough. The furniture is a bench or two, a table, and
perhaps a wooden arm-chair; and in the dormitory the only beds are
wooden bunks, like ships’ berths, built against the wall in two tiers.
The unmarried men about the station live here, perhaps half a dozen in
all. The head of the establishment is the cook, whose business it is to
keep the hut and prepare the food. In the old, rough days he needed to
be a man able to hold his own and preserve discipline, and if necessary
to prove himself the better man against anyone who complained of the
dinner. He is generally butcher and baker to the whole station. At a
short distance off is the wool-shed, the most important and imposing
building of all, where the sheep are shorn and the wool packed. And
there are a few outlying shepherd’s huts, each with its hut-keeper
(unless the shepherd is married), whose only business is to cook and
keep house for the shepherd, and occasionally lend a hand with the
sheep pens. They all get good wages. The shepherds get from 40_l._ to
50_l._ a year, and the hutkeepers from 30_l._ to 40_l._, and they get a
sheep a week between two, and the other usual rations. Strange to say,
the men do not seem to care for vegetables, and seldom take the trouble
to make a garden, though they might have as much garden ground as they
liked for nothing.