been removed; and though others appeared from time to time, they could
never escape capture very long, not having, as escaped convicts had in
New South Wales, any sympathisers among the settlers; and now for many
years past no such thing as a bushranger has been heard of in Tasmania.
As the country became safe, land became valuable, and was sold instead
of being granted away, and sheep and wool brought a certain degree of
prosperity. Still no great amount of wealth was made by the settlers
up the country, and in the towns those who made money by trade
generally migrated with it to Victoria, and settled there where there
was more scope for them, and the less adventurous built themselves
comfortable houses in or immediately around Hobart Town; so that the
original landowners have not been supplanted so much as might have been
expected, considering the events and changes which have taken place, by
rich mercantile men or tradesmen; but in the bad times of late years
have either disappeared altogether, leaving their places vacant, or
continue on the same property, seldom richer, and often much poorer,
than when they were younger. In the list of magistrates there are
still[9] fifteen who were on the commission before 1835.
Very many persons have not once left the island since they came to
settle in it, or were born in it. It is quite a new sensation to live
amongst people, comparatively few of whom, rich or poor, old or young,
have ever seen a railway. The old came before railways were made
anywhere, and both live in a country where a Bill to make the first has
only this week passed the Legislature.
Nevertheless, with all their conservatism, during the ten years since
the first Parliament under the new Constitution met, the Government has
been changed seven times, four Parliaments have been elected, and only
three Members of the House of Assembly have kept their seats during
the whole time. The latter contains a considerable ‘rowdy’ element,
which has introduced a degree of scurrilousness and coarse personal
abuse, astonishing to decorous English ears, into hustings speeches and
occasionally into parliamentary debates. On one occasion, the Head of
the Government, when received with disfavour by the Assembly, appealed
from it for sympathy to the spectators. Shortly afterwards, when he
had left office, he was, for gross misconduct, expelled by a vote of
the House from sitting there for a year. Yet he is still a prominent
member of the Opposition, and is one of the three Members who have been
returned for every Parliament.
The administration ordinarily consists of a colonial secretary, a
treasurer, and an attorney-general, one of whom is Premier. The duties
of office are not so onerous as to prevent a minister pursuing his
ordinary avocations, such as those of barrister or merchant.
The legislative power is vested, as in all the Australian colonies
which have a constitution, in two Houses, corresponding to our Lords
and Commons, and actually using May’s _Parliamentary Practice_ as their
text-book on points of order. The upper House or Legislative Council
of Tasmania contains fifteen members, each of whom sits for six years
from the date of his election. This House is not subject to dissolution
by the Governor. Its members are chosen by electoral districts, the
electors being freeholders to the amount of 50_l._ a year, doctors,
ministers of religion, graduates of a university, barristers, and
army or navy officers, resident twelve months prior to the election.
The Lower House, or Legislative Assembly, is chosen by ten-pound
householders, and is subject to dissolution by the Governor, who now
has much the same powers in the colony that the Crown has in England.
This ten-pound franchise is in the towns practically equivalent to
household suffrage. In the country the labourers in general have no
votes, as they live rent-free in houses belonging to their employers.
No lowering of the franchise has ever been seriously demanded or
proposed, and indeed there has been hardly any such thing as a
genuine democratic cry; but from time to time sham ‘poor man’s friend’
cries are got up for election purposes. Those who get them up are so
notoriously worthless, that most honest people here are inspired with
contempt for democratic cries and democrats everywhere, and when they
read their English news have less toleration for noisy demagogues than
an average English Tory would have. Yet here, as in England, such
opinions are oftener expressed in private than in public, and there is
apparently the same shrinking from plain outspoken denunciation of the
evils of an unmixed democracy—evils the approach of which so true a
lover of liberty as De Tocqueville constantly deplored, as certain to
be, sooner or later, fatal to both freedom and patriotism.
Intimidation of voters is out of the question in a country where there
are scarcely any large employers of labour, and where the relation of
landlord is comparatively rare, has none of the traditions of feudalism
in it, and is subject to no obligation but that of money payment. In
general a seat in the House of Assembly is not so much coveted as to
have any money value, so that there is no inducement to bribery. The
only constituency, I was told, amongst which it has been practised is
that of Hobart Town itself. In this, the only instance in which the
ballot could have been of use, it (on one occasion at least) signally
failed. An ingenious method was practised of evading its secresy, and
making it certain that the bribees carried out their contract. The
system of voting was for each voter to be presented, on entering the
polling-booth, with a voting-paper, duly signed, containing the names
of _both_ the candidates. This the voter took into the room containing
the ballot-box, where he erased the name for which he did _not_ wish to
vote, and then deposited it in the box. The trick was done as follows:
Bribee number one was instructed to pass through without depositing his
voting-paper at all, but to give it after he came out to the bribing
agent. The agent then erased from it the hostile candidate’s name,
and gave it to bribee number two, who deposited it in the ballot-box,
bringing out his _own_ paper entire, which, after the Opposition name
had been erased, was in like manner handed to bribee number three, and
so on, the bribees having thus no opportunity of voting wrong without
being discovered.
In conversation members not only of the Legislature but of the Ministry
do not hesitate to avow their conviction that the granting of the
new Constitution has proved to be a mistake and a misfortune to the
country, and that the old one worked better, under which ministers
held office permanently and a proportion of members of the Assembly
were nominated by the Governor. It is not that the government, as
compared with that of the neighbouring colonies, has not on the whole
been well carried on. Under the discouraging circumstances of a
steadily diminishing revenue, which had to be met from time to time
by increased taxation, the public debt amounts to 5_l._ 10_s._ per
head as against 13_l._ 17_s._ 6_d._ in prosperous Victoria; and the
taxation to 2_l._ 11_s._ per head annually against 4_l._ 12_s._ 4_d._
in Victoria. The men of education and respectability have in general
succeeded in maintaining an ascendancy over the unprincipled and rowdy
element, though the latter is always at least a strong minority.
But there is something unsuitable and almost comical in adapting
the ponderous machinery of _quasi_ Crown, Lords, and Commons to so
small a community. A popular House requires numbers to give it any
appearance of importance, and it is impossible that there can be very
much dignity in a very miscellaneous assembly, containing when all are
present only thirty members; although a reasonable proportion of them
are men of fair average ability, and there is nothing of pomposity
or self-importance in the demeanour of the speakers. Strangers are
admitted into the body of the House, and sit on benches or on the floor
all about the Speaker’s chair, and though this arrangement is rather
disorderly, it is perhaps an assistance to the speakers to have their
small audience a little increased.
The title of _Honourable_ has been accorded to members of the upper
House; but so conscious are they, apparently, of its inappropriateness,
that in assuming it they do not drop the title of esquire, and Mr.
Smith of the Legislative Council is the Honourable John Smith, Esquire.
And there is a very practical, and not merely æsthetic,
inappropriateness and inconvenience in too soon conferring almost
complete independence, and consequent isolation, on a small community.
It is true the mere possession of a sufficient amount of territory
rightly gives importance and a position of dignity in the world.
Tasmania being about the size of Ireland, and geographically very well
situated, is quite _big_ enough to stand almost alone. But its entire
population, town and country, is under a hundred thousand, less than
that of a moderately large manufacturing town in the old world. Making
it self-governing tends to cut off the supply from home of educated men
who used to go out in various official positions. As a new generation
grows up, its ranks are no longer increased by those who have had a
more complete education and a wider experience in the old world. By
most of the older generation of colonists this isolation is felt and
deplored as an evil. But the younger ones cannot be expected to look
upon the matter in the same light; and as an instance of this, an
attempt was lately made to abolish two scholarships which are annually
given out of the public money by competitive examination for sending
and maintaining two students at an English University. The Bill passed
the lower House almost without opposition, and the scholarships were
only saved in the upper House by a narrow majority obtained by the
strenuous protest of one of its Members.
Interest in the details of imperial questions of necessity grows
weaker year by year. It is not that loyalty to the old country and to
the crown is decaying. None would repudiate such an idea more than
the Tasmanians. Their Tasmanianism is to them scarcely more than an
accident, which the fact of their being English far transcends in
importance. Considering its age, this colony retains a more completely
English character than any of the others. But the rising generation
knows England only by tradition and by books. And of the older men
throughout Australia many feel somewhat keenly the indifference shown
to the colonies by England.
Those in particular who by tradition or by the natural bent of their
minds are conservative, have, in fighting their hopeless battle against
the excesses of democracy, looked almost in vain during the last
fifteen years for support or sympathy to the political party in England
from whom they had a right to expect it. Such neglect could not fail
to alienate their interest in English politics. And when the news came
that the cause of their old party at home was not only lost, but its
political honour indelibly stained by the unprincipled and time-serving
policy of its leaders, it seemed like a last act of painful severance
from their old hopes and traditions of political life.
The parliament of a colony, especially one so small in population as
Tasmania, can have in general only petty local questions to discuss.
With no foreign relations, such as an altogether independent state has,
and therefore no foreign policy, and generally with no clearly defined
or special domestic policy either, there are no opposing principles for
opposite parties to adopt. The result is that, so far from agreeing,
they divide with tenfold greater hostility and rancour on personal
and private grounds. It is sometimes difficult, when a government is
defeated and resigns, for the Governor to know whom to send for to
form a new Ministry. The plan at first resorted to, of sending for
the proposer of the hostile motion, might not improbably result in
obtaining a new Premier with no other claim or qualification for the
office than his hostility to his predecessor.
An instance of personal and party feeling overriding plain public
justice occurred some years ago, in the case of one of the judges—with
this one exception always a good set—who endeavoured to borrow money
of a suitor pending the decision on his case. The suitor refused and
made the scandal known; whereupon the judge, fearing the consequences,
pleaded ill-health and applied for a retiring ill-health pension in the
ordinary way. This the government, under the circumstances, refused;
but afterwards, finding that the judge would not voluntarily resign
without a pension, and that his partisans and friends in the House were
too strong to allow a vote of the House summarily dismissing him to
pass, they were compelled to bring in and pass a special Act granting
him the full amount of the pension asked for, as the only means of
getting rid of him from the bench. Shortly afterwards, his alleged bad
health notwithstanding, he got himself elected and took his seat in the
House. The pension, of course, he still continues to enjoy.
Where population is thick and the choice of companions large, as at
an English University, quarrels are rare, for men can easily avoid
uncongenial society. Where population is sparse, as up the country in
a colony, jealousies and animosities are more likely to arise and
to become inveterate. And thus the same kind of petty personal and
party spirit which is to be found in the Parliament, often pervades
to a still worse and more noxious extent the Municipal Councils which
have the local management of the country districts. Roads, excellently
engineered and solidly made in old days by convict labour, are allowed
to get out of repair because there is a dispute in the Municipal
Council whether or not a new road shall be made, which would be shorter
for some and longer for others. Corrupt officials are retained because
their patrons or relations are in a majority in the Council. In one
instance which came under my notice, an upright and conscientious
magistrate was so moved to indignation by the unpunished misconduct and
peculations of the police superintendent of the district, that he could
not refrain from denouncing him in a hustings speech. The offender
retorted by publicly giving the magistrate the lie, there and then,
and at the next petty sessions summoned the magistrate for slander,
the magistrate at the same time taking out a cross summons against him
for insulting his superior. There could not be a doubt of the man’s
guilt, though hitherto all attempts to punish him had failed, yet it
was so notoriously certain to be made a party question, that when the
magistrates assembled they confessed that they were not impartial
enough to hear the case, and agreed to refer it to some magistrate of
another district. Even then the two parties amongst the magistrates
could not agree to whom to refer it, and at last were reduced to the
expedient of selecting three magistrates’ names by lot.
The Press of course suffers from the paucity of readers and from the
absence of a sufficiency of topics to discuss. Every day one if not
two leaders appear, often necessarily about nothing at all, while the
rest of the sheet has to be filled up anyhow, with cases of vagrants
fined at the police-court for being drunk, and so on. Hobart Town in
general supports only one daily paper, though now and then another
makes a start, which suffices for all the south of the island. There
are no other gods in Olympus, and so this local Jupiter reigns with
undisputed sway, his power being as independent of his merit as that
of the Emperor of China. So entirely uncontrolled and uncriticised is
it that even a Premier in forming an Administration may have to take
account of it as of a formidable power in the state, which cannot be
defied with impunity, and may even consider that it is entitled to be
consulted on such matters, and be ready to resent anything having the
appearance of neglect. In such a state of things there is of course
always a possibility and a danger of the Jupiter for the time being
falling into the hands of some ambitious, unscrupulous, and perhaps
illiterate speculator, and being used by him as an instrument of
personal advancement, as could easily be done in a hundred different
ways, and so becoming a serious annoyance as a source of jobbery and
petty tyranny. There is indeed a rival Olympus at Launceston in the
north of the island. But there are generally two or three deities
there to share the power between them, and moreover the northern and
southern population have in many respects different interests, and do
not, I believe, read each other’s papers very much.
VIII.
TASMANIA (_continued_).
I must recall even the little I have said in a former letter in
dispraise of the Tasmanian climate. In the valleys it may be too mild
and enervating, but there are other parts where it is very different.
Go in the coach, for instance, for sixty miles along the high road to
Launceston, which is still the main artery of the settlement, having
been made in the old times, with enormous expenditure of labour, by
huge gangs of convicts, clusters of whose ruined and deserted huts are
still to be seen. It is by far the best road in all the Australian
colonies, the only one (as far as I know) over which a common English
stage-coach can travel, and travel too at the rate of ten miles an
hour, including stoppages. Then mount your horse, leave highways and
civilisation behind, and ride westwards along a pleasant grassy road
to the foot of a long wooded range, or tier, as it is called. You
ascend perhaps a thousand feet and find yourself, not on a ridge or a
mountain, but on a high table-land, in a new and uninhabited country
and in a new climate. It is the lake country. Five large lakes, from
one to three thousand feet above the plains, are ready to pour down
their waters and irrigate the whole island into a garden. The sun’s
rays are as powerful as on the plains, but the air is fresh and even
keen, and at night for the greater part of the year it freezes sharply.
Snow falls often as early as March, the first month of autumn. There is
no fear of relaxing heat there. The grass is greener, too, and feels
softer and more springy to ride over. A continuous fence is on each
side of the track; for the country, though uninhabited except by sheep
and their keepers, is most of it purchased and fenced now. But it is a
dead-wood fence of unhewn trunks, with the smaller branches built up
horizontally upon them, and therefore not an eyesore, like the ugly
straight post-and-rail fences; and, moreover, capable of being easily
cleared by a horse at any weak place. Eight miles of this, and a large
and beautiful lake startles you by shining not a hundred yards off
through the trees, and, almost at the same moment, another lake on the
opposite side. Between them is a log hut, the first habitation passed
for twenty miles, and out of it appears a fine, active-looking old man,
whose privilege it is to stop passers-by for a ten minutes’ chat. In
Tasmania it is not safe to ask a stranger _why_ he left home, but you
may always ask _where_ the old home was, and the old man is soon full
of Oxford, and the boats, and boat races, and knows (alas!) which boat
has been winning at Putney of late years. And so you may go on day
after day. It may be there is nothing strikingly magnificent in this
part of the country, but there is not a mile of the track that is not
charming in its way. Only you must not lose it. For some distance the
fences of the sheep-runs are parallel to and indicate it, and there is
no fear of getting wrong, but afterwards you need some one who knows
the country for a guide. For it is seldom that there are landmarks to
go by. Once off the track, and there is nothing but the compass or the
sun to steer by, and nothing bigger than a hut to aim at. One gum is
like another gum, and one wattle like another wattle, and you may come
back to the same spot without recognising it. And there is nothing
to eat in the bush, unless by chance you come across a kangaroo, or
an opossum, or a kangaroo-rat, and have the means to kill, and the
inclination to eat, such food. In old times this part of the country
was a favourite haunt of bushrangers, but want of food obliged them
to make frequent incursions into the more settled districts, and in
all the Australian colonies bushranging was, for this reason, easily
extinguished, where it had not the connivance of some of the settlers.
In New South Wales there must be a taste for preserving bushrangers,
for they still flourish there.