distant intervals, cross the broad deep Derwent by the steam-ferry
at Hobart Town, or, taking the other road, by a ferry three or four
miles higher up, of which a burly Yorkshireman has charge. The first
road winds round a high hill, and the second mounts it by a gradual
continuous ascent of three miles. The cleared land with its yellow
harvest or green, growing crops, and neat dead-wood fences and bushes
of luxuriant sweet-briar, and perhaps a garden and green English trees,
make a foreground to a forest of gum-trees and wattles, which has been
thinned but not cleared by fire, or by cutting a deep ring through the
bark of the trees, for the sake of the scanty brown grass underneath,
which their shade and growth make still more scanty. The bare white
trunks and boughs of these slaughtered but still standing trees stand
out grim and gaunt against the sky for many a year, till a pitying
gale or a fire at their roots brings them to earth, making weird
and ghostly dells such as Gustave Doré loves to draw, and too often
needlessly caricatures. The road descends again upon a township. There
is generally something dreary and repelling about the townships in all
the Australian colonies. They are like little bits cut out of a modern
English manufacturing town, and more than half killed in the process.
Bare square-built brick houses, without a scrap of flower-garden or
shrubbery, or any heed given to prettiness or neatness. Almost every
tree cut down for perhaps a mile round; dust and glare; an inordinate
number of public-houses, none of which care much to take you in unless
you are a large consumer of strong drinks. They look like places
intended only for business, and not for homes at all. And so you pass
through a township, if possible, without stopping, and this time three
miles on you turn aside across pleasant meadows to where, half hidden
by St. Helena weeping willows and by a thick high hedge of brilliant
yellow broom, stands a hospitable house. There is another house, the
prettiest of wooden cottages, or rather bungalows, where you would be
equally welcome; but you must leave it for another time, for if you
stopped everywhere where you were tempted, you would not travel far
in Tasmania. The road henceforth is in general only a track cleared,
where it is necessary, amongst the trees; and you and your horse’s
feet rejoice in the absence of all pavement save nature’s own. Day
after day you ride on through the pleasant bush, meeting or passing or
seeing some one perhaps once in two or three hours. Bright-coloured
parrakeets fly about in flocks; the blue, red, and green Rosella parrot
is the commonest bird of any in the bush. Now and then, though rarely,
you may see a white cockatoo raise his yellow crest, or a kangaroo or
wallaby jump across the track, or a mild-eyed opossum looks foolishly
at you from a tree; or you stop to kill with a whip or stick a snake
basking by the roadside, as you are bound to do if possible, for they
are numerous and all poisonous. Of sounds there are few. Sometimes
in the early morning the native magpie fills the air with the music
of his delicious dreamy note, or later in the day the jackass utters
his absurd laugh. The bush is monotonous perhaps, and the foliage and
vegetation grey and brown and scanty, and the ground often bare instead
of grassy, as in moister climates, but here there is constant change
of hill and valley, constant pleasant surprises of new scenery, such
as one meets with only in travelling for the first time in country
undescribed by tourists and guide-books. If it spoils the interest of
a novel to be told the plot beforehand, does it not ten times more
spoil the enjoyment of new country to be forewarned of its surprises
of scenery, which are the most delicious morsels of our pleasure in
it? And along this east coast you seldom or never need a guide, for,
wild and lonely as it often is, the track is always clear enough. You
may, if you please, take a cart and luggage, for it is astonishing
how carts and their horses learn to dispense with roads. A horse that
is used to it thinks nothing of drawing a cart over a fallen trunk a
couple of feet in diameter, going at it obliquely, one wheel at a time.
But as tall hats, and black coats, and crinolines, and bonnets are
about as necessary on a bush journey as an Armstrong gun or a pair of
skates, you will probably dispense with any such useless incumbrance,
and take only a change of clothes in a valise on the pommel of your
saddle or behind it, or a mackintosh-covered bundle of eight or nine
pounds weight strapped neatly to the off side of your side-saddle. You
are free then, and can go or stay when and where the spirit moves you.
And to anyone with the faintest idea how to use pencil or brush, the
sharpness of outline, the clear blue of the distance, the brilliant
sunshine and strong defined shadows, offer temptations to stop at
every turn, and let your horse stand quietly grazing—‘hung up,’ as
the phrase is, to a tree—while you sketch at leisure. You spend a day
or two perhaps on Prosser’s Plains, a level tract lying charmingly
amongst bush-covered hills; or turn aside to Cape Bougainville with
its lovely views of the coast and of Maria Island; and you pass close
along the calm shore of Oyster Bay, the sea a deep Prussian blue with
broad dark lines of shadow, and beyond, closing in the bay, the bright
purple island and peninsula of Schouten. A lovelier coast, and a
less frequented, it would be hard to find. Hobart Town is seventy or
eighty miles off, and there are no made roads to communicate with it.
Formerly a small steamer plied thither, but somebody must needs start
an opposition steamer, and so they ruined each other, and both ceased
to ply, and now there is only a small schooner. Every fifteen or twenty
miles, or oftener, you come to cleared land, often studded with stumps
two or three feet high in the midst of the growing crops, and to the
house of the proprietor generally built all on the ground-floor, and
all the prettier and more comfortable in consequence, and almost always
with a deep verandah, which gives it shadow and character. Properties
are small and produce little, compared with the huge stations of the
other colonies, and there is little prospect of acquiring great wealth.
But, on the other hand, there is not the same Damocles-sword of anxiety
lest a drought or a fall in the price of wool should bring inevitable
bankruptcy and ruin. Here up the country one does not hear so much
moaning and groaning as in the towns about the depressed state of the
colony, which after all is for the most part only an undue hurry and
impatience to get rich. Cannot people be satisfied with a fair profit
on their own capital, without borrowing at eight or nine per cent.,
and expecting a large profit over and above on that? There may be too
much wealth in a country for comfort and happiness, as well as too
much poverty, if people would only believe it. Few things disturb
honest industry and breed discontent more than the contemplation of
too easily and too rapidly acquired fortunes. Those that were made in
Victoria and elsewhere soon after the discovery of gold have left their
demoralising and disheartening influence on all Australia. Without a
large income, Arcadian luxury of climate, scenery, and quiet may be
enjoyed in Tasmania. It is the perfection of retired country life. If
there is in general not much wealth, there are almost always comfort
and plenty. It does not matter that Hobart Town is some days’ journey
distant, and that a day’s shopping is an occurrence that seldom happens
once a year—sometimes not once in many years—for almost every want of
the household is supplied from its own resources. And a traveller from
the old country, utter stranger though he be, meets with a welcome so
cordial, so hearty, so completely as a matter of course, that to one
used only to the highways of European travel it bears a tinge almost of
romance, and the memory of days thus spent in perfect enjoyment gathers
a halo about it which no words of mine can describe.
Or ride out of Hobart Town, where, perhaps, towards the end of the
summer scarcely any rain has fallen for two or three months, and
follow the new road to the Huon, over the side of Mount Wellington.
As you ascend, on a sudden it is cold and damp, and the road sloppy
with wet. The vegetation, too, has changed. The gums are ten times the
height of those down below, straight gigantic trunks, rising fifty to
a hundred feet without a branch. People speak of trunks seventy feet
in circumference twelve feet above the ground, but I have seen none
so large as that. I am afraid to guess at their height: the mightiest
European trees are dwarfs in comparison. Splitters are at work felling
them and clearing away the underwood, and the blows of the axe sound
and echo as if in a banqueting-hall of the gods. It is sacrilege to
fell them; but the gaps made open out a view far away over the tops of
the trees below to the mouths of the Derwent and the Huon, the jagged
coast-line, the distant capes and breakwater-like islands, conspicuous
amongst them, long, narrow Bruni, where Captain Cook landed nearly a
century ago; and over all the south wind blows cool and fresh from the
Southern Ocean, for there is nothing but sea and ice between you and
the Pole. Further on the road diminishes to a narrow track, cut amongst
the huge gums, and through an undergrowth of almost tropical vegetation
so dense that within twelve miles of Hobart Town it remained till a few
years ago almost unpenetrated. There is the sassafras, with straight,
tapering stem and branches, and fragrant myrtle-like leaves; and fern
trees, drooping their large graceful fronds from thick brown or red
stems, from six to thirty feet high; and bright purple nightshade
berries as big as cherries, and shrubs without end, and it seems
almost without names, except such barbarous misapplications of English
names as are in use to distinguish them, till the Heralds’ Office of
the Linnæan Society gives them title, rank, and lineage—all growing
in a dense mass, and baffling even the all-penetrating sun. Then the
track descends a little, and it all vanishes, and the ground is dry
as before, and two hours’ more riding brings you out suddenly upon
the bank of a fine river, the Huon, as wide here and deeper than the
Thames at Richmond. A short distance off along the bank are a roughly
made landing-stage and a ferry boat, and you must _cooé_ in the best
falsetto you can (if there is a lady of the party she will probably
do it better) till the ferryman hears you and comes, and with some
trouble persuades the horses into the boat, and punts you across, and
gives you directions how to thread your way through the scrub till you
emerge upon a corduroy road and upon the township of Franklin. It is
the chief township of the district, with some six hundred inhabitants,
exceptional in being the perfection of a country village, stretching
along the base of a hill two or three hundred feet high, and fringing
the river bank and tiny wharf with its neat wooden houses. The grass is
green, and not burnt up and brown, as it is in most places long before
summer is over, for here there is moisture enough all the year round.
The people here grow apples, and send them off by shiploads straight
from the wharf to the all-devouring Melbourne market; and they make
shingles for roofing, and shape timber, and saw up the famous Huon
pine, which they often have not even the trouble of felling, for the
winter floods wash it down from almost unpenetrated bush. Though it
is not thirty miles from Hobart Town and civilization, yet westward
for seventy or eighty miles to the sea is no human habitation, nothing
but bush so thick, so devoid of anything to support life, that of the
convicts who from time to time in years past escaped into it from
Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast, scarcely any got through alive.
Much of it needs only clearing to make fine agricultural land. There
are millions of acres to be bought by the first comer at a pound an
acre. Yet, out of sixteen and a half million acres which Tasmania
contains, only three and a half are alienated, and on this small
portion, including the towns, the population is less than one person
for thirty-five acres!
Can any country be more perfectly delightful? Once mounted (and, rich
or poor, there are few who cannot possess or borrow a horse of some
sort in Tasmania) one is free with a freedom known only in dreams to
dwellers in the old country of hedges and Enclosure Acts, where to quit
the dreary flinty roads is to trespass and to break the law. One’s
first reflection is on the astonishing folly of humanity in neglecting
to inhabit it. Surely there must be many wearied with the crowd and
strife and ugliness of English cities, who, brought to a virgin
forest such as this, would be ready to sing their _Nunc dimittis_ in
thankfulness that it had been permitted them to exist in such beauty,
to have their dreams helped to the imagination of the glory of the
new heavens and the new earth. Probably, however, not one person in
twenty, take England through, would have his or her enjoyment of life
materially increased by living in a free unspoiled country, with
abundance of space and air, or indeed in natural beauty of any kind;
and doubtless a large majority at heart prefer the shops of Oxford
Street, for a continuance, to the most beautiful scenery imaginable.
And it may be there is something of a true instinct in them, such as
was in Sir Robert Peel when (as the story goes) he used to stand at
the top of Trafalgar Square, and looking down over the dreary, ugly,
blackened buildings, and the busy colourless crowd, say it was the
most beautiful sight he ever saw. For after all men are better than
trees. Besides, rich people are too comfortable to change their homes
and their hemisphere, and poor people must go where they can find
bread as well as beauty. So till the country is found to provide a
cure for impecuniosity as well as for less tangible and less generally
recognised requirements, it must remain, I suppose, nearly as it is.
The common, and no doubt correct, reason given for its failure in
this last respect, is that it is essentially an agricultural and not
a pastoral country, owing to the quantity of timber, and that wheat
is too cheap to repay even a moderate profit on cultivation. Wheat
is unnaturally cheap now, because the popular cry in Victoria lately
has been for protection, and the Victorian Government, to conciliate
it, and to nurse their ‘cockatoo’ settlers, has put a duty on corn
and other produce which, to a great extent, drives the Tasmanians
from their natural and legitimate market. Certainly, at the present
low prices, a farmer employing labourers finds it difficult to make
a living. In some places there is land thrown out of cultivation,
looking dismal enough. Nevertheless, for common agricultural labourers
there is plenty of demand; a labourer can earn at least three times as
much as he can in the southern counties of England. In wages he gets
at least ten shillings a week, out of which he has hardly anything
but his clothes to buy; for in addition he has rations, consisting of
twelve pounds of mutton, twelve pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar,
and a quarter of a pound of tea; and a log hut, and a garden if he
likes, rent free. Fresh comers from England sometimes do not know
how to consume so large an allowance of meat, and ask to have part
of it changed for something else. But before long they fall into the
universal Tasmanian custom of eating meat three times a day, and learn
to be glad of it all. At shearing time a large number of hands are
wanted at once, and wages are much higher. It is a common thing for a
man after shearing is over to give the cheque he has earned, perhaps
for twenty pounds or more, to the keeper of the nearest grog-shop, and
bid him supply him with liquor there and then till it is all spent.
If a man will only keep from drink he can save money enough in a few
years to buy land and support himself till his first crop is reaped. He
has no labour to pay for, and like the peasant proprietors of Adelaide,
who this year have been sending their wheat to England, may succeed
where an employer of labour fails. There is land along the north coast
rich as any in the world, but heavily timbered. The settler gets rid of
the smaller trees and underwood simply by setting it on fire, and sows
his seed in the ashes, and gets a fine crop without even ploughing,
leaving the larger timber to be felled as he has leisure for it. There
are harbours all along this coast, and a railway is about to be made,
and before many years are over it will take a heavy tariff to keep the
produce of this fertile district out of Melbourne market.
And after all, at the worst, is it to come to this—that a shrewd,
strong, hard-working man, with plenty of land of his own, cannot live
unless markets and prices are favourable? Need an Englishman starve
now, under circumstances in which a Saxon or a Dane of a thousand
years ago would, after his fashion, have luxuriated in plenty? If
so, it is the custom of excessive subdivision of labour, the growing
incompleteness in themselves of men and of households, which has
spoilt us for settling in a new country. Such subdivision of course
increases production in a highly civilised country, but it may easily
become a source of mental and physical degradation to the producer.
Sheffield knives may be the best and cheapest in the world, but we
have all heard of the Sheffield emigrant girl, who, landing in a new
colony, and seeking employment, confessed she had never been taught to
do anything whatever, indoors or outdoors, but _pack files_. If wheat
or other produce will not fetch a profit, cannot a man grow less of
it, and instead keep sheep and poultry to supply himself with meat,
and on such a soil as this grow perhaps grapes for his own wine, such
as it is, and even possibly flax for his own linen? And if his wife be
of the right sort for a settler’s wife, and not of the file-packing
sort, there will be few things for which he need go to a shop. Such
a state of things, if possible, and not Utopian, has at least this
advantage, that it saves the wife and young children from the great
bane of peasant proprietorship, that of becoming like mere unthinking,
routine-following beasts of burden on the soil, as we see them too
often in Belgium and France, with no other thought or employment but
how to put the utmost possible pound of manure on the soil, and how
to extract from it the utmost bushel in return, to the neglect of all
things else on earth. At any rate, it is hardly to be believed that
English agricultural labourers will not, sooner or later, have spirit
to attempt to solve the problem for themselves one way or another,
rather than rest contented with their present condition. The present
generation may hope to live to see them asking twice or three times
their present wages, and, if unable to obtain them, departing for a
new, and, for them, a freer country.
Unfortunately, some working men at home have singularly unpractical
ideas about freedom. At least so it appears to us out here at the
antipodes, where home questions assume such different relative
proportions, and the monthly mail, with its tale of political strife,
is so often a weariness rather than a pleasure to read. Franchise
questions are trifles compared to land questions out here, and we
cannot see the point (even after allowing for rhetorical flourish) of
people choosing to call themselves serfs because they have not got
votes. It is difficult to understand what conceivable meaning those men
could have attached to the word ‘freedom,’ who considered that they
were asserting or claiming it by parading the streets at the summons
of a Beales. To us, such an exhibition of franchise-worship—if that be
what it means—under such a high priest, appears like lingering round a
golden calf, when a promised land lies waiting to be claimed.
IX.
SYDNEY AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD.
The chief towns of the five principal Australian Colonies are separated
by nearly equal intervals. The distances from Adelaide to Melbourne,
from Melbourne to Hobart Town, from Melbourne to Sydney, and from
Sydney to Brisbane are not very different. That from Melbourne to
Sydney is a little the longest of them. It is rather more than a two
days’ and two nights’ voyage. To go by land is a tedious and laborious
journey, except for those who know the country and its inhabitants very
well. Only a small portion can be done by railway, and most of the
way is through flat, monotonous country, more or less afflicted with
floods, bushrangers, bad roads, and worse inns. Indeed, whenever there
is steam communication by water between two Australian towns, it is
seldom that there is any other practicable way of going.
The Melbourne steamer keeps close in shore all the way. The coast
generally has a barren look, and, except at Cape Schank and near a
mountain called the Pigeon House, has few striking features. It is so
little settled or cultivated that its appearance from the sea cannot
be much changed since Captain Cook explored it. It is seldom that
there is a sail in sight. At the very entrance of Port Jackson hardly
a living creature, few buildings except the lighthouses, and no mast
of a ship at anchor are visible. It is not till the narrow opening
between the high precipitous cliffs is entered and the South Head
rounded, that a scene of beauty bursts upon you as suddenly as a vision
in a fairy story. In an instant the long rollers and angry white surf
(for there are rollers and surf on the shores of the Pacific on the
calmest day) are left behind, and the vessel is gliding smoothly over
a glassy lake, doubly and trebly land-locked, so that the open sea is
hidden from every part of it. To the north and east numberless inlets
and coves branch off, subdivide, and wind like rivers between rocky
scrub-covered shores, which are fragrant with wattle, and brilliant
with wild flowers, all new and strange to a European eye. To the left,
on the southern side, are large deep bays, on the shores of which the
rich men of Sydney have built villas and planted gardens, with which
no villa or garden at Torquay or at Spezzia can compare. Farther on,
perhaps four miles from the Heads, you pass three or four men-of-war,
lying motionless at anchor little more than a couple of stone-throws
from the shore, having for their background the graceful bamboos,
and trim Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay pines, and palms, and other
semi-tropical vegetation of the Botanic Gardens. Steamers of all sizes,
from the great P. and O. and Panama ocean steamship, to the busy,
puffing, gaily-painted little harbour paddle-boat, plough up the
clear water. Pleasure boats, from the yacht to the sculler’s funny,
flit noiselessly about. Or a panting steam-tug drags a merchant ship
amongst the hulls and masts and funnels which fringe the innermost part
of the harbour. Above the masts, with miles of winding wharfage at
its base, stands Sydney. At sunrise or sunset on a calm day there is
something almost Oriental in the brilliancy of colour, something dreamy
and unsubstantial in the water, the shores, the black hulls and spars,
seen through the sun-lit haze, like pictures one sees of the Golden
Horn—such as Turner would have delighted to paint. Port Jackson, both
for use and beauty, is almost unsurpassed in the world. It is nowhere
much more than a mile in width; its most distant extremities are not
twenty miles apart in a straight line; yet its perimeter, measured
along the water’s edge and up its numberless little inlets, must be
hundreds of miles in length.
But once land and enter the town itself, and all pleasing prospects
and illusions vanish at once. Never was a city less worthy of its
situation. The principal street is nearly two miles long. For the
greater part of the way this street is more or less in a hollow, and
from hardly any part of it is the harbour visible. The rest of the
city straggles right and left of it, covering with its suburbs a very
large extent of ground. Only one good street, Macquarie Street, is
finely situated. There are two really fine buildings, superior to
anything of the kind in Melbourne, the new Cathedral, and the Hall
of the University. A few public buildings and some of the banks are
solidly, if not gracefully, built. But in general the houses are small,
ugly, ill drained, ill built, and in bad repair, and the greater part
of the town a poor specimen of the mean style of house architecture
prevailing in England forty or fifty years ago. It is but seldom that
any attempt has been made to make the plans of houses such as to suit
the requirements of the climate, as has been done so successfully at
Melbourne. Deep verandahs, which add so much to the appearance of a
building by producing contrasts of light and shade, and which are so
essential to comfort in a hot, glaring climate, are the exception
rather than the rule. People who can afford to be comfortable and
luxurious live out of town now, and so what is perhaps the best part of
Sydney has been preserved almost unaltered from the Governor-Macquarie
era of half a century ago.
The climate is such as to make shade and protection from sun, wind, and
dust almost a necessity. In winter, in July and August for instance,
it is very pleasant. Even then it is often as hot in the sun as on
an average fine day in England in summer; and a fire is out of the
question, except in the evening or on a wet day. Snow has not fallen
in Sydney, it is said, for twenty years. A sensation was produced the
other day by a large snow-ball which a guard on the railway brought
in his van from somewhere up the country where there had been a
snow-storm. Towards the end of September it begins to be unpleasantly
hot. The streets are for the most part left unwatered. Often a violent
hot wind blows, filling the air with fine red dust, which penetrates
through closed doors and windows, covering everything, and severely
trying all mucous membranes, eyes, and tempers. This wind is known as
a _Brickfielder_. It blows from the west, and generally lasts from one
to two days. Then comes a southerly wind, often accompanied by rain and
thunder, which strikes it at right angles, and prevails over it. The
temperature at once falls. The sea breeze is disliked by many almost as
much as the other, for though cool it is enervating. The temperature
in summer at Sydney is not nearly so high as in the interior. Yet the
Squatter from up the country when he comes there complains of the heat.
Labourers declare that they cannot do a good day’s work there. With
all classes hours of work are short and holidays frequent. Old people
and persons with delicate and peculiar constitutions may have their
lives prolonged; but strong men get ill who never were ill before, and
complexions and faces look white, sallow, and shrunken almost like
those of Anglo-Indians.
Sydney is specially deserving of attention as being politically a
fair average type of an Australian city. It is more like what most
other Australian towns are likely to become than any other place. For
the colony is nearly eighty years old. It has a history by no means
uneventful or uninteresting. Among its early heroes it can point
to many men of conspicuous ability, energy, and integrity. Most of
the population are natives of the colony, real colonials, and not
emigrants from the old country. They are less restless, less excitable,
perhaps less energetic, than their neighbours at Melbourne. Some of
them have hardly ever been ten miles from their native city.