Sydney is an important and increasing town. The more rapid growth of
Melbourne has thrown it into the shade, and no doubt Melbourne will
maintain its position, and, owing to its central situation, continue
to be the commercial emporium of the other colonies. But it may be
doubted whether Victoria will maintain its lead over New South Wales.
The good land of Victoria extends to the very shores of Port Phillip,
the country is small comparatively, and has been easily opened up. In
New South Wales three trunk lines are in progress and are open for some
distance, but hundreds of miles of railway must be made before many
fertile districts can be even known, except by report, and before even
the inhabitants—much more, possible emigrants at home—begin to realise
the enormous resources of the country. Gold is found in all directions,
though as yet in few places, compared with Victoria, in quantities
which repay the digger. Iron is plentiful. There is an unlimited supply
of coal close to the mouth of the Hunter. Kerosene is being procured in
abundance. The English cereals flourish as well as maize and arrowroot.
Almost any quantity of wine might be grown, and some of it is about as
good as average light French claret. Light wine is a great addition
to comfort in this climate; and as it becomes more plentiful, and
cheaper, it will help more than anything to drive out the old colonial
vice of excessive spirit-drinking, already on the decline. There are
several varieties of climate, for climate depends more upon height
above the sea-level than upon latitude. From the mountainous district
of Kiandra the telegraph day after day even to the end of September
reports ‘snow falling,’ while at Sydney we are broiling. In New
England, close to the borders of Queensland, there is almost an English
climate, and strawberries and other English fruits and vegetables grow
in perfection; while a short distance off, on the Clarence, and on the
vast plains to the westward, the heat, though dry and comparatively
healthy, is intense, and men will put away their coats and waistcoats
in a box, only to be taken out if they want to go to Sydney or to look
specially respectable. To the number of sheep and cattle which may be
kept there is practically no limit. Only there is a distance beyond
which the expense of carting wool or driving cattle to a market eats up
all the profit. For wool, railways will at once extend this distance.
As for cattle, there is a new invention for freezing meat by means of
ammonia, and thus preserving it entirely unchanged for any number of
weeks or months. If this is successful, as there is every reason to
hope, frozen meat may be brought down to the nearest port and kept
frozen for a voyage of any length, and thus the English market may be
supplied with fresh meat from the heart of Australia.
Food, both animal and vegetable, is perhaps as cheap in Australia as in
any part of the world. Even in Sydney, where it is comparatively dear,
the best beef and mutton cost only about fourpence a pound, a price
which is said to pay a very large profit to the butcher. Inferior meat
is as low as a penny or two-pence a pound. Wheat this year has been
as low as half-a-crown a bushel in some country places. In the bush,
where shepherds and others get their rations of half a sheep each a
week, the waste is often very great. Much is thrown away, or given to
the dogs, or spoilt by bad cooking. This abundance makes it at first
sight seem extraordinary that the early settlers at Sydney should have
been for so many years dependent on supplies of salt provisions brought
from England or the Cape, and that when these supplies ran short they
should several times have been on the verge of starvation. But a ride
outside the town explains it. The soil for many miles round is sandy
and barren. To this day unenclosed and uncultivated land extends up
to the very streets of the town. Even market gardeners have not found
it worth while to establish themselves, except in a few gullies where
the soil is a little better. It is a good thing _now_ that this is so;
for near a large city, which can easily be supplied from a distance,
an unlimited expanse of natural park is better than ploughed fields.
Populous and straggling as the town is, a short ride, or half an
hour’s row across the harbour, takes you into country as wild as a
Scotch moor. On the north shore you may almost lose yourself in the
bush within two or three miles of the town. To the south you may ride
in an hour and a half over glorious open country, amongst scarlet
bottle-brush, epacris, and a profusion of beautiful wild flowers, to
the clear water and white, sandy, uninhabited shores of Botany Bay,
which even in mid-winter quite deserves its name.
Amongst the few cultivated districts near Sydney is Parramatta. It is
there that the trim gardens of dark green orange trees are, with their
profusion of golden fruit hanging patiently among the leaves for three
or four months. But to see agriculture on a large scale you must go by
railway nearly thirty miles to the valley of the Hawkesbury. A richer
alluvial soil than there is in this valley could not well be, nor one
requiring less labour in its cultivation. But, owing to droughts and
floods, so precarious are the crops that the cultivators are said to
be content if they can secure one out of three which they sow. In the
early days a bad flood on the Hawkesbury caused a scarcity throughout
the colony. In June last an unusually bad one occurred. The river
actually rose nearly sixty feet in perpendicular height, flowing more
than forty feet above the roadway of the bridge near Richmond. You may
see the rubbish brought down by it on the tops of the trees. And though
the stream runs between high banks, the wide, flat plain above was
twelve feet deep in rushing water, which a furious gale of wind made
still more destructive. A few small patches are already green again
with a luxuriant crop. The rest of the plain is a dismal brown expanse
of dried mud. The strong post-and-rail fences are tumbling down or
half buried. Here and there a few slabs or a door-post sticking up out
of the ground mark the place from which a log hut or a cottage has been
swept away.
Another fertile district, the Illawarra, may be reached by going in
a coasting steamer for fifty miles south from Sydney. A longer but
pleasanter way is to take the Southern Railway for thirty-five miles,
and ride the remaining thirty. The ride is through poor, sandy, scrubby
country, abounding, as sandy soils so often do, with brilliant wild
flowers. The native or gigantic lily grows here in perfection, a single
red flower on a straight stem, often fifteen or twenty feet high;
and the waratah, or native tulip, in diameter as big as a sunflower,
but conical, and crimson like a peony. Suddenly you reach the edge
of a steep descent, so steep as to be almost a cliff, and look down
amongst large timber trees interlaced with dark-leaved creepers of
almost tropical growth, which hang like fringed ropes from the trunks
and branches. Lower down are palms, wild figs, and cabbage palms; and
beyond is a broad strip of rich green meadow land, lying far below
between the cliff and the sea, and stretching many miles away to the
south. Half an hour’s steep descent takes you down to it. There is a
home-like look about the green grass, the appearance of prosperity, and
the substantial look of the farm houses. Farmers’ wives jog along to
Wollongong market with their baskets or their babies before them on the
pommels of their saddles. Almost everybody, except a few of the larger
landowners, is Irish. Here, if anywhere, the Irish have fallen upon
pleasant places and found congenial occupation. There is very little
agriculture. The land is all in pasture, and nothing is kept but cows.
The population is wholly given up to making butter. Even cheese they do
not condescend to make: but Wollongong butter is the butter of Sydney,
and finds its way to far-off places along the coast. The meadows are
as green in summer as in winter, or even greener. For then the sea
breeze often brings heavy showers and storms, and droughts are seldom
known there. I saw an English oak tree in full leaf in the middle of
August—the February of the southern hemisphere. So valuable is the
land, that as much as 20_l._ an acre has been given for uncleared land,
and 2_l._ a year rent—prices almost unheard of in Australia.
But the pleasantest of all the short journeys to be made from Sydney is
to the Blue Mountains. The range is not high, in few places, I believe,
more than three thousand feet above the sea; but it is intersected by
very deep precipitous ravines, and densely wooded; and the chain, or
rather mass, of mountainous country is very wide. It was many years
before the early colonists succeeded in penetrating it and getting
at the good country beyond. Even now there is only one road and one
cattle track across it. After the first ascent at the Kurrajong the
track descends a little, and then runs nearly level for twelve miles
till Mount Tomer is reached, on the highest ridge, beyond which the
water-shed is to the south-west. Here, as at the Illawarra, occurs
one of those sudden changes which are so delightful in the midst of
the monotony of the bush. The ragged, close-growing, insignificant,
‘never-green’ gum-trees, which, mixed with a few wattles (_mimosa_)
and she-oaks, are the principal constituents of _bush_, give place to
enormous trees of the same as well as of other species. The delicate
light green of the feathery tree-ferns relieves the eye. The air
is full of aromatic scent from many kinds of shrubs, all growing
luxuriantly. Wherever there is an opening you can see as far as the
coast, and for nearly a hundred miles to the north and to the south,
over the bush you have come through. And seen at a distance, the
poorest bush has a peculiar and beautiful colour, quite different from
anything we see in Europe, a reddish ground, shaded with the very
deepest blue, often without a trace of green.
Sheep, it is said, do not thrive east (that is, on the Sydney side) of
the Blue Mountains, till as far north-wards as the rich valley of the
Hunter. As for cattle, I was told that the quickest and easiest way to
get to a cattle station from Sydney was to take a voyage of two days
and two nights in a steamer to Brisbane, in Queensland, and thence go a
day’s journey by railway to the Darling Downs. For New South Wales is
a vast country, and distances from place to place very great. Railways
as yet do not extend far. Roads are very bad, seldom metalled, often
only tracks. In the valley of the Hunter, on the great northern road,
a road as much frequented and as important as any in the colony, I have
seen twenty oxen yoked to one dray to drag it through the mud up a hill
which was neither very steep nor very long. The coaches in New South
Wales, as in Victoria, are all of the American kind, low and broad,
resting on very long leather straps stretched taut longitudinally,
which are the substitutes for springs. An ordinary English coach would
very soon have its springs broken and be upset. They generally have
(as they need to have) very good drivers, many of whom are Yankees or
Canadians. The bodily exertion and endurance required for a long coach
journey are not small. The ruts and holes made by the narrow wheels of
the drays are often so deep as to make it advisable to leave the road
for a mile or two, and drive straight through the bush amongst the
trees. Often the best way of getting through a bad place is to go at it
at a gallop. Everybody holds tight to save his hat and his bones, and
when the difficulty is passed the driver looks round at his passengers
and asks enquiringly, ‘All aboard?’ The horses, rough in appearance,
possess wonderful strength and endurance. In spite of all difficulties,
four horses will generally take a heavy crowded coach six or seven
miles an hour, which is quite as fast as it is pleasant to travel on
leather springs and on such roads. They are often used at first with
little or no breaking-in. One day the driver of a mail coach meeting
ours stopped us to ask if we had seen anything of his two leaders.
They had broken loose from the rest of the team, he said, during the
journey the night before, and got clear away, splinter-bars and all,
and he had not seen or heard of them since.
X.
AN INSTITUTION OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
In New South Wales a considerable proportion of the population is of
convict descent. It is impossible to say _what_ proportion, for the
line of separation is no longer strictly preserved, as it once was,
between free settlers and emancipists; and questions are not often
asked nowadays about origin and parentage. The tendency of the convicts
when they got their liberty was to go to the country districts, rather
than to the towns. Many became shepherds or hutkeepers on remote
stations. Their children born in the bush have grown up with less
instruction, religious or secular, often in even worse companionship,
and with a still worse political education, than their fathers. For
who was to look after them? Squatters, even if they had the will to do
so, were few and far between, and Squatters’ wives fewer still. The
Voluntary System does not supply clergymen where there is no demand,
although common sense and common experience show that where there is
the least demand there is the sorest need. Those who remain of the
convicts sent from England are old men now, except a few who have come
across from Tasmania, for it is more than a quarter of a century since
the last shipload of them entered Port Jackson. But they have left a
legacy behind them which is emphatically the ‘peculiar institution’
of New South Wales, as distinguished from the other Australian
colonies—_Bushranging_.
In the old times bushrangers were simply escaped prisoners, often
desperate ruffians, who took life, when it suited them, without
scruple. Even then they were not regarded as we regard thieves and
murderers in England. Familiarity with criminals had taught the more
humane among the settlers to consider them as men of like passions with
themselves, and not as only pariahs and enemies of the human race. I
have heard an eye-witness describe the ‘sticking-up’ of a house in the
country many years ago. One of the bushrangers, without any warning,
deliberately shot a manservant in the kitchen through the window.
The lady of the house, hearing the report, ran into the kitchen and
found the man badly shot in the arm. The bushranger who had shot him,
instead of setting to work to plunder with his companions, at once
came to her assistance, obeyed her directions, fetched water, and the
two were amicably engaged for a long time binding up the wounded limb
and assisting the sufferer. The gang were nearly all taken and hanged
afterwards, but I think the people of this house felt more pity than
satisfaction at their fate.
Many of the lower class have hardly disguised their sympathy with these
successful outlaws. There is a tinge of romance about their lives. A
bushranger is a greater and a freer man than a Hounslow highwayman
of a century ago. He rides an excellent horse, and leads another by
his side. He is armed with a ‘six-shooter,’ and perhaps with a rifle
as well. He has miles and miles of country to roam over, and many a
hut where fear or sympathy will at any time provide him with food or a
night’s lodging. Boys at school play at bushrangers, and no boy, if he
can help it, will act the inglorious part of policeman. Even the name
of the profession has been dignified by being turned into Latin. There
is an inscription in the principal church of Sydney to some one _a
latrone vagante occiso_.
And so it has come to pass that bushranging, which languished, or
was kept under by the help of an efficient police, for many years,
has broken out again with as great vigour as ever. The country is
distributed between different gangs. I asked the driver of the
Wollongong Mail if he had ever been ‘stuck up.’ His reply was, ‘Not for
nearly a year,’ or something to that effect. On the main north road,
along which you seldom travel a mile without meeting somebody, the mail
coach was stopped at one o’clock in the day by a single armed man, who
calls himself Thunderbolt, and carries on his depredations in this
district. He compelled the driver to drive off the road into the bush,
and there deliberately took down the mail bags and carried them off on
a led horse. A few days later he unexpectedly came upon a policeman,
who at once fired at him. He had just time to cover himself behind a
horse he was leading; the bullet struck the led horse, and he escaped
on the one he was riding. Less than three weeks after the first robbery
he again stopped the same mail coach and the same driver, almost at the
same place; this time at night. The account in the Sydney paper was as
follows:—
The down mail from Muswellbrook to Singleton, with two days’ mails,
was stuck up by Thunderbolt this morning at 3 o’clock, between
Grasstree Hill and the Chain of Ponds. With the exception of one bag,
all the letters were taken by him. The police are in pursuit.
The weather is very warm.[10]
There is an unconscious irony in the way the hot weather and the
robbery of Her Majesty’s mail stand side by side, as if they were
equally every-day matters. Generally a bushranging story only gets into
small type in a corner of the paper, and very seldom indeed inspires
a leading article. You may sometimes see two or three such accounts
in a single daily paper. The most formidable gang is in the Lower
Murrumbidgee, and is known as ‘Blue Cap’s’ gang. I should like to quote
unabridged a column of the newspaper in which some of their doings
are described, but it is too long. It describes[11] how in the course
of about a fortnight they ‘stuck up’ two mails, two public-houses
(shooting at the owner of one, but fortunately not hitting him), a
steamer on the river, and four stations, taking all money, arms,
horses, and valuables they found. Only one man, a mail-man, made
serious resistance. He was mounted, and carried a large duelling pistol
in each sleeve, and a revolver in his belt. Finding he was outnumbered,
he fled, closely pursued by two of the gang, who soon overhauled him.
Pistol shots were exchanged in quick succession, the horses going all
the time at full speed. In the end, the mail-man, after wounding ‘Blue
Cap’ in the hand, had come to his last barrel, when his horse fell
with him, and he was at the mercy of his assailants. ‘Blue Cap’ was
for giving him ten minutes to prepare for death and then shooting him;
but his life was spared at the entreaty of a woman and of one of the
gang who was friendly to him. A very pretty ‘sensation’ story this, one
would have thought, and rather a catch for an editor. But no; it is a
stale subject. And so the newspaper, for want of something better, had
a leader on the expenses of Greenwich Hospital.
This wholesale plundering of houses and stations does not often happen.
Operations are nowadays generally confined to the road. And usually
no violence is offered except in resisting capture. For unless a
bushranger has already forfeited his life by committing murder he will
abstain from taking life if he can, being pretty sure that for any
number of highway robberies unaccompanied with violence he will only
be punished, at the worst, with penal servitude for life, and that if
he behaves well in prison he may very likely be at large again in ten
years. The owner of a house which is attacked must resist if he has
much to lose which he cannot spare. But in travelling, people generally
prefer to take little that is valuable with them, and to leave their
pistols at home. For the bush which borders all the roads, more or
less, gives the bushranger an almost irresistible advantage. He can
choose his own position, and without being seen cover a driver or a
passenger with his rifle or his revolver, and bid him throw up his
arms or be shot, before the latter has time to get at his pistol. The
traveller cannot be prepared on the instant. To undergo the jolts and
plunges of an Australian coach on Australian roads with a cocked pistol
in one’s hand would be to run a greater risk than any to be apprehended
from bushrangers. They practise, too, a certain contemptuous
Turpin-like courtesy towards passengers, especially poor ones and
women; and often take nothing but the mails. And so the actual loss and
danger from this state of things is not so great as might be supposed.
But the insubordinate and lawless spirit of the population, of which
it is the evidence, is a more serious matter. And it must prevail very
widely. A bushranger’s person and features are generally perfectly well
known in the district where he carries on his depredations. A large
reward is offered for his capture. He could not get food to support him
or clothes to wear without the connivance of a great number of persons.
_With_ their connivance he often pursues a successful career for years;
and it is often only by a lucky accident if the police succeed in
making a capture.
XI.
POLITICAL DIFFICULTIES OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
If the British public is as ignorant of other things as it is about
Australia, it must be quite as ignorant a public as Mr. Matthew Arnold
would have us believe. It appears to be under an impression that
Australians habitually carry revolvers. It has always persisted in
believing that Botany Bay was the place to which convicts were sent
out, and has a misty idea that that much libelled bay is the port of
Sydney. A person at Hobart Town is requested by an English friend to
invite to dinner occasionally a man who lives at Sydney. Even Lord
Grey invariably spells Port Phillip with one L. And so on. But the
most remarkable blunder I have seen was made by the _Saturday Review_.
It had an article criticising the appointment of Lord Belmore to the
office of ‘Governor-General of the Australian Colonies,’ in blissful
ignorance that no such office exists, or has existed for some years
past. The office referred to was that of Governor of New South Wales.
But it was not only a mistake in a name. The writer laid so much
stress on the paramount importance of the appointment and the power
it conferred, that it is evident that he was under the impression
that a Governor residing at Sydney possesses authority over the other
Australian colonies. I need hardly say that this is no more true than
it is true that the Queen possesses authority over the United States of
America.