Hitherto I have been writing of the properties and adjuncts of Australian
life. It is high time to say something of the colonists themselves. And,
here I shall describe the types which the colony has produced and is
producing, rather than such modifications as colonists born and bred in
England have undergone during their subsequent residence in
Australia--colonials as distinct from colonists.
Perhaps of their first stage of existence the less said the better. I
have a holy horror of babies, to whatever nationality they may belong;
but for general objectionableness I believe there are none to compare
with the Australian baby. It is not only that the summer heat and sudden
changes of climate make him worse-behaved than his _confrères_ over
the ocean, but the little brute is omnipresent, and I might almost add
omnipotent. Nurses are more expensive and mothers less fastidious than in
England. Consequently, baby lives in the family circle almost from the
time of its birth. Nurseries are few and far between. He is lashed into a
chair by his mother's side at meals; he accompanies her when she is
attending to her household duties, and often even when she is receiving
her visitors. But if this were all I would say nothing. French children
are brought up in a similar way; and in their case it certainly has its
advantages as far as the child is concerned, whatever may be the
inconvenience to the adults amongst whom it is brought. It is easy to
avoid families whose children make themselves nuisances to visitors. But
the middle and lower classes of Australians are not content with the
baby's supremacy in the household. Wherever his mother goes, baby is also
taken. He fills railway carriages and omnibuses, obstructs the pavement
in perambulators, and is suckled _coram populo_ in the Exhibition.
There is no getting away from him, unless you shut yourself up
altogether. He squalls at concerts; you have to hold him while his mother
gets out of the omnibus, and to kiss him if you are visiting her house.
It is little better when he gets old enough to walk and talk. Having once
made the household bow down before him, he is slow to relinquish the
reins of office. Possession is nine points of the law. It requires a
stern parent to make good the tenth. If the child no longer cries or has
to be kissed, he makes up for it in other ways. He has breathed the free
air of Australian independence too early to have much regard for the
fifth commandment. To make himself a nuisance till he gets what he wants
is the art he first learns and to this end he considers all means
legitimate. Strict and _a fortiori_ severe measures towards children
are at a discount in Australia, and, considering the surrounding
circumstances, by no other means can they be rendered tractable. The
child has no restrictions put on his superabundant animal spirits, and he
runs wild in the most extraordinary, and often to elders, unpleasant
freaks. Certes the second stage is but little less unpleasant than the
first,
When it gets into petticoats or breeches, the child must be treated of
according to sex. And here _place aux demoiselles_, for from this time
upwards they are a decided improvement upon their brothers. The
Australian schoolgirl, with all her free-and-easy manner, and what the
Misses Prunes and Prisms would call want of maidenly reserve, could teach
your bread-and-butter miss a good many things which would be to her
advantage. It is true that neither schoolmistresses nor governesses could
often pass a Cambridge examination, nor have they any very great desire
for intellectual improvement. But the colonial girl is sharper at picking
up what her mistress does know than the English one, and she has more of
the boy's emulation. Whatever her station in life, she is bound to strum
the piano; but in no country is a good pianoforte player more rare, or do
you hear greater trash strummed in a drawing-room. Languages and the
other accomplishments are either neglected or slurred over; but, on the
other hand, nearly every colonial girl learns something of household
work, and can cook some sort of a dinner, yea, and often cut out and make
herself a dress. She is handy with her fingers, frank, but by no means
necessarily fast in manner, good-natured and fond of every species of
fun. If her accomplishments are not many, she sets little value on those
she possesses, and never feels the want of, or wastes a regret, on any
others.
Almost all girls go to school, but the home-training leads to little
obedience or respect for their teachers, and the parental authority is
constantly interposed to prevent well-deserved punishments. Accustomed to
form judgments early and fearlessly, each girl measures her mistress by
her own standard; and if she comes up to that standard, an _entente
cordiale_ is established, the basis whereof is the equality which each
feels to subsist independent of their temporary relations.
At seventeen my lady comes out, though for the last two, if not three or
four, years she has been attending grown-up dances at the houses of
friends, so that the edge of her pleasure has long been dulled. School
once left behind, she looks upon marriage as the end and object of life;
but it must not be supposed from this that she makes any attempt to catch
a husband. Young men are plentiful enough, and she does not care when her
turn comes. That it is bound to come she takes for granted, and
accordingly is always on the look-out for it. The camaraderie which
exists between her and some half-a-dozen men may lead to something with
one of them; and meanwhile she has time to ascertain their dispositions
and turn their qualities over and over in her mind till some one's
attentions become marked, and she makes up her mind that she is suited or
the reverse. She has danced too much before she came out to care much for
it now; but in a warm climate, where verandas and gardens lend themselves
so readily to flirtation, she retains a due appreciation of balls and
parties, and gets a far larger number of them than an English girl of the
middle class.
On the average, colonial girls possess more than their share of good
looks; but 'beauties' are rare, and the sun plays the deuce with
complexions. The commonest type is the jolly girl who, though she has
large hands and feet, no features and no figure, yet has a taking little
face, which makes you say: 'By Jove, she is not half bad-looking!'
Brunettes are, of course, in the majority; and every third or fourth girl
has beautiful brown eyes and an abundance of coarsish hair--which, by the
way, she probably dresses in an untidy knob, all corners and no
rotundity.
Her manners have lost the boisterousness of school days, but still often
want toning down according to English ideas. Her frankness and
good-fellowship are captivating, and you feel that all her faults spring
from the head, and not from the heart. She is rarely affected, and is
singularly free from 'notions,' though by no means wanting in ideas and
in conversation of a not particularly cultured description. With a keen
idea of the value of money and the benefits to be derived from its
possession, she never takes it into consideration in choosing her
husband: her ideal of whom is above all things 'manly'--the type that
used to be known under the description of 'muscular Christians.'
In religion her views are not pronounced. She attends church pretty
regularly, but is entirely free from superstition, though not always from
intolerance. Adoration of the priesthood is not at all in her line. For
politics she cares nothing, except in Victoria where naturally she
espouses her father's side warmly, but in an irrational, almost stupid,
way. Art is a dead letter to her, and so is literature, unless an
unceasing and untiring devotion to three-volume novels be counted under
that head. To music, according to her lights, she professes, and often
feels, a strong leaning.
There is one thing about her that strikes you disagreeably in society. It
is her want of conversation with ladies and married people. To a
bachelor, to whom she has just been introduced, she will chatter away
nineteen to the dozen; but, even in her own, house, she has no idea of
the social duties. Marriage, in her opinion, is a Rubicon, which, once
crossed, if it does not altogether debar from the pleasures of maiden and
bachelorhood, at least makes it necessary for married folk to shift for
themselves. To talk or dance with a married man would be a terrible waste
of time; and as for married women, she expects to join that holy army of
martyrs in the course of time, and will then be quite contented with the
same treatment as she has meted out to others. The politeness which
springs from a sense of duty to others is little known to the Australian
girl. If she likes you, she will make herself very pleasant; but if you
are not worth wasting powder and shot on, you must expect to realize that
disagreeable truth in all its nakedness.
In many things a child, she often looks forward to her wedding for the
mere festivity of the occasion, and thinks how jolly it will be to have
six bridesmaids, how nice she will look in her bridal dress, and how the
other fellows will envy her chosen one. Generally marrying two or three
years younger than the English girl, she would consider herself an 'old
maid' at twenty-three; and for old maids she entertains the very minimum
of respect, in spite of their rarity in the colonies. Once married, she
gives up to a large extent, if not entirely, the pomps and vanities of
which she has had her full during spinsterhood, and devotes herself to
her household, children, and husband. She usually has a large family, and
in them pays for all the sins of her youth. She has had her fling, and
for the rest of her life she lives but to serve her children and make
them happy, recognising that in the antipodes 'juniores priores' is the
adopted motto.
The Australian schoolboy is indeed a 'caution.' With all the worst
qualities of the English boy, he has but few of his redeeming points. His
impudence verges on impertinence, and his total want of respect for
everybody and everything passes all European understanding. His father
and mother he considers good sort of folk, whom he will not go out of his
way to displease; his schoolmaster often becomes, _ipso facto_, his
worst enemy, in the never-ceasing, war with whom all is fair, and
obedience but the last resource. Able to ride almost as soon as he can
walk, he is fond of all athletic sports; but it is not till leaving
school that his athleticism becomes fully pronounced: thus reversing the
order observed in England, where the great majority of the boys, who are
cricket and football mad at school, more or less drop those pursuits as
young men. He is too well fed and supplied with pocket-money ever to feel
the need for theft, but it is difficult to get him to understand Dr.
Arnold's views about lying and honour. Though not wanting in pluck, he
lacks the wholesome experience of a few good lickings, and can easily
pass his school-days without having a single fight. He is quarrelsome
enough, but his quarrels rarely go farther than hard words and spiteful
remarks. At learning he is apt, having the spirit of rivalry pretty
strong in him.
In all but one or two schools classes are too much mixed to make a
gentlemanly tone possible, and such little refinements as tidiness of
dress are out of the question. When he is at home for the holidays, his
mother tries to dig some manners into him (if she has any herself); but
he has far too great a sense of the superiority of the rising generation
to pay more attention to her than is exacted by the fear of punishment.
Unfortunately, that punishment is very sparingly made use of; and when it
is used, it takes a very lenient shape, public opinion being strongly
against corporal punishment, however mild, and according to children a
number of liberties undreamed of in the old country.
Indoors the Australian boy is more objectionable than the English one,
because he is under less restraint, and knows no precincts forbidden to
him. Generally intelligent and observant, he is here, there, and
everywhere; nothing escapes him, nothing is sacred to him. Of course his
further development draws its form and shape from his previous
caterpillar condition, and when he comes to take his place in mercantile
or professional life, he is equally disagreeable and irrepressible.
But such a young 'gum-sucker' must not be confounded with the ordinary
middle-class Englishmen who form the majority of the professional and
business men one comes in contact with in the present day. The native
Australian element is still altogether in the minority in everyday life,
and the majority of adults are English-born colonists. What modification
then, you will ask, does the middle-class Englishman undergo in
Australia? In some ways, a deterioration; in others, an amelioration. The
deteriorating tendency shows itself in an increased love of dram--and
especially spirit--drinking; in apparel and general carelessness; in a
roughening of manner and an increase of selfishness. The improvement lies
chiefly in greater independence of manner and thought, in a greater
amount of thought, in enlarged and more tolerant views, in less reserve
and _morgue_, in additional kindness of heart, and in a more complete
realization of the great fact of human brotherhood.
In Australia a man feels himself an unit in the community, a somebody; in
England he is one amongst twenty-seven millions, a nobody. This feeling
brings with it a greater sense of self-respect and responsibility.
Altogether, then, it may be said that the balance of the modification is
generally on the side of improvement rather than of deterioration. The
Englishman in Australia improves more than he deteriorates. And this is
the more true the lower you descend in the social scale. It may be
doubted whether the really well-educated man--the 'gentleman' in short,
to use the word in its technical sense of a man well born, well bred, and
well educated--generally improves in the colonies. As a rule, I should
say he deteriorates. He cannot often find a sufficiently large number of
his equals within a sufficiently small area, nor keep sufficiently
amongst them not to lose somewhat in manner and culture. He develops the
breadth, as distinct from the depth, of his intellect. He learns a great
deal which he did not know before from the life around him, but he also
forgets a great deal which he has learnt.
The great tendency of Australian life is democratic, i.e. levelling. The
lower middle-class and the upper middle-class are much less distinct than
at home, and come more freely and frequently, indeed continually, into
contact with each other. This is excellent for the former, but not so
good for the latter. In the generation that is growing up, the levelling
process is going much further. The small tradesmen's sons are going into
professions, and the professional men's sons into trades. You have the
same tendency in England, but not nearly to the same extent.
Slight as is the division between the middle-class and the wealthy class,
I ought perhaps to say a few words on the latter. Practically, as well as
theoretically, there is no aristocracy in Australia, and the number of
leisured men is yet too small for them to form a class by themselves.
Still every day their number is increasing; and although they almost all
do a certain amount of work, it is rather because, if they did not, they
would find time lie heavy on their hands, than because there is any
particular need for it. The wealthy squatter--which low-sounding word has
in Australia become synonymous with aristocrat--spends the greater part
of the year in supervising his station, although generally employing a
manager, whose work bears much the same relation to his own, as that of
the permanent head of a department does to that of his political chief.
Whenever there is a race meeting or any other attraction, the squatter
comes down ( _not_ up as in England) to town and spends a few days or a
few weeks there, as the case may be. If he is a married man he probably
keeps a town house, where his wife lives the greater part of the winter,
which is the 'season;' if a bachelor, he lives at his club, which
supplies him with lodging as well as board.
But he finds it hard work to spend any lengthened period in town. The
clubs are deserted for the greater part of the day; everyone else has his
or her work to do, and a lounger becomes equally a nuisance to himself
and to his friends. With no tastes for literature or art, and little
opportunity for their gratification if he should chance to possess them,
he is thrown utterly on his own resources, and these rarely extend beyond
drinking and gambling. Both these pursuits are more fitted for gaslight
than daylight, and if indulged in too freely during the day, pall in the
evening, so that he has literally nothing to do from breakfast till
dinner. He cannot race or play cricket quotidianally, so that he soon
returns to his station, where he stops till the next race meeting.
The wealth of Australia has not yet passed beyond the first generation.
The majority of the wealthy have themselves made their fortunes, and are
not inclined to let them be squandered by their sons, at least during,
their lifetime. The number of young men with no regular employment is at
present very small. And it is well it should be so. Else we should feel
all the evils of a plutocracy, purified neither by education nor public
opinion--evils which have already made themselves apparent in the
political system of Victoria.
The Australian aristocrat has the greatest contempt for politics, and
thereby has forged a collar for his own neck. The 'Berry blight,' as it
is called, which has fallen over Victoria, is, to a great extent, a
reaction against the selfish and inconsiderate policy of the squatters
when they were in power. In such a crisis the mob has no time to be just,
remembering only that the aristocracy were never generous. Politically, I
fancy that the squatters will never again obtain power, except under
conditions which will make a return to the old _régime_ impossible.
Socially, there are yet evil days before Australia.
There is a great deal of truth in the old saying--that it takes three
generations to make a gentleman and there is no doubt but that the second
is infinitely the worst of the three. Shortly the country will pass
through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a
half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal
passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social
as we are passing through the political crisis, and obtain a modified
aristocracy in the third generation, which in the fourth should become as
profitable to the country as an aristocracy well can be.
At present the old squatter drinks and gambles; his son will drink less,
gamble more--though it was not a young man who recently lost £40,000 in a
night's sitting at a club in Melbourne--and lead a wanton life; but he
will probably have the sense to educate his children thoroughly, instead
of taking them away from school at seventeen, as was done with himself;
and the grandson will obtain some cultivated tastes which will make a
fight for it with those he has inherited. In the fourth generation there
should be an aristocracy, with as much similarity of character and
disposition to the existing English aristocracy as the different
circumstances of the two countries will permit.
The life of a wealthy woman in Australia is _ennuyeux_ to a degree. If
she is a lady by birth and education, she must necessarily feel that the
advantages which wealth bestows are squandered upon such provincialism as
she is perforce subjected to. To reign in hell is, after all, a very low
ideal, and one which can only be entertained by an inferior nature, so
long as heaven remains within reach. There are, of course, advantages in
being rich even in Australia; but the wealthy lady will naturally draw
comparisons between these and those which the same amount of money would
procure for her in London or Paris. She can import dresses from Worth's,
and carriages from Peters', but she cannot choose them for herself; and
if they should be really admirable, who is there to appreciate their
superiority to the surrounding fashions?
'How on earth am I to get on in Adelaide,' said a musician of
considerable merit to me, 'when, as you know, there is no one with whom I
can provoke comparisons?' The very superiority of the man was fatal to
his success. And so it is with the Australian lady of taste. Nor does the
misfortune stop there. Unless she makes frequent visits to centres of
taste, I will defy any woman to retain her appreciation of good taste.
Her own taste gets dulled by the want of means of comparison. You will
perhaps say that taste in her surroundings is not everything which wealth
can bring to a woman. But if you come to reflect for a moment, you will
see that in the more comprehensive meaning of the phrase it is. Dress is
but one example of the surroundings which a woman covets. I have chosen
it because it is perhaps the commonest, though of course not by a long
way the highest,
But wealthy ladies 'to the manner born' are not so numerous in Australia
that I need dwell long on the drawbacks of their position. It is at any
rate happier than that of the _parvenue_, unless the mere fact of being
_arrivée_ confers any special enjoyment. At what has she arrived? At
carriages, at dresses, at houses and furniture, and at servants of a
style she is totally unaccustomed to and unfitted for. When you tremble
before your butler, and have to learn how to behave at table from your
housekeeper, wealth cannot be unalloyed pleasure. Without education and
taste, the _parvenue_ has small means of enjoying herself except by
making a display which costs her even more anxiety and trouble than it
does money. Wiser is the rich woman who contents herself with the same
style of life as she was accustomed to in her youth, adding to it only
the things that she really wants--a more roomy house, a couple of
women-servants, and a buggy. Thus she can feel really comfortable and at
home; but unfortunately for their own and their husbands 'peace of mind'
these poor women are too often ambitious to become what they are not.
Even leaving aside the discomforts which are always allied to
pretentiousness, the poor rich woman has a hard time of it. What can she
do with herself all day long? She has not gone through that long
education up to doing nothing which enables English ladies of means to
pass their time without positive boredom. She has no tastes except those
which she does not dare to gratify, and becomes a slave to the very
wealth whose badge she loves to flaunt.
The Australian working-man is perhaps too well paid to suit us poor folks
who are dependent upon him; but, for all that, comfortable means bring an
improvement in the man as well as in his condition. It is very trying to
have--as I recently had--to go to four plumbers before I could get one to
do a small job for me, and still more trying to find the fourth man fail
me after he had promised to come. Such accidents are of everyday
occurrence in colonial life, and they make one doubt the advantages of a
wealthy working-class. But, independent and difficult to please as the
colonial working-man is, his carelessness is only a natural consequence
of the value set on his labour. Provided he does not drink, you can get
as good a day's work out of him as at home. He will pick his time as to
when he will do your job, and hesitate whether he will do it at all;
but having once started on it, he generally does his best for you.
Too often the sudden increase of wages is too much for his mental
equilibrium, and a man who was sober enough as a poor man at home,
finds no better use for his loose cash than to put it into the
public-house till. But as a class I do not think Australian working men
are less sober than those at home. Those who are industrious and careful
in a very few years rise to be masters and employers of labour, and are
at all times so sure of constant employment that it is no wonder they do
not care about undertaking odd jobs. If their manner is as independent as
their character, I am far from blaming them for it, though occasionally
one could wish they did not confound civility and servility as being
equally degrading to the free and independent elector. But when you meet
the man on equal terms in an omnibus or on other neutral ground, this
cause of complaint is removed. Where he is sure of his equality he makes
no attempt to assert it, and the treatment he receives from many
_parvenu_ employers is no doubt largely the cause of intrusive assertion
of equality towards employers in general. Politically he is led by the
nose, but this is hardly astonishing, since, in nine cases out of ten,
his electoral qualifications are a novelty to him. He carries his
politics in his pocket, or what the penny papers tell him are his
pockets; or, if he rises above selfish considerations he is taken in by
the bunkum of his self-styled friends. But in what country are the free
and independent electors wiser? Happily for Australia, his Radicalism
rarely lasts long, if he is worth his salt. He becomes in a few years one
of the propertied class, has leisure to learn something of the conditions
under which property is best preserved and added to, and thus--according
to the admission of the leading Radical paper--Conservatism is constantly
encroaching on the ranks of Liberalism. Except under very rare
circumstances poverty in Australia may fairly be considered a reproach.
Every man has it in his power to earn a comfortable living; and if after
he has been some time in the colonies the working-man does not become one
of the capitalists his organs inveigh against, he has only himself to
blame.
Of the three sections into which the working-class may be divided--old
chums, new chums, and colonials--the first-named are, on the whole, the
best. For the most part they began life with a superabundance of animal
spirits, and a love of adventure, which have been toned down by a
practical experience of the hardships they dreamed of. They certainly
drink most and swear most of the three sections, but with all their
failings there are few men who can do a harder day's work than they.
Barring pure misfortune, there is always some good reason for their still
remaining in the class they sprang from. Though this is not always
strictly true, since a good many of them began life higher up in the
world than they are now. Still I prefer them to the pepper-and-salt
mixture which has been sent out under that happy-go-lucky process--free
immigration. When the colonies were so badly in want of population, they
could not stop to pick and choose. Hence a large influx of loafers, men
who, without any positive vice, will do anything rather than a hard day's
work, and who come out under the impression that gold is to be picked up
in the streets of Melbourne. Under the name of 'the unemployed' they are
a constant source of worry to the Government, whom they consider bound to
give them something light and easy, with 7s. 6d. or 8s. a day, and give
rise abroad to the utterly false impression that there am times when it
is hard for an industrious man to get work in Australia. Of course many
of our immigrants have become first-rate workmen, but such men soon rise
in the social scale.
The best workman when he chooses, and the most difficult to get hold of,
is the thoroughbred colonial. Being able to read and write does not,
however, keep him from being as brutal as Coupeau, and, except from a
muscular point of view, he is often by no means a promising specimen of
colonization. It is from this section of the community that the
'larrikins,' as they are called, are recruited, roughs of the worst
description, insulting and often robbing people in Melbourne itself, and
moving about in gangs with whose united force the police is powerless to
cope. Sometimes they break into hotels and have 'free drinks' all round,
maltreating the landlord if he protests. In a younger stage they content
themselves with frightening helpless women, and kicking every Chinaman
they meet. On all sides it is acknowledged that the larrikin element is
daily increasing, and has already reached, especially in Melbourne,
proportions which make it threaten to amount to a social clanger within a
few years. Of late their outbreaks have not been confined to night-work,
but take place in open daylight, _coram populo et_ police. No one
exactly knows how to meet the difficulty, and What shall we do with our
larrikins?' is likely to replace the former popular cry of 'What shall
we do with our boys?' to which some ingenious person furnished the
obvious answer, 'Marry them to our girls.' Corporal punishment for
corporal offences is in my opinion and that of most of the serious
portion of the community, the only remedy which is likely also to act as
a preventive; but however desirable it may be acknowledged to be, there
is a difficulty in bringing it into use in communities whose sympathies
are so essentially democratic as those of Victoria and New South
Wales--for in Adelaide the police has still the upper hand. The votes of
these very larrikins turn the scale at elections. Their kith and kin form
a majority of the population, and therefore of the electorate. However
much a member of Parliament or a Minister may recognise the necessity of
meeting a social danger, he can hardly afford to do it at the expense of
his seat.
At the time of the Kelly trial practical demonstration of the latent
sympathy with crime in Melbourne was afforded. Thousands of persons,
headed by the Chairman of Committees of the House of Assembly, actually
agitated for the reprieve of the most notorious, if not the greatest,
criminal in the annals of Australia, a man whose murders were not to be
counted on the fingers; and all this because for over two years he had
set the police at defiance, and after a life of murder and rapine had,
shown the courage of despair when his only choice was between being shot
by a policeman or hung on the gallows. In many respects, as, I have
elsewhere intimated, our free political system makes the social outlook
here far more promising than in Europe; but larrikinism is a peculiar
danger already well above the horizon, against which we seem powerless to
deal. Some set it down to the absence of religious teaching in the State
schools, but its real point and origin seems rather to lie in the absence
of parental authority at home and the unpopularity of the old proverb:
'Spare the rod and spoil the child.'