Chapter XVII: Loyalty and Cynicism 200 (3)

For there more than elsewhere in Australia—as much, perhaps, take the whole year round, as anywhere in the world—do scenery and climate invite retirement to country life. It is the Capua of the Australias. Snow scarcely falls except to ornament the summits of Mount Wellington and of the distant ranges of the uninhabited and almost unexplored west coast. The frosts are seldom fatal even to the tenderest plant. The stifling hot winds of the continent are cooled by a hundred miles of sea before they reach the island. Nor is the air stagnant or sultry. Hot as the sun is by day, the summer nights are cooler than in England. English trees, flowers, and fruits, flourish with a rare luxuriance, side by side with pines from Norfolk Island and New Zealand. Geraniums blaze out in huge pink and scarlet masses, growing in almost wild profusion. The English sweet-briar has been introduced, and has spread of itself till in its luxuriance it has become a noxious weed to the farmers. Fruit follows fruit so fast under the early summer sun that apples ripen almost before strawberries are over. It is in such profusion that it lies rotting on the ground for want of mouths to eat it. Life is long here, and you seldom see the pale, thin, dried-up, prematurely old faces and lean figures of the other colonies, which almost make one doubt whether the English race was meant to live in climates such as those of Queensland and of South Australia. Sometimes indeed it seems as if the climate were _too_ Capuan, too little compelling to exertion. Invalids bask in it, rheumatic people find in it relief from pain, and the consumptive live out the full tale of their days. But the strong and active seem to lose something of their vigour, to ride where they used to walk, to walk where they used to run, to drink stimulants when they used to eat. Children seem to grow up less hardy for want of the nipping of the keen frost and the bitter blast of the English east wind to compel them to activity and to make repose for half the year, except by the fire-side, impossible.[8]

VII.

TASMANIA (_continued_).

Circumstances have made Tasmania lean more than any other of the Australian Colonies towards sober conservatism in its ideas and its social and political aspect. Perhaps the youthful ideal of those who are now middle-aged and influential was generally the British regimental officer, as he was to be found, some twenty or thirty years ago, in quarters at Hobart Town, or retired and occupied with his grant of land up the country. For in those days there were sometimes a couple of regiments in the colony, which formed no unimportant or inconsiderable proportion of its population, besides a number of government officials in various capacities. The original landed proprietors were mostly retired officers of the army or navy, army doctors, or other government officials, to whom up to about thirty-five years ago grants of land were made by the Crown.

Land was not worth very much then. Ploughing your field with a sentry keeping guard at one end of it lest you should be speared by a black fellow crawling out of the bush, was farming under difficulties: to say nothing of the probability of having the station cleared out by bushrangers from time to time, and the chance of being shot, as a precaution against identification, by men who had already forfeited their lives.

It is better than any novel to get an old Tasmanian settler to tell you about those old times, the uproarious, dare-devil, killing and robbing heroic age of the colony. The crowning event, the great joke of the time—soon after which things began to get comparatively peaceable and prosaic—was the ‘black war,’ as it is ironically called. This was one of the wildest and most impracticable schemes ever devised by a really wise man, for catching the black fellows alive and unhurt and deporting them to some island where they might be both harmless and safe. All available soldiers and settlers were mustered and posted in a continuous line across the south-eastern corner of the country, which line, advancing day by day and gradually converging, was at length to enclose and catch them as in a trap. It was like sending half a dozen mastiffs to drive rabbits out of a wood, as almost every one knew beforehand it would be. Somebody caught (I think) one black man and a woman, very much by accident, and no more were even _seen_. But 30,000_l._ or 40,000_l._ had been spent on the campaign, and when the campaigners sent the bill home accompanied by a memorial setting out magniloquently the glorious results attained, John Bull unsuspectingly paid it, and the colony was so much the richer for its ‘black war.’

Very soon after this—but in no sort of way in consequence of it—the whole race of aborigines came one by one and voluntarily gave themselves up to a man named Robinson, who had acquired an extraordinary influence over them, and who deserves to be nominated patron saint of the colony. They were settled on Flinders Island and kindly treated, but nevertheless died off fast. The small remnant was afterwards settled at Oyster Cove, an exquisitely lovely spot on D’Entrecasteaux’ Channel, where the survivors, now only three in number, are to be seen.

The bushrangers too were put down soon after the black fellows had 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.

Or if you prefer a more settled country with farms and townships at 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.