Chapter XII: The Australian on the Land

The man on the land in Australia is represented by two classes, the squatter and the cockatoo farmer. Why the latter is so called I am at a loss to know. He never has a feather to fly with. The squatter is more birdlike. He puts on a lot of "wing," and some of him go so far as to flout a crest.

Many of the squatters of to-day in Australia are the descendants of cattle "duffers," as their nondescript herds amply testify. A fine portly legislator of the present time has a couple of well-stocked stations, and generally looms large in Australian landscape. One day, before he became smug, a neighbour of his caught him with an unbranded calf in his yard, and cried, "Heigh! That calf is not yours!" "No," he called back, "but it will be as soon as the iron is hot!"

I wouldn't like to be an Australian squatter for many reasons. That is, of the old type. There are a few importations of recent years--men with clean breeding and clean money--from England. They're all right. But they are not representative of the class. As a class squatters are illiterate, and an exemplification of the poet's mock logic that "The man who drives fat cattle must himself be fat"--particularly about the head. They are used chiefly as members of the different Legislative Councils, where they obstruct liberal land laws with much vehemence and bad grammar. They are in the main responsible for the slow settlement of Australian agricultural lands by their relentless harassment of the selector at every point. The result is a trend towards land monopolies. New South Wales illustrates the case. The evidence and finding of the Lands Scandals Commission showed that a Minister of the Crown in New South Wales accepted enormous bribes to perpetuate this state of things; there have also been land scandals in Victoria and Queensland. In that State 24 men or companies hold 44 million acres between them, and hold this preposterous area so tightly that when Australians complain that it is unfair to judge the country's indebtedness on a population basis they should remember that this sort of thing debars immigration: it rather accentuates the borrowing plight, by causing emigration.

The squatter encourages pests, not people, to settle on the land. It was a squatter who introduced sparrows into Australia, and rabbits, and Scotch thistles, and docks, and the bot fly; also swine fever. A squatter's son is a chip off the old blockhead. When he's about twenty he's sent to England for a brush up, and he either becomes an absentee or returns to help make Australian cities more vicious. As a rule he acquires a beautifully discriminative taste for whisky, and what time he is sober races horses on the most approved spieling method. There was one of him in the Sydney Equity Court recently, who said he had been drunk for eight years, and that the whole of that time was a blank to him.

The evening papers chronicled how many times he had delirium tremens, and how many times he had fits, and how as Vicar's warden he took up the collection in the country church and breathed whisky fumes on the congregation. He sat on the Bench--drunk: he played polo--drunk: he was captain of a volunteer corps--drunk: he read family prayers--drunk: he started races--drunk: he sat on the hospital committee--drunk: when he couldn't do these things he was dead--drunk.

But to the cockatoo. There is little to be said of him. He spends most of his time growling. He would have you believe that his title deeds are in a lawyer's office in perpetuity as security for loans, while the local grocer invariably has a lien over his crops. He is, as a matter of fact, mostly well to do, but the way he lives it is to be hoped will never in its sordidness be known to the other half of the world. His wail for cheap railway freights and seed wheat ceaseth not, and though he has learnt to call himself the backbone of the country he is really a national calamity. In the back country he is little better than his dog.

Francis Adams says his heathenism is intense, and that everyone in the bush is at heart a pessimist. He has almost lost the power of speech, and his jaws move with difficulty when he attempts it. Henry Lawson, an Australian, tells of the intelligence of the bushman at his highest development in a study entitled "His Colonial Oath." He writes: I recently met an old schoolmate of mine up country. He was much changed. He was tall and lank, and had the most hideously bristly red beard I ever saw. He was working on his father's farm. He shook hands and looked anywhere but in my face, and said nothing. Presently I remarked at a venture:

"So poor old Mr. B., the school master, is dead?"

"My oath!" he replied.

"He was a good sort?"

"My oath!"

"Time goes pretty quickly, doesn't it?"

"His oath (colonial)."

"Poor old Mr. B. died awfully sudden, didn't he?"

He looked up the hill and said, "My oath!"

Then he added: "My blooming oath!"

I thought my perhaps city rig or manner embarrassed him, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, spat, and said, so as to set him at his ease: "It's blanky hot to-day. I don't know how you blanky blanks stand such blank weather. It's blanky well blank enough to roast a crimson carnal bullock, ain't it?" Then I took out a cake of tobacco, bit off a quarter, and pretended to chew. He replied:

"My oath!"

The conversation flagged here. But presently, to my great surprise, he came to the rescue with:

"He finished me, you know?"

"Finished? How? Who?"

He looked down towards the river, thought (if he did think) and said: "Finished me edyercation, yer know!"

"Oh! you mean Mr. B.?"

"My oath!--he finished me first-rate."

"He turned out many good scholars, didn't he?"

"My oath! I'm thinkin' about going down to the training school!"

"You ought to--I would if I were you."

"My oath!"

"Those were good old times," I hazarded. "You remember the old bark school?"

He looked away across the siding, and was evidently getting uneasy. He shifted about and said: "Well, I must be going."

"I suppose you're pretty busy now?"

"My oath! So long!"

"Well, good-bye. We must have a yarn some day."

"My oath!"

He got away as quickly as he could....

The Australian bushman has, what is generally known as a "rat"; in fact, the lunacy of Australia is most alarming. "There seems little doubt that insanity is slowly but steadily increasing in the States," remarks Coghlan, on the Commonwealth. He is only working on the figures asylum returns show. If only the idiots of the backblocks were included, the mad rate per thousand in Australia--now in excess of that of England--would stagger humanity.