Chapter I: Part 1

THE REAL AUSTRALIA

THE
REAL AUSTRALIA

BY

ALFRED BUCHANAN

AUTHOR OF
“BUBBLE REPUTATION”

Where the water-blossoms glister,
And by gleaming vale and vista,
Sits the English April’s sister
Soft and sweet and wonderful.--KENDALL.

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS
1907

[_All rights reserved._]

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The object of a novel is, as a general rule, to reflect life and temperament in a selected environment. For various reasons it has become the fashion to achieve this end by indirect means. An author goes to Italy, and writes a book about Italy. He tells us the things about Italy, and the people of Italy, that we want to know; but in order to discover these things we have to read many pages dealing with imaginary persons, for whose adventures we may or may not care, and in whose personality we may or may not believe.

The present work is merely an attempt, and an obviously imperfect one, to do directly what the travelled and cosmopolitan novelist does in an indirect way. That is to say, it is an attempt to mirror in some fashion the social life, the literary life, the individual life, the present-day life, of a developing continent and four millions of people.

The author is aware that books of this kind are usually written by travellers of more or less distinction. He knows that it is the easiest thing possible for your up-to-date journalist to rush across to Japan or Siberia and to be back in six months with the MSS. of a book that will exhaust the subject. He knows this; and he is bound to admit that he may be lacking in that breezy and picturesque point of view which follows naturally on an acquaintance of ten weeks, but is liable to vanish with a knowledge of ten years.

Yet he does not apologise; certainly not for the subject matter, nor yet for the fact that he writes about Australia as a resident Australian. The living world should be at least as worthy of interpretation as the dead world, or the world that existed only in some writer’s brain. What he does apologise for is the treatment, should that prove _altogether_ inadequate to the theme.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. VIRTUES AND VICES 1

II. SOCIETY 23

III. JOURNALISM 45

IV. THE GAME OF POLITICS 68

V. PSEUDO-LITERARY 91

VI. ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 113

VII. THEATRES AND AMUSEMENTS 137

VIII. THE ETERNAL FEMININE 160

IX. TWO CITIES 181

X. THE NOVELIST AND HIS SELECTION 204

XI. THREE WRITERS OF VERSE 225

XII. FOUR PRIME MINISTERS 252

XIII. THE IMPERIALIST 277

XIV. THE LITTLE AUSTRALIAN 296

INDEX 313

THE REAL AUSTRALIA

I

VIRTUES AND VICES

Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
_Life_ there outlying!

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as national character. That is to say, there is no set of qualities peculiar to any one nation. In every known country extremes meet. They meet now, as they met in the days when history began. Greece has had its Zeno and its Epicurus, Rome its Octavian and its Vitellius, France its Barrère and its Chateaubriand, Germany its Heine and its Bismarck, England its Cromwell and its John Wilkes. Why multiply the list? Why assert of the contrasted characters that exist always side by side that one is typical of the people as a whole, and the other is not? Why imply that one class of individual ceases to exist at a particular parallel of latitude, and another begins there and then to take its rise?

But while there is no such thing as national character--except in the sense that historians find it convenient to use--it is yet a fact that certain people encourage each other in certain practices, and that these practices come in time to assume the proportions of public virtues and vices. One environment may permit an individual to wear a species of garment, or to indulge in a form of language that would be among other surroundings either legally forbidden, or frowned out of existence. The unwritten law in regard to externals insensibly modifies both the law of conduct and the habit of thought. In Australia there are opposing tendencies at work. There is, in the first place, the tendency to freedom and to license which the remoteness from an older civilisation fosters. Opposed to this, and rapidly overcoming it, is the tendency of a country, as it develops settled institutions, to mould itself on the ambitious models of fashionable society elsewhere. As a third factor, and an undoubtedly powerful one, there is the influence of climate. This is tending in Australia to produce a different race of beings, physically and morally, from that in the Northern Hemisphere. It is tending to do so--but up to the present it has produced a crop of half results, of insufficiently proven theories, and of partially established types.

There are certain qualities--virtues, they may be called--that come prominently under notice in Australia and appear, from their habit of repeating themselves, to form some integral part of the life of the community. The foremost of these good qualities is that of hospitality. And here a singular anomaly presents itself. Politically the Australians are the most exclusive and the most inhospitable race on earth. Their only rivals in this respect must be looked for among the bottled-up Confucians of China, or the mysterious Buddhists of Thibet. The “white-ocean” policy of the Federal Parliament, no less than the present Immigration Restriction Act, with its humorous travesty of an education test, is the most glaring instance of political bigotry that has come to light in modern times. The whole of this legislation has been described by an Australian Prime Minister as a “monstrous outrage” on every tolerant sentiment and every democratic ideal. Yet the law has been in force for three years and no Minister or Government has dared to repeal it. It is true that a certain concession has been made in favour of the Japanese. But it is only a partial concession. There the law stands on the statute-book; and there it seems likely to remain until the excluded victors of Tsu-shima show a desire to argue the question from the vantage ground of a battle-ship. In the latter event anything might come to pass.

The anomaly consists in the fact that the Australians, desiring to live politically like frogs in a well, are, as individuals, among the most open-hearted and hospitable in the world. The prevailing temper is shown in small things as in great. In England, if you are in doubt as to your locality, you feel some hesitation in asking a stranger to put you on the right road. The hesitancy may do the Englishman an injustice, but his manner explains it. In Australia you have only to enquire as to the whereabouts of a certain street or of a particular house, to be accompanied half the way there by a man who is manifestly and unmistakeably pleased to be in a position to give the information. The same hospitality is shown in the average householder’s desire to surround himself with as many people as possible, to entertain as many as possible, and to have as many as possible sampling his wines and his coffee and his cigars. If you are thirsty in Australia--and the thirst of the nation is proverbial--it is usual to look for some one who will drink with you. The hermit temper is not common, nor is the prevailing type that of the individual who wishes to be let alone, and to enjoy things alone. If there is a new lawn, or a new piano, or a new motor-car, the owner has a real anxiety that its merits should be tested, and its benefits shared by as large a circle as practicable. Vanity may have something to do with this desire, but however accounted for, it exists. The inconsistency between the temper of the unit and the policy of the Government--of each successive Government--runs from A to Z. The elector who will vote to have black men deprived of the means of earning a living, brown men deported, and blind or sick men refused the right to set foot on land, will, if he meets the alleged undesirable immigrant in the ordinary paths of life, come to his assistance with an alacrity that the good Samaritan of sacred history might equal, but could not surpass.

There are other qualities that must compel admiration. The Australians are receptive-minded, tolerant--except in the political sense just mentioned--and ready to learn. The intense conservatism of older countries is not theirs. Standards are not arbitrarily fixed as they are in Britain. The social groove is not artificially restricted. It is narrowing, but it is still fairly broad. The slavish adherence to a certain set of rules, designated collectively as “good form,” is not a characteristic of the people. In the unwritten code that finds most favour there is the principle that a person may be worth cultivating even though he does not pronounce his “_a_’s” as if they were “_ai_’s,” and even though certain monosyllables, by the aid of which the smart set avoids the trouble of conversation, form no part of his vocabulary. The Australian holds--in theory, at any rate--the revolutionary doctrine that every one should be given a chance. Now and again an individual is found who acts up to this unfashionable and somewhat crude precept.

There is something elastic in the people’s attitude to life. They have not become socially or mentally atrophied by centuries of convention, by centuries of custom, by centuries of meaningless and idiotic routine. The atrocious crime of being a young nation, with much of what the word youth implies, is still to be laid at their door.

A certain warmth, a certain generous instinct, a certain spontaneity of thought and action, a certain buoyancy of temper, must be placed to the credit side of the ledger. A certain fairness to opponents must also be conceded, despite the remarks of a noted English cricketer to the contrary. This fairness becomes all the more praiseworthy when it is remembered that the only topic on which the Australians, as a people, hold any definite opinions is that of sport. Such being the case, it is inevitable that some feeling should be shown when matters of sport--that is to say, matters of far more general interest than the fate of Governments or the choosing of Parliaments--are being decided. Invidious comparisons are sometimes drawn between the behaviour of crowds in Sydney or Melbourne, and the behaviour of crowds at Lords’ or at the Oval. The fact is usually overlooked that the London rough, who is the counterpart of the Australian larrikin, is not to be met with in any numbers at an athletic contest. For one thing he has not the money to go there, and for another thing he has not the desire. But the more boisterous and more objectionable type of Australian has a habit of finding his way to cricket matches in Sydney or in Melbourne. Broadly speaking, it is a select crowd that watches the game in England--a crowd made select by the price of admission. It is a crowd less select in Australia, for the reason that the price of admission is more easily obtainable. Allowing for all the circumstances, and measuring unit for unit, it is a fact that the virtue of fairness to opponents is one that the new nation can confidently claim.

Much might be said--in fact much has already been said, and much more will be said--of the vices of the people. This is a topic on which it would be foolish to dogmatise, seeing that so much depends on the individual point of view. Vice itself has become a term of obscure meaning. What with our logicians and metaphysicians, our up-to-date moralists, and our new hedonists--what with our emancipated lady novelists, our reforming social philosophers, and our revolting sisters and brethren--what with all these, we have no arbitrary rules of conduct, and no definitions that can for a moment be relied upon. Even so correct and comparatively orthodox a writer as Edmund Burke has made a statement implying that vice practically ceases to exist when it is sufficiently embroidered and set among sufficiently magnificent surroundings. To be vicious to the accompaniment of fine phrases and minuet-like movements--to be vicious while the rich embroideries are sweeping the floor, and the lights are falling on velvet curtains, and “the stately silver shoulder stoops”--that is not really to be vicious at all. Such at least would appear to be the general opinion. And if the general opinion is not to be taken as a guide in these matters it is difficult to say what is.

So far as national vices come under the heading of national crimes--and the terms are more or less related, though they are not identical--it can be easily shown that Australia is neither very much better nor very much worse than other countries. The number of people who are punished each year for crimes of various kinds is, relative to population, much the same as the number similarly punished in the United Kingdom. Statistics of drunkenness are incomplete and unreliable, but there is the authority of Mulhall for the statement that while the United Kingdom consumes 3.57 proof gallons of intoxicants per inhabitant, Australasia consumes no more than 2.50 gallons. Illegitimacy is somewhat more prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere than in Great Britain, but the difference is not considerable. The proportion of illegitimate births is 6 per cent. in Australasia and only 4.15 per cent. in England and Wales, but in Scotland, where morals are understood to be rather austere, the proportion of illegitimate births is 7 per cent. And so it is in regard to most other offences--in regard to burglaries, assaults, thefts, murders and the rest. The lot of the average policeman is neither more nor less unhappy, neither more nor less strenuous, in Australia than in England. The chances of being murdered in one’s sleep--though the middle-class English household may disbelieve the statement--are not appreciably greater in Australia than they are in Great Britain.

Yet a nation that is outwardly law-abiding may be inherently vicious. The habit that saps vitality may not be the habit that advertises itself in the police-court. As a matter of fact, a heavy crop of burglaries, and assaults with violence, may be quite a healthy sign, tending to show that national vigour is unimpaired. Every philosopher knows that the abounding energy which, in the one case, drives the possessor to break open doors and to hit other people on the head will, in ninety-nine other cases, impel him to daring feats in exploration, or in athletics, or in war. It is the drug-taking habit, the cigarette-smoking habit, the card-playing habit, the gambling habit, the loafing, swearing, work-shirking habit that produces the most insidious results, and tells the most disastrous tale. None of these practices are liable, in the ordinary course, to land the perpetrator in a Court of Law. There is no statistician who can say anything definite about them. But that they are all unduly and dangerously prevalent in Australia is a fact admitting of no reasonable doubt.

The most pervading phase of Australian character is its irresponsibility. If this is not a vice in itself, it is the parent of a great many vices. The term by which it is usually designated is lack of principle, or of moral sense. The average Englishman may be innocent of much outward profession of virtue, or, for that matter, of any definite, cut-and-dried standard of beliefs. He may be a very long way from the ideal of the just man made perfect. But very often he is discovered to possess something that may be neither creed nor conscience, but that is more potent than either. It is more than a fear of the law. It is more than regard for the opinion of others. It is more, even, than sense of shame. It is the inner something--accumulated instinct, if you will--that makes a man prefer, when the pinch comes, to do the honourable thing. At the very least, and at the very worst, it makes him silent as to his vices, and conscious of the fact that they are not virtues. But the Australian is beginning to run into a different mould. It is the commonest occurrence in the world to find him talking and boasting, jesting and laughing, over that about which he should be most inexorably dumb. Of his successes with women, of his breakages of the seventh commandment, of his nights at bridge or in a public-house, of his supposed power of cajoling man, woman, or child--and more especially woman--he will talk as long and as often as he can get an audience to listen to him. The larger the audience the better he is pleased. It is an unfortunate tendency of the people, and the fact that there are conspicuous exceptions to the rule just laid down does not make the tendency any less noticeable or less unfortunate.

When this irresponsibility reaches its zenith, its nadir, its crown and summit of perfection or imperfection, it produces the Australian larrikin. Every one knows this product of the hour. His fame has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere, and from pole to pole. All the hooligans of London, all the gamins of Paris, all the lazzaroni of Naples, all the miscellaneous ruffians of Cairo and Port Said, have not eclipsed, or even approached, the reputation acquired in the space of a very few decades by this child of beneficent skies and benign, smiling weather. It is impossible to say anything new about the Australian larrikin, just as it is impossible to exaggerate the heights of his lawlessness, or to plumb the depths of his depravity. But from the scientific and psychological points of view he is both interesting and valuable. There are a number of well-informed and earnest people who are distressed and disgusted by the all-pervading hypocrisy of our social laws and conventions. Mirabeau, who was exceedingly well informed, and very much in earnest, made it a boast that he had mastered all formulas. He had in fact reached the summit of irresponsibility. The Australian larrikin is in precisely the same position. But when you take weight off one man you enable him to redeem a nation; when you take weight off another you make him what he is--a living monument of hopeless vulgarity and inexpressible vice. In view of the fact that the temper of the average man is more disposed to make of him a larrikin than a Mirabeau, it becomes evident that artificial restraints are, in the aggregate, the salvation of the race. From the member of the “Rock’s Push” and of the “Flying Angels” we learn valuable lessons--lessons which such enthusiasts as Godwin and Condorcet would have us ignore. We learn that conventional laws are necessary, that artificial restraint is admirable, that people must be prevented by force from being what most of them left to themselves would become.

Of a somewhat similar type to the larrikin, though not occupying such a dizzy pre-eminence, is the cad of common or everyday life. This individual is not quite hopeless. If he were taken in hand and disciplined, drilled, and tutored, made to shoulder a rifle and practise a compulsory goose-step, fined every day for using bad language, forbidden to stand at street corners, imprisoned for the habit of expectoration, and under no circumstances allowed the use of a bicycle, he might come in time to be a valuable citizen. At present he is left too much to his own devices. Lord Roberts had his English counterpart in view when he announced that the future of the Empire depended on the adoption of a scheme of conscription. A warlike race is not to be discovered at street corners. It does not grow there. Neither is it over-much given to frequenting unregistered race meetings, and “two-up” schools. It swears occasionally, but only when circumstances appear to call for emphasis. Something will require to be done with the youth who perambulates its main streets before Australia will be able to supply the world with a new Thermopylæ, or even another Yalu.

The form of vice that is more or less prevalent in all countries--a form that is continually being warned against by the social brigade of the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and a worthy Colonial Secretary, and some less worthy members of the police--is a form much in evidence in Australia. The warfare, it need hardly be said, is scarcely as profitable, while it is as unending as the warfare of the Pigmies against the Cranes. There is scarcely a main street in which, after dark, the evidences are not visible of that which the hypocrite censures, and which the wise man merely deplores. In this continent all social currents follow their own bent. There is no attempt to make people moral by Act of Parliament. There is not even an attempt to save them by Act of Parliament from certain possibilities arising from their own actions. So the woman goes her way. Her unending sacrifice--for there is no doubt that it is a sacrifice, chosen as the less of two sacrifices--brings in the usual rewards, social outlawry, criminal associates, a fiery, unquenchable thirst, and a slum in which to draw the curtain. It is a very ancient story. In matters of this kind one does not look for novel and revolutionary features. The life of pleasure here is as pleasurable as it is elsewhere. As much, and no more. The pleasure, facetiously so called, is the outcome of an industrial system under which the working womanhood of the country is expected to feed and clothe and house itself on ten shillings a week, or less. By the toil of feminine hands--so long as they choose to toil--factories abound, industries keep themselves going, manufacturers grow rich. By the sacrifice of feminine respectability the carrion kites of society are fed. It is an obvious truth that Australia is always in danger of being injured, politically, by its statesmen, while it is always being rescued, socially, by its nymphs of the street.

There are certain acts, certain qualities, which it is impossible to forgive. On the other hand, there is a certain species of wrong-doing that is readily pardoned. Vice, as already pointed out, is to some extent a relative term; and if the motive is not petty or sordid, if the actor can rise to great occasions, if the man or woman is superior to the occasional outbreaks of his or her worse nature, it is safe to say that the nation is still capable of great things, and is by no means inherently bad. The most noteworthy characteristic of the Australian is his mental attitude to life. It is an attitude that is in danger of becoming crudely materialistic. It is impossible to build on this anything lasting. The pursuit of pleasure may be pardonable enough; but it is distinctly disquieting, from the point of view of one who wishes his country to be anything or to accomplish anything, to discover that the word _pleasure_ is being given only one meaning. “Patient, deep-thinking Germany” was at one time laughed at by the wits of Vienna and Paris. But Germany has had its Koniggratz and its Sedan, and is laughed at no longer. The moral is that it is better, in the national sense, to be patient and deep-thinking than to be shallow and pleasure-loving. The charge that is being brought against the typical Australian is that he is not self-contained enough, not deep enough, not patient enough, not idealistic enough. The pleasure that he understands, that he works for, that he gives himself over to, that he is limited by, is the obvious pleasure that is dependent on sense, and the things of sense; and _that_ must inevitably, sooner or later, become pallid and dead. He seems to be learning--in very many cases he has already learned--

To say of shame, what is it?
Of virtue, we can miss it;
Of sin, we can but kiss it,
And it’s no longer sin.

And he threatens--it may be only a threat--to flutter down from the stage of spasmodic enterprise to that of foolish indifference, from that of energy to that of ineptitude, from that which commands the respect, to that which invites the contempt of nations physically stronger and more enduring than his own.

Australia has so far achieved nothing great from the national standpoint. It cannot be said to have failed, because it has not yet been called upon. There are people who declare that they have the utmost confidence in its future. And if certain present-day tendencies could be overlooked, or if they could be obviated, as they might be, this confidence would be abundantly justified. The country has still indefinite room for expansion. It is not over-populated, and for at least another century is not likely to be. The wild-eyed enthusiast who imagines, with Milton, that he can see a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man from sleep, and shaking her invincible locks, must, if he forsake the _rôle_ of prophet for that of the sober speculator, find some habitation and dumping-ground for the people that are to be born hereafter. And there are not many regions remaining where new growths can be attempted without decided inconvenience to the old. Apart from South America, Australia is practically the only country offering--the only country, that is to say, where there are millions of acres of unoccupied land, and a soil and climate that do not actually forbid approach. But the people, if they are to do great things, if they are not to become a tributary of some foreign power, or an appendage of Eastern Asia, must be prepared sooner or later to make a few changes, and even a few sacrifices. They must be prepared to give up the habit of looking to their big brothers for ideas on art and literature, and dress, and dining, and ball-room dancing, and methods of pronunciation, and national defence. They must be prepared to get a _belief_ of some kind, a religion of some kind. They must be fanatical on some point--whether a religious point or a point of national honour, it does not matter--or they will go down before the Oriental fanatic as surely as the grass goes down before the scythe. No one imagines that a dilettante preference can stand against a consuming fire.

Be it a mad dream or God’s very breath,
The fact’s the same,--belief is fire.

The Australian must be prepared, in the event of great emergency, to die for something or for somebody. When he is thus prepared, his virtues and vices will not greatly matter; they will learn as a matter of course to adjust themselves.

II

SOCIETY

The gods their faces turn away
From nations and their little wars;
But we _our golden drama_ play
Before the footlights of the stars.

George Eliot, in a passage that has become famous, lets it be understood that good society is a terribly expensive product, that it is accustomed to float on gossamer wings of light irony, and that in order to bring it to perfection infinite labour is required from common people who sweat in factories, and toil in coal-mines, and tramp heavily about in agricultural districts “when the rainy days look dreary.” The novelist was dealing particularly with England; but the circumstances which she had in mind repeat themselves more or less exactly in most civilised countries. Even in Australia, which has not been civilised very long, men are sweating in factories, and toiling in coal-mines, and grubbing industriously on way-back selections for the benefit of other people who live in large houses and give a social tone to populous cities. Much interest attaches to this thing called “good society.” Is it, as a matter of fact, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, or on gossamer wings of any sort? Is it as delicate and ethereal as George Eliot says it ought to be?

There are certain truisms that do not require to be insisted upon. They are self-evident. Mr Henry Crosland, who has become quite famous through his ingenious habit of turning positives into negatives, and negatives into positives, says that the moral tone of English upper-class circles is excellent, while that of English middle-class circles is deceitful and desperately wicked. But the ordinary man, with no literary reputation to weigh him down, declares confidently that the facts are neither as George Eliot nor as Mr Crosland declare them to be. The term society, as commonly used and understood, refers to the limited number of people who have come into possession either of a certain property or of a certain name. The atmosphere of this circle is not light and buoyant. It is heavy, and _blasé_, and tired, and dull. This good English society does not float on gossamer wings; it drags itself round two continents with very conscious endeavour. It is not ironical; to be that, requires mental effort, while it is easier and more effective to be supercilious. This same society is not moral; the whole scheme and purpose of conventional morality is narrow and circumscribed, and therefore unattractive to those unprejudiced people who perceive that arbitrary rules of conduct are made for slaves. The set in question is in no single particular what its apologists and admirers declare it to be. It is not really exclusive; a man with sufficient means can always enter it. There is only one thing to which it is actively antagonistic, and that is ability. It is not antagonistic to poverty; it is merely disdainful. Its arrogance is appalling. Its lack of creative power is more appalling still.

And yet while the characteristics of the best London society are of this nature--while the whole edifice would suggest the Jugurtha reflection that the city is for sale, and will perish quickly when it finds a purchaser--it is undeniably true that the passion to enter the comparatively limited circle is steadily growing. The desire is the natural result of that envy which the man or woman who is everywhere circumscribed feels for the individual who is in all things privileged. The important circumstance at present is that the London “four hundred” were never more run after than they are to-day. Their patronage and presence were never in greater demand. We may swear that this smart set is a very dull set; we may vow with the earnestness of conviction that its very atmosphere is fatal to initiative and inimical to brains, and more destructive to morals than to either; but there is not a woman, scarcely a man among us who does not bear witness, in the way he dresses, or dines, or parts his hair, or takes the hand of a lady in a ball-room, that he is a humble imitator of the example set him by the people who live in large houses and flourish in the pages of De Brett. There is not a man outside this narrow pale, be he English or Australian, who could walk along Piccadilly in the company of two members of the aristocracy, effete though that aristocracy may be, without a sense of elation bordering on vertigo. With all its vice and frippery and inanity and boredom, the thing called society is an influence, a power, a far-reaching entity, a commanding and controlling force. From a distance we can criticise it and discover what it really means, what it actually is. But at close quarters it makes cowards of us--that is to say, of all who are not hermits or desperadoes, of all who are not phenomenally rich or abysmally poor.

Good society, as already mentioned, is a peculiarly English institution. Nevertheless, it has flourishing offshoots in different parts of the world. In Australia, there is rapidly growing up a set of conventions and a habit of speech founded on a close study of the older community. There is such a thing as Australian society. It exists. It is ambitious. It aspires to be recognised. It wants to grow. Some of its members have been presented at Court and have brought back with them large social aspirations. Certain of its women have been taken into dinner by members of the British peerage. Quite a number of Australian tailors have been in Bond Street and have made observations. A proportion of Australian dressmakers has seen something of Paris. These dealers in cloth and millinery have magnificent ideas. They have impressed themselves and their notions on the home-staying community. So it has come about that dress, wealth, reputation, fashion, and appearance have done a great deal between them to create the nucleus of a favoured _clientèle_, and to scatter to the winds the obsolete idea that in a democracy all things are equal, and all people are socially on a _par_.

What, it may be asked at the outset, is meant by the term “Australian society”? It has been agreed that something of the kind has been evolved. But who are the individuals? Where are they? How can they be recognised? For purposes of rough-and-ready definition, they may be classified as the people who are in the habit of receiving invitations to Government House. It is the business of the aide-de-camp to discover who is who in Australia. The task is impossible to the statistician or the scientist, but it seems in some mysterious fashion to fit in with the temperament and abilities of an aide-de-camp. There are no definite rules that can be relied upon. The dividing line between desirables and non-desirables is of the most shifty, and uncertain, and elusive character. Yet, when mistakes are made, as they always will be, the social uproar is tremendous. The unfortunate official whose business it is to request the pleasure of So-and-so’s company at a Vice-regal dance, or a garden party, is for ever voyaging upon troubled waters, with scarcely a beacon or a land-mark to guide him. His eye may light upon a few judges, a few prominent politicians, one or two naval and military officers, half a dozen wealthy land-owners, and a few prosperous warehousemen. So far as they are concerned, he knows he is safe. But there remain the grocer, the land-agent, the brewer, the confectioner, the lawyer, the singer, the actor, the doctor, the grass-widow, and many more--a miscellaneous assortment which cannot be entirely ignored or collectively accepted, and which presents a problem baffling in the last degree.

It is almost unnecessary to say that the social world of Australia is controlled by women. It is they who set most store upon artificial distinctions. It is they who value most the receipt of a request to disport themselves on His Excellency’s lawn, or in His Excellency’s ball-room. It is they who understand best how far the Vice-regal card of invitation exalts them over their sisters who have not come in for a like attention. The average man, if left to his own devices, would not sparkle with animation at the prospect of either a Government House dance, or a Government House garden party. This average man--unless he happens to be very young and very volatile--is not an enthusiastic exponent of those ball-room exercises in which Ouida’s heroes excel. Neither has he any delight in the formality and stiffness, the silk hats and the long coats inseparable from a two hours’ promenade on some distinguished person’s lawn. If it were a matter of personal inclination, he would confess that he knew better ways of amusing himself. But the Australian woman is socially ambitious. Her passion for social festivities is unquenchable. When the tocsin has sounded she will march with the procession--at the head of it, if she can. And the man of her circle, whether he likes it or not, must march with her.

All the mannerisms that do duty in the society of one hemisphere come in their turn to do duty in the society of the other. The puppets advance and retire to identical sets of rules. If the high handshake is fashionable in England, it must become fashionable in Australia. If it is the custom to take your partner’s arm in the West End of London, it has to be the custom, a little later, in certain quarters of Melbourne and Sydney. If it is the correct thing for the young English lordling to talk in tired monosyllables to the daughter of the Marquis, it is equally the correct thing for the Australian young man of means to look as bored as possible when conversing with the daughter of the host. One artificiality follows another. The imitative processes extend to the manner of using a finger-bowl, and of handling an eye-glass. If white waistcoats and gaudy ties are the rule among certain people in England, they become the rule among certain people in Australia. Society in either country is raised, fortified, buttressed, and embellished with shams--with shams that have nothing to recommend them on the score of cleverness, or ingenuity, or outward grace or hidden meaning. They represent, simply and solely, the desire of a certain class to do certain things in a manner peculiar to itself.

As to the inner life of this fashionable society, as it exists in Australia, there is little new to be said. The object in view is simply that in view everywhere else, namely, that of obtaining as much amusement as possible, and of being left to one’s own devices as little as possible. All the distractions known to civilised man are drawn upon in one country as in another. The men bet on racecourses, drink, and play cards. The women do all three, and in addition smoke and talk scandal. In one respect Australian society has an advantage over that of London, or of Paris. It has more physical energy with which to pursue its vices and its follies to the bitter end. Its opportunities for extravagant display may be fewer, but its zest is greater. It has no series of inter-marriages to look back upon. It has no titled and _blasé_ families to support. Its fathers or its grandfathers belonged to the race of hardy pioneers. The present generation is the product of a virile stock. As a consequence it has not exhausted its physical equipment. There is a certain buoyancy about its mental attitude, a certain juvenility in its pursuit of the bubbles of the moment. The _nil admirari_ manner, borrowed from London drawing-rooms, sits awkwardly on its shoulders. If it could only get away from old-world traditions, if it were willing to stand upon its feet, if it would leave its absurd mannerisms to the people who first invented them, this Australian society, with all its health and youth and unimpaired vitality, with all its magnificent opportunities furnished by variety of scene and splendour of climate, might set an example of living which other countries would have reason to envy, if they had not the power to imitate. For Australia, if the fact were only recognised, is a country in which it is possible to enjoy oneself finely, or to deny oneself greatly, as the mood pleases, independently of the world.

One characteristic of Australian society is its vulgarity; another is its snobbery; another is its lack of ideals. The vulgarity is apparent on the surface. It is usually explained on the ground of want of familiarity with the more luxurious and the more cultivated conditions of living. To endow a man who commenced life as a small shopkeeper with a large house, a carriage, some superior furniture, and still more expensive possessions in the shape of wife and daughters, is not to make him refined. The glorified tradesman is the pivot of the social life of the continent. The distinction between the wholesale and the retail dealer, which is still more or less observed in England, does not obtain here. If a man has the money he is accepted at his own valuation. He can go anywhere. Government House throws its gates open to him, unless, indeed, it should have happened that certain incidents of an unusually lurid character have reached the ears of the painstaking aide-de-camp. The landowner, if his lands are extensive enough, is another who helps to set the standard. He also is usually a novice at the pursuits and mannerisms that find favour with the more seasoned upper classes. The trail of newness, of _gaucherie_, of awkward, although of lavish ostentation, is over the whole social fabric. The people have zest and energy. They dine well, drink well, gamble well. But they have not yet learned to do these things with the nonchalant air that comes of heredity or of much experience.

The snobbery of Australian society is a matter equally beyond the reach of question. It is an elementary principle in all speculations as to human conduct that the man or woman who is intrinsically best worth knowing is the one who asserts himself or herself least. The plutocrats of Australia are continually and tirelessly asserting themselves. They all advertise--possibly because of the survival of the shopkeeping instinct, which prompted them in earlier days to get ahead of the man next door by making a finer display of haberdashery or of cold meat. The advertising habit does not die out in one generation. At present it dominates the social life of the community. This is the reason why the man who does not care to advertise, or feels he has no need to advertise, prefers to stay away from gatherings at which the resplendent tradesmen are the observed of all observers. There are _many_ men of sensibility, of imagination, of delicacy of thought and refinement of feeling, in Australia. There are women equally gifted. But these are not the people who besiege the Vice-regal Residence most determinedly, or appear in the papers most often. If they have means, or leisure, or culture--and often they have all three--they look for congenial souls, or are satisfied to remain apart.

The selfishness of Australian society is more or less implied in what has been already stated; but a special significance is often given to the word in connection with the declining birth-rate. The population of the continent is by no means stationary. The birth-rate is about 28 per thousand, and the death-rate scarcely 13 per thousand. In fifty years, even at the present rate of increase, there will be 8,000,000 people in the Commonwealth. But the preachers and politicians are not satisfied. They want the increase to be still greater, the births to be still more numerous. They have discovered that the cradle of the working man--when he can afford such an article of furniture--is seldom empty, while the cradle of the rich mother has only an occasional inmate. The cry has gone up that the women of the well-to-do class are furnishing a bad precedent. A committee of nine, appointed by the New South Wales Government, recently investigated the whole question. And the conclusion arrived at is that Australia, and more especially its middle and upper classes, are socially and morally in a bad way.

It is remarkable that so much unnecessary alarm should have been created over this subject. To say that the diminishing birth-rate is necessarily a bad sign is to ignore great part of the teaching of history, and of science, and of civilisation. Birth is stronger than death, and has been throughout the ages. It was so when the barbarians were knocking at the gates of the Eternal City; when the tens of thousands of Attila were falling before the tens of thousands of Aetius; when Goth and Vandal, Frank and Scythian, were transforming Central Europe into a charnel pit; when famine and pestilence were assisting the war-god of the Middle Ages to keep population in check. Yet population grew then, and is growing now. Science, by checking disease, and humanitarian sentiment, by preventing war, are helping it to grow still faster. No one can pretend to say what the end will be. The temper of Australian society is probably no more unselfish and no more moral than is that of any other society equally endowed with means and leisure time. But even out of evil good may come; and if selfishness and immorality are evils, it has yet to be shown that a declining birth-rate belongs to the same category.

The tone of what is called society is, as a matter of fact, the outward expression of the country’s ideal. Australia badly wants an ideal. At present it has none worthy of the name. It is not looking for one; at least there are few indications of a search. What is everybody striving for? Unto what altar is the mysterious priest of nationhood leading his followers? Of what nature are the offerings? Who are the deities that are being invoked? These are all questions that should interest the speculative mind. As to the habits and inspirations of the working classes, there is not much uncertainty. They are aiming--and it is an honourable and straightforward aim--at improved mental and material conditions of living. But as the present argument deals with methods of employing leisure, and the workers are understood to have no leisure, they may be omitted from the general conclusion. The leisured classes, the privileged classes, the social classes have one, and only one objective. Their familiar gods are those of the worshippers in _Atalanta in Calydon_--Pan by day, and Bacchus by night. Their mission is to pass the time, to kill it in the most agreeable way, to accompany its exit with the music of flutes, to see that its obsequies are attended by the most lulling effects, the most soothing harmonies, the most insidious appeals to brain and sense that money will allow.

Once upon a time there were ideals. The patriotic ideal was one of these, and it was decidedly useful, though from the logical standpoint rather absurd. The march of intelligence teaches that the willingness to die for one’s country is the survival of a crude and primitive instinct; that it is much finer, as well as much safer, to entertain a cosmopolitan feeling of regard for the foreigner, and not to put oneself unnecessarily in his way. Leonidas, when he put himself in the way at Thermopylæ, illustrated the earlier man’s fondness for an ideal. From his country’s point of view his ideal was a good one, though for himself it had no concrete value. Another manifestation that is occasionally to be met with in Europe and elsewhere is what might be called the aristocratic ideal. This is an inheritance from feudal times. Yet a third variety is the intellectual ideal. France in the time of Louis XIV. grew tired of looking up to the people of high birth, and for a brief space looked up to the people of high intelligence. Every member of the best society carried his sonnet about with him as the modern man carries his walking-stick. The age of Louis and of Molière was the heyday of the intellectual ideal.

In Australia there is no real acknowledgment of any of these three. There is no inducement to the average citizen to be patriotic. The quality, so far from being idealised, is hardly recognised. Times have altered since King Xerxes looked out over Salamis and since Arnold von Winkelreid fell at Sempach. The people of the new continent have never been called upon to defend themselves. Where there is no desire for fighting, no military spirit, no past history, no present danger, there is not likely to be a patriotic ideal. If you were to ask the average Australian whether it was not his highest ambition to die for his country he would take you either for a person of weak intellect, or for an eccentric amateur comedian. Neither is there any quality in the people that corresponds to the ancient practice of idealising noble birth. The country has no aristocracy of its own. It has no special desire for one. Whatever ambitions or aspirations it may acknowledge, they have nothing to do with a titled class. Neither is the typical Australian given to worshipping intellect as such. When the particular brand of intellect brought under his notice has been commercially successful, and can command a high market value, he is appreciative and respectful. But for the quality itself he has no special regard, and in nine cases out of ten does not recognise it when it is there.

Without any such ideals as connect themselves with patriotism, with good birth, and with intellect, Australia bestows its enthusiastic idolatry on the individual possessed of great riches. Patriotism, good conduct, character, intelligence, imagination, fancy, unselfishness, brilliancy of expression--all these things are quite unnecessary in local social circles. It is only when they have been translated into a cash value that they can be seriously considered. It is not that brains are ruled out of court. They are always tolerated. But it is only when they have allied themselves with some kind of commercial success that they are sought after. The ideal before the community--the ideal that finds expression in society, that shines through the restless eyes of the women, and stamps itself on the dissatisfied faces of the men--is nothing if not a monetary one. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is not an ideal at all. Money will purchase everything that the country has to offer, and for want of something else it does duty as the country’s ideal.

It is unfortunate that the continent should be in this position--the position of having nothing but a large fortune, a motor car, and a quantity of expensive furniture to aim at. Henry Lawson and one or two other poorly appreciated writers of talent have endeavoured to inspire the people with a martial sentiment, but as yet without success. All invocations to the “star of Australia” have so far fallen on deaf ears. There is no star of Australia. It has not set, and it has never risen. Until something unforeseen happens it does not seem likely to rise. How can it? The well-spring from which patriotic aspirations mount up has not yet been discovered. People with admirable intentions have recommended Australia, as an escape from mere frivolous amusements, to cultivate various forms of the strenuous life--for example, the life in barracks, the life in libraries, the life on the intellectual mountain top, the life in the home. It is unquestionable that a new development of some kind is badly needed. Australia would reap a substantial benefit, and one reflected throughout all ranks and conditions, if in the near future it evolved _something_, whether it were a patriotic ideal, a jingoistic ideal, a home-life ideal, a moral, intellectual, religious, or even a physical ideal. If it is to play a respectable part in future questions of magnitude it must, at any rate, develop some variation in the pleasure-seeking, money-making, work-shirking propensities that represent the greater part of its social life. Probably the salvation, when it does come, will be wrought by the working classes; for though they have blundered industrially, and failed more than once politically, they have the confidence of numbers, they are emancipated, and they are quick to learn. The ultimate destiny of the Australian continent is very largely in their hands.

III

JOURNALISM

The many waves of thought, the mighty tides,
The ground swell that rolls up from other lands,
From far-off worlds, from dim eternal shores
Whose echo dashes on life’s wave-worn strands.

The people who are connected with journalism in Australia, as elsewhere, fall naturally into three classes--managers, sub-editors, and newspaper writers. There are numerous subdivisions, but these are the three cardinal ones. The outside public does not always appreciate the value of the classification just given. The outside public may, therefore, in its tolerance, submit to be informed. For modern journalism has become a vast and comprehensive and complex thing. It touches every one, interests every one, more or less attracts every one, more or less mystifies every one. The man who is not an outsider, but who has had the lot to

See with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine--

who has been caught up and whirled round by the wheels, so to speak--should be able to claim the privilege of describing his observations and his sensations.

The managerial class is deserving of much respect, and usually gets all that it deserves. Its members are few, but its influence is undoubtedly great. Only a short account need be given of the character and abilities of the handful of men who either own or manage the great “dailies” of Australia.