In England everyone speaks of the gum-tree, or eucalyptus, as if there was only one possible species of it, as they speak of Australia itself and its climate. But, in truth, the gum-trees are almost as varied as the country and the climate. They are a “pernicketty” family, too: one sort will flourish in one place and wilt away only a few miles distant, another grow to profusion in one district, and elsewhere hardly be met with. Besides, all the forest growth is not composed entirely of the eucalyptus tribe, although it is to a very large extent.
In the Victorian Grampians is to be found for the most part blue gum and messmate, stringy bark, and red and white iron bark. In the Wombat Forest, extending along the dividing range from Cheswick to Mount Macedon, is found messmate, peppermint, and swamp-gum. Farther eastward iron bark and stringy bark prevail, and red gum follows the course of the Murray and its tributaries; while on the Wimmera Plains is massed the dwarf eucalyptus known as the Mallee Scrubb, the roots of which make such ideal firewood. In the Haelesville Forests, of which I have been writing, is found spotted gum, mountain ash, messmate, and white gum, the prevailing timber in Gippsland being the stringy bark.
Apart from the wattle, the most striking note of colour in these softly-tinted forest masses is afforded by the sarsaparilla, which creeps up the young trees or low-growing scrub, and hangs them with a mantle of imperial purple. In general, however, the country regions round Melbourne are not rich in wild flowers. There is a bluebell, more like the Scotch harebell; a wild scabious, very similar to the English one; little yellow bachelor-button-like flowers; and an infinite number of tiny little blossoms, exquisite in themselves, but in no way comparing with a field of poppies, or coppices carpeted with the true bluebell, such as are seen at home.
The woods and forests in Victoria are under the supervision of the Conservator of Forests, who has under him nine men on the office staff, and seventy-seven on the field staff, a meagre enough allowance, in all conscience, when one remembers the vast distances even in this, the smallest of all the States; and yet, more power to it, topping all the others in this matter, for in New South Wales the staff, including the Director, comprises only seventy-two persons; in South Australia, forty-four; in West Australia thirty; and in Queensland nine—Queensland! covering an area of 670,500 square miles as compared with Victoria’s 87,884, and holding, as it does, an untold mine of wealth in its vast forests. Queensland! the home of the red pine and the kauri-pine, the red cedar, the Moreton Bay pine, and black-bean; and nine men to guard the interests of all this wealth!
The Pyrenees, which, with the Bald Hills, are a continuation of Mount Macedon, are really all a part of the great dividing range which enters Victoria at Forest Hill, and in which is included all the most important mountain peaks in the State; those mountains which are not actually part of the main range being mostly offshoots from it, while not only in Victoria is this the case, for Australia, in fact, is federated by her mountains more completely than she is ever likely to be by her people.
The great main Dividing Range, indeed, can be traced from New Guinea across the Torres Straits to Cape York, and thence southward through Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria to Wilson’s Promontory, being from there continued by the Flinders group of islands to Tasmania, a second spur traversing Victoria in a westerly direction. South Australia and Western Australia alone lie out of touch of this great backbone of the continent, possessing a mountain system of their own. Thus, by the help of forests, and mountains, and streams, the continent does not, on the whole, present to its inhabitants such a flat desert waste as is popularly supposed. How oddly English it is, too, in parts! I know one place on the Dandenong line, not half an hour’s journey from Melbourne, where there is open waste land, broken by pine-trees and ablaze with yellow gorse in the autumn. I remember, the first time I saw it, getting out at the nearest station and hunting about till I found a decent lodging, then staying there for two months, and enduring all the disadvantages of a daily journey to town—a thing I abominate—merely for the sake of living within sight and scent of the gay homelike stuff, with its delicious perfume.
CHAPTER X
OF THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE, AND OF
MELBOURNE GARDENS
Victoria, and, indeed, Australia as a whole, has been spoken of as the “Paradise of the working-man”—a paradise in which Melbourne, as the busiest and richest city in the Commonwealth takes the foremost place, this according to its people. The inhabitants of Sydney think differently, so do those of Adelaide and Brisbane. Yet, on the whole, I think Melbourne has the best reason for her proud boast. Wages may not be higher than they are in Sydney, while they are certainly lower than they are in Brisbane or the West; but the disadvantages are far less. The heat is never really unendurable, while at the worst it is stimulating, instead of enervating as in Sydney, only coming in bursts, with constant cool intervals between in which to recoup. For two or three days it may perhaps be over 100 in the shade, when the asphalt in the street bubbles and the pavement feels red-hot beneath one’s feet; but after about three days comes a change, and only once during eight whole years have I known the thermometer remain for a whole week above 100° in the shade. That was, if I remember rightly, in 1907, when whole families turned out to sleep in the public parks and gardens. But usually at the end of about the third day of heat there comes a terrific scorching north wind, laden with thick yellow dust, a thousand times worse, if the Australian would but believe it, than any London fog. It whirls in through every crack of window or door, it fills eyes, and lungs, and mouth, and nose till one feels on the verge of choking, and one’s skin is so gritty that one could smooth a plank with it—a demon of a wind, making every woman it encounters look a hag, and every man a fiend. If the women of Melbourne would really put their brains to work in the matter of complexions, instead of supporting a whole army of skin specialists and spending incredible sums upon creams and washes, they would see to it—holding a vote as they do—that every member of the municipal council were hung, drawn, and quartered. Then they would pour all their messes upon the streets instead of upon their faces, and go on appointing fresh councillors and killing them off, till they lighted on even “one righteous man” of sufficient intelligence to grapple with that dust-fiend, which draws such heartrending lines round pretty eyes, and plays such hopeless havoc with even the freshest and most youthful of complexions.
I speak feelingly, because I love Melbourne; because I adore its sunshine and the crisp, light air that might be so clear; because I hate to have its most perfect days—days that in the country are a pure delight—absolutely spoilt by what, one can but believe, is a remediable evil.
But I have wandered away from the red-hot, north-wind days, which I believe are thoroughly intractable—save, perhaps, under some immense system of afforestation. The only possible good point about this north wind is that when it gets to its very worst it usually changes. But oh! with such a flame of fury! One can almost hear it stamp its foot as it flings round. There is a whirl of skirts, an inarticulate shriek of fury, and—bang goes the door of the north wind. The thermometer drops, perhaps as low as to 70° within the hour, and one hurries home, folding oneself upon oneself as well as possible—shivering and shaking in the thin clothes, which had seemed of a blanket weight when they had been donned that very morning—to spend the evening over a flaming wood-fire, listening to the lovely drip-drip of rain upon the leaves, picturing how the earth is palpitating into growth beneath its caress, hugging to oneself the thought of the cool restful night, the glorious sleep, and the enchanting air of spring that the whole world will wear on the morrow, for the spring in Australia seems veritably to arise afresh after every shower.
In Melbourne gardens there is no dead season. The borders and beds are for ever full of surprises. It seems sometimes as if, for no particular reason, the flowers have a fancy for coming out; and out they come. It is a country where people please themselves. So, all the year round, one may gather roses from some bush or other, a little hectic, perhaps, but none the less beautiful for that; while the autumn and spring literally run to meet one another in the gardens, overlapping winter in the most cavalier fashion. I have seen willows along the Yarra bank all dark tresses of drooping twig, and two days—only two days—later, thickly veiled in a vivid green, not a hint of brown bark visible.
During the winter, which is marked more by an unpleasant damp and chilliness than real cold, will come sudden, fervently warm days, which bring all sorts of unlikely flowers into bloom, so that one sees Oriental poppies flaunting among the primroses, and heliotrope, and carnations out with the first daffodils, while it is seldom indeed that there is not pink bloom on the ivy-leaf geraniums.
Some writers on Australia complain that because most of the completely native trees do not shed their leaves, Australians do not know what a true spring is like. Perhaps they are right in one way; the longer a man has been starved the more completely will he appreciate a good meal when he gets it; and there is no such length of colourless winter days to struggle through in Australia—living only by this one hope, that the spring must come at last, however tardily—as there is in England, and therefore relief must be felt far less ardently. But against this let us weigh the thousand and one subtle surprises of Nature in such a country. Autumn, indeed, comes sobbing through the land, sweeping her heavy rain-drenched garments over lawn and border, till the flowers drop to earth, flattened, brown, and bedraggled; while “envious, sneaping” frosts nip the dahlias, and flush the roses with hectic tints. It is nonsense to say that the leaves do not fall, for they do, even from the native trees, not in a mass, it is true, but even more sadly, one at a time, as if the tree were with infinite reluctance slowly parting from each emblem of her youth, the tattered bark hanging in ribbons round her, the sport of every breeze; while everywhere in the cities and gardens there are English trees of all sorts to be seen, with leaves that fall in a fashion almost cheerful compared with the slow agony of their Australian compeers.
Then suddenly the sun breaks through the clouds. Brilliant patches of blue spread over the sky till they join in one unbroken sea of cobalt. One forgets to put fresh logs on the fire, which the sun is laughing out of countenance, flings open doors and windows, orders tea in the veranda, and fares forth with little packets of seeds and bits of sticks, to grub in the sweet teeming earth. What matter that in a couple more days winter may be back again? Anyhow, it is only a matter of three months, and that with innumerable such breaks.
The dahlias and the cosmos may have been all uprooted and the chrysanthemums have blackened in the borders; but by that time the narcissi are out, and the forget-me-not beds are alive with colour. There are violas, too, and grape hyacinths, and what in England we call “summer snowdrops,” and wallflowers, and periwinkles, while the japonica is jewelled with bloom, and the lawns are a glory of green. If the curtain of winter does slip down again, it does not matter much, for all these are sturdy people, and not easily discouraged; while when it lifts once more, the daffodils are ready to break into bloom, and the tulips and irises; while the wattle is a veritable masque of spring in itself.
With such a climate it seems extraordinary that the private gardens in Melbourne are not more of a success than they are. One reason, I believe, is that the people are too busy to trouble, another that they are too restless: they are always moving house—sometimes literally so, for it is no uncommon thing to meet a fair-sized wooden edifice coming along the road drawn upon wheels, by a long train of horses, and looking like a gigantic snail. I really believe the idea of settling down in one house for life would be—to use an Irishism—the death of any Australian. The servants in Melbourne will inform you, almost at the moment they enter your door, that they have “not come to stay”; and a man takes a new house in much the same spirit. I believe it is all owing to the lack of tradition. In England many of us have been born in the same house where our progenitors have lived for centuries, and where, perhaps, the descendants of our eldest brother may be expected to live for centuries longer; while we ourselves fare out in the world with the hope of founding some such enduring dwelling-place for ourselves, the need of a permanent home being inherent in our blood.
But though the Australian’s great-grandfather may have lived in some such fashion, it is more than probable that his actual grandfather lived in a waggon or a tent, and that both he and his son were, from the exigencies of the New Country, for ever moving on, seeking fresh pastures as the country became more open and settlers began to thicken.
The discovery of gold alone was enough to instil this restless drop into the blood of a people whose very presence in the country was indeed first proof of such a tendency. In the wholesale rush which followed the first discovery of gold in Bendigo and Ballarat, it must have seemed to onlookers as if the merely agricultural and commercial Australia would cease to exist. Vessels lay in the docks, rotting for the want of men to repair them and hands to work them; for the sailors and the dock hands, the Government clerks, the policemen, the shopkeepers and their employees, even the very domestic servants, all joined in the stampede to that delectable land, where a casual miner could earn from thirty to forty pounds a day; while the Governor, like a modern Alexander Selkirk, was left “monarch of all he surveyed,” with no one to dispute his rights, certainly, but equally with no one to obey his orders. In the year following the discoveries at Bendigo—1851—ten tons of gold were said to have been taken from Victoria, gold then being worth £4 an ounce, while a quarter of a million of presumably adventurous spirits landed in Melbourne, all eagerly confident of making their fortunes. When this lure was sufficient to induce people to risk the discomfort and peril of the long voyage in a sailing-ship, and all the dangers of an unknown land, it was not to be wondered at that the earlier settlers, who were already on the spot, relinquished their ideas of a pastoral life in favour of the enthralling possibilities of mining, and, forsaking their farms, joined in the general rush to the gold countries.
You will say that all this has very little to do with Melbourne gardens. But really it has a great deal to do with them, in that it has produced a people with very little of the real home-making spirit; while if a man will not trouble to make a home, it is certain sure that he will not trouble to make a garden. There was one man in Melbourne—I except, of course, the curator of the Botanical Gardens, whose work is too well known to need any comment—who veritably created a garden out of a rubbish-heap—a garden such as Australia needs, full of shade and greenery, and massed flower and foliage that helped to conserve the moisture of the ground. But there did not seem much money to be made out of it, and so one of the endless succession of Ministers for Agriculture—with that eternal craze to be up and doing which makes Australian officialdom so galling to the real worker—decided to change the garden into a dairy farm. It had not been in any way a useless appendage, for it was a public place, and thronged with people on Sundays and holidays; moreover, it had a horticultural school attached to it, where boys and girls whose parents lived near, and who could not afford to send their sons to some distant and costly agricultural college—for their daughters no other possible training-ground existed—could be taught fruit-growing and horticulture. At the time the place was started the then Minister for Agriculture was interested in fruit-growing; and by some good chance the next Minister happened to be the same, judging, rightly enough, that it was likely to be one of the most profitable minor industries of Victoria. But after them arose yet another Minister, whose interests were all on the side of dairy-farming, and the garden—to many a veritable oasis in the desert—was, as such, condemned. What has ultimately happened I do not know, but I believe that one flower-bed, some six half-starved cows, and as many boys, instructed after the methods of Mr. Squeers, somehow fight it out together, though certainly when I last saw it all the beauty and repose of the place had vanished for ever. Yet this is but a single example of the restlessness with which the country is infected, and the difficulty of producing and maintaining anything really staple under such constantly-shifting conditions.
The suburbs of Melbourne are beautifully wooded. If you climb to any eminence of the city, such as the fire-station, and look down and around, it seems as if it were indeed built in a veritable forest of trees, while you imagine the most beautiful gardens luxuriating beneath their shade. But, on the whole, you are doomed to disappointment.
The owners or tenants of the small villas seem to do the best with the scrap of ground that is at their disposal. But the cottagers make little or no effort to beautify their houses even when they are their own possessions; while the gardens of the wealthy people—say at Toorak, which is supposedly the most select suburb—are certainly very disappointing. One sees hideous corrugated iron fences round really fine houses, with gardens out of all proportion to their size; Gothic mansions, in a setting worthy only of a little villa at twenty pounds a year, looking like nothing so much as a very big joint on a very small dish; gardens where there is no shade nor retirement possible, and with the aggressive fence visible from every point; while the parsimony in the matter of water is almost beyond belief, fine shrubs that may have cost pounds, rare plants, and well-laid lawns, all being reduced to a khaki-coloured waste for the want of a few pounds spent in watering them. Really, I believe that if the gardens had to be watered with champagne the wealthy Melbournian would not hesitate; it is spending his money on mere water which he dislikes: that is the clouds’ job, and not his, and he spends his life waiting for them to do their duty, though he ought to know them better by now.
All over the country it is the same, in the great as well as the small. People seem to resent money being spent on any form of irrigation. They will plough and sow, they will reap when the crop is ready, and in any well-conducted climate that ought to be enough. But the Australian climate, like all beauties, has its very distinct failings, and in the matter of rain it is, to say the least of it, capricious. In most countries a caprice such as this, when once fully known, is provided against. In time, perhaps, the Australians also will grow to realize their country’s shortcoming, and a vast system of irrigation be carried out that will make a veritable Paradise of Victoria; but until that is accomplished, one can only say that its agricultural qualities are, like the curate’s egg, “good in parts.”
Still, something has been done, though any movement to further irrigation has received very lukewarm support from the public.
As early as 1884 an artesian well was formed at Sale, which for a number of years gave out 100,000 gallons a day. When that failed—whether from the choking of sand or from corrosion of the casing I do not know—a new bore was put down; but, as the water was impure, containing too much sulphuretted hydrogen, a third had to be sunk, which now yields as much as 145,000 gallons of water a day.
In 1906 eight bores were put down on one estate. Overnewton, Maribyrnong, all of which yielded good supplies of water for stock purposes, though from only one was water obtained fit for drinking; while quite recently a number of bores have been sunk on the Mallee, that drought-tortured district, where the almost ironical existence of a large underground lake has lately been discovered, the bore in one place striking water at 190 feet below the surface.
Under the direct control of the “State Rivers and Water-Supply Commission,” which came into force in 1906, are the Goulburn River Works, which include the Waranga Basin, with a storage capacity of 9,500,000,000 cubic feet; the Loddon River Works, with storage capacity of 610,000,000 cubic feet; and the Kow Swamp Works, with its capacity of 1,780,000,000 cubic feet. Then there are the Broken River Works, the Kerang North-West Lakes Works, the Lake Lonsdale Reservoir, the Lower Wimmera Works, and the Long Lake Pumping Works, the two irrigation areas of Nyah and White Cliffs, and some thirty distributory works; also the Mildura Irrigation Trust and the Geelong Water Supply, these last being governed independently of the Commission.
Now there is a plan mooted for damming up the Upper Goulburn River with a gigantic weir, that would have to be about 1,700 feet long, and, at the deepest part of the river, 140 feet high, by which it is estimated that a reservoir with a capacity of 60,000,000,000 cubic feet would be obtained, and 20,000 acres of gullies and river flats permanently submerged, making it the largest reservoir in existence.
Of course, this latter scheme is only sur le tapis, remaining, indeed, to quote the Australian Official Year-Book’s tactful statement, “in abeyance.” But still things are, as the American would express it, “beginning to hum” in the irrigation line, and when once the people grasp its enormous significance, it is impossible to believe that they will not only insist on more irrigation schemes being inaugurated, but also see to it that they are not allowed to remain “in abeyance.” Meanwhile, imposing as some of the figures may seem, when one thinks of the size of Victoria, even if all these already completed schemes were successful, they could but appear almost as inadequate for the necessary supply of water as was Mrs. Partington’s mop for its dispersal.
But, alas! even the schemes which have been carried through have not proved altogether successful. With her usual courage and tendency to rush her fences, Victoria embarked quite blithely in the first place on the Mildura scheme, which has at last struggled to success through a series of depressing failures, while the history of the other schemes has been far from cheering. The fact was, nobody knew anything about irrigation, or thought for a moment that there was anything to learn. In many places huge lengths of channelling were badly constructed, badly laid, and so badly placed that the land which would have profited most by the water was left completely dry, while the distribution was so wide that a very great deal was lost in the long channels. As a matter of fact, I believe that the estates in Australia are too large and the population too small to admit at present of a very great deal of effective irrigation, much as it is needed. For a good many years I lived on a sugar estate in Mauritius, which depended completely on irrigation. But, though one of the biggest estates in the island, it would have been altogether lost in any corner of an Australian station; while it was continually thronged with workers, always ready to correct any defective flow or clear out any blocked channel. As Victoria increases her country population, so also will she increase her chances of success in irrigation, for I feel it is only on small, densely cultivated farms that it can have a proper chance of paying for its working expenses. As it is, an extract which I must quote from a Ministerial statement, made not so very long ago, is anything but encouraging:
“The State has already spent £1,450,000 on irrigation works. Interest on this at 4 per cent. amounts to £98,000 annually; maintenance, about £47,000; receipts from rates and sales of water average about £35,000. The State irrigation channels command 1,104,000 acres of land, of which 218,000 acres were irrigated last year; but the crop return was trivial (over half the irrigated area was native grass), when compared with the results obtained from similar irrigated areas in other countries having no greater natural advantages.”
The great fault of the system seems to have been that, instead of paying a certain percentage on the value of their estates regularly, be the season wet or dry, just as a man will pay a life or fire insurance, the landowners have been allowed to pay only for the water they use. In this the holders of the largest areas were the most culpable. Their estates were extensive enough for them to be independent of very heavy crops, while the smaller men, to whom close cultivation was a necessity, and who used water—and therefore paid for it—at all seasons were in time of drought deprived of what they needed by the sudden demand made on the supply by the large holders; therefore it is not to be wondered at that the system resulted in what the Melbourne Age has described as a “colossal failure.”
At last, however, a new policy has been instigated. In the future the distribution of water is to be controlled by State experts only, landowners who are within the irrigation area having to pay for it whether they use it or not, so that when holdings become smaller and settlers more plentiful there is every hope that the desert may indeed “blossom like a rose.” Æsculapius, in his “Birds,” tells us that it is from our enemies, not from our friends, that we must learn; and it is equally so with our failures. Australia has had a good many nasty jars, mostly caused by that impetuosity that is part of her political youth; but nobody can say that she does not profit by her mistakes, that she immortalizes them as some older countries do, or that she is willing for a moment to remain beaten.
Meanwhile, from the farmer’s point of view, comes the complaint that irrigation costs more than it is worth, and that he cannot get sufficient labourers to work irrigated land. But, with all due respect to the Australian farmer, this is mainly a case of having taken up more land than he can cultivate. He idealizes size. He would rather have a thousand acres of drought-stricken and useless land than he would have a hundred densely cultivated, and paying hand-over-hand. He himself will work incredibly hard in bursts, while his wife and children toil like slaves, but he does not care to face the constant, steady round demanded by what he would scornfully describe as a “pocket-handkerchief lot.”
The scarcity of labourers is indeed a difficulty, and it will remain a difficulty till the farmers provide more adequately for the comfort of their hands. The married man is altogether at a discount on the Australian station and farm. In the former the men, all more or less casual employees, live together in a large hut, served by a special cook; in the latter they live with their employer. Any accommodation for wife or family is very rare indeed, so that a married man who secures work in the country must, for the most part, maintain his belongings separately in lodgings in town. One hears a very great deal of virtuous indignation expressed in regard to the overcrowding of the towns, and the fact that men who are out of work there will not take billets as farm labourers. Also, on the other hand, that men do not marry as they should, that the legitimate birth-rate is so low and the percentage of illegitimate children so high. But if a man is normal and honest-minded, with a liking for clean living, he needs a wife and children and a home of his own. As a single man, wandering from station to station for shearing and harvesting, he has, on the whole, a very good time, plenty of company, plenty of money to spend, and no responsibilities. But the better sort of men do not fear responsibilities, and they want something more than a good time; so that, after a few years, they get sick of the wandering life and wish to settle down. In the country, however much they might desire it, there is, indeed, very little chance of this for farm labourers when once they are married.
They may, perhaps, have saved enough to start a tiny farm of their own, but it means ceaseless drudgery, and only too often a life of complete isolation both for husbands and wives, while the masters, whom they would be only too willing to continue to serve, have no place for them.
There is a great deal good in Australia that is not at all good in England, particularly in the life of the working-man; but I have found no parallel to the comfortable two-storied cottages, surrounded by good gardens, which one sees gathered round English farm-houses. When cottages such as these are built; when a labourer can settle down for life on one farm, and grow his own vegetables, keep poultry, and purchase a cow; and can see his own family growing up healthily and happily around him, then I believe that Victoria and her sister States will have no need to complain of her working-people all flocking to the big towns; while a new generation of agricultural labourers, bred and born to country life, will thus be insured, the number of illegitimate children be lessened, and emigration bear a more tempting face to the English labourer than it has done heretofore—so far, at least, as Australia is concerned.
This short-sighted policy of the banning and barring of the married man is evident in many other branches of Australian industry besides that of agriculture; and only the other day I cut the following out of the Sydney Bulletin, which has a happy knack of putting its finger directly on the weak places in the administration of its country:
“The old, old policy of baby-prohibition, this time from the Victorian Police Department:—‘Wardsman wanted at Police Hospital, Victoria Barracks, St. Kilda Road. Salary, £75 per year, with board. Applicants must be single, etc.’ It is a wonder the unfortunate baby ever contrives to get born at all, when one considers the number of awful bosses who fine the father in his whole salary if baby happens.”
All this time I seem to have got very far away from my first subject of gardens, but it has been merely from a natural discursiveness of mind, and not from any lack of legitimate material, for, indeed, the paucity of interest to be found in the private gardens of Melbourne is amply balanced by the beauty and variety of the public ones; among which the Botanical Gardens must be accorded the first place, both in importance and size—covering, as they do, eighty-three acres—exquisitely situated, for the most part on either side of a deep valley, along the hollow of which runs a thick grove of moisture-loving palms.
To the right of this, as one looks towards the city, is the Alexandria Avenue and the winding, silver ribbon of the Yarra, which is gradually being made as beautiful at close quarters as it now appears from the all-enhancing distance. Besides this deep valley, one elevation of which is topped by Government House, there is an infinitude of ups and downs, sweep after sweep of undulating greensward broken by many flower-beds and by jutting masses of trees, fringed with blossoms of every colour. It seems that anything will grow in Melbourne if only you water it enough—the old, old grievance again—and both subtropical plants and the hardiest English varieties flourish amicably side by side in the Botanical Gardens. Still, it is in the diversity of its trees rather than its plants that it really gains most over an English garden of the same sort, the shapes and colouring of the trunks, the almost human turn of the branches, the size and luxuriance of the leaves, proving an endless source of delight.
Best of all I love the gardens in the autumn, when all the borders are gleaming with the pale masses of chrysanthemums, bed after bed, border after border of them, tawny yellow and pale gold, white and amethyst, not one single glaring or sharply-defined tint, the very soul of colour. The autumn in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens is exquisite. The little, sharp chill in the morning air, the noon of clear warm sunshine; and the mist-haunted evenings, when standing on the high ground, one watches the trees grow ghostlike and unreal in the fading light, while the lamps of the distant town glimmer out beyond the grey veil of the river. Autumn evenings in England smell very good, but not as good as autumn evenings in an Australian garden, where the sun has been shining warmly through the day, drawing all the perfume from the blossoms, the fallen leaves, and humid earth. Then, there is not the same sense of sadness, of loss, which is inseparable from the autumn at home; for here it is not the end, but rather the beginning, the time when the burden and heat of the long summer is past, while life is all ready to start afresh during the damp coolness of the winter days; for, however cold it may be, it is always a cold that quickens, and does not deaden as does that of northern climates.
Besides the Botanical Gardens, ‘Melbourne boasts, among others, the Exhibition Gardens, famous for their roses, and the Treasury Gardens, windswept, and dirty, and desolate, their ragged garments incongruously patched by a Japanese garden, railed all round with spiked iron rails, into which no one but the gardener can ever penetrate, though city urchins sit on a mangy bank near and toss stones into it. Just beyond these gardens, separated from them, indeed, only by a road, lie the Fitzroy Gardens, which come first and foremost in the affections of many people. They have not the grandeur of the Botanical Gardens, though they display an even more perennial greenness and a certain wild charm of their own, and the lawns are not so smoothly kept, while in places the grass grows deliciously lush and high. There are more English trees there, too, and in the autumn the ground is all golden with fallen leaves, while there are fewer precisely-set flower-beds and more borders—a far more artistic arrangement, to my mind.
They are, indeed, lovely gardens—gardens where old Andrew Marvell might well have brought to life his all exquisite conception of “A green thought in a green shade,” if—and, alas! that there should be such an “if”—if only it had not been that—by some impish freak of, God knows what, Mayor, Corporation, or City Council—these sylvan lawns and glades are decorated, the horrible word stands well here, with a redundancy of statues, beside which some of Madame Tussaud’s figures might well be considered as works of art. I have often wondered that the puritanical City fathers have not raised objections to these figures on account of their classic want of drapery—the only classical thing about them—but perhaps it has been realized that they are too utterly hideous to arouse any feeling but aversion, even in the most ardent and youthful breast. However it may be, there they remain, and are likely to remain, till that golden age when education has been digested into something at least resembling cultivation.
CHAPTER XI
PRIMITIVE VICTORIA
Charles Dickens has created characters which will assuredly live for ever. If he had invented real animals instead of imaginary people—who are much more real than many real people, because more clearly drawn—I would attribute to him all the strange beasts of Australia which, for the most part, are absurdly Pickwickian. They are so clumsily and curiously formed, their expressions are so alert and inquisitive, their limbs are so oddly proportioned. Indeed, I could never see a kangaroo without thinking of a picture by Cruikshank of the Artful Dodger, with his long trousers, huge feet, and look of cocksure cunning; or a native-companion, without reviving at the same time a mental picture of the fascinating Jingle. Besides, though, like the characters of Dickens, the Australian animals are so odd as to be almost unbelievable; they are yet intensely human. They have not the expression of animals. They know really too much. Of course, they were like that long, long before the days of Dickens, but Nature has odd freaks of humour, and perhaps they were the outcome of one such freak and the novelist’s imagination of another. I know one has no business to propound theories like this in a book that is trying hard to be matter of fact, but it is no use blinking the fact that the Australian animals are pure farce, save only, and above all, in their management of that greatest of all affairs—maternity.
What an extraordinary thing it does seem that Nature should have invented anything so absolutely perfect as the pouch, and then, apparently, forgotten about it. To see a woman—a mere woman—her baby, with its pathetically nodding head, clasped in one arm, which, in addition, is, as often as not, further weighted with string bags and baskets, while the other hand clutches skirt, and umbrella, and the wrist of a toddling two-year-old—to see this, I say, and then to think of the safe babies of the Australian forests, gives one pause. The lubra does her best, in spite of Nature’s stinginess, and slings her baby across her hip or over her back in a shawl or length of calico, or at the worst a strip of gum-fibre. But the European mother, even in Australia, for the most part sits it upright on the crook of her arm, or clasps it with agonizing firmness round its middle, at an age when the little marsupial, swinging at ease in its mother’s pouch, learns to know the look of the world, while it sniffs the fresh air and crops the daintiest fronds of grass; all in perfect safety, with no risk, even, of damp feet.
At times I have literally haunted the Melbourne Zoo just for the fun of watching the kangaroos and seeing the tiny little heads peering out from the mother’s pouch, and particularly remember one snow-white mother-kangaroo I once saw, a rare and beautiful creature.
I do not quite know the difference that exists between the kangaroos and wallabies, excepting in point of size, the wallabies being a good deal the smaller. There is a walking club in Melbourne to which a good many professional men belong, calling itself “the Wallaby Club,” the members of which walk—every other Sunday, I believe it is—mostly from somewhere where they have had lunch on to somewhere else where they have tea, and then stay and dine; also indulging in periodical dinners in town, with punning menus and toast-cards, often exceedingly witty. Then, again, an expression used for what in England we call “tramping,” is “going on the wallaby,” otherwise “humping the swag,” or “the bluey,” or “sun-downing.”
Smaller still than the wallabies are the kangaroo rats, which are about the size of a large cat. I do not know if they are ever seen in Victoria; but my only acquaintance with them was in New South Wales, at a little farm where they used to come in any number on to the veranda at night, after the house was shut up; seeking for crumbs and scraps, I expect, as we had many of our meals there. The sound of their jumping feet on the bare boards used to make such a noise that I would often get up to “shoo” them away; then stand quite fascinated watching their antics in the bright moonlight. I believe they are quite easy to tame, if only they can be caught young enough, like all the kangaroo tribe; but as yet I have never had the chance of trying, though for a long time I had a tiny tame opossum, who used to love to creep up my coat sleeve, and sleep comfortably against my shoulder, in the little pent house formed by the fulness at the top.
In Victoria kangaroos and wallabies are still to be found in the woods and on the wide, open plains, though each year they become more and more scarce; while among the forest trees, if you are very quiet and patient, you may yet meet with a wombat—particularly in the eastern part of the state—or a lumbering native bear, like nothing on earth so much as a child’s woolly toy, really the most ingratiating creature. Standing about two feet high, and covered with soft, thick fur, it has an odd, blunt, wistful sort of a nose, with little round eyes like boot-buttons, and makes one of the most charming of pets, if it can only be caught young enough. The native bear carries its baby on its back—the two little paws clasped tightly round its neck and buried deep in its fur—and climbs, thus encumbered, up the highest gum-trees, and from bough to bough, nibbling at the tender young leaves; the mildest person in the world, the very turn outwards of its toes giving it an almost absurdly apologetic air. “I have been left behind,” it seems to say; “but do, please, let me go on in my own way—I and these wise old woods; we understand one another, and life and leisure are pleasant things.” The wombat is heavier and clumsier, and its fur darker in hue, but it, too, is slow and peaceful in all its ways, the opossum, indeed, being the gadabout of the forest.
There is now a national park at William’s Promontory, which is the most southern point of Victoria—indeed, of the whole of Australia—where it is hoped that many of the rapidly-decreasing and unique wild animals of the continent may be induced to breed and otherwise make themselves at home, though, oddly enough, the kangaroos—true kangaroos, for there are any number of wallabies—have been found the most difficult to procure of all the animals. Still, there are koalas, and wombats, bower-birds, lyre-birds, and many others—though whether there is or is not a platypus I am unable to say; but the scarcity of kangaroos is appalling to all lovers of Nature-life, who remember how Flinders, in his book, tells of the huge flocks of those animals abounding along the shores of the new colony, so numerous and so tame that they could easily be killed with clubs or the butt-end of the men’s guns.
Every year, however, the number of truly wild animals of Australia is—sad to say—lessening as surely as are the aborigines, though, perhaps, more slowly. In a book about Victoria, written by the old colonist, modestly hiding his identity under the pseudonym of “A Pioneer,” we are told of the immense numbers of the kangaroos, which in the old days were a source of serious worry and loss to the squatter, who used to gather together parties of his neighbours—anyone within a hundred miles coming under that heading—and, forming a cordon, drive them into some enclosed place and then shoot them. The scene is described in stilted Early Victorian phraseology, but yet brings to our mind the most vivid picture of the intense excitement of such a drive. On one station of 100,000 acres some 5,000 kangaroos were killed by driving them into a specially prepared cul-de-sac, ending with a great pit at the far end of a blind fence, as many as 500 a day having been destroyed, while as the animals began to realize that some awful danger was overtaking those in front of them, their efforts to escape, says “A Pioneer,” both by creeping under the horses and leaping over them, became little short of frantic.
When “A Pioneer” first landed in Melbourne in 1840, there was, where Port Melbourne now stands, one “mean, solitary cottage on the beach, boasting the name of Liardet’s Hotel”—rather an ominous combination of syllables, one might imagine. But the owner of it, Captain Liardet, seems to have been a very good fellow, and, meeting the newcomer at the ship, rowed him up the river, thick with wild duck and black swan, to the city of tents and shanties, where the entire space now occupied by Government buildings was one dense scrub. Later on he writes of his experiences at the time of the gold rush, when he and his partner drove a mob of cattle to Melbourne, and found there neither butchers, slaughterers, nor buyers.
He tells, too, of the annoyance that the “cocky” farmers even then were to the more settled colonists; how, on paying one pound an acre, or five shillings down and promising the rest, they could pick out the very best bits from the run; often ruining the squatter by taking the entire river frontage or water-holes, till the banks came forward, and in some measure checked the evil by advancing money to the squatters on the security of their leases, to a sufficient extent to enable them to buy the land.
Mrs. Frank Madden—the Speaker’s wife—once told me a very amusing story of the biter being bit by overreaching himself. A “cocky” had picked out a very fine slice of an estate on the Murrumbidgee, at the river-edge, as he thought. The squatter and his wife had been as kind as possible to the man and his wife, and the kindness of the people in the country districts in Australia is something worth having. But the new-comers, a common, mean, little Glasgow man and his wife, had been bitterly jealous of the comfort and refinement of their neighbours’ home—in which, by-the-by, they had been staying while their own was building—and, once settled, they determined on equalling matters up. They had picked out and fenced a long narrow strip along the water-edge, and absolutely refused to let the squatter’s sheep be driven through it to drink, so that the poor beasts had to trail many miles before they could reach the water, many actually dying of thirst on the way, for, as the whole estate had originally run along the river-edge, no water-holes had been dug.
In vain the squatter and his wife remonstrated and pleaded, and offered money; the mean little wretch’s envy and spite proved even greater than his rapacity, and he absolutely refused to concede an iota of his right.
The squatter might well have been driven distracted, but for one thing. He knew that it was only a matter of time. Before the “cocky” had taken up the land there had been heavy rains, and the river had swollen, and flooded fully a mile of the land at either side, and along the edge of that flood the stranger had pegged out his claim. Gradually it began to seem to him that the water—day by day, inch by inch—was slipping away from his border. Then, as the whole truth dawned on him, he drove off post-haste to the nearest town to buy up the rest of the land between himself and what he had begun to suspect was the true river-bank. But he was too late; the squatter had been there before him and already completed the purchase; so that as the water sank back into the river-bed and the billabongs gradually dried up, the “cocky” found himself obliged to beg the same boon for himself as he had refused to his neighbour, which—as the squatter was a man, and not an archangel—was promptly and consistently refused, till there was no choice left for the interloper but to move on elsewhere.
In those days the “cockies” pegged out their claims and took the land for themselves; nowadays the Land Board takes it for them—not a bit here and there, as they did, but large areas of the very best part of the run—sometimes even the entire estate.
How deliciously Robert Louis Stevenson writes in his book “Travels with a Donkey,” of the delights of sleeping out of doors! I wish he could have spent even one such night in the Australian Bush.
There was a round pool, deep among the trees in one forest that I know of, and there at dusk the drama of the night—which is really the woodland day—used to begin with the ibis, that came each evening to bathe. I used to go into the wood and sit down under the trees just to watch and wait for them. Punctually, just as the sky changed from blue to pink and grey, they used to arrive—from some mysterious world of shades, I veritably believe—and, floating down silently from above the tree-trunks, step delicately into the water. It is lovely to see them fly; their necks arch back like the handle of some Ionic vase, purely Greek, though as they alight and stand in the water they are completely Egyptian in form, and with all the mystery of Egypt in their mien. They do not splash and flutter their wings in bathing, as other birds do, but, when they move at all, do so very slowly, lifting first one foot, then another, high out of the water; while they stare persistently, without the faintest trace of alarm at any intruder. All the other animals here are the remnant of the true wild, left far behind by the ages, uneasy, wistful, and half ashamed. But the ibis is the spirit of a civilization older than any other; and if it does not speak, it is only that it has learnt how futile are all words.
One very hot night I took a blanket with me and camped out beside that pool. But I did not sleep, simply because everyone else seemed awake, and all the time things were happening. The lories sat up far later than they ought to have done, chatting among themselves. Then, as the ibis all floated away over the tree-tops once more, a white sulphur-crested cockatoo came down to bathe with a most prodigious splashing and fuss.
After this the forest rested tranquil for a little while. Rolling myself tightly up in my blanket, I turned on my side and laid my cheek against the earth, mossy and sweet-scented, sweeping aside with my hand all the little nobbly gum-seeds. Away back in the scrub a lyre-bird gave a hoarse, angry cry—on one never-to-be-forgotten day in that same spot I had seen one of these shyest of all the denizens of the forest, with his lovely tail spread, treading arrogantly with his great feet across the very moss where I lay—then there was another spell of silence, broken only by the whispering of the leaves and an odd little complaining sound, where, high up above my head, a dead bough had fallen across another and sawed gently backwards and forwards, with a note like that of a ’cello.
A tree fell in the distance, with no tearing shriek of perturbation, but with a resounding crash, which told me that its death had come to it, perhaps months before, and that only now were its neighbours letting it slip from their supporting arms to the earth, where unnumbered seedlings would, in a few weeks, spring to life over and around it. Another silence—during which I lay and watched the moon climb up over the tree-tops, the way the ibis had come—and then a harsh, guttural complaint broke on my ears from just above my head. “Ug-g-g-, ug-ug, ug—?” It was an opossum just awaking from his cosy sleep. I could almost see him shake himself and snap his little sharp white teeth. “Ug-ug, ug,” he seemed to say. “What a nuisance! Another day’s work all to start over again! tut, tut!” Then a little pouched mouse hopped airily out into the moonlight right under my very nose; sat upright, stroked his whiskers thoughtfully, and started off, on what cannibal orgy I almost trembled to think, remembering Mr. Hall’s story of how fifty of these bloodthirsty beings were sent to the University—were sent, I say, for but two arrived—with a little heap of skin and fur to tell the tale; while, in the very bottle in which they were put to be chloroformed, the survivors indulged in a mortal combat. There are other tiny pouched mice in parts of the State which jump like kangaroos, but that night I was not in range of them; and this one cannibal creature was the only one of his kind that I saw.
By the time the mouse had passed, literally brushing by me in search of a more sizeable prey, the owls had started, and the doleful cry of “More pork, more-pork!” echoed from tree to tree. More opossums began to stir, leaping and scolding among the boughs, while all the undergrowth seemed alive with the oddest rustlings and little whimpering cries. Of a truth night in the forest holds an infinitude of wonder and delight, but little enough of sleep, unless you are so inured to it as to cease to start and wonder at every sound. Once there were Titanic marsupials as large as a rhinoceros, and phalanges monstrous as any polar bear, and giant kangaroos a dozen feet high, and a wombat as great as an ox, in these very woods, away back in what I believe is called the Eocene Age—and what must the stir and turmoil of such a night have been in those days, when all these small people make such a bustle now from dark to dawn!
The mammals in Australia are divided into two groups, to one of which—the egg-laying mammals, or prototheria—only two specimens belong, all the rest coming under the other section, the theria. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater, which comprise the first group, are—to the superficial eye—as different as any two animals can well be, the anteater not being unlike a slender light-coloured English hedgehog in appearance, and covered with similar prickles, while the platypus is covered with the softest and closest of brown fur. I have a little toque made of platypus—in defiance of all law, for, rightly enough, the weird little animal is most strictly protected—which has often been taken for a very close, fine sealskin. The platypus has a wide bill, like a duck, and webbed front feet; but its hind-feet have claws on them, rather like an otter, while it lays eggs and suckles its young, and does everything else by means of which it is possible to puzzle the zoologist. It is an intensely shy creature, and, living in the burrow by the river’s edge, as it does, is as much at home in the water as on land, and very difficult indeed to catch a glimpse of.
Once I numbered among my friends a very likeable vagabond, who for years earned a sufficiency of food by selling the eels he caught in a bend of the River Yarra, about three miles above Melbourne. He had no roof over his head, excepting the trees, or perhaps an empty cattle-shed in the wettest weather, and he possessed neither wife nor children nor domestic impedimenta of any sort, nor any wardrobe—except what he carried on his back—while he was so frankly idle—apart from his occasional and leisurely occupation of letting down eel-lines—that at the last census he wittily suggested he should be described as a gentleman. This man told me—and I believed him, for he had nothing to gain by lying—that he had seen a platypus in that very bend of the river; but, though I crept out evening after evening and watched untiringly in the same place, I never met with the same luck; perhaps because I had not, like him, such fine “estates in time,” as Charles Lamb would put it.
The “native-companions” are among the strangest sights of the Australian Bush, and if you are lucky enough to see them dancing out in the open on a fine moonlight night, you will not be likely to forget the sight. I do not know if they are a species of crane, but they are certainly very like them in appearance—tall and slim, and of a delicate grey colour; while if some forerunner of Mr. Turveydrop’s was responsible for their mien and deportment, he might well be proud of his pupils. They do not play about at random as some animals do, apparently intoxicated by the night air and the moonlight, but they literally dance; with a decorum and grace which belong, in truth, to the days of the dandies. Picture, if you can, an open stretch of country, moonlit and veiled in light mist; the white, ghostlike trees, and these shadowy figures stepping so lightly, bowing and bending with such solemn grace; twisting and turning in a maze of intricate figures, seemingly governed by some unbreakable law of etiquette, like ghosts from bygone ballrooms.
All the Australian birds, however, seem to me extraordinarily different from the English birds in character and expression, as well as plumage and note. They are less simple, or guileless, if one may use such a word. They are wild with the sort of wildness that gives one the idea that they are the imprisoned souls of wood-fawns and satyrs, older and wiser than any other birds, with an odd sort of cunning in their aspect. I have watched them again and again beside the pool of which I speak, which seems, indeed, a veritable show-ground for them. There the mud-larks, rather like our water-wagtails, only much larger, come there with the most wanton flutter of broad black and white tails, to disport themselves upon the patch of green at its verge. And the laughing jackass and cockatoo, wild-duck, and even an occasional wild-swan; lories and galahs, and innumerable little green and grey birds; owls and hawks, the blue goshawk, and the rare white hawk.
But these are not all the strange characters to be found in the book of Nature, which lies open before us in the Australian Bush—a book of fantastic contradictions, of Rabelaistique twists and turns, and of the oddest humours. There is the flying squirrel—which does not fly, and is not a squirrel at all,—with a long fold of skin stretching from the front to the back leg at either side, enabling its possessor to glide through the air for a considerable distance, though always from a greater to a lesser height. And there are kangaroos—though not in Victoria—which climb the trees and browse on the top of the highest eucalypti; and birds which hatch their eggs, after the manner of reptiles, in the warm sand or gravel; and there are so-called legless lizards, peculiar to Australia, and the water-holding frog found in the central deserts, which can blow its body out with a sufficiency of fluid to support it for a year or more in a dried-up mudhole—completely independent of any “Wowser.” And there is a fish with a lung, and in Gippsland an earthworm 7 feet long, and the thickness of a man’s finger—fit bait for the leviathan, indeed.
There are now in Victoria 4,016,995 acres of state forests and timber reserves, apart from the other tracts of forest land, and this in spite of the fact that ever since the white man put his foot in the state he has been, year in, year out, stubbling up and cutting down, burning, and ring-barking. Once up in the woods above Macedon I remember coming across a tiny two-roomed cottage in the heart of the forest. For the distance of a hundred feet or so the ground had been cleared at either side, save for ragged stumps, while all around tall trees stood in thick ranks, like the straight white pillars of a cathedral, in the middle of which the tiny homestead appeared like an altar, with the curl of blue smoke uprising from its chimney as incense; the only tree quite near, and, indeed, towering over it, being one gigantic gum, on which, even as I lingered there, the men were busied with their hatchets; and I remember it seemed to my mind an incredible piece of vandalism that such a beautiful tree should be destroyed, the one possible shade that the little house could hope for through the blazing summer day; more particularly as there were miles upon miles of forest all round if they needed wood.
I stood and watched the men at work till they had chopped all round the tree, leaving only a slender spindle of wood in the centre, when, by the help of ropes which they had already fastened to it, it was dragging, crashing, to the ground. It hurts me horribly to see a great tree fall, for it seems to tear the very heart out of one with its last rending cry. Something in my throat chokes me, and my eyes grow misty. To see a tree fall, or a mighty ship launched, both overpower one with the same intense excitement. Birth or death—they are much the same in their first breath—joy or sorrow, they tear you alike.
A woman, one of those flat-chested, neutral-tinted women one sees in country districts, came out of the cottage and stared sombrely at the fallen giant, while the two men—her husband and grownup son, as I afterwards found—walked round it, lopping off a bough here and there. I went up and asked her for a glass of water, impelled more by curiosity than thirst; then, as I sat on the oozing trunk and drank it, I asked her why the tree had been cut down. Surely they would miss it when the summer came, for the shadows of the other trees would not reach to the house.
“Well, it ain’t always summer, you see,” said the woman, and she looked at the tree with a sort of sickened dislike on her dull face. “It wur a deal too near to be pleasant. Night after night I laid awake in the winter when the wind wur blowin’ and ’eard it moanin’ an’ cryin’ out, thinkin’ it ’ud crash down on us one o’ these nights. And where ’ud us be then?”
I gave a little shudder. “I never thought of that,” I said. “And it is horribly big.”
“Big! Yer right there! Ah! when I wur lyin’ in bed thur a’ nights with the wind blowin’ across it and across us, it seemed like as it growed bigger an’ bigger, an’ we growed littler an’ littler. Why, I mind when my Jim there wur born—” and she jerked her thumb in the direction of the younger man.
“Why, was he born here? and with that tree—”
“Yes—twenty years ago, come next July. Awful the weather was, I mind; snow an’ rain an’ wind—the wind fair terrible, an’ that tree a-shriekin’ an’ moaning. There weren’t no doctor anywhere in reach, and there weren’t no nuss; my man ’ee did all ’ee could fur me. But, Lord bless you, miss, when I were in my pains it seemed as if I wur a-bein’ torn up by the roots, the same as that there tree was, an’ I didn’t rightly know which wur goin’ ter end me fust. My man, ’ee promised ’e’d ’ave it down first thing when the weather cleared. But thur was allus a powerful lot to do, an’ it got put off an’ put off; though I wur never not to say easy about it fur one minute o’ time. Allus afraid, then, that it ’ud fall on the kid an’ kill ’im. An’ the higher an’ heavier it got, the worse it seemed, fur them gum-tree roots don’t run not no depth ter speak of. But there it stayed, till only this very mornin’ the boss said as ’ow ’e an’ Jim ’ud ’ave it down. An’ thur it be, but I reckon as ’ow I’ll never quit dreamin’ on it. All my folk were woodcutters, an’ my feyther wur killed by a fallin’ tree, just the dead spit of this one.”
It was a bald enough narrative, rendered all the balder from the sing-song, drawling voice in which it was recounted; but I have never forgotten it. The long, uneventful years there in the clearing, more than twenty years from the time that the drab-faced woman arrived there as a fresh young bride; the fear and fascination of the tree gathering to an obsession during those long nine months before her child was born—with no nurse or doctor to stay her fears. Then that awful night, when she did not know rightly whether it was her or the tree that was to be torn up by the roots; the twenty years of busy days, when doubtless it seemed less terrible, and when her husband was too hard-worked to bother about it; and the twenty years and more of nights when it had seemed to tower over the tiny house like some wild beast; tugging at a too slender chain, which some night would—and must—give way, leaving it free to spring; the only rest possible being when the wind was blowing steadily in the other direction. And, above all, the man who had the strength and the knowledge to rid her once for ever of such torment sleeping heavily night after night by her side.
Still, it is not only women who are tormented by such fears. Men have spoken of having been possessed by a horror of the loneliness of the Bush that has half driven them mad, while a Sister in one of the large Melbourne hospitals told me that they had far more cases of nervous breakdown among men than among women, particularly from the effects of isolation and loneliness; perhaps because, on the whole, a woman’s day is more filled up with a succession of trifling duties, so varied in themselves that she has but little time to brood. Curiously enough—though the number of male and female lunatics in Victoria is very nearly equal—the number of women who had committed suicide during the year before the latest statistics were compiled is less than a third of that of the men; while I honestly believe that any man who had been obsessed by fear during all those years, as was the woodcutter’s wife, and yet was unable to remove the cause of it, would have put an end to himself.
About a couple of hours’ journey from Melbourne, and within a short drive from Haelesville, there is a Blacks’ Settlement, where there is gathered together a remnant of those people who, with their four-footed fellows, were once in undisputed possession of these mountains and forests—before the days of the axe and saw, the “stump-jump,” and the “mallee roller.”
It is a good many years since I was at Coranderrk, as the settlement is named, and therefore I have no very clear memories of it, excepting that the people all seemed exceedingly leisurely and good tempered, and childishly clamorous for pennies. Two or three men emulated each other in throwing the boomerang for our amusement, and in this the older men were certainly by far the best, literally bursting with pride at their achievements; one grey-haired man, taller and bigger-built than his fellows, sending it to such a height and distance that it had dwindled to a hardly distinguishable speck against the blue sky before it turned and came whistling back, in a sweeping semicircle, to drop almost exactly at the place where its owner stood.
The little huts at Coranderrk are tidy and comfortable, and the people well fed and cared for; but there is something inexpressibly sad about the whole encampment. It is bad enough to see one person dying—say of consumption, or some such fatal disease—but it is worse by far to see a whole people die, no matter how ineffectual they may be in their powers of grappling with the conditions of modern life, for those individuals who are not actually dead are yet in a state of senile decay, and, having lost the wonderful instincts of a savage, are still groping wistfully and ignorantly among the intricate ways of civilization. Still, sometimes if you can borrow a black fellow, to go fishing or trapping with, you may yet catch sight of a spark of the old bushman’s cunning and mysterious lore.
Altogether there are in Victoria seven mission-stations and depôts for aborigines, the number they house being in all only a little over 260. Besides this, there are still a few wandering black fellows, who are given food and clothing when they call at the mission-stations, but they are very few in number, many of them being but half-castes, the total number of the pure-blooded blacks, in 1901, being estimated at only 271, with 381 of mixed blood. [298]
Once, when I was staying up in New South Wales, a little old black fellow, apparently a most genial person, was pointed out to me, who had married a white woman. After a while she had grown tired of the union and forsaken her Othello, on which he brought her back, with the aid of a club, and, finding her still restless, broke one of her legs. Directly the bone had set she ran—or rather hobbled, with the help of a stick—away again; on which he brought her back once more, and broke both her legs, to make sure of her. After this—or so I was told—they remained a most happy and peaceable couple, while, though she was still lame, she was quite sufficiently recovered to limp about the mia-mia and attend adequately to her lord’s wants, which, after all, were not much more numerous than those of old Omar—less, indeed, by the book of verse, for which might be substituted a pipe. Who can say now that, tactfully managed, mixed marriages are not a success?
The lower a man is in the scale of nature, the more compensations he seems to possess. If the brain and reasoning powers are imperfectly developed, the sense of smell, of touch, of hearing, and of sight is intensified. As his brain becomes more mature, he learns a better way to catch and kill his prey than by chasing it on foot, and therefore loses his swiftness. His teeth and jaws become weaker because he can cook his food before eating it. He loses his sense of time because he has clocks and bells to tell it to him; and his instinct for locality, because he has grown to depend on a compass, roads, or signposts. In all matters connected with hunting the aboriginal, in the hard school of necessity, has brought his powers of observation to a fine point that is little short of marvellous to us, who have grown to depend on books for the greater part of all we wish to know. To go to the public library, look through the catalogue, and hunt up the best book on any subject we wish to master; to stuff ourselves up with some special information, so that we may wriggle our way through an examination. It is all very different from the years of patience and endurance that a black fellow brings to the accomplishment of any special task, the mastering of any peculiar knowledge. With the passing of the Australian aboriginal will pass also a minute and intimate knowledge of animal life and habits that no European zoologist can ever touch, and of which the average sportsman, with all his improved appliances for transit and slaughter, has no idea. He will watch a laughing-jackass for hours so that he may track and kill a snake. He will know in what hollow stump an opossum may be lurking, simply by the movements of the flies which are hovering near. He will slip silently into a pool, or billabong, and, diving under the water, seize a duck and break its neck beneath the surface, so noiselessly that none of its companions swimming around it will be disturbed, and so will kill one after another until he has enough; while, when he wishes to decoy pelicans, he will throw stones into the water in such a manner as to give the precise effect of a fish rising. He knows—with an almost unerring knowledge—from which direction the wind may be expected to blow during the night, and so makes his little shelter of boughs on the side from which it will come; while the opening of his camp is always away from it, with the fire in front; and he is the most expert water-finder in the world, knowing at a glance, by the way vegetation grows, where water will be found, and at what a depth, and in what places and where, after a heavy dew, he may be able to collect enough to fill his water-bag, or the shell or skull, with the orifice sealed up, which serves the same purpose; collecting, even in the heart of the desert, where any white man would die of thirst, a sufficiency of water from the long tap-root of the gum-scrub. He knows how to throw the boomerang so as never to miss; how to carve the returning one—short and flat, with a curious twist on its own axis—which is used mainly in trick-throwing or among large flocks of birds, and the long heavy one, which does not return, and is used in all serious hunting; how also to make, and use in the chase and fight, two-handled wooden swords, and clubs, and shields, sometimes beautifully carved, though with handles that are for the most part too small for a European hand.