South Australia and Western Australia

I fear that it will seem that in what I have said I have given a verdict against Western Australia. I have intended rather to show how great may be the difficulties attending the establishment of a young colony, which in its early years finds no special or unexpected aid from remarkable circumstances. The same struggles with equal hardship and similar doubts have no doubt been made before, and nothing has been said of them. The stragglers have lived through and fought their way to prosperity, and but little has been heard of the details of the fight. When the Puritans were landed on the shores of Massachusetts men did not rush about the world and write books. It may probably be that they too, at their first starting, had but few glimpses of the glory of the coming Yankee world. It was perhaps only by hard fighting with adverse circumstances that they could get corn, and labour, and money. But they went on, and the glories of Yankeedom are now patent to the whole earth.

It is to the gold that has been found in Eastern Australia that the eastern colonies have owed their rapid rise and great name;—and in a great measure, the want of reputation under which Western Australia labours is due to the golden achievements of her sisters. She would not have been thought to have done so badly, had not those sisters done so well. This cannot be pleaded as being entirely sufficient to account for the effect, because we know that South Australia has not done much with gold, and South Australia holds up her head. I have not yet spoken of South Australia, but, when doing so, I will endeavour to show how and why she has prospered.

And then, in another way, the gold-diggings of the eastern colonies have been detrimental not only to the reputation, but to the very existence of Western Australia. Men have constantly gone after the gold. It became almost useless to land emigrants on the western shore. Tidings came of this rush and of that rush, and the new-comers disappeared, soon turning up, as new chums again, in the golden land. I have expressed my opinion more than once that the majority of those who have rushed after gold have done themselves but little good;—but they enriched the colony to which their labour was given, and from which they drew their supplies. Gradually this evil of “rushing” is dying out. The amount of Australian gold produced may go on increasing year by year for many years. They who profess to understand the matter think that it will do so. But the gold will come from quartz-crushing,—from that eating up and digesting of the very bowels of the mountains by heavy machinery, which I have endeavoured to describe elsewhere,—and not by the washing of alluvial soil. It is the latter pursuit which has produced the rushes, whereas the former produces steady industry with a fixed rate of wages. The shifting of labour from colony to colony will, I think, from this cause, become less common than it has been, and agricultural work will hold its own against mining work,—in Australia as in other countries. It is a mining country, and there will be many miners;—but it will not occur to every man that he should be a miner.

In speaking of the future of Western Australia I shall not receive the thanks or sympathies of many of its inhabitants, if I express an opinion that that future is to be independent of gold. The idea is deep-rooted that there should be gold and must be gold,—that Providence cannot have been so unjust as not to have put gold there. Why not in the west as well as in the east? And then the stranger is told of mica, and slate, and quartz, and boulders,—and of the very confident opinion which Mr. Hargreaves expressed. I know nothing of mica, and slate, and quartz, and boulders,—and very little of Mr. Hargreaves. But I know that no gold worthy of the name has been found yet; and that the finding of gold in infinitesimal quantities has been common in many countries. Doubtless gold may turn up in Western Australia, but I trust that the colony will be too wise to wait for it. Should it come, let the favour be accepted from the gods;—but I do not think that men should live expecting it.

In the meantime what other measures may serve to turn the tide, and produce some life and action? The land is good, and if properly tilled will produce all that is necessary for man’s life. And the land that will do so, though widely scattered, is abundant. I need hardly say that at home in England there are still among us millions of half-starved people,—half-starved certainly according to the dietary of the poorest even in this poor colony,—to whom the realisation of rural life in Western Australia would seem to be an earthly paradise if it could be understood,—to whom it would be a paradise if it could be reached. I have spoken in anything but flattering terms of the colony and its labourers. I have not depicted the present normal Western Australian carter as a very picturesque fellow. But, bad as he is, he can always get enough to eat and drink, and, if he will behave himself well, can always have a comfortable home.

But they who will come now will not be unpicturesque with the lineaments of the gaol, as he has been, and the more that may come the less probability will there be of mistaken suspicions. Living is cheaper than in England, as meat is 4d. instead of 10d. a pound, and wages are higher;—for in no agricultural county in England do they rule so high throughout the year as 18s. a week. In the colony 18s. a week are the lowest that I have known to be given without rations. And the rural labourer in Western Australia is more independent than in England. How, indeed, could he possibly be less so! He is better clothed, has a better chance of educating his children, and certainly lives a freer and more manly life.

But how shall the rural labourer out of Sussex, Suffolk, Essex, or Cambridgeshire get to Western Australia? If there were no pecuniary difficulty in the journey,—if every labourer were empowered by Act of Parliament to go to some parish officer and demand to be sent across the ocean,—it is probable that a very large fleet of transport ships would soon be required, and that English farmers would find it difficult to get in their seed. This can never be the case, but something towards it is done. The colonies assist intending immigrants, and the mother country too assists, or, in some cases, pays the entire expense of emigrants. We sent out those ill-born and ill-bred women who were wanted as convicts’ wives,—and who, when received, were found to be mere Irish. But it is ill bringing a man out who will not stay when he is brought. If you, my philanthropical reader, send out some favoured tenant or parishioner, your object is fairly achieved whether the man make himself happy in Western Australia or Victoria. But it is by no means so with the colony, when the colony pays. When a colony has paid for three or four hundred immigrants, and finds after a few months that they have all disappeared, and gone to more fortunate lands, the colony not unnaturally becomes disgusted. Then it is that the colony feels that nothing will do but gold. And the mother country is affected somewhat in the same way, though less bitterly. It is said now that England has promised a certain number of free emigrants to Western Australia, and that she has not kept her word. But the mother country says that, as regards Western Australia, it is useless to send her emigrants unless she can keep them. In speaking of the continuance of the obligation on the part of England, Lord Granville, in July, 1869, wrote as follows:—“It has already been laid down as a condition of that continuance that the immigration should be wanted, and such as the colony can provide for; but it is clear from the census returns that the large proportion of these persons who reach Western Australia do not remain in it. There is therefore the strongest primâ facie evidence that the immigration is not wanted.” The men are tempted away; and do the colony, for whose benefit they were sent, no good by their short sojourn. Then why send them? Renewed petitions for emigrants, emigrants to be sent out at the expense of the government, were made; but the Secretary of State was firm. Nominated emigrants would remain,—emigrants nominated by friends in the colony. So pleaded the governor, with an anxiety which showed that at any rate his heart was in the matter. But the Secretary of State was still hard. “Her Majesty’s Government are fully aware,” he said in 1870, “that nominated emigrants are more likely to remain in the colony than others; but unfortunately they have no evidence before them that either one or the other class do in fact remain.”

How shall men and women be got who will remain:—who will come to the place in order that they may live upon the land, and not simply making it a stepping-stone to some rush for gold? It can only be done by making the land attractive; and the great attraction offered by land is ownership. Let a man understand that he can have land of his own and live upon it, owing rent to no one and service to no one, subject to no bondage, with no one to order his coming in and his going out, with no tasks laid on his shoulders by another, that he can be altogether free from the dominion of a master, and you open up to his mental eyes a view of life that is full of attraction. This new home, that is so unlike the home that he is to leave, is indeed far across the waters, in another world, away from the comrades and circumstances of his life amidst which he feels that, though wretched, he is secure. He feels that if he go he can never return; and he hears vague, unsatisfactory, even contradictory accounts of the new land. He knows that he is groping his way, and that, should he go, he will at last take a leap in the dark. Even with those among us who have many friends, the nature of whose life has taught us where to look for information, who can not only write but express in writing what we mean, who can not only read but know where to find the books that will teach us that we want to learn, there is felt to be much difficulty when the question arises whether we shall remove ourselves and our household gods to the new home that we call a colony, or whether we shall send a son to push his fortunes in the new country. To digest what we have learned and bring it all together so that we may act upon it safely is no easy task. What must it be to the working man whom some newspaper has reached, or some advertisement to emigrants; and who, in addition to this, has heard the vague surmises of his neighbour? He goes to the parson, or to the squire, or perhaps to his employer,—and is recommended to remain. The adviser hardly dares to say otherwise, and is probably himself impregnated with the patriotic idea that there is no place for an Englishman like England. For members of parliament, and men with £5,000 a year, or with prosperous shops in Cheapside,—for some even whose fortune is less brilliant than that,—England is a very comfortable home. No land can beat it. But for Englishmen in general, that is, for the bulk of the working population of the country, it is I think by no means the best place. A large proportion of our labouring classes cannot even get enough to eat. A still larger proportion are doomed so to work that they can think of nothing but a sufficiency of food. In all the Australian colonies, if a man will work the food comes easily, and he can turn his mind elsewhere. I do not assert that there is no poverty,—no distress. Even in Western Australia the government is obliged to maintain an establishment for paupers. But poverty is not the rule, and a man who will work and can work may be independent.

Success in emigration depends much on the fashion of the thing, and this peculiar exodus,—to Western Australia namely,—is not at present fashionable. If in the course of the next two or three years two or three thousand new-comers were to land upon its shores and stay there, the thing would be done. And the two or three thousand would find plenty and happy homes. But solitary immigrants to the colony feel that they become mixed with the convict population. At the present moment great encouragement has been offered to new-comers,—to men who on arriving with a few pounds in their pockets will be willing to work with their own hands, but who will so work on their own lands.

I do not know how far, in what I have written of the other colonies, I may have been able to make my English reader understand the nature and position of a “free-selecter.” I found it very difficult to understand myself, or to come to a conclusion whether he should be regarded as the normal British emigrant,—manly, industrious, independent, and courageous,—or a mere sheep-stealer. There was one other alternative, hardly more attractive than the last. He need not be a mere sheep-stealer, though probably he would do a little in that line; but might have free-selected with the first great object of making his presence so unbearable to the squatter on whose run he had perched himself, that the squatter would be obliged to buy him out. I certainly found that the manly, independent, and courageous free-selecter was not the free-selecter of whom the squatters talked to me in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. The squatters did not carry me with them altogether; but it certainly is the case that free-selecters in these colonies often do steal sheep, and often do make themselves disagreeable. A man desirous of free-selecting,—say in Queensland and New South Wales, for the game has nearly been played out within the smaller and more valuable confines of Victoria,—has the whole world of the colony open to him, and very little to divert his course. He searches and inquires, and, actuated by good or bad motives, settles down on some bit of land which he thinks will grow corn, and where he is sure to be hated by the squatter whom he is invading. The colonial governments offer him every possible encouragement as to money,—land at 15s. an acre, land at 10s. an acre, and especially land with deferred payments,—with payments taking the shape of rent, perhaps 1s. 6d. or 1s. an acre per annum,—the land becoming his own at the end of a term of years, the yearly deferred payments having been taken as the price of it. But the governments have done little or nothing to assist the free-selecter in placing himself. A part of the charm of the thing in the eyes of the free-selecter has been the power of choosing his land. We can understand that there is a pleasure in going well on to the run of some great squatter, pegging out some 40, 80, or 160 acres, and saying, “By your leave, sir, I mean to have this.” We can understand that there is pleasure in doing it, and great pain in enduring it. My sympathies have been chiefly with the free-selecter, not believing that he is always a sheep-stealer, and feeling that the land should be open to him. Pastoral autocrats with acres by the hundreds of thousands,—acres which are not their own,—cannot fill up a country. They are the precursors of population, and, as the population comes, should make way for it. But might it not be arranged that the free-selecters should be invited to come and take up their lands in some manner less objectionable than that which has hitherto prevailed?

When I was in Western Australia new land regulations were issued and proclaimed, having just received the sanction of the Colonial Office at home; and these regulations go a long way towards effecting a remedy for those evils attaching to free-selection which I have attempted to describe,—and they will remedy another evil which, in Western Australia especially, is very detrimental to the selecting farmer. They will bring the agricultural occupiers of the land together. Men are invited to occupy lands chosen for “special occupation.” By this arrangement the skill and experience of the land officers of the colony will be used on behalf of the selecter, who will not only be enabled to place himself on soil capable of bearing corn, but will find himself surrounded by others, occupied as he is in producing corn. In this way rural communities may be formed which shall not be sheep-stealing communities. The locality having been chosen in the first place, not by the new-comer, but by the government, sheep-stealing will not at any rate have been the object when the choice was made,—nor the idea that a squatter if harassed sufficiently may at last be induced to buy his neighbour out. Communities will be formed, and communities will make markets. I have sometimes thought that free-selecters like to take their land up far away in the bush, at long distances each from another. There is a wild independence in the doing so which charms. But no decision can be more detrimental to the man’s material interest. When so located he is driven to consume all that he grows, and then,—unless he steal sheep,—he can consume nothing else. That which is most to be desired by him is that gradually a township should be formed round his homestead.

Immigrants and others are invited by these new regulations to take up land selected for special occupation, and great boons are offered to those who will do so. In the first place the payment of the price of the land is deferred. Hitherto in this colony it has always been necessary that the price of the land should be paid down. The land, as has been explained elsewhere, has been purchased at various prices, ranging from 5s. to 20s. an acre,—but there has been no deferred payment. At last 10s. an acre was the settled price,—and so it remains. The ordinary free-selecter may go where he will beyond the limits of town, suburban, or mineral lands, and, if no purchaser have been before him, may purchase any amount of land in blocks of not less than 40 acres, at 10s. an acre. But when purchasing after this fashion he must pay his money down. If he will take up land selected for special occupation, he need not pay his money down. He need only pay 1s. an acre per annum, such payment being required in advance. He must then fence the whole of his land and till a quarter of it during the ten years over which the payment is deferred.—and if he do thus the land becomes his own.

There are other stipulations which the intending emigrant should understand. The purchaser cannot purchase in this manner less than 100 acres. It is considered that he cannot crop all the land yearly, and that less than 100 acres will not afford a man subsistence. Nor can he take up more than 500 acres. In addition to the use of the land which will be his own at the end of the ten years, and will be in his own hands during the previous occupancy, the selecter will be entitled to run cattle and sheep upon commonages, or neighbouring lands not fitted for agricultural purposes. It is stipulated that the common land shall in no case exceed 200 per cent. of the land fitted for agricultural purposes,—so that the commonage for 2,000 agricultural acres, or acres fit for agriculture, shall not exceed 4,000 acres. It is not stipulated that the commonage shall amount to any fixed number of acres. It is understood, however, that it will suffice,—not of course for the produce of wool,—but for meat and milk.

In writing for the information of future emigrants, it is very difficult to make the exact truth clearly intelligible. The new regulations speak of land fitted for agricultural purposes, and in what I have written above I have spoken of “agricultural” land. The emigrant who comes out to take up lands selected for special occupation in Western Australia, must not expect that he will find ploughed fields. He will find forest land, covered more or less thickly with timber,—what all the world in Australia knows as bush,—and it will be his first work to clear that portion of his holding from which he intends to get his first crop. But the land will have been chosen as being fitted, when cleared, for agricultural purposes. The thickness, and what I may call obduracy, of timber is very various. It may be presumed that the land chosen will not be heavily timbered. I was told that the average price of clearing bush in Western Australia was about £4 an acre. A man contracting to do such work would expect to make 25s. a week. If this be so, a man knowing what he was about would clear an acre in three weeks.

But, to my thinking, the best part of the offer made still remains to be told. Any emigrant taking up land in the colony selected for special occupation within six months of his landing,—the time named should I think have been prolonged to at least twelve months,—and who can show that he has fulfilled the above conditions with regard to improvements, is entitled to the value of his passage-money out, provided that passage-money does not exceed £15; and he will have the same allowance made to him for every adult he brings with him,—the money to be credited to him in the payments made for his land. The offer in fact amounts to this,—that thirty acres will be allowed free for every adult whom the immigrant may bring with him to settle on the land, provided that the passage out has cost £15,—which is I presume the usual price of sending an adult to Western Australia. I am also assured, certainly on good authority, that half the allowance will be made for non-adults; but there is no proviso in the bill itself to this effect.

The result of all this any intending emigrant can calculate for himself. A man with a wife and one adult and one non-adult child would in fact get his one hundred acres for nothing. If his family were larger, he would get more land;—but he should bear in mind that he has to fence it all and till a quarter of it within ten years, and that in this way a larger acreage may become an increased burden to him rather than an increased property.

Of course I am here addressing those who have in their own hands the means of emigrating. Not only will the £15 a head be wanting in bringing out his family, but also something on which to live when the new country is first reached. But, presuming that a working man with a working family can raise £200,—a very strong presumption I fear,—I do not know that he could do better than establish himself as a farmer in Western Australia.

I believe that Western Australia has no agent at home, as have the other colonies, a part and perhaps the chief part of whose business it is to facilitate the emigration of those who intend settling themselves in the new colony. Why should we pay an agent to send us emigrants when no emigrants will come to us? That no doubt is the feeling of a desponding Western Australian. And yet the colony has, as I think, with much wisdom offered most alluring terms to emigrants. At present, however, I do not see how these terms are to be made known to persons at home. I say this as an apology for the insertion here of details which cannot, I fear, interest the ordinary reader.

It is admitted on all hands that Western Australia cannot be made to thrive until her population shall be increased by new-comers. Twenty-five thousand people may perhaps live together in comfort within confines which shall be sufficiently extended to afford to all a sufficiency of land, and at the same time compact enough to bring them together. But Western Australia is an enormous country, and its scanty population is spread about it by hundreds. The so-called settled districts are twelve in number, and the average area of each is more than half as big as England. The average population of each district is only just above 2,000. Let the English reader conceive the ten northern counties of England with 2,000 inhabitants between them! And in saying this I am speaking of the settled districts,—not of the distant regions which are claimed by the colony as belonging to it, and which will remain probably for centuries, perhaps for ever, uninhabited. An influx of population is necessary to Western Australia, not only that there may be enough of men and women to form a community and administer to each other’s wants, but that the very nature may be changed of those upon whose industry the colony now depends. In its deep distress it accepted convicts, and was saved, as I think, from utter collapse by doing so. But the salvation effected was not healthy in its nature. I have given the figures over and over again. To make up a population of twenty-five thousand souls, ten thousand male convicts have been sent! Life and property are fairly safe. Work is done. The place is by no means a lawless place. Those who emerge from their sentences reformed are encouraged to prosper. Those who come out unreformed are controlled and kept down. But nevertheless the convict flavour pervades the whole,—to the great detriment of that part of the working population which has always been free. This evil is of course curing itself by degrees. The colony receives no more convicts, and the very birth and growth of its young citizens will gradually obliterate the flavour. But this would be done much more quickly and much more effectually by an influx of new blood. Nothing would tend so much to the improvement of the people as any step that would enable the enfranchised convict to move about among his fellow-labourers without being known as a convict. It is so in New South Wales and Tasmania. Intimate intercourse will probably reveal the secrets of a man’s past life in any country; and if a man once degraded afterwards rise high, his former degradation will be remembered. But in these once convict colonies time is having its effect, and men’s minds are not always referring to the matter. It does not affect the rate of wages, nor the character of the work to be done. The once convict does not feel that every one regards him as a convict, and does not therefore work as convicts work. In Western Australia the man who never was a convict will fall into such habits of work, simply because they form the rule of life around him. Nothing but an increasing population will cure this quickly.

But the very fact that it is so, the very injury to which the colony has been subjected in this matter, gives in one respect the surest promise that here a new-comer may find a prosperous home. In England, as all the world knows, residences of all kinds are to be had at a much cheaper rate to the east of London than at the west. The east has all its disadvantages,—which are chiefly of a sentimental or fashionable nature. The man who can despise these may live there in a commodious house, who would be forced to put up with straitened quarters if he allowed himself to follow the fashion. Western Australia is the east side of London. The objections to it, bad as they are, concern chiefly sentiment and fashion. I do not recommend the man who is taking out £20,000 to a colony, with the idea of becoming a great man, to go there; but to him who feels that with £200 or £300 he has but little hope in England, and who would prefer independence and property of his own to the composite luxuries and miseries of a crowded country, I think that Western Australia offers perhaps as good a field for his small capital as any other colony.

I have endeavoured, as I have gone on, to indicate the natural sources of wealth to which the colony has a right to look. To those that I have already named I should add the breeding of horses, for which it seems to be specially adapted. At present the business is limited by the difficulty which the breeders have in disposing of their produce. India is their great market,—together with Batavia and Singapore. But there are no middle traders to take the young horses off the hands of the breeders,—who cannot themselves breed horses, and charter ships, and conduct the sales. This again is one of the evils to which a scanty population is ever subject.

I have no doubt that the exportation of jarrah-wood and of pearl-shell will become large and prosperous trades. The former will probably be by far the most beneficial to the colony, as it will be prosecuted by men in the colony,—whereas the pearl-shell will be sought and taken away by coasting strangers. It is hard, too, to believe that a country should be so prolific in grapes as this is without some result. I will not take upon myself to say that I drank West Australian wine with delight. I took it with awe and trembling, and in very small quantities. But we all know that the art of making wine does not come in a day;—and even should it never be given to the colony to have its Château This, or Château That, its 1841, its 1857, or 1865, or the like,—still it may be able to make raisins against the world.

Gold of course may turn up even yet. For myself, I look to corn and fruit, and perhaps oil,—to the natural products springing from the earth,—as the source of the future comfort of this enormous territory.