The worst part of Federation is that nobody quite realizes its power; it may be merely a semblance of reality, or it may be an ogre. It is like those shadows which lurk in the dark corners of a room, frightening wakeful children; or the genii that Sinbad at first hoisted, with such genial good-will, upon his back.
When I landed for the first time in Australia the relations between the landowners and the working-people were certainly far happier than they are now. People were proud of the vast estates, as indicative of the size of the country; of the immense flocks of sheep, and the merino wool that nowhere else could be matched for quality and quantity. Certain especially silky wools are procured from sheep in certain parts of the Western District of Victoria, and nowhere else, lambs’ wool actually reaching the price of 2s. a pound in Geelong market this last season. It was famous wool such as this, grown largely by the Macarthur and Russell families, which built up the reputation of Victoria far more surely than gold ever did, or pigs or onions ever will. Sheep do not reach to such a pitch of perfection by chance, and the Western District merinoes would scarcely be recognized by their original progenitors, popularly supposed to have emerged from the Ark. Immense sums of money have been spent on importing animals and bringing them to the highest pitch of perfection, and a question that has got to be faced is: Who—when the land is cut up into small holdings—will have either the money or enterprise necessary for importing fresh blood; and how will all the evils of inter-breeding, always such a danger on small farms, be avoided? Even now stud sheep are being sent out of the country, one owner a few months back having shipped off close on a dozen to Natal, feeling, I suppose, that there was nothing more to be made out of valuable sheep in a country which was, bit by bit, being cut away from under his feet.
“Men are more valuable than sheep,” is the parrot-like cry of politicians—some men I would say. In any case, men can live on sheep, and they cannot—unless they are cannibals—live on each other. If the large estates are not put to a proper use, if the sheep and wool they produce are a menace to the credit of the country, or when all the unsettled land is gone, then a reconstruction will become imperative. Meanwhile it is well to remember what has been done with the sheep, and what the sheep have done, and are still doing, for the country.
The original flock of sheep which formed the chief part of the stock owned by the Henty family was formed in Sussex at the end of the eighteenth century, taken out to Jamaica, then, later on, transferred to Portland by Edward Henty. To this flock many of the best of the Victorian sheep owe their origin, merinoes, also originally imported from England, being brought down from New South Wales by Captain Macarthur. In 1836 there were, officially, 41,332 sheep in Victoria—or Port Phillip. By 1842 the number had risen to 1,404,333, from which the number went on increasing by leaps and bounds till, in 1891, it reached 12,692,843, when the run of dry seasons, which lasted till 1901, decreased the flock to 10,841,790. The enormous rate at which the value of the export of wool increased may be gathered from the fact that between the years 1837—the year following the settlement of the Henty family in Portland—and 1840, five years after Faulkner’s settlement on the bank of the Yarra, and six years before the recognition of Victoria as a separate colony—this value rose from £11,639 to £67,902. In but one more year it leapt up to £85,735; while in 1908–09 the total value of the wool-clip in Victoria, with wool stripped from Victorian skins and exported on skins, has been estimated at £3,556,168, the weight of wool from the Western District sheep alone weighing 27,708,920 pounds.
The first live stock landed by Captain Phillips in Australia, in 1788, comprised 7 horses, 6 cattle, 29 sheep, 12 pigs, and a few goats.
Four months later the live stock in the colony were estimated, in a letter from Captain Phillips to Lord Sydney, Secretary of State for the Colonies, as follows:—“7 horses, 7 cattle, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks, 205 fowls, and 5 rabbits”—so that Mr. Austin was not the first, or the only, culprit in respect to Master Bunny.
In 1908 there were, roughly speaking, 87,043,266 sheep in this colony, the result of breeding and importation from the old country, from India, and the Cape, the sheep in the six years from 1902 to 1908 having increased by 33,374,919; while the value of the wool exported from the entire colony in 1908 was £22,914,236. In the face of these figures and the well-known fact that the number of sheep in all other countries is diminishing, it does seem rather like killing the goose with the golden egg to prohibit big estates, which, after all, are the only estates possible for pastoral success, As long as there is plenty of land still vacant and the output of wool is not only a great source of wealth, but also a credit to the country, it seems a mistake to financially cripple, beyond all hope, the people who produce it; while the fact that many of the large estates have been on the market more than once and found no purchaser, seems to have escaped the notice of Mr. Fisher when he so light-heartedly sent the maximum rate careering upwards. It seems, indeed, like trying to hang a man who has already been beheaded to take away all the land that is worth anything and impose the heaviest possible tax on that which is worthless.
As yet no one seems to know whether the Federal Parliament is or is not within its rights in levying any such tax at all. However, if their action is proved unconstitutional, the landowners will not be very much better off, as the State Parliament will be only too ready to impose a progressive tax on their own account. Still, they should certainly be able to show a trifle more discrimination than is possible for the Federal Government, while there is some hope that they may differentiate between the man who owns a vast stretch of land, far from any railway or town, and only possible for pastoral purposes, and the man with a small, compact estate, with rich soil, well watered, and capable of the closest cultivation; while something might be done to compensate individuals and companies “away out back” for the disadvantages under which they will labour in competing with the lease-holders of Crown lands, who will have no tax whatever to meet.
There is an idea in England, among the people who do not know much—and these are always the readiest to express their opinion—that the squatter simply sat down on a piece of land and raked in just as much as he could get from the surrounding country, mile upon mile upon mile of it; riding round, killing off horse after horse in the process, sticking up a post here and a post there, and asserting:—“All this is mine”; straddling over the land, with his long legs, and his top-boots, and his picturesque slouch hat, striking his breast, just like a man in a play, and reiterating, “Mine, mine!”
But it was not like that at all. It was blood, and sweat, and sheer endeavour, and hard cash. For one must remember that the men who hold the large estates are not the same men who ran up a fortune in a year on the gold-fields.
The land was paid for—and to the Crown, too—up to as much as 20s. and 25s. an acre. Yet, as Sir Henry Wrixon says during his report on the Federal Land Tax in the Argus of August 20, 1910, the present Government, in its desire to still have the cake its predecessors have eaten, would say to the landowners: “True, we have sold you this land and have got your money; indeed, in some cases we urged you to buy at more than its real value, in order to facilitate your plans for land settlement. But now we have altered our views; we want no large purchasers or holders of land. Clear out, you miscreants. Tremble before the vengeance of a triumphant democracy.”
It may be political, but is it—to put it in a characteristically Australian term—“is it cricket?” and is it sense? And is it the sort of behaviour that is likely to tempt new settlers with means to invest their money in Australian land?
At a public meeting lately Mr. Fisher assured a delegation of mercantile men that they might always rely on him in commercial matters. But Mr. Fisher, in as far as he counts—that is, politically—is not immortal, and his successor may in his turn “barrack,” to use another popular expression, altogether for the landowners; while the mercantile class may in their turn go to the wall with one single twist of the kaleidoscope.
If such a tax as is now determined on was not retrospective there would not be much to complain of. If it was even decreed that it would be regarded as a capital crime in the future to acquire any land over 5,000 acres in extent, that might be fair. But to sell a man anything, then count it a crime that he should possess it—well, it seems, to say the least of it, a peculiarly feminine way of looking at things. And I cannot help wondering if Mr. Fisher was going to try on a new suit, or buy a new hat, or anything else really important, when he lately dismissed the deputation of prominent pastoralists—headed by Mr. J. A. Campbell, President of the Pastoral Union of Southern Riverina—who sought to lay their side of the question before him, after twenty-five minutes, with the airy remark that:—“Doubtless we are all of us desirous of going somewhere else this morning.” And this to men whose homes and families, whose whole means of life, and pride of life, depended on such a twenty-five minutes!
It is true that Mr. Fisher promised to consider the new facts brought before his notice by the deputation. Still, it is not generally considered quite the best thing to mix a cake after it is baked. In our old nursery days we were inoculated with the saying that “It is better to be sure than sorry”; and it is an odd feature of the political affairs of this country that, while all discussion is perfectly free, and praise, criticism, and condemnation equally open to all, great questions are still settled and great measures passed with hardly any discussion at all, or even thought.
From the beginning that part of the new land tax which has been most carefully impressed upon the people is that, while they will all benefit from it, only some 6 or 10 per cent. will be called upon to pay it. This all the electors completely understand, as they naturally would anything that has been so carefully explained.
What has not been so clearly put before the people is the question as to whether the small farmers—who are to occupy the improved holdings on the alienated land, 200 acres or so—and who will be straining every nerve to meet the half-yearly payments, all the immigrants and townspeople will, in the future, be as beneficial to the working-man—whom the tax is supposed to benefit, who in any case has the pleasure of seeing others squirm beneath its weight—as the large landowners have been in the past. After all, these landowners have not stood alone. They have employed an enormous number of men, in an enormous number of ways, from the shearers who clip their sheep to the stevedores who ship their wool, the people who transfer it by railway or bullock waggon, the people who buy it—English, French, and Flemish wool-buyers, who live in Melbourne for two or three months each year, and spend money there; the tradespeople, servants, and artisans.
A big station is like a camp of soldiers; the store-room alone would amaze any English housekeeper, resembling, as it does, a shop, stocked with all the necessities of life in immense quantities. There have been an enormous number of people employed in Australia in growing, making, and packing most of these supplies; and the revenue has been swelled by the importation of the rest. In the shearing season the place is like a hive, and the whole country is alive with men flocking from one station to another, and carts and waggons with supplies—relatively alive, of course, for in these vast distances an army would have as little effect as a swarm of ants. Still, the big stations are the arteries of the back blocks, keeping vital tracts of country which, except for them and except for the sheep which find a living there, would lie uncared for and untouched.
The small cockies do most of their shearing themselves, all the family being called upon to help: the girls in carrying away the fleeces, and even clipping the belly-wool for their brothers; while sundry neighbours will drop in to give a hand, the wool-shed usually consisting of an extempore tent or canopy of hessian.
In other places the cockies shear in a neighbouring squatter’s wool-shed, after his flocks are finished with, keeping on some of the regular shearers if the wool-clip seems large enough to warrant it; while from many small selections all the men go off at shearing-time to make a bit of extra money on the neighbouring stations. It is upon co-operation such as this, both in the matter of wool-sheds, shearers, and stud rams, that—if all the large estates are to be cut up—the small selectors will have to depend in the future; unless the sheep is completely “taboo,” though the enormous tracts of country which are necessary to support the flocks will prevent this pastoral co-operation ever being so successful as in the matter of central butter, cheese, and bacon factories.
Hand-shears have been so completely replaced with machinery nowadays that only a minority of the younger men can clip by hand at all, and are often completely at a loss in the smaller flocks, where there are no machines in use.
A big shearing-shed is a tremendously inspiring sight, as every place is—even a match factory—where work is being done quickly and well. But, apart from this, there are the various marked characteristics of the men, the play of muscle in the sunburnt arms and necks, and the colour of the weather-worn clothes, the shimmer of heat and dust, and the silky gleam of the wool as it falls upon the boards, swathe upon swathe of it, exquisitely creamy-tinted and fine, the product of intensest care and cultivation, the result of breeding being shown in the fact that fifty years ago a fleece from a full-grown sheep averaged 3 to 4 pounds, whereas now it averages 8 or 9, from some flocks even 15, pounds.
The shearers live—that is, sleep and eat—in what is known as “the hut,” a long narrow structure with bunks at either side, in two tiers, each bunk just long enough to hold a man. The table, which runs pretty well the whole length of the hut, is made of sheet-iron tacked on to a rough frame, with benches at either side, and there is little else, save the atmosphere, which is thick and portentous, an intermingling of tobacco, wool, beer, spirits, clothes, boots, blankets, and men.
The better sort of shearers declare that the noise and the stench, the constant fidgeting and stirring all night, the snoring, coughing, spitting, and swearing, make it impossible for anyone to get a decent night’s sleep in these huts, and many pitch a tent for themselves and a pal, or build a mia-mia of boughs as far from the rest of their companions as possible.
The shearers have one chronic grievance, and that is the food and the cook. They have another constantly recurring grievance, and that is wet sheep, over which they are in a perpetual state of insurrection; and little wonder, considering that the labour and the menace to health incurred in shearing wet sheep is hardly to be overestimated. No squatter can make his men shear wet sheep since the formation of the “Shearers’ Union,” and rightly enough too, though he is bound to pay them all the time that they are in the sheds waiting for the sheep to dry. A really wet sheep can be picked out in a moment by the lank, dark look of the wool; but when the wetness is not so distinctly shown, the question between the shearers and the squatter—who naturally wants to get his sheep finished—becomes a vexed one. Often, too, the back is quite dry, while the neck and belly of the sheep is wringing wet; while the argument so often used in courts of law that no rain has fallen for weeks is absolutely futile. Anyone who is used to shearing in Australia is not likely to doubt the Scriptural story of the wet fleece, whether it was on the sheep’s back or off it, for the yoke of the wool will absorb moisture to any extent from fog, dew, or even from an atmosphere that is not palpably the least damp.
Harry Lawson has drawn us some grim pictures of life in the back blocks. It is often bad enough for the large landowner and his womenkind. But they have books, and papers, and motors—which have revolutionized country life in Australia more than anything else. They can take occasional runs up to town, and have friends to stay with them, so that existence becomes endurable in a way that it never could become to the small settlers, and it seems to me that before such people are uprooted it would be well to face clearly the question as to whether those who replace them will ever be able, or willing, to endure the life which they must face—conditions which will appear far more appalling to strangers than to people who have been bred and born in the country, and who possess, as all Australians seem to do, the most amazing powers of rebound. “John Barleycorn got up again and sore surprised them all” might be said of many a man and many a district in Australia. One of the most extraordinary things about the people being that they will live in absolute loneliness, facing drought, heat, and loss, toiling incredibly to get their stock fed and watered, watching them die day after day during a bad season; and then, when good times come, start again at the very beginning, with as gay a spirit as ever, absolutely unembittered by all the hardships through which they have passed.
Usually the spring might be expected, in its rebound, to fly too far in the opposite direction; but, oddly enough, men who have hardly seen a woman, or sat down to a decent meal for months; or known what it was to have a moment’s relaxation, or pleasure, or sport, will come up to Melbourne and enjoy themselves in as well-ordered a fashion as though they had been living in the very lap of civilization and luxury. In most countries where men had lived as these men had lived, there would be the wildest orgies and excesses, and all sorts of tragedies to follow; but the Australian possesses more than his share of “horse sense”—he also possesses a sense of humour which is mainly, I believe, the greatest reason for his not making a fool of himself.
Of course, men still go “on the bust,” cheques are planked down, and “shouting”—the Australian equivalent for “treating”—indulged in till all the money is finished. But, even so, the men are good-tempered, and it is not a case of shooting everyone who does not happen to be as thirsty as they are; while on the Australian gold-fields, from the very beginning, the record of crime and lawlessness has been far less than in other countries. I remember one story which shows the inspiring joy—even in anticipation—of planking down a cheque that strikes me as delightfully characteristic. A new-chum arrived at a shearing-shed and asked his way to a township some thirty miles distant. None of the men were able themselves to direct him, as they, too, were new to that district, but referred him to the cook, who, they declared, had been there. “Why, yes,” acknowledged that worthy when appealed to; “I’ve been there right enough; but I’m blessed if I remember the road. Ye see, mister, it was like this: I wur only along that way once, an’ I wur goin’ ter cash a cheque.”
An old book by an early Australian settler tells another characteristic story. A clergyman arrived at a far-away station at shearing-time, and was put up there for a few days, which happened to include a Sunday, when he expressed himself very desirous of holding a service for the shearers. As one may imagine, his host was rather torn in two between his desire to please his guest and not set all his men’s backs up. Anyhow, on Sunday morning he proposed riding on to the wool-shed—three miles’ distance—in advance, and preparing the congregation. As he expected, none of the men had a moment of time to spare; there were shears to sharpen, clothes to wash and mend; one man declared he was a Catholic, and had never been inside a church in his life; and the cook and his boy had dinner to prepare for thirty men.
Then the boss changed his tone, and declared: “Every man who attends the service in the wool-shed in half an hour’s time, and behaves himself in an orderly and respectful manner, shall have a glass of rum served out to him after the service.”
It was the greatest success. The men—as such men will—played fair; and years after that very clergyman, then become a high dignitary of the Church, described in a book on the Colonies the picturesque incident: the service in the wool-shed, with the wool-press as a pulpit, and the absorbed congregation of shearers and washers.
On another occasion it struck a visiting clergyman, who was merely travelling through the country, that there must be an enormous number of children who had never been baptized. As it was a slack season, he somehow inveigled the squatter at whose homestead he was staying to start out with him on a sort of camping expedition, during which they rode close on a hundred miles, meeting with several families of shepherds, whose children they baptized, often to the great indignation of the parents, who imagined some slur was thereby cast on the management of their progeny. One matron, however, declared that she was quite willing that her brood should be christened if only they could be caught. They were as wild as kangaroos, and as they had bolted into the scrub at the first sight of strange faces, the only thing possible was to ride them down and literally drag them by force into the Church’s fold. The highly amused squatter officiated at this ceremony both as godfather and godmother, and, I presume, whipper-in, though he declared himself as thankful never to have met any of his god-children in after-years.
The Australians, up to this day—though they are as good as most, and better than many—do not trouble themselves overmuch about the forms of religion, while just the same strenuous efforts are still made to gather wandering sheep more securely into the fold. Some years ago Parliament actually dared to attempt to interfere with the people’s Sunday, and an Act was passed which stopped all local and excursion trains running on Sunday mornings. Needless to say this law was short-lived, and endured, I forget exactly for how long, but certainly only a month or two. At the present time there is no Sunday post, and no second delivery of milk; but these regulations stand more for the benefit of the workpeople than the Church, I believe; while now the Postmaster-General is absolving all men in his department from Sunday labour who can plead “conscientious objections.” I believe that inquiries as to how these objectors spend their Sundays have been set on foot, with the result that fishing, cricket, and billiards have been found to rank highest in their esteem. Apparently it has not occurred to the Postmaster to try rum, as the more man-wise squatter did.
Oddly enough, even the Boer War has not diffused an idea, which is very general, that the Australian working-man is divided into two types—the luxurious, lazy, arrogant holiday-maker and the rollicking cow-boy sort of person. For myself, I should say that the town man, artisan or labourer, is much the same as in any other country, with the added—but quite unimportant—defects and virtues of his time and place. He is more cocksure, but he is also more self-respecting, than the labourer at home. He works less uninterruptedly, but he works harder while he is at it, though with less appearance of sweat and fever, merely because he is better fed, and all the conditions of his life are more wholesome, while his hours are shorter; but otherwise he is much the same as elsewhere.
In the country districts the difference is far more pronounced. “Away back” the shepherd and cattle-man is more ignorant than most of his fellows at home, but he is more resourceful; he has more spirit and more pluck. If the country is not new to him, it was new to his father or grandfather, and it needed all their power of resource and adaptability to get on in it.
I have said that the schoolmaster and schoolmarm in the back blocks face difficulties and meet with conditions almost incredible to their fellow men and women at home. The distance makes the outlook larger. An afternoon visit becomes a long day’s journey, an adventure, an undertaking. The Bush parson and the Bush doctor live a life completely different from the life of a country parish. The very fact of being so constantly on horseback, as they are, makes a difference. The many hours of open air, of sunshine and storm that are involved when they go to visit a patient or christen a baby—it all makes a difference, and a wholesome one too.
Then the postman; think of the country postman at home! His leisurely ways, his thick boots, his slow, steady progress, his many pauses for gossip and refreshment, all dignified by a sort of consideration which the other yokels show him as a servant of the King. Then think of the mailmen in Australia, of their dependence on their maps, and their knowledge of the country, the danger they are in from thirst, from privation, from the chance of being bushed, and from blacks—not, perhaps, in Victoria so much now, but certainly up North, which very fairly represents many other places as they were fifty or sixty years ago.
Only last year a mailman missed his way up by the Archer River, and turned up, nearly a week later, 120 miles farther south than he should have been, having gone right round Coen, for which he was bound, without striking his track. Again, quite lately another mailman in the same district was lost for fourteen days, having travelled round and round in a circle. When the police found him he was delirious, and fought them wildly, thinking they meant to murder him and steal the mailbag, which he had stuck to through all his suffering.
Coen, which is in Queensland, on the Cape York Peninsula, is indeed a place of tragedies. Another young mailman on the same track disappeared, and when his forsaken camp was discovered at the foot of Marsley’s Spur, a note was found pinned to the bag. “Please do not touch the mails; am away horse-hunting.” But though this man’s tracks were followed for miles, no trace of his body was ever found. One mailman, worn out by despair and long, dry stages, shot himself when within actual sight of Coen Post Office; while another was drowned while attempting to cross the Archer. In a district such as this even the arrival of a bill by post would cease to be a commonplace and inevitable event, the wonder being that it should arrive at all.
One often sees little boxes in the country places nailed to some tree on the road. It is there that the letters for the settlers, squatters, and cockies are left by the mailmen; while it is generally one of the duties of the daughter of the house to ride for the mail once, or perhaps twice, a week, twenty miles or so to where the precious documents have been dropped into the private box.
Another thing besides pluck and resource that the way-back districts breed is the true spirit of friendship. The first time I went up-country in Australia I travelled by night, arriving at my destination soon after four in the morning, and such a morning as I believe only an Australian spring can show: cool and fragrant, though it was at the height of a great drought, and enveloped in a haze of wonderful blue.
In spite of the beauty of the morning I must say I was feeling rather miserable and forsaken, and in doubt as to what was going to happen next, when I climbed wearily out of the train and saw no one I knew on the platform; and little wonder, I thought, considering the hour. However, my anxiety did not last long, for two young girls in fresh white dresses claimed me, explaining that they had promised my friends to come and meet me, and take me to their house, where I could have breakfast, and rest till later in the day, when I should be fetched.
That was my first introduction to a sulky, I remember. I and one of the girls packed into the odd little vehicle, and the other girl ran behind through the still sleeping township. There were a lot of streets, all with very imposing names at the corners on large name-boards, but we did not take much notice of them—indeed, there was nothing beyond the names to distinguish them from the open spaces of spare ground, between the little tin-roofed houses, across which we and the sulky and the running girl cut at a hard gallop.
When I arrived there was a room ready for me and a hot bath, the girls themselves having started the bath-heater before they came to the station; and a fire of logs—a welcome sight, for there was a nip of frost in the air—and tea and thin bread-and-butter, and a nightdress ready aired, so that I need not trouble to unpack. Of all the warm-hearted kindnesses I have ever met with in this country, this preparation for the coming of a woman who was an absolute stranger—simply the friend of another friend, herself a new-chum—lingers in my mind as one of the kindest. To this moment I remember vividly the feeling of exquisite comfort with which I snuggled my tired limbs in among the bedclothes, after my bath, and lay there, with the blinds down, sipping tea in the dancing firelight.
It is odd how often one can do with, and delight in, a fire in one’s bedroom out here; but days which have been blazing hot are apt to end with a cold night, and then the wood fires are so tempting, so cheerful and companionable. I recollect once staying a night with some friends on Mount Macedon, where the sitting-room boasted a really huge open fireplace, in which burnt an immense log, part of the trunk of a tree, banked up with smaller pieces. This monster burnt steadily all day till about eleven o’clock at night, by which time the middle of it had become a glowing mass of crimson, that finally broke, with a soft crash, a flare of sparks, and thick fall of silver-grey ash. It is a sound one grows after a time to listen for and love, this breaking of the burnt-through logs. Once up-country I was lodging in a little wooden shanty, through the cracks of which I could see the stars as I lay in bed. The nights were very cold, and I used to make up a good fire the last thing—the fireplace and chimney being the only part of the house built of bricks—to be regularly awakened after some hours by the soft crash of falling logs. Yet, though the nights were cold, the days were such a blaze of golden sunshine that my sheets—there were only one pair for each bed—used to be taken off, washed and dried, and aired in the sun, and put back again the same morning.
But it is not only among the well-to-do people that the spirit of comradeship shows itself, as it did to me that first morning up in the back blocks—it is everywhere among all classes. People have done surprising things for me—people to whom I was a complete stranger—while among themselves, from squatters to swaggies, though they do not write essays on friendship, they will hold by a mate through good and ill—and most of all through ill.
One instance, which, though it belongs to New South Wales, is so typical of this that I cannot resist quoting it, was lately cited in the Sydney Bulletin, which says:
“The Outback can still breed some true mates. One of them was heard of at Parkes (N.S.W.) the other day. With another man—a good deal older than himself—he had tramped into Forbes looking for work. On the way the older man’s boots gave out, so the mate bought him a pair, and then had only a few shillings left. They didn’t get the work they were after, so they decided to give their feet a rest and take the rail to Parkes. The older man’s fare was fixed up all right, but the young one quietly took a ticket as far as his money would stretch, and then, with a breezy: ‘So long!’ he got out and walked. The older man rode on; but bad luck had got him down, and when his mate turned up at Parkes he was a corpse. The coroner’s court said it was suicide on the part of one, and mighty fine and generous behaviour on the part of the other; and witnesses and others insisted on dropping their fees and some odd coins into the white man’s empty hat.”
Very few people of any social standing beyond a few college professors and doctors actually live in Melbourne. But, still, it is thickly inhabited, and has a curious sublife of its own, quite distinct from that of the people who flock to it during business hours; returning again to their suburbs between five and six, only to reappear later, like flashing meteors, on their way to the theatre and supper at The Vienna or Paris Café. The professors congregate for the most part round the University, and the doctors up at the east end of Collins Street, where one would imagine there must be at least one doctor to every five people in the town. But beyond these there are the upper parts of shops, where the tradesmen who cannot yet afford a villa in suburbia live; and dingy, narrow streets, with little huddled homes where the workpeople dwell, and out of which issue on Sundays and high days the most resplendently attired young women that you could possibly imagine; while, besides these, there are huge blocks of buildings known as “Chambers,” the inhabitants of which are less easy to place—and what a hotch-potch they do present in all faith, kept ever a-simmer by a flame of gossip.
Rooms in these places are all prices, all sizes, all degrees of comfort or dinginess. Melbourne Mansions head the list; but these are really flats, beautifully appointed and proportionally dear. The drop from them is sudden indeed, chiefly marked by the washing accommodation. In Melbourne Mansions each suite, even if it consists of but two rooms, has its own bathroom attached. But the next step down in price gives two bathrooms, with hot water laid on, between the inhabitants of each floor, one floor for men, the next for women, and so on. Thus, if you live on the landing where the men’s bathroom is, and you happen to be a woman, you must walk the length of a long passage, and upstairs in your dressing-gown before you can reach your morning tub. It is all very well if you are early, before anyone else is about, but if you are late, you meet all the men coming out of their rooms on their way to work. Another drawback being that you more than occasionally forget to take your latchkey with you, and do not realize your fatal error till you return from your ablutions, when you alternately cower against your lintel and make wild dashes to the lift: entreating the lift-man to send the caretaker with his duplicate key, so that you may gain the shelter of your own apartment.
There is a rule that no one shall wash clothes in these baths, but everybody does; and when I used to hear the tap running furiously, and someone singing loudly behind the locked door, it needed no particular penetration to guess that it was all done with the idea of muffling the sound of scrubbing and rinsing. Considering the incomes of the people who lived in these chambers, and the exorbitant prices charged by laundresses; also the fact that many of the tenants have only one room, and have to carry both clean and dirty water up and down stairs, this washing habit cannot be wondered at; and only when people, quite beyond the pale, wash their saucepans and frying-pans in the same manner do any but the most inveterate grumblers register a serious complaint. Though I must say a great deal of sound and fury always rages round the bathrooms; one great scandal I remember being started by a lady whose husband had seen another lady going to the bath in her robe de nuit alone.
These particular chambers, or rather the entrance passages and stairs, are kept beautifully clean by a small army of men and char-ladies; as for the rooms—well, they vary; though it seems that the smarter the ladies are who come out of them the less savoury is any glance or whiff that one catches through the open door. But these are mostly comparative idlers: those people who never do have time for anything. No praise that I can give would be too high for the bona-fide working or business girls, who form a large percentage of the inhabitants of these places, the way they toil to keep themselves and their belongings dainty and fresh, and their unbounded goodness to any fellow in distress; their cheeriness and gallant efforts to keep up appearances, being beyond words.
There are telephone-girls, typewriting-girls, shop-girls, tea-room girls, University students, art students, dressmakers, and milliners. For the most part they live in one room, that presents on the whole a very cheerful appearance, with disguised packing-cases masquerading as cupboards—in which all the toilet paraphernalia is poked away—pegs with a curtain over them for a wardrobe, a basket and deck-chair or so, and a trestle-bed, which during the day does duty for a couch. These rooms are often no bigger than a medium-sized bathroom, but the girls entertain there; their men friends come to supper, and they make coffee over the little gas-ring, or primus, and cut anchovy sandwiches, and have a very cheerful time—washing up the cups in the bathroom at dead of night when it is all over. There is much gaiety and good-comradeship, and a little too much noise, perhaps. But if you are young, and have been tapping a typewriter all the day and answering your snappy employer in respectful monosyllables only, it is good, no doubt, to feel you are still a woman; and there are men in the world who like to talk to you, and would like to make love to you; cannot bear your soiling your hands over the kerosene stove; and are really disturbed because you look tired. After a long day’s grind to have a hot bath, which makes you feel as good as anyone; and brush your hair till it shines, Melbourne girls are veritable artists in hairdressing, marvellous when one thinks of the size of the looking-glasses; then to put on your best Jap silk blouse—at one and four-three a yard—made by yourself, aye, and washed and ironed again and again by yourself, and arrange your threepenny bunch of flowers in the vases, and turn the cushions to the clean side. Then “play at ladies,” waiting for your guests to arrive, life is really very pleasant, and the next day’s work seems far away; besides, anything may happen before that, for the life even of the most ordinary girl is full of infinite possibilities. Though if the expected visitors do not turn up, and send a wire or a note at the last moment, it is little short of killing; while the sight of the anchovy sandwiches—all curled up—which you try to eat for breakfast, in the cold dawn of the next day, because you simply cannot afford to waste them, seems the last straw.
These girls work incredibly hard, and live the straightest, simplest of lives, every day of which is a series of petty privations and self-denial, in spite of small pleasures. That some gayer damsels do have rooms in these buildings merely for the sake of the liberty it allows them, and use it, too, to its full extent, has, on the whole, given them rather a bad name. But this is grossly unjust to the greater number of the residents, who live there for the very good reason that they would rather have the tiniest room of their own, and “leave off work to carry bricks,” than herd with a lot of others in a boarding-house, at the mercy of a landlady. They rise very early—one kind-hearted music-teacher used to bring me a cup of tea in bed nearly every morning at six—and though I always turned out myself at half-past, I was never by any means first. The girls get their own breakfast—and along every corridor one hears the whirr of primus stoves; and smells, and breathes in, an atmosphere of kerosene, sausages and bacon; coffee is generally kept for evening parties, tea being both cheaper and more easily made. For the most part business girls have their lunch out, or take it with them—generally the all-ubiquitous scones and tea; but when they come back from work they get their own evening meal, and then the roaring of the primus starts afresh.
At midday on Saturday they flock home and start to turn out their rooms, and wash, and dust, and sweep, while whole stories may be read in the little odds and ends of furniture which take an airing in the passage while the cleaning goes on. Then, as often as not, they do their week’s washing, no inconsiderable task in the hot weather, when print dresses and blouses are worn. Still, they get through their work quickly enough—for the Melbourne girls are fine workers, sharp and decisive in all they do—hang their clothes on lines across their room, then dress and go out for the rest of the afternoon, with some friend, often ending with an evening at the theatre; for, though they work hard enough, goodness knows, yet they enjoy life on the whole. There are sweethearts, or “boys,” as they are always called, in plenty; and cottons and muslins are cheap; and the beach, with all the gaiety of bands and sideshows and bathing, to be reached for the small sum of threepence.
Then on Sunday mornings there is profound peace hanging over the building till well over nine o’clock, when the primus smell begins to be replaced by a distinct odour of ironing proceeding from every girl’s room for about an hour before she starts off—with flying white veil, crisp muslin skirts and blouse, long white washing gloves and beflowered hat—for a day by the sea or in the country with her “boy,” and another girl and her “boy”—the usual quartette. No wonder that these girls are more fearless-looking, healthier, brighter, and less neurotic than their fellows at home; for, apart from the greater facilities for fresh air and cheap, healthy amusements which they enjoy, they are better paid, a typist with a machine of her own getting half a crown a thousand words; while, if she is any good, she can always demand £2 a week in an office, with extra pay for overtime. The same thing holds good in every branch of women’s work, the domestic servants demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages every year.
In Melbourne it is no good trying to get a servant by merely stating your requirements at a registry-office, and asking that a likely girl should be sent out to see you. On the contrary, it is the mistresses who line the waiting-rooms at the offices. They come early and stay late, often bringing books with them, and only slipping out for a hurried meal when they are quite certain that every possible domestic is comfortably enjoying her dinner at home, or in some restaurant. If it is very hot or wet, no maids turn up at all, though the ladies still flock to town by each early tram and train; a wistful-eyed and weary host, so evidently bent on that all-absorbing quest that one gets after a time to recognize them at first glance as servant-hunters. When a smiling and self-satisfied young woman is brought into the room by the harassed person who runs the office, and introduced to some eager mistress, all the other ladies glare at the possibly successful candidate for the girl’s favour, and meanwhile smile at her in the most beckoning and easy-going way; though even when she has thrown the glove, so to speak, they all know that she will not have the faintest compunction in breaking her agreement. These are a few of the questions a mistress may have put to her:—Does she keep a piano for the maids? If not, are they allowed to practise in the drawing-room? Are there any children?—an unforgivable sin in the eyes of a Melbourne domestic; as one hopeless lady said to me, after many days of weary waiting:—“They expect us to put out the work and kill our children.” Is she allowed every evening out, and half a day a week, and a whole day a month, and every Sunday? And is she expected to wear a cap?
For the most part even the best of them refuse to call you “ma’am.” It is, “Hey, you there,” if they wish to attract your attention, and “All right” in response to any order. A little less in the rough, and they repeat your name every moment, till you are sick of the very sound of it. One woman I know, who remonstrated with her maid on the constant reiteration of “Mrs. —” was met with the response that if she was Mrs. — she ought not to mind being called so, and if she was not, she ought to be ashamed of herself!
But I have strayed far from the subject of the chambers and their inhabitants, of which, indeed, a whole book might be written. One sees the cheery, independent-looking girls walking, with that characteristic swing of the hips, along the passages, or hurrying to their work through the sunny streets; but this is all the brightest side of the picture, to which there is, as in all pictures true to life, a reverse side. Even here there are not always billets to go round; a girl may lose her situation, and not get another at once, and then the primus roars less frequently, and there is no odour of bacon or sausages mingled with the kerosene. The door is kept jealously closed. Sometimes the men from the shops which let out furniture on the hire system come and fetch it away. The inhabitant of the room tells you jauntily that she is moving, and that it is not worth while carting furniture about; but she stays on, with lips that every day grow whiter and more persistently smiling, while you meet her in the street during business hours, trying to look very busy and full of affairs.
Some girls will talk of their position; they are “out of a billet”; they are “awfully hard up,” and one need not fear greatly for those who can do this. We have all been in the same box, and are only too ready to give her a meal here and a meal there; to lend her a lounge-chair by way of a bed, till something turns up, and help out her scanty wardrobe, if she wants to appear particularly smart and prosperous when interviewing some possible employer. But it is those who do not and will not complain who are the difficult ones to deal with. One such girl, I remember, was found by the caretaker—when the busy people about her at last began to realize that they had not seen her go in and out of her room for some time—lying on the floor behind the locked door, as nearly dead as any woman could be, from sheer want—starvation, to put it bluntly—though there was not a single woman in the building who would not have helped her, if only the real state of things had ever been guessed at; for the uncharitableness of the Australian woman is, for the most part, verbal; they will abuse you like a pickpocket, but, while they will not leave you a shred of character, they will literally strip themselves in other ways that you may be clothed.
But girls such as I have been writing of do not comprise the whole inhabitants of these chambers. There are married couples, for the greater part, living as much on the edge of things as the girls. I remember one quite cheerful matron confessing to me that she and her husband at that moment had only twopence between them. He was an engineer, of sorts, and when he was out of a billet she used to take in dressmaking by the day, and get a small part at one of the theatres in the chorus, or as part of a crowd; or—being possessed of an extremely fine figure—pose for a photograph or sketch of some newly imported model gown for one of the larger drapery firms, or as an example of the newest styles of hairdressing for a ladies’ paper. Then there are more prosperous couples, sometimes with children—or more likely with one child—and various men who “batch” in places such as these, getting their meals out at some handy tea-room or restaurant.
Cheaper than these rooms are others, to be found for the most part in the narrow back-streets—buildings with long, echoing, uncarpeted passages, kept very moderately clean by occasional charwomen, with no hot-water supply whatever, and for the most part no bathroom. They are badly lighted, shivery places even on the hottest days, and though some of the rooms are bright and cheery enough, the doors, with the dirty, cracked, chipped paint, bear an ominous look, as though the wolf were for ever pawing at them. They are failures as buildings. Mostly they have not been designed for residential purposes at all, but as huge blocks of offices, in those days of swollen pride “before the boom.”—In England things have happened before the Conquest and after, but even B.C. and A.D. are letters which here have no significance—except to the geologist—and it is as “before the boom” or “after the boom” that all affairs of any importance are said to have occurred, unless the date is further particularized as “the year So-and-so won the Cup.” Among many other mementoes of the great bubble these buildings stand confessed failures: as unadapted for the purposes they are put to as are the many human failures, who drift into them, aimlessly as a stray leaf is drifted through an open door by some passing breeze.
From places such as these people are always moving, whether from an inborn restlessness or a desire to escape their creditors, I cannot say; but one day you see them toiling up and down stairs with the oddest, and most intimate, household and personal belongings clasped in their arms. There is an eddying whirl of dust and straw outside some room door, while from within it comes a persistent sound of hammering. Then only a week or two later you run across the very same people staggering downstairs under the same burdens, or dropping soft bundles over the banisters to the hall below; and pass a widely open door, which shows you an empty room, with fresh stains on the walls, and a fresh irruption of tin-tack holes everywhere; while a perspiring “char-lady” tussles valiantly with the dirt-begrimed floor, for these “flitters” take little or no pride in their surroundings.
The army of “char-ladies” in Melbourne is a large one. It is a “legion that never was ’listed”; it has no commander and no regulations; it is managed by no Acts of Parliament; is included in the affairs of no Board; has no fixed minimum wage; in fact, has no protection of any sort, beyond what lies in the tongue of each individual member; though that is, indeed, most often a two-edged sword. But, for all that, these women have one weakness, and that is their strength. If they were not strong enough to work their husbands would be supporting them. If they had not willingly and bravely put their shoulders to the wheel at the time of some crisis, scarcity of employment, or illness, their husbands would never have found out how much more capable they were than they themselves; for, with very few exceptions, the women that one sees scrubbing miles of passages and mountains of stairs, in warehouses and offices and chambers, long before it is light on a winter’s morning, are married women.
There was one charwoman attached to a big block of buildings I once lived in, a little upright, dark, bright-eyed incarnation of energy—very different from most of the bent and wearied regiment—to whom I often gave a cup of tea and some work to do in my rooms just for the sake of hearing her opinions. Remarking to her one day that I supposed a great many daily workers, such as herself, had husbands, as many as half—the rest being widows, with the exception of a very small percentage of spinsters—she replied that well over two-thirds of them were either deserted wives or supporting their husbands in idleness. Her own husband had been a hard-working fellow and very good to her and her two children, till one time when he was out of work she had turned-to and gone out charing. From that time onward she had never had a penny from him, for herself or the children. For a time he had lived at home in idleness on her earnings; then—what an irony of fate!—got a good job and gone to live with another woman, who spent every penny of his wages on dress and luxuries, not even doling out to him sufficient for his weekly allowance of tobacco, as even the most niggardly wife would have done. But for the most part these defaulting husbands have “gone West”; and when a husband does that—leaving his wife behind to follow him later on, when he has got a job—she might as well ring down the curtain and realize at once that her married life, anyhow, as far as he is concerned, is at an end.
In the heart of each individual wife hope lingers for a little while: “her Bill,” or “her Jim,” is not like the others, and at first letters and an occasional remittance may come pretty regularly. But in the ears of those who merely look on at the game the words “going West” ring like a knell, and God only knows what history of struggling hope, of poverty, of disillusion, and toil might be gathered round that one little phrase. As I write these women seem to visualize before my eyes; the work-bowed figures, the roughened hands, the tired faces, with their bright, eager eyes, all victims of the golden lure of the West, where the Victorian husbands seem to cast their conscience as easily as a snake casts its skin.
Luckily for the Melbourne “char-lady”—I once heard a child severely rebuked by its middle-class mother for speaking of a washer-woman, and the female side of the Melbourne prison, referred to as “the place where the lady convicts are kept”—she is far better paid than her English sister, the minimum daily wage being four shillings, with dinner and sundry cups of tea, while she receives at least half a crown a week for attending to an ordinary small office or room, lighting the fire during the winter months, and sweeping and dusting it daily. It is wonderful how much of this sort of work a really smart woman can get through, and the one of whom I have spoken seldom did less than twenty rooms regularly each day—the offices the very first thing in the morning, or the last thing at night, and the living-rooms of the bachelors and more prosperous business girls between nine and twelve. After this she would race home, see to her own house, cook her children’s dinner and return about six to get a certain proportion of the offices ready for the next morning; doing her own washing, as she told me, on Sundays—a practice not greatly to be condemned, seeing how near a place cleanliness occupies to godliness. Her four children were always very models of neatness and cleanliness—as was their mother—indeed, the appearance of all working-women in Melbourne, of whatever class, strikes me as very far superior to what I remember it in England.
One summer when I lived out of town and went to work every morning by the eight o’clock train, I used to marvel at the way the girls going to business in shops and offices managed to turn themselves out at such an early hour; and the amount of real work that it must have occasioned them to wash and get up their fresh stiffly starched print or linen dresses—which certainly could not be worn for more than two days—their dainty white cuffs and collars and other etceteras of the toilet. One particularly trim girl, I remember, confessed to me that she only possessed one set of muslin cuffs and collar, and washed and starched them regularly every evening when she got home, ironing them out before she left each morning. On the whole these girls are a far fresher, healthier set than those who live right in the town, as much, I suspect, from the better food they have when they are living with their people as from the better air. Indeed, without any exaggeration, it is worth while going to Flinders Street Station, or Princes Bridge, any day between eight and nine, for the mere delight of seeing the dozens of fresh, happy-looking girls that the early trains disgorge; then to watch them branch off in every direction—up Flinders Street, and down Flinders Street, and along Swanston Street—to their places of business. It is as if the puffing suburban trains were each a veritable part of the heart of the town, pumping bright new blood through every artery, in the shape of the grey and dust-grimed street. The human freight brought in by the later trains is more exotic, and on the whole less robust; though whether the work, in which the girls who arrive between nine and ten are employed, is more sedentary, or the girls themselves come of a more refined and delicate stock, I cannot say; but certainly the employees in the large, well-lighted, and airy shops, factories, and public buildings, though they may have a lower social status, work under more healthy conditions than those in the smaller offices.
It used to amuse me to notice the books these girls read on their way to and from town. At one time I kept a list during several months, and found that, apart from the little penny English papers, like Home Notes and Home Chat, Mrs. Henry Wood topped the list; then came, oddly enough for people who could not know his world, Dickens; and, still more odd, Thackeray.
In the dressmaking trade, at which many of these girls are employed, there is, as in all other recognized trades, a fixed minimum wage of half a crown a week for beginners—with a fixed rate of increase—so that it is impossible for an employer to use a girl without any payment under the pretence of teaching her, and then dismiss her when the time comes for her to receive an adequate wage. Indeed, the work-girl is most carefully protected, and her hours regulated in accordance with her age. In the tailoring trade the wages of female pressers and buttonhole makers average 21s. a week. Dressmakers’ assistants, or ordinary hands, get 26s. a week; the woman in charge anything from £2 to £7; and ordinary machinists, 21s.
As in all countries, the makers of underclothing, or white workers, are the least well paid, averaging only 16s. a week, the people who wash the clothes after they are made having far the best of it, as a fair laundry-hand, or ironer, can easily command £1 a week. Women working in the straw-hat factories are paid from 20s. to 30s. a week, and so are the pressers in the dye-works; knitting machinists, from 20s. to 28s.; printers’ feeders (female), £1 a week; box-makers, 22s. to 25s. Factory wrappers and packers average from 15s. to 22s. a week; match-makers, 17s. 6d.; and warpers in the woollen factories, 25s.
Over four employees of either sex constitute a factory, the room in which they work being then under factory laws and the supervision of the factory inspector. On the other hand, the employment of but one Chinese also constitutes a factory, and I cannot help thinking that this is rather a mean little law; though in its own way far-seeing in the interests of Australia, for, of course, no laundry proprietor who wishes to engage, say, one or two hands to help herself and her family, is likely to engage a Chinaman, however quick, clean, and hard-working, when it means all the trouble of being registered as a factory, and the constant irritation of official inspection and interference.
Among domestic workers cooks get from 17s. a week to 30s.; house-maids, 12s. to 15s., with everything found; thereby being much better off than many typists—who have themselves to keep—and in an infinitely superior position, from a pecuniary point of view, to the tea-room girls. These are for the most part ladies, and therefore, I suppose, expected to support themselves and keep up a good appearance on from 10s. to 16s. a week; whereas the hotel waitress gets from 15s. to 20s. and her board and lodging, besides tips, which no one ever thinks of offering to the pretty, refined tea-room girl.
I remember one such girl saying to me bitterly that men, when they wanted to show their appreciation of her services, sent her a box of sweets—or lollies, as they are called out here. A subtle irony to one who was so sick of the sight of anything in the shape of food, and would have been so truly thankful for some of the ready-money that the more plebeian waitresses pocketed gaily each day.
For girls wishing to enter the musical profession the premier University College, Trinity, is open to men and women alike—the Trinity College Hostel adjoining it affording accommodation for the resident students—while the women doctors and dentists hold very high place in the Melbourne world. There is one hospital—the Queen Victoria—where all the visiting surgeons and physicians are women, and where operations of all kinds are carried out. Though it is small, consisting of but two wards, medical and surgical, the out-patients’ department catering, as it does, for the needs of women and children only, is very large indeed. There are absolutely no men at all about the place. It might be the dream of the “Princess” come true, and rendered practicable, the very portress who works the lift in which the patients are carried up to the wards being a woman. I have been a patient in Melbourne hospitals more than once—Providence seeming to have constructed me in a gimcrack and random fashion. The last time does not bear thinking of, save for the delightful kindness and courtesy of the sisters and nurses, for Providence seemed also to have fatally muddled both the manners and the intelligence of the house physician. But the one really happy memory I have of hospital life all hangs round “the Queen Victoria.” It was extraordinarily gay; I do not think I ever heard more laughter and more droll remarks than in that surgical ward, where most of the patients were either waiting for, or recovering from, some serious operation. I remember particularly the storm of laughter and chaff that greeted me the first time I was able to rise from my bed and stand upright They christened me the “Canary”—not on account of my voice, but because of the thinness of my nether limbs, which, as one wit remarked, reminded her of number eleven on a cottage door—cannot you see it, the two straight, stark lines of white chalk on the rough boards?—while others, again, declared that I was like nothing so much as two yards of pump-water.
The work of resident physician and matron were combined in the person of one delightful woman, always immaculate in the whitest of white linen, who used to lend me books—her own books, not the hospital possessions—while the coming of the honoraries was always quite the event of each day. There is a fantastic illusion to the effect that women take no interest in their own sex. Anyone who could have seen how the coming of the visiting doctors was watched for by these poor women, many of them desperately ill, and have heard the conjectures made as to what they would wear, and the way the patients disputed together over the charms and “smartness” of their special honorary, might have lost all illusion on that point, once and for ever; if anything ever can destroy such a hidebound and century-old error. I think that convalescence was the most pleasant I have ever known, lying on a long couch in the balcony, looking out into sunlit courtyard with its huge fig-tree; the nurses in their pale green uniform flitting across it from the office to their dining-room; visitors coming and going; or the portress sweeping up leaves and burning them in a bonfire, from which the pungent smoke floated in a thin blue cloud up to the balcony. Then someone brought me a present of a soft grey dressing-gown, trimmed with pale blue silk, which I loved because I looked nice in it. I remember lending it one visiting day to a pretty girl whose young man used to come and see her—a matter of vast interest to us all; and she looked nicer still, because her blue eyes just matched the blue silk. She died a few months later, and I have always been sorry that I was not strong-minded enough to have given it her “for keeps,” as the children say.
Between the hours of seven and eight, when the ward was all tidied up ready for the night, the women’s husbands were allowed in to see their wives. It was midsummer, I remember, for I had my Christmas dinner there—and at that hour the long ward was filled with a tender twilight. We women who had no one to come and see us used to turn over on our sides and gaze out of the window at the leaves of the fig-tree, black against the pink sky—at least, I did, because there were no beds that way, other lonely patients, with a husband and wife on either side, having to lie on their backs and stare out stolidly in front of them; still, one could not help seeing the men tiptoeing in—some in their Sunday black, others straight from work in their blue dungarees—and noticing how the faces of some of the wives would flush and glow, as if a lamp had been lit behind the transparent white mask. And how the man would hold one hand in his, and fling his other arm over the pillow, above his woman’s head, and say very little, while she talked eagerly, incessantly, in a little weak whisper. We did not want to see all this. Not that they minded, as long as one was not ill-bred enough to stare deliberately; but it gave us a nasty lumpy feeling in our throats—nous autres who had nobody to come and see us during that twilight hour, which always seems so completely made for intimacy.
There is, I suppose, no state of life that does not bring its own pleasure and its own pain; and though perhaps, the ups of life are the most comfortable, on the whole I would award the palm for interest to the downs; and I for one never learnt more, from all of the world that I have known, than I did from the eight weeks in that hospital ward, where the very atmosphere seemed to breathe content and good feeling as palpably as it did iodoform and carbolic.
Taking it all round, I should say that women in Australia, of the working and middle classes, have a much better time of it than in England. In some ways they do not expect so much. A girl marries a man who is earning a decent wage because she loves him—even in the upper classes there is very little question of settlements, nor does she expect to start at exactly the same point as her parents have reached. I have lived in countries where coolie labour of all sorts is ridiculously cheap, and where a girl whose parents have, say, two hundred a year, need not even trouble to put on her own stockings; is literally waited on hand and foot, and knows nothing either of cooking or house-work, and, after all, I have come to the conclusion that the servant difficulty in Melbourne is by no manner of means an unmixed evil, and that certainly it is a great factor in the making of good wives. In England the attitude of men towards women is completely different from what it is in Australia. At home they expect a tremendous lot of their women, but in the smallest possible way. They must be purely domestic angels on the hearth, and not over-interested in anything beyond it. If they have no hearth on which to practise their virtues, then they are indeed unsexed. The women in Victoria naturally do not like to hear of the stone-throwing, etc., practised by their own sex in the fight for political equality at home, and, I believe, are truly sorry that there seems no prospect of the brains of those in authority being reached in any less forcible fashion; but, then, they literally cannot comprehend a woman’s side of the question being disregarded, simply because she is a woman. They have never themselves resorted to violence, because there was no necessity for it; the laws in Australia being the same for the women as for the men, in divorce, in labour, and the ownership and care of children. When one first lands in Melbourne one may, perhaps, form the hasty opinion that the men are not as courteous to women as they are in England—I am not speaking of the rich and travelled minority, who are much the same all over the world, but of the ordinary middle or lower classes. It is true that the men are not fond of parting with their hats, and will stand and talk to a woman with both hands deep in their hip-pockets. But, though they will not refrain from contradicting her because she is a lady, they will yet give her their fullest attention; and in business as well as pleasure weigh her opinion against theirs as carefully as though she were of their own sex. While men at home continue to treat girls and young women like pretty kittens, merely to be petted and played with, they must not be surprised that they develop at times into mature cats, using their claws, if only to show that they have got them. In England there seems always—everywhere—to be running beneath all social and political intercourse between men and women, and even beneath much domestic life—for nothing can be more bitter than the remarks some wives make on their husbands’ characters, pursuits, and pleasures—a sub-current of fierce sex-antagonism that is very rarely indeed felt out here where there is so much true equality between men and women; they know here that it pays them, if nothing else, to stand shoulder to shoulder, and to make of themselves and their family a compact little commonwealth, protecting their interests against outside interference only.
Certainly a very great number of women in Victoria do not use the vote now they have it, but that is no argument against its possession. A great many men—particularly in lonely, scattered districts, do not use theirs, either. Though voting by post is permitted to anyone living more than five miles away from the nearest polling-booth, or suffering from any illness or infirmity which prevents them from voting personally, this is not much help to people who are many more miles than five from a post-office, and probably quite unaware, even, that any election is taking place. As a matter of fact, the disparity between the number of men and women who availed themselves of their privilege at the election of 1906 is very small indeed—considering for how very short a time in the world’s history women have been permitted or expected to use their faculties outside their own homes; the number of male voters in Victoria for the Senate being 335,886, and the votes recorded 209,168; while the female voters enrolled numbered 336,168, and the votes recorded 171,933. But even in Melbourne all women are not interested in the actual possession of this much-coveted privilege, and I remember one labourer’s wife saying to me: “I don’t want no vote, not I! Jim votes as I tell ’im to; an’ if ’e didn’t, I’d let ’im know the reason why.”
She was a wise woman, that labourer’s wife, in more ways than one; an excellent help-mate, keeping her home spotlessly clean, and feeding her menkind—husband and grown-up son—thoroughly well—many a cup of tea and fresh-baked, featherlike scone have I enjoyed at her kitchen-table—but she insisted on her own rights and privileges, all the same. On Sundays her husband and son “lay in,” as she called it, till midday, while she gave them their breakfast in bed. But every Friday morning she “lay in,” and they lit the fire, prepared her breakfast, and took it to her in bed, cut their own lunches, and set off to work, leaving her to lie there quietly and rest till she felt inclined to rise and get herself a midday meal; usually a light one, in any case, for the Australian labouring classes mostly have their dinner, with hot meat and vegetables and, of course, tea,—when the men come back from their day’s work. But in every way there is more give and take, and not only between the sexes. One family I knew, consisting of four sisters who lived with their old mother in the suburbs and went up to town every day for business. They did not have to be at work till nine, and breakfasted a little after eight, the one servant bringing them all round the inevitable cups of tea at seven. On Sunday mornings, however, one of them always got the early tea, and took the maid a cup in bed. I do not in the least suppose that she was especially grateful—though doubtless she enjoyed it thoroughly—but neither did the girls expect her to be so. They simply did it because it seemed to them “fair.” And there you have the keynote of much which prevents the hardest work in Australia from developing into drudgery, or the poorest people from becoming downtrodden and hopeless; for, as far as is humanly to be expected, it is a fair country, while the people that are in it abide, at any rate, by this one great working ideal of “fairness.”