Read Ebook: Rambles in Australia by Grew Edwin Sharpe Grew Marion Sharpe

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roach. Yes, she said, matter-of-factly, I prefer to have no road to the house, it keeps "sundowners" away. The sundowner is the Australian tramp; he arrives at nightfall and demands food and lodging; if he does not get it, the householder pays the penalty in missing poultry, or burnt ricks. Of course he only extorts this toll in lonely places; but what a delightful career for a man of indolent habits, and sufficient obtuseness of feeling, to wander through that beautiful country, where the sun always seems to shine, sure, if not of a welcome, of supper, bed, and breakfast, where he would.

The golden light of the setting sun was flooding the river and the wooded hills, when we came away, our host and hostess pointing out to us sadly a noble English oak tree on their lawn, that the white ants had riddled through and through, reducing it to touchwood. We hurried back, entering once more, as we neared Perth among a crowd of returning cars, buggies, and bicycles, a haze of its soft red dust, while from its hills the city itself was wrapped in a mysterious dull grey twilight.

On one of our last days at Perth we paid a visit to the Parliament House. Only the back is finished, and is impressive in its simplicity of white freestone columns. The designs for the front are very effective, the interior simple and well proportioned. While as for the Upper House it is as luxurious as the council chamber of a medieval Dutch town hall. We observe in passing that they provide remarkably agreeable hot buttered toast there.

Our host on this occasion was an ex-Minister of Education, from whom we learned many interesting facts about the social and economic development of Western Australia. He was especially enthusiastic on the importance and good results of cadet training, which he had done much to promote. In the case of schoolboys of twelve to fourteen years old it consists mainly of physical training calculated to produce better development. This training carried out by the school teachers is given for not less than fifteen minutes a day, the boys learn marching, drill, and either first aid, swimming, or miniature rifle-shooting. Teachers are trained for the purpose of giving this special education in Government Schools of Instruction, where certificates of proficiency are conferred; but the whole subject of the complete and admirable system of Australian military training is dealt with in another chapter.

Soon after our arrival we were overtaken by rumours of European war, almost incredible, except that Europe seemed so remote. Then came the news that Germany had declared war on Russia and France. Great Britain, it was said, would stand aloof. Even so the news was sufficiently serious, and telegrams on the Perth post office were eagerly scanned. It was not till quite the end of our visit that definite intelligence arrived that England had joined the cause of the Allies, and even then nobody realised it in the least.

Our last day came all too soon, warm and sunny, when we made the short journey from Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle. The war news seemed more real, when we saw a German tramp held up in the harbour, with the guns of the forts trained on her. The big Orient liner was lying alongside, and we boarded her with many regrets at what we were leaving behind, for we had to say good-bye to many friends, and our cabin was filled with flowers, sweet violets, and the heavy scented boronia, of which Western Australia is so proud. At last we started on the four days' voyage to Adelaide, and it was not till we reached Northern Queensland that we again encountered that atmosphere of primitive freshness and novelty, that we were leaving behind. So we left Western Australia, with its warm-hearted, generous people, its vast, almost untouched resources of primeval forest, and rich soil, its social problems, on which the visitor is incompetent to pronounce, problems acute in the old world, making themselves felt even here, especially that seemingly irreconcilable one of the interests of the Labour man and the Liberal. Irreconcilable so it seemed to us, for the Labour man may be clear-sighted, but he cannot afford to be far-sighted, because, as he himself would put it, he can't afford to wait.

PART II

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

In a poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.

What was it the Engines said, Pilots touching--head to head, Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back? This is what the Engines said Unreported and unread.

Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storied East:--

All the Orient, all Cathay Find through me the shortest way.

That parable will find a new application in the meeting of the engines on the track which is to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and would be entitled to add others concerning Afric's sunwashed lands, for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland. But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within itself.

The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn, were older than mankind, and if by some accident of social progress its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. No tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world. But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam, to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best, man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of enchantment in the bush; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and here--you could see him at the beginning--he was carving wheat-lands and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to the markets of the East.

The locomotive from the East, with puffs which politeness had hitherto repressed, would yield the point about antiquity in order to show that in the more modern period the East had done very well with its time. On the progress of Melbourne and Sydney it would not enlarge; suffice it to point out the advantages of Adelaide.

That is what the locomotive from the East would say about the car service at Adelaide, which links up the spreading homesteads of the periphery with the nucleus of handsome buildings, official, municipal, educational, commercial, at the centre of the city. Adelaide is a city within a park, surrounded by a garden suburb, and that is as good a definition as one can find of it. It is handsome within its city limits, taking a pride in its big buildings, the University standing among lawns, its handsome private houses, its broad streets, its general air of competence; but outside them, beyond the parks, one would rather call it charming. The motor-car is bringing its changes to Adelaide as to other places in the world. Just as in London a generation ago the merchants and the well-to-do City men built big houses at Streatham and Dulwich, but now are moving out to Ascot or Sunningdale, so in Adelaide the prosperous are now building towards Mount Lofty and the hills--though the gradients here are trying even to the hard-driven Australian motor-car. The fringe of suburbs is therefore occupied by what in England we should call the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class--or may we say a professorial class?--than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying that Adelaide represented "culture" in the Commonwealth; but that is unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs, interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, and he produced a representation of "The Board of Irish Agriculture sowing the Seeds of Progress in Ireland." It was a picture which was full of remarkably fine drawing, as one might expect from one of the best two draughtsmen in Britain, and the nude figure of the lady distributing seed , as well as the two naked babies in the middle, and the black-clothed missioner on the right, were all admirable. But what did it mean? Most English critics were silent on this point, and nobody seems to have troubled Mr. Orpen to explain himself, for, as Wilde wrote to Whistler, "to be great is to be misunderstood." However, the picture was bought for the Adelaide Art Gallery, which is rightly anxious to collect work of the younger artists, and made no mistake in choosing Mr. Orpen as one of the most brilliant among them.

When, however, the picture was hung at Adelaide, the people gasped. Then they wrote to the newspapers. Then artists wrote to the newspapers. Some of them sympathised with the public bewilderment. One of them, the best of Australian water-colourists, bludgeoned the public for their ignorance in not appreciating the colour and drawing of the masterpiece; but he did not insult the picture by saying what it meant, and that was what the public wanted to know.... Probably the discussion would be going on yet, but the War put an end to it, and the picture in 1915 still adorned the Art Gallery; and we hope it may continue to do so, though it was rumoured that Mr. Orpen had offered to substitute something less recondite. However, this anecdote will perhaps illustrate the vividness of the interest which Adelaide takes in artistic and intellectual movements. It is an interest which may be perceived in its active University, a University that has contributed several first-class men to English Universities, and is no less perceptible in its society which reproduces very closely the social atmosphere of an English University town such as Cambridge. The resemblance becomes closer still if the comparison is made between Adelaide's flowering and tree-shaded suburbs and the residential environs which stretch away from the University town at home.

Such is Adelaide. Beyond and outside it, and on the farther side of the tree-covered barrier of hills is rural South Australia, which, if one were to indicate on a map, one might shade off to the northward as the population grew less dense and the region of widely separated sheep stations became more prevalent. As the herbage grows more scanty and the water supply more precarious, the sheep stations themselves become larger and fewer, till they give place to desert. Perhaps the greatest surprise to a European visitor is the kind of land which in the more distant stations, where the rainfall sinks very close to the margin of double figures per annum, is called pasture land. It is khaki-coloured and scanty, and one would imagine that only a persevering sheep could find anything on it to eat. Industry is certainly demanded of the sheep, for the phrase of three acres and a cow is altered in Australia to five acres to a sheep. When the rainfall sinks the sheep has still farther to travel for its daily meal; when it fails, the back block sheep farmers see their sheep die by the thousand and ruin approaching.

Nowhere does the rainfall become a factor that can be neglected, and South Australia was suffering from drought in the year 1914, when we visited the state; but though the extremity of scarcity had not been reached, there seemed to eyes accustomed to English well-watered pastures, hardly any water at all. From the summit of Mount Lofty, whence one could so easily see the vast shield of the sea, there were also pointed out to us nearer patches of water shining like dull steel in the hollows of low hills. These were the reservoirs, basins filled by streams which we called brooks. These storage reservoirs are the device which South Australia is developing to counteract drought; and we visited a new one in course of construction among the hills to the north-west of Adelaide.

That was the day on which we visited Mr. Murray's sheep farm, a mere trifle of forty miles from Adelaide. Before leaving the subject of the reservoir, which was interesting from the engineering design of its dam, then being thrown across the gap of two hills--a difficult and masterly piece of work--one may give some idea of the size of the basin by remarking that Mr. Murray, who lived some ten miles away, had protested against the first plans. The reason was that when the reservoir became filled it would have come flooding up to his front door. A very pleasant front door it was too, belonging to something that was part manor-house, part farm, and the counterpart of which might have been found in many an English county. A long, low house with windows meant to shade large, cool rooms, a wide hall, with pictures and polo sticks and photographs--photographs of famous sheep--and a side table gleaming with silver--the cups won as prizes. In front of the house roses and flowering borders and a lawn--on it playing a collie and a tame kangaroo. Beyond, the orchard garden. And not a sheep in sight.

Far better as a picture, our host and his tall sons on the stone steps to welcome us; and in the pretty drawing-room--the drawing-room of a Victorian house at home--the hostess and her daughter. You might see them both any summer's day at Hurlingham, or Henley, or at Lord's when the Oxford and Cambridge match is being played.

However, our purpose was to see sheep. Could this be a sheep farm? Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the landscape--as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a flock of wild cockatoos--and though that may seem nothing to you who read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild anything that one has never before beheld except captive. There were flocks of green and red and blue parrots too, and the laughing jackass perched on the tree-stumps. But about the sheep?

They are there; no doubt about that. An Anglo-Australian whom we know at home once confessed to us that the only blot on life in that southern continent of free air and sunshine was that there was too much sheep in the sheep-rearing districts--there was nothing else to talk about. And at this point we recall an anecdote told to us by Dr. E. S. Cunningham, the editor of "The Melbourne Argus." There was a Colonial Conference in England some years ago, and he and some of the others who came to it, Mr. Deakin among them, went back to Australia across the United States. One night in the Far West their train was held up by accident, and they stopped at the hotel of some wayside station. After supper, as they sat round the red-hot stove of the hotel parlour, some of the citizens of the township blew in for their evening conversazione, and hailed the opportunity of conversation with strangers.

They quickly found that the strangers were Australians, and as quickly turned the conversation on to the comparative advantages of the two continents.

"I suppose now," said one of them, "that you reckon to have a few sheep in your country. We have sheep here too. Some. Now what size holdings do you put up down there?"

Mr. Deakin, to whom the question was addressed, paused reflectively and said: "Well, I don't know that I'm well posted about sheep; but I believe my friend has some knowledge of the subject. Cunningham, what was the size of that farm that Colonel Burns got rid of last autumn?"

"I can't quite tell you the size," said Dr. Cunningham, after assumed cogitation. "It was pretty big. There were about a quarter of a million sheep with it."

The American looked from one to the other, and expectorated at the stove in a discontented manner. After a minute or two he started in again.

"We get a good figure for our stock hereabouts," he observed; "we breed for quality. I guess wool is your strong suit. Now what about is your figure per sheep over there?"

Again Deakin referred to Cunningham, the authority.

"What was it Murray of Adelaide was asking for that merino ram of his, Cunningham--it was called Lion II, I believe?"

"I don't know what he was asking," returned Cunningham swiftly, "but I can tell you what he got for it. He took eleven hundred guineas."

The American looked from one to the other and swallowed hard.

"Thunder!" he said. "Give me cattle!"

Well, we didn't see the quarter of a million sheep, and Mr. Murray's thousand-guinea ram lives only in portraiture in the hall of his farm; but we did see some of the famous herd of which Lion II was the congener. They had been rounded up for us, about fifty of them, in one of the shearing yards; and most attractive animals they were. Their thick merino fleece was about five inches deep, like soft fibre, and their thick necks were in folds--concertina folds, as they are called. They have been bred to this type, and their peculiar scientific interest is the information which they afford to the explorers of Mendelian principles of the permanence of the so-called "factors of heredity." But to the practical stock-breeder their immediate interest is the vast amount of wool they yield. Mr. Murray said that they each yielded about fifteen pounds' weight of wool at a shearing.

Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage. It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep farms--especially in the back blocks, where the life is wilder, the herbage scanty, the seasons precarious--are interesting enough, though here we cannot dwell on them. What does remain as the recollection of Mr. Murray's sheep farm is that of a hospitality and a generosity which are so natural that they are never ostentatious, but which, long after the day and hour have gone, warm the heart with the memory of them.

ADELAIDE

We had been warned to expect cold and rough weather, if anywhere, in the great Australian Bight, but like everything we had ever been told about Australian weather, the prophecy was fallacious. The Tuesday in August on which we sailed from Fremantle and the four following days of the voyage were fine, calm, and sunny. We skirted a coast bound by gneiss rocks, rounded, ground, and weather-worn to smoothness, with immense breakers dashing their foam up the face of the cliffs. Except the beautiful harbour of Albany, it is a most inhospitable-looking coast.

On the third day out a wireless message from Perth warned the captain to alter his course and to moderate the ship's lights at night so as to disguise her. It was a significant suggestion, that the War, the outbreak of which took place while we were at sea, but in which we hardly yet believed, was a matter of grim earnest. Otherwise the voyage was uneventful. We reached Adelaide, sliding in through glassy water, with land on either side, and numbers of diving birds swimming round us. After the inevitable delay of disembarkation that seems so unnecessary to the impatient traveller, we at last got ashore, walked through the Customs, merely an amiable formality, and took the train for Adelaide, which is at some distance from its harbour. The line runs through salt marshes, dotted with pink mesembryanthemum in flower. Then come trim suburbs with English names, a Cheltenham among them; presently the train appeared to be running through the streets of a big city, and we had arrived at Adelaide station.

The different capitals of the Australian states are as unlike each other as possible, and Adelaide is especially distinctive. This graceful garden city has none of the rawness of our dear Perth. She has, on the contrary, an established air. The hotel at which we stayed might have been in any large town in the world, except for a certain friendly loquacity on the part of the staff, and a trifling indifference to details characteristic of Australia.

The first impression of Adelaide is a delightful one. She is a city of space and light and air, with broad, tree-planted streets and fine buildings; in fact, more like the Australia we had imagined, because less unlike England, than the West. The cathedral with its twin spires dominates the whole from rising ground. The city is laid out in straight lines, separated by parks from its spreading, growing suburbs, the whole place is green and restful.

In the afternoon of our arrival we were motored round the city and its suburbs, and a closer acquaintance deepened this impression, for we passed through avenues of plane trees and saw English plants growing in the gardens. Rising ground revealed the lovely situation of Adelaide and gave a view of the city as a whole, scattered among her trees and gardens, girdled by green hills rising abruptly from its environs, with the grey Pacific spread out to infinite distance beyond. The cloudy, hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home.

Of course, there was a great deal that was unfamiliar: here were hedges of olive, thick-set and cut like box, other hedges were made of the South African box-thorn, and everywhere the sides of the roads were yellow with a pretty pale oxalis, regarded by the inhabitants as a noxious weed and called Sour Sod. There were many vineyards, and sheep and lambs feeding, for South Australia is largely a pastoral state. The development of pastoral industries has been an important element in her general prosperity. The pastoral settler gauged the capacities of the land and paved the way for agricultural and closer settlement. South Australia now has a larger acreage under cultivation in proportion to the population than any other state, and the annual returns from pastoral industries amount to nearly ?4,000,000. In 1912 between two and three million pounds' worth of pastoral products were exported, including sheep, cattle, horses, frozen meats, skins, hides, tallow, and wool.

South Australia was declared a province under the British Crown in 1836 by Governor Hindmarsh in the reign of William IV, so that the state has a history stretching back over a period of nearly eighty years, during which time she has progressed rapidly, and at the time of our visit was actually enjoying great prosperity after a series of good seasons, though we heard on all hands in Adelaide that there had been two dry springs and rain was badly wanted.

The climate is mild, the high temperatures that occur in summer are mitigated by the absence of humidity, and extreme cold in winter is unknown. Sheep, cattle, and horses live out of doors all the year round and thrive on natural herbage, so that neither artificial feeding nor housing is necessary, and the cost of production is thus greatly reduced. It is superfluous to enter here into figures showing the purposes for which the area of the state is leased or alienated, but beyond the limits of agricultural settlement more than 143,000 square miles are held by Crown lessees as sheep or cattle runs. Formerly the principal part of South Australian wool was shipped to London, and it was not till within the last forty years that local wool auctions attained importance.

Agriculture is determined by the rainfall, which varies from 10 or 11 inches in northern and inland districts to 30 or 35 inches in the south and in the more hilly regions. Within these widely varying conditions almost anything can be grown from corn to grapes, nearly every kind of cereal, fruit, or vegetable. But economically all the conditions of agriculture are very widely different from those at home, for it must be taken into consideration that the wages of farm labourers are about double those paid in England, and the cost of plant and implements about 50% more. Wheat predominates in the value of all crops grown, for while it is estimated that the total value of all crops, including fruit, amounts to ?18 per head of the population, the value of the wheat crop for grain and hay is over ?13 per head. The production of hay in Australia is intimately associated with the cultivation of cereals, as the greater bulk of this fodder is composed of wheat or oats. The Year Book returns for 1911-12 show more than two million acres under wheat cultivation with a total production of over twenty million bushels, a low average compared with other countries, but against which must be set the exceptionally low cost of production brought about by conditions of soil and climate.

One peculiarly local industry is the growth of wattle for its bark, which is utilised for tanning leather. The industry is a lucrative one. At from five to seven years old, when they are fit to strip, the trees yield from one ton an acre, and the market price of the bark is from ?5 to ?8 a ton.

But we must again insist that in trying to estimate the position of agriculture in Australia the different labour conditions have to be taken into consideration. In the first place it is possible for a man owning a team of eight or ten horses and the latest and best machinery, to do all the work on a holding of from 200 to 240 acres of wheat himself, with some extra help at harvest time, so extensive is the use of labour-saving machinery--multiple furrow ploughs, for instance, 12 or 14 furrow twin ploughs on the lighter land, and 8 to 10 horse cultivators. This being so, it can be easily seen that there is no surplus of skilled labour, for under such conditions a capable man very soon saves enough to begin farming on his own account, especially as he can get cheap land on easy terms. This, of course, applies to Australia generally; at harvest time, though the demand for labour is great and the pay high, thoroughly efficient men are not to be had. The same thing is true of dairying, so that the farmers are actually reducing their herds to numbers that can be conveniently managed by their own families with the aid of milking machines.

At the same time the Labourers' Union has drawn up a "log" of prices and hours of labour, and requires its acceptance on the part of the farmer, who would be willing enough if the supply of labour were efficient. Economists question whether, if these conditions, including the regulation of hours, were enforced, the result produced might not be an increased adoption of grazing, where hardly any labour is required.

In the pastoral industry all conditions of labour and living are fixed by the Arbitration Court, and good accommodation is provided for shearers. Among farmers, on the other hand, though good food is always provided, the men often have to sleep in machinery sheds. Here, as everywhere else, labour is dependent not merely on supply and demand, but on desirable conditions of employment, and it is extraordinarily interesting to see our tentative efforts in the direction of Wages Boards, and the regulation of employment, reproduced in the form of the finished article in the Commonwealth, which had no great mass of vested interest and tradition to oppose to a generous system of Labour Legislation. It must be remembered, however, that Australia can hardly yet be considered as a manufacturing country, though her industrial development has been so rapid in recent years, that the total value of manufactures already amounts to more than a quarter of the whole production of the country. It is calculated that the value of productions from all sources per head of the population exceeds that of any other country.

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