Greater Britain

CHAPTER XII.

ADELAIDE

THE capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest of all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the English race, and as I neared it through the Backstairs Passage into the Gulf of St. Vincent, past Kangaroo Island, and still more upon landing at Glenelg, I came to the conclusion that its reputation was deserved. The extreme heat which characterizes South Australia is to some extent a consequence of its lying as far north as New South Wales and Queensland, and so far inland as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are visited; for although by “South Australia” we should, in the southern hemisphere, naturally understand that portion of Australia which was farthest from the tropics, yet it is a curious fact that the whole colony of Victoria lies to the south of Adelaide, that neither of the great southern peninsulas of Australia are in, but that nearly all the northernmost points of the continent now lie within, the country misnamed “South Australia.”

The immense northern territory, being supposed to be valueless, has generously been made a present of to South Australia, which thus becomes the largest British colony, and nearly as large as British Hindostan. If the great expenditure which is going on succeeds in causing the discovery of any good land at the north, it will of course at once be made into a separate colony. The only important result that seems likely to follow from this annexation to South Australia of the northern territory is that schoolboys’ geography will suffer; indeed, I should say that a total destruction of all principle in the next generation would be the inevitable result of so rude a blow to confidence in books and masters as the assurance from a teacher‘s lips that the two most remote countries of Australia from each other are united under one colonial government, and that the northernmost points of the whole continent are situated in South Australia. Boys will probably conclude that across the line south becomes north and north south, and that in Australia the sun rises in the west.

Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the staples here are wheat, sheep, copper, and my introduction to South Australia was characteristic of the colony, for I found in Port Adelaide, where I first set foot, not only every store filled to overflowing, but piles of wheat-sacks in the roadways, and lines of wheat-cars on the sidings of railways, without even a tarpaulin to cover the grain.

Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern the wheat and flour trade are, perhaps, the strangest to the uninitiated. Breadstuffs are still sent from California and Chili to Victoria, yet from Adelaide, close at hand, wheat is being sent to England and flour to New York!

There can be no doubt that ultimately Victoria and Tasmania will at least succeed in feeding themselves. It is probable that neither New Zealand nor Queensland will find it to their interest to do the like. Wool-growing in the former and cotton and wool in the latter will continue to pay better than wheat in the greater portion of their lands. Their granary, and that possibly of the City of Sydney itself, will be found in South Australia, especially if land capable of carrying wheat be discovered to the westward of the settlements about Adelaide. That the Australias, Chili, California, Oregon, and other Pacific States can ever export largely of wheat to Europe is now more than doubtful. If manufactures spring up on this side the world, these countries, whatever their fertility, will have at least enough to do to feed themselves.

As I entered the streets of the “farinaceous village,” as Adelaide is called by conceited Victorians, I was struck with the amount of character they exhibit both in the way of buildings, of faces, and of dress. The South Australians have far more idea of adapting their houses and clothes to their climate than have the people of the other colonies, and their faces adapt themselves. The verandas to the shops are sufficiently contiguous to form a perfect piazza; the people rise early, and water the sidewalk in front of their houses; and you never meet a man who does not make some sacrifice to the heat, in the shape of puggree, silk coat, or sun-helmet; but the women are nearly as unwise here as in the other colonies, and persist in going about in shawls and colored dresses. Might they but see a few of the Richmond or Baltimore ladies in their pure white muslin frocks, and die of envy, for the dress most convenient in a hot dry climate is also the most beautiful under its bright sun.

The German element is strong in South Australia, and there are whole villages in the wheat-country where English is never spoken; for here, as in America, there has been no mingling of the races, and the whole divergence from the British types is traceable to climatic influences, and especially dry heat. The men born here are thin, and fine-featured, somewhat like the Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are all alike – small, pretty, and bright, but with a burnt-up look. The haggard eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the dreaded presence of my old friend of the Rocky Mountains, the brulot sand-fly.

The inhabitants of all hot dry countries speak from the head, and not the chest, and the English in Australia are acquiring this habit; you seldom find a “cornstalk” who speaks well from the chest.

The air is crisp and hot – crisper and hotter even than that of Melbourne. The shaded thermometer upon the Victorian coast seldom reaches 110°, but in the town of Adelaide 117° has been recorded by the government astronomer. Such is the figure of the Australian continent that Adelaide, although a seaport town, lies far up as it were inland. Catching the heated gales from three of the cardinal points, Adelaide has a summer six months long, and is exposed to a fearful continuance of hot winds; nevertheless, 105° at Adelaide is easier borne than 95° in the shade at Sydney.

Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the capital. In laying out Adelaide, its founders have reserved a park about a quarter of a mile in width all round the city. This gives a charming drive nine miles long, outside which again are the olive-yards and villas of the citizens. Hedges of the yellow cactus, or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia, bound the gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and aloe grow upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward are the cool wooded hills of the Mount Lofty Range, on the tops of which are grown the English fruits for which the plains afford no shade or moisture.

Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by railway, to Kapunda, I beheld one great wheat-field without a break. The country was finer than any stretch of equal extent in California or Victoria, and looked as though the crops were “standing” – which in one sense they were, though the grain was long since “in.” The fact is that they use the Ridley machines, by which the ears are thrashed out without any cutting of the straw, which continues to stand, and which is finally plowed in at the farmer‘s leisure, except in the neighborhood of Adelaide. There would be a golden age of partridge-shooting in Old England did the climate and the price of straw allow of the adoption of the Ridley reaper. Under this system, South Australia grows on the average six times as much wheat as she can use, whereas, if reaping had to be paid for, she could only grow from one and a half to twice as much as would meet the home demand.

In this country, as in America, “bad farming” is found to pay, for with cheap land, the Ridley reaper, and good markets, light crops without labor, save the peasant-proprietor‘s own toil, pay well when heavy crops obtained by the use of hired labor would not reimburse the capitalist. The amount of land under cultivation has been trebled in the last seven years, and half a million acres are now under wheat. South Australia has this year produced seven times as much grain as she can consume, and twelve acres are under wheat for every adult male of the population of the colony.

A committee has been lately sitting in New South Wales “to consider the state of the colony.” To judge from the evidence taken before it, the members seemed to have conceived that their task was to inquire why South Australia prospered above New South Wales. Frugality of the people, especially of the Germans, and fertility of the soil were the reasons which they gave for the result, but it is impossible not to see that the success of South Australia is but another instance of the triumph of small proprietors, of whom there are now some seven or eight thousand in the colony, and these were brought here by the adoption of the Wakefield land system.

In the early days of the colony, land was sold at a good price in 130-acre sections, with one acre of townland to each agricultural section. Now, under rules made at home, but confirmed after the introduction of self-government, land is sold by auction, with a reserved price of £1 an acre, but when once a block has passed the hammer, it can forever be taken up at £1 the acre without further competition. The Land Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and a few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines, being paid out of it, the remainder is divided into three portions, of which two are destined for public works, and one for immigration.

There is a marvelous contrast to be drawn between the success which has attended the Wakefield system in South Australia and the total failure, in the neighboring colony of West Australia, of the old system, under which vast tracts of land being alienated for small prices to the crown, there remains no fund for introducing that abundant supply of labor without which the land is useless.

Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immigrants come of themselves, and, in the assisted importation of both men and women, the relative proportions of English, Scotch, and Irish that exist at home are carefully preserved, by which simple precaution the colony is saved from an organic change of type, such as that which threatens all America, although it would, of course, be idle to deny that the restriction is aimed against the Irish.

The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in the want of women: not only is this a bar to the natural increase of population; it is a deficiency preventive of permanency, destructive of religion; where woman is not there can be no home, no country.

How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a question which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales, have each in their turn attempted to solve by the artificial introduction of Irish work-house girls. The difficulty apparently got rid of, we begin to find that it is not so much as fairly seen; we have yet to look it squarely in the face. The point of the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest girls, – not women merely, but women fit to bear families in a free State.

One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a lately-received batch of Irish work-house girls, has said that, if these are the “well-conducted girls, he should be anxious to see a few of the evil-disposed.” While in South Australia, I read the details of the landing of a similar party of women from Limerick work-house one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city authorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more abominable than their conduct in the mean while. They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs, keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by the time the authorities came down to pack them off by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky. At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech; nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish work-house girls. This was no exceptional case: the reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can show as bad; and in Canada such conduct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parliamentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The woman was duly sent down, and found next day in her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in her own words: “Here I am with my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say.”

It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls cost a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as the free passages across the seas of an equal number of worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint. Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigration superintendents that the traces are visible to this day, for wherever the women went, “sin, and shame, and death were in their track.” The Irish unions have no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of their most abandoned girls; their interests and those of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be effective in the face of facts like these. The class that the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with babies in their arms; no one will take them into service because the children are in the way, and in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial benevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow up or the mothers die. Even when the girls are not so wholly vicious as to be useless in service, they are utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of neither domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to refuse employment unless they were engaged to serve together. The agents are at their wits’ ends; either the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of life that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant in their new-found “independence” that they on their side will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every evil upon the long sea voyage. They say that they select the best of girls, but a few days at sea suffice to demoralize them.

The colonies could not do better than combine for the establishment of a new and more efficient emigration agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; for here as in America it is found that the Scotch and Germans are the best of immigrants. The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in the known world. Half the most prominent among the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the great merchants of India are of the same nation. Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the most part men of better education than those of other nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotchman owes his uniform success in every climate to his perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact remains, that wherever abroad you come across a Scotchman, you invariably find him prosperous and respected.

The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland because he wishes to rise faster and higher than he can at home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in calculating contentment; the Irishman in sorrow and despair.

At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines there is not much to see, so my last days in South Australia were given to the politics of the colony, which present one singular feature. For the elections to the Council or Upper House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50 or a leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single district, and the majority elect their men. In a country where party feeling runs high, such a system, were it possible, would evidently unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of representation, but in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selection of a governor for an American State, use their position with great prudence, and make choice of the best men that the country can produce. The franchise for the Lower House, for the elections to which the colony is “districted,” is the simple one of six months’ residence, which with the ballot works irreproachably.

The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a capital for the Northern territory; that coast of tropical Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a promise to name after me either “a city” or a headland. He said he should advise me to select the headland, because that would remain, whereas the city probably would not. When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry passengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs, and the whole of the money received from capitalists at home, for 300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the government are seriously thinking of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for land. It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, as tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland that the work is done.

It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the northwest of Australia is called “The land of gold;” and we are told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese reported their discovery.

By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George‘s Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay glowing along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRANSPORTATION

AFTER five days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King George‘s Sound – “Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie,” as I saw it written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curiously-cut leaves.

The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives – tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the “colonists” by a gang of fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade, and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.

Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most considerable convict establishment we possess across the seas.

At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or emancipists within the “colony,” of whom 1500 were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 5000 had been released upon conditional pardons: 600 of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500, or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women and children.

If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled us to draw the moral, that transportation and free emigration cannot exist side by side: the one element must overbear and destroy the other. In Western Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two-thirds of the whole population, and the district is a great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.

Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts as with free settlers: fifty or sixty convicts have successfully escaped from the settlement within the last few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a month or two, although sheltered by the people, the vast majority of whom are ticket-of-leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every year.

On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was striking down on him in a way that none can fancy who have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an armed warder, who idled in the shade by the roadside. This was an “escape-man,” thus treated with a view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to get away from Albany. No wonder that the “chain-gang” system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than before the introduction of this tremendous punishment.

Many of the “escapes” are made with no other view than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Adelaide to King George‘s Sound, a convict coal-man was found built up in the coal-heap on deck: he and his mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by the help of the others “for a change.” Of ultimate escape there could be no chance; the coal on deck could not fail to be exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and this they knew. When he emerged, black, half smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punishment. Acts of this class are common enough to have received a name. The offenders are called “bolters for a change.”