CHAPTER I.

SYDNEY.

At early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer, the _Kaikoura_, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far inland upon the gale. We had placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he could steer, but, as we reached the steamer‘s side, instead of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently before the wind, although our treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours the wind moderated, and I reached the _Kaikoura_ just before she sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbor through the boil of waters that marks the position of the submarine crater, I found that there was but one other passenger for Australia to share with me the services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons. “Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Australasian colony to another,” I felt inclined to say, but during the voyage and my first week in New South Wales I began to discover that in England we are given over to a singular delusion as to the connection of New Zealand and Australia.

Australasia is a term much used at home to express the whole of our Antipodean possessions; in the colonies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in the way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a congratulatory paragraph on the amount of the New Zealand debt; the only allusion to Australia that I ever detected in the Wellington _Independent_ was in a glance at the future of the colony, in which the editor predicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would be a great naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or levying a contribution upon Sydney.

New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country; New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic. Had Australia and New Zealand been close together, instead of as far apart as Africa and South America, there could have been no political connection between them so long as the traditions of their first settlement endured.

Not only is the name “Australasia” politically meaningless, but geographically incorrect, for New Zealand and Australia are as completely separated from each other as Great Britain and Massachusetts. No promontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of any New Zealand cape; the distance between Sydney and Wellington is 1400 miles; from Sydney to Auckland about the same. The distance from the nearest point of New Zealand of Tasman‘s peninsula, which itself projects somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than that of London from Algiers: from Wellington to Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from Manchester to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil.

The sea that lies between the two great countries of the south is not, like the Central or North Pacific, a sea bridged with islands, ruffled with trade winds, favorable to sailing ships, or overspread with a calm that permits the presence of light-draught paddle steamers. The seas which separate Australia from New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without islands, torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and traversed in all weathers by a mountainous swell. After the gale of Christmas-day we were blessed with a continuance of light breezes on our way to Sydney, but never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that seemed to surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw was as often out of as in the water; and in a fast new ship we could scarcely average nine knots an hour throughout the day. The ship which had brought the last Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed was struck by a sea which swept her from stem to stern, and filled her cabin two feet deep, and this in December, which here is midsummer, and answers to our July. Not only is the intervening ocean wide and cold, but New Zealand presents to Australia a rugged coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by a snowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and America all her ports and bays.

No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct as Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian continent by negroes. New Zealand is ethnologically nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zealand to Australia.

If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, the countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is one of the groups of volcanic islands that stud the Pacific throughout its whole extent; tremendous cliffs surround it on almost every side; a great mountain chain runs through both islands from north to south; hot springs abound, often close to glaciers and eternal snows; earthquakes are common, and active volcanoes not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and windy; the land is covered in most parts with a tangled jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants; water never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the summer heat is never great; the islands are always green. Australia has for the most part flat, yellow, sun-burnt shores; the soil may be rich, the country good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is an arid plain; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather the thermometer rises higher in the interior than it does in India, and dust storms and hot winds sweep the land from end to end. It is impossible to conceive countries more unlike each other than are our two great dominions of the south. Their very fossils are as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna of our time.

At the dawn of the first day of the new year, we sighted the rocks where the _Duncan Dunbar_ was lost with all hands, and a few minutes afterward were boarded by the crew engaged by the Sydney _Morning Herald_, who had been lying at “The Heads” all night, to intercept and telegraph our news into the city. The pilot and regular news-boat hailed us a little later, when we had fired a gun. The contrast between this Australian energy and the supineness of the New Zealanders was striking, but not more so than that between my first view of Australia and my last view of New Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy peak of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Iva, while we ran before a strong breeze, in the bright English sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon; the albatrosses screaming around our stern: to-day, as we steamed up Port Jackson, toward Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night of oven-like heat, the sun rose flaming red in a lurid sky, and struck down upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless foliage of the Australian bush; while, as we anchored, the ceaseless chirping of the crickets in the grass and trees struck harshly on the ear.

The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is not without a singular beauty if seen at the best time. By the “hot-wind sunrise,” as I first saw it, the heat and glare destroy the feeling of repose which the endless succession of deep, sheltered coves would otherwise convey; but seen from shore in the afternoon, when the sea-breeze has sprung up, turning the sky from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land that leads out to the Government House, you catch a glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side, rippled with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with white sails; the brightness of the colors that the sea-breeze brings almost atones for the wind‘s unhealthiness.

In the upper portion of the town the scene is less picturesque; the houses are of the commonplace English ugliness, worst of all possible forms of architectural imbecility, and built, too, as though for English fogs, instead of semi-tropical heat and sun. Water is not to be had, and the streets are given up to clouds of dust, while not a single shade-tree breaks the rays of the almost vertical sun.

The afternoon of New Year‘s day I spent at the “Midsummer Meeting” of the Sydney Jockey Club, on the race-course near the city, and found a vast crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red earth that did duty for “turf,” although there was a hot wind blowing, and the thermometer stood at 103° in the shade. For my conveyance to the race-course I trusted to one of the Australian hansom cabs, made with open fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as to allow a free draught of air.

The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be distinguished from Englishwomen in dress or countenance, but the crowd presented several curious types. The fitness of the term “cornstalks,” applied to the Australian-born boys, was made evident by a glance at their height and slender build; they have plenty of activity and health, but are wanting in power and weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate, without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand, eating much meat, spending their days in the open air, constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping fellows, physically the perfection of the English race, but wanting in refinement and grace of mind, and this apparently constitutionally, not through the accident of occupation or position. In Australia there is promise of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New Zealanders, are as little given to book-learning, but there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quickness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Australians boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and every young face in the Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not more like that of the Peloponnesus than they are like the old Athenians. The eager burning democracy that is springing up in the Australian great towns is as widely different from the republicanism of the older States of the American Union as it is from the good-natured conservatism of New Zealand, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment would of itself suffice to distinguish the Australians from both Americans and British. Large as must be the amount of convict blood in New South Wales, there was no trace of it in the faces of the persons present upon the race-course. The inhabitants of colonies which have never received felon immigrants often cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the prejudice is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants, nor by the records of local crime. The black stain has not yet wholly disappeared: the streets of Sydney are still a greater disgrace to civilization than are even those of London; but, putting the lighter immoralities aside, security for life and property is not more perfect in England than in New South Wales. The last of the bushrangers were taken while I was in Sydney.

The race-day was followed by a succession of hot winds, during which only the excellence of the fruit-market made Sydney endurable. Not only are the English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas, oranges, loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Brisbane, figs of every kind, and the delicious passion-fruit; and if the gum-tree forests yield no shady spots for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta.

A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom known was brought to a close by one of the heaviest southerly storms on record. During the stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the approach of a gale from the far south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here and there men‘s feet left footprints on the stairs.

Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are known as “southerly bursters;” but the earlier settlers called them “brickfielders,” in the belief that the dust they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brickfields to the south of Sydney. The fact is that the sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles, from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; for the Australian “burster” is one with the Punjaub dust-storm, and the dirt-storm of Colorado.