CHAPTER II.

RIVAL COLONIES.

New South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.

The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of “shoddy;” but of Queensland--an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves possess--the Sydney folks are not without reason envious.

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony--a wheat-growing country--is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling every year.

The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats--a policy which, however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers--at all events, of skilled artisans--are still excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.

To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in England of dissuading letters.

As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation.

In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, “squatters,” as they are called, sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South Wales power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign; but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the “up-country desert” or “unwatered tracts” can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural settlers.

The struggle between the great crown tenants and the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine.

The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the settlement of a tropical country by Englishmen, and of its cultivation by English hands. The future, not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of every tropical country, of our race, of free government itself, are all at stake; but the success of the experiment that has been tried between Brisbane and Rockampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has prospered much, quadrupling its population and trebling its exports and revenue in six years, but it is the Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep countries, or, on the other hand, the Northern gold fields, which are the main cause of the prosperity; and in the sugar and cotton culture of the coast, colored labor is now almost exclusively employed, with the usual effect of degrading field-work in the eyes of European settlers, and of forcing upon the country a form of society of the aristocratic type.

It is possible that just as New England has of late forbidden to Louisiana the importation of Chinamen to work her sugar fields, just as the Kansas radicals have declared that they will not recognize the Bombay Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have refused to allow the further reception of convicts by West Australia, separated from their territories by 1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh and Victorians combined may at least protest against the introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, Chinamen, South Sea Islanders, and Malays, to cultivate the Queensland coast plantations. If, however, the other colonies permit their Northern sister to continue in her course of importing dark-skinned laborers, to form a peon population, a few years will see her a wealthy cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the vices of a slaveholding government, though without the name of slavery. The planters of the coast and villages, united with the squatters of the table-lands or “Downs,” will govern Queensland, and render union with the free colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take place, and save the country to Australia.

Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere shows itself in the acts of English settlers, there might be a bright side to the political future of Queensland colony. The colored laborers at present introduced, industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hindostan, laborious, sober, and free from superstition, should not only be able to advance the commercial fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the Mauritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free government with their white employers. To avoid the gigantic evil of the degradation of hand labor, which has ruined morally as well as economically the Southern States of the American republic, the Indian, Malay, and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become members of landholding associations. A large spice and sugar-growing population in Northern Queensland would require a vast agricultural population in the south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals, might grow up as sister countries, each depending upon the other for the supply of half its needs. It is, however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned field-hands provide only for the payment of wages _in goods_, at the rates of 6_s._ to 10_s._ a month. The “goods” consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging from the experience of California and Ceylon, there can be little hope of the general admission of colored men to equal rights by English settlers, and the Pacific islands offer so tempting a field to the kidnapping commanders of colonial “island schooners,” that there is much fear that Queensland may come to show us not merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds, in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to death than to “breed” him.

Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise to power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent poverty of New South Wales, that were the question merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the subtropical settlers would be as certain of the foremost position in any future confederation as they were in America when the struggle lay only between the Carolinas and New England. As it is, just as America was first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Australia will be saved by the coal of New South Wales. Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of the future is on the side of the free settlers of the cooler climate, at Newcastle, in New South Wales.

On my return from a short voyage to the north, I visited the coal field of New South Wales at Newcastle, on the Hunter. The beds are of vast extent, they lie upon the banks of a navigable river, and so near to the surface that the best qualities are raised, in a country of dear labor, at 8_s._ or 9_s._ the ton, and delivered on board ship for 12_s._ For manufacturing purposes the coal is perfect; for steamship use it is, though somewhat “dirty,” a serviceable fuel; and copper and iron are found in close proximity to the beds. The Newcastle and Port Jackson fields open a singularly brilliant future to Sydney in these times, when coal is king in a far higher degree than was ever cotton. To her black beds the colony will owe not only manufactures, bringing wealth and population, but that leisure which is begotten of wealth--leisure that brings culture, and love of harmony and truth.

Manufactories are already springing up in the neighborhood of Sydney, adding to the whirl and the bustle of the town, and adding, too, to its enormous population, already disproportionate to that of the colony in which it stands. As the depot for much of the trade of Queensland and New Zealand, and as the metropolis of pleasure to which the wealthy squatters pour from all parts of Australia, to spend, rapidly enough, their hard-won money, Sydney would in any case have been a populous city; but the barrenness of the country in which it stands has, until the recent opening of the railroads, tended still further to increase its size, by failing to tempt into country districts the European immigrants. The Irish in Sydney form a third of the whole population, yet hardly one of these men but meant to settle upon land when he left his native island.

In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris, in Austria a continual drain toward Vienna, in England toward London. A corresponding tendency is observable throughout Australia and America. Immigrants hang about New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Sydney, Melbourne; and, finding that they can scrape a living in these large cities with toil somewhat less severe than that which would be needed to procure them a decent livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty as well as the dissipated throng together in densely-populated “bad quarters” in these cities, and render the first quarter of New York and the so-called “Chinese” quarter of Melbourne a danger to the colonies, and an insult to the civilization of the world.

In the case of Australia this concentration of population is becoming more remarkable day by day. Even under the system of free selection, by which the legislature has attempted to encourage agricultural settlement, the moment a free selector can make a little money he comes to one of the capitals to spend it. Sydney is the city of pleasure, to which the wealthy Queensland squatters resort to spend their money, returning to the north for fresh supplies only when they cannot afford another day of dissipation, while Melbourne receives the outpour of Tasmania.

The rushing to great cities the moment there is money to be spent, characteristic of the settlers in all these colonies, is much to be regretted, and presents a sad contrast to the quiet stay-at-home habits of American farmers. Everything here is fever and excitement;--as in some systems of geometry, motion is the primary, rest the derived idea. New South Welshmen tell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria; to a new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne.

Judging from the colonial government reports, which immigrants are conjured by the inspectors to procure and read, and which are printed in a cheap form for the purpose, the New South Welsh can hardly wish to lure settlers into “the bush,” for in one of these documents, published while I was in Sydney, the curator of the museum reported that he never went more than twelve miles from the city, but that within that circuit he found seventeen distinct species of land snakes, two of sea snakes, thirty of lizards, and sixteen of frogs--seventy-eight species of reptiles rewarded him in all. The seventeen species of land snakes found by him within the suburbs were named by the curator in a printed list; it commenced with the pale-headed snake, and ended with the death-adder.