Part 3

The great and ever-present charm of Melbourne consists in the exceptionally vigorous and active appearance of its population. This is due simply to the fact that the great bulk of it was formed by the almost simultaneous immigration of men who are not yet grown old. As yet there are comparatively few old people to be seen about; and everybody seems hard at work and able to work. An immense majority of the grown-up men and women were born and bred in England. Many whom one meets about the streets look as if they might have a history of their own, full of interest and strange adventure, none perhaps more than the car-drivers, an occupation followed by some who have been used to a very different position in life. I never drove in a car without asking all I dared, and speculating as to what the reason was in each case for wandering to the Antipodes. Physically the Melbourne people are likely to be above the average; for, in the early days of the colony at least, the sick and weakly in constitution did not think of committing themselves to the then uncertain hardships and discomforts of a voyage and a new country. A certain degree of force of character too is probable in those who have had resolution enough to break through home ties and cast their lot in another hemisphere. Hence also in some respects the tie with the old country is a closer and firmer one than in most of the other Australian colonies. There is quite a crowd and an excitement about the post office for some time before the English mail closes. Little stalls are erected by newspaper-sellers, provided with pen, ink, and cover, to direct and despatch the newspapers to friends at home, and a brisk trade they seem to do. Home associations and reminiscences underlie and prevail over more recent ones. Even the word ‘colonial’ is often used to express disparagement; ‘colonial manners,’ for instance, is now and then employed as a synonym for roughness or rudeness.

In nothing is the energy and enterprise of the Melbourne people more conspicuous than in their public works. Lately, indeed, either money has not been so plentiful or else the desire of building has been less ardent, for many buildings have been left unfinished and in very unsightly plight. But the Post-office _is_ finished, and is a really magnificent building in its way. On the Legislative Council and Assembly Chambers an incredible amount of pains and money must have been expended, though perhaps with hardly adequate result. The architecture of the public buildings generally, if not always successful or in the best taste, is on the whole at least as good as in the average of public buildings at home; though it is disappointing to find that new requirements of climate have failed to inspire any originality of style or design, such as one sees growing up naturally and spontaneously in private houses, whether suburban villas or station-houses in the bush.

But the institutions of the Museum, the Public Library, the Acclimatisation Gardens, and the Botanical Gardens, are above all cavil and beyond all praise. The last two in particular, aided as they are by a favourable climate, promise before many years are over to equal anything of the kind anywhere. Last and greatest of all is the great Yan-Yean Reservoir, which from twenty miles off pours its streams into the baths, fountains, gardens, and dusty streets of the thirsty city. Every house has its water-meter, and the price is only a shilling for a thousand gallons. Without this generous supply the suburbs would in summer be a Sahara, with a few dismal, almost leafless, gum-trees, instead of being brightened by pleasant gardens, enriched with English as well as semi-tropical flowers and fruits. The stiff clay, which is a quagmire in winter, dries up in summer like a sun-baked brick. Garden lawns are with difficulty kept green by Yan-Yean water turned on, not at intervals, but continuously through a perforated pipe. Yet the grass two or three feet off is quite dry. The water escapes through the first crack and is gone.

On the other hand, one soon experiences that a Circumlocution-Office is a Victorian quite as much as a home institution. Goods of all kinds, including passengers’ luggage, are brought up by railway from each ship as it arrives, and discharged into a vast shed at the Melbourne railway station; and as there is now a tariff on most manufactured articles, nothing is allowed to leave the shed till it has been more or less inspected. Many hours did it take to select my various needles from this great bundle of hay, but it was not till my two saddles turned up that any difficulties were made about releasing them. On seeing them, a very young clerk in a cloth cap at a high desk referred me to a white-haired superior official, who shook his head and refused to let the saddles pass without an order from the commander-in-chief of the shed, who inhabits an office at its extreme end. Alas! the commander-in-chief, though the most courteous and obliging of men (as were indeed all the officials with whom I had to do that day), pronounced that I must ‘pass an entry’—I think that is the expression—at the Custom-house. So to the Custom-house, a quarter of a mile off—the ugliest erection that ever was built or left half-built—I trudged. Going into a large hall I addressed a clerk, who gave me into the care of another clerk, who took me downstairs, and introduced me to a Custom-house agent, and then the real business began. Dictating to him, I made an affirmation to the effect that the saddles were old and for my own personal use, which affirmation having been, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, made in precise accordance with the facts of the case and duly signed, Custom-house agent, affirmation, and I walked upstairs to the anteroom, and at length to the sanctum of some high official, who after gently cross-examining me vouchsafed to append his initials, whereupon Custom-house agent, affirmation, and I walked downstairs again to the place whence we had come. I suppose I looked a little weary—it was a piping hot day—at this stage of the proceedings, for the Custom-house agent reassuringly remarked that it would not take more than a quarter of an hour more, a statement hardly verified by the result. The next step was for the Custom-house agent to make a memorandum of the nature of my affirmation, to make a number of copies thereof (I did not count how many, but there must have been at least five), and to despatch them by messengers, whither or wherefore I know not, nor why so many, unless they were tentative, in hopes of procuring a favourable response from one out of many possible sources. Anyhow, a sealed letter did at last arrive from somewhere; it was handed to me; I left the building, made for the shed, and delivered it to the commander-in-chief, who wrote and gave me another missive to the white-haired clerk, who made it all right with the young clerk in the cap, who gave me a pass-ticket, which I gave to my drayman, who gave it to the porter at the yard gate, who allowed the dray to pass, and I and my saddles were free.

III.

BALLARAT.

Two hours’ railway travelling will take you from Melbourne to Geelong, over rich, flat, grassy plains, with scarcely a tree, nothing but ugly posts and rails to break their outline. In summer these plains must be parched and dreary beyond description; but it is May now, and the autumn rains have made them green as an emerald and pleasant for the eye to rest on. Geelong is scarcely worth stopping at, unless to speculate upon why it is not Melbourne, and Melbourne it, as might have been the case—so superior in many ways is its situation—if its harbour bar had been cut through a few years sooner. During two more hours’ railway you rise gradually, and emerge from a forest of ill-grown, scrubby gums, upon a large, undulating, irregular amphitheatre, surrounded by small hills. Seventeen years ago the locality was scarcely ever visited except by blacks, for it was covered with bush and unproductive. Now it is Ballarat, the fourth city in Australia. A strange, irregular, uncouth, human ant-hill it is, with its miscellaneous cells above, and its galleries beneath the ground. You may walk two miles and more, from east to west or from north to south, without getting fairly out of the town. The houses are of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, generally not contiguous, and the majority consisting of a ground-floor only. Most conspicuous are the hotels, and the banks, glorying in stone fronts and plate glass, as befits their dignity; for are they not suckers at the fountainhead, drawing the golden stream which, joining other rills, waters the whole world of commerce? Next door to one of these is perhaps a common log-hut, or a two-roomed cottage of corrugated iron, or a large shop stocked till its miscellaneous contents overflow through doors and windows, and are hung on hooks and pegs outside. Next to this, perhaps, and still in the heart of the town, may be an acre or two of ground covered with disgorged gravel and mud, in the midst of which, and at one end of a great mound twenty or thirty feet high, puffs and sobs a steam engine, as it works the shaft and puddles the produce of the gold mine beneath. It is easy to gain admittance to a gold mine, at least if the manager is satisfied that you are not a spy, and are not interested in the ‘claim’ which lies nearest this one, and with which it probably is, or will be as a matter of course, engaged in litigation as soon as the workings of either approach the boundary between them. Boundaries above ground are productive enough of disputes, but they are nothing to boundaries under ground. The richest harvest reaped by the Victorian bar is that of mining; cases and mining Appeals. But there is not much to see in a mine. Down below I suppose it is not so very different from a coal mine (for the gold is far too minute in quantity to be visible), and not much cleaner. The operations at the surface consist simply in stirring and washing the mud and gravel with water in various ways till the gold settles at the bottom. But a good big panfull of some two thousand pounds’ worth of the clean yellow gold is a pretty thing to see for once.

But the strangest place in Ballarat is an unsightly piece of ground on the slope of a hill, many acres in extent, which has been turned over, heaped up, scooped out, drained, flooded, undermined, perforated, shored up with timber, sifted, scarified, and otherwise tormented as Mother Earth never was tormented before. It is the remains of the old surface diggings, almost (if not quite) the first discovered, and the richest in all Australia, but long since worked out, and now deserted and dismal. It is a pity that no scribbling digger kept a journal during the first year or two after gold was found. Generally speaking, I believe the stories which are told of those days are strictly true. The reality was so strange, so different from any other condition of circumstances conceivable in this century, the crowds suddenly collected were so miscellaneous, and at first so entirely emancipated from all rule, precedent, or prejudice, that there was enough that was original and ludicrous without having recourse to exaggeration and caricature. I believe it is a fact, and no fiction, that a successful digger had a gold collar made for his dog, that he, like his master, might put aside his working dress and be magnificent for the rest of his days. It is a fact that another rode through Ballarat with his horse shod with gold. To keep a carriage and pair was the great ambition of a digger’s wife. There was a woman near Colac who lived in a common log-hut, with nothing but mud for floor, and a couple of stools and a bench or two for furniture. Outside the hut was the carriage, under a tarpaulin, and a pair of horses grazed near. For a year or more she was constantly to be seen on the road to Geelong. Her son drove, and she sat inside in silks and satins gorgeously arrayed, a short pipe in her mouth, and the gin bottle reposing on the cushion by her side.

One day at Ballarat a man rushed up to the police magistrate, his face livid, and speechless with excitement, so that the magistrate began to think he had just committed or witnessed a murder. At last he found words to express himself. He had come upon a nugget so big he could scarcely carry it, and dared not bring it in alone. Two or three of the police went back with him to help him, and he brought it in in triumph, followed by a procession of diggers. And indeed it _was_ a nugget. It was about as big as a leg of mutton, and much the same shape, white lumps of quartz sticking to it like so much fat. It weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he was offered 5,000_l._ for it on the spot. He refused to sell it, and took it home to England to exhibit it. But it proved to be a nugget of expensive habits, and at last was sold to pay for its keep and lodging, and the finder ended, as so many finders of great nuggets ended, in poverty and wretchedness, and even madness.

At Ararat, fifty-six miles beyond Ballarat, the gold-fields remain just as they were left by the diggers; and the claims are more in working order and less broken in than at Ballarat. Ararat is now a thriving township, containing perhaps 2,000 inhabitants. Twelve years ago there were 65,000 people there, digging or dealing with diggers. When the ‘rush’ began the stream of people and drays was continuous, the noses of each team of bullocks close to the dray in front of them, for the whole fifty-six miles, along a track on which, though the district is a thriving one, you will now hardly meet anything on wheels once in ten miles. Centuries may pass without obliterating the traces of these diggings. There is a broad belt of ground, two or three miles long, pierced by thousands of shafts thirty or forty feet apart, with mounds of white sand and gravel beside them. Most of the shafts are oval, four or five feet long, and about two or three wide. Little holes are cut alternately in the nearest pair of opposite sides, to act as steps for going up and down. Each shaft is neatly and cleanly cut, and as intact as if freshly made. All are deserted now; only a few Chinamen remain, laboriously gathering up the crumbs that are left, and contriving to live and save money where an Englishman could not subsist.

There were comparatively few men, gentle or simple, in Victoria when gold was first found who did not try their luck at digging for a greater or less time. Nevertheless, though so short a time has elapsed, it is hard to get a true conception of the state of things during the height of the gold fever. No two men had the same experience. One will tell you that nothing could be more quiet and peaceable and orderly than a concourse of men upon a newly found gold-field; that property and life were safe, and every man so eagerly and excitedly absorbed in his work as scarcely to take his eyes off it while daylight lasted, and impatient of nothing except interruption. Another will say he never stirred after sunset without an open knife in his hand, and will tell you (no doubt with truth) that hundreds, and even thousands, disappeared, whether murdered for their gold, drowned in a swollen creek, or lost and starved in the bush, no one knew or cared to enquire; for in all that crowd who would miss a lonely and friendless man? Not that the police, as far as their scanty numbers permitted, were otherwise than most efficient. In general they were on the best of terms with the diggers; and only in one serious instance, the diggers at Ballarat, considering themselves aggrieved, made armed resistance to the authorities. They formed an entrenched camp and were not dispersed till as many as a hundred of their number had been killed or severely wounded. If money came fast, it had to be spent fast too. Actual famine was with difficulty averted during the first winter. The country round was drained of supplies; provisions went up to fabulous prices. The diggers could not eat their gold; and it cost 100_l._ a ton to bring up flour from Melbourne, for the road was a quagmire like that from Balaklava to Sebastopol, and ninety miles long instead of seven. The carcases of the dead draught bullocks were alone sufficient to indicate the track to one if not to two of the senses.

But it is a mistake to suppose that gold-digging has been throughout a gambling occupation, offering a few prizes and many blanks, and pursued only by reckless men. The big nuggets soon came to an end, and on the other hand experience was gained, and digging became in the long run a tolerably certain and steady occupation, at which a strong man able to bear heat and cold, wet and fatigue, could in general make a pretty steady income, though not often a large one. Many have risen from comparative poverty to great wealth in Victoria, a few by owning sheep stations, many by steady devotion to business, some without any real exertion of body or mind, by the sheer accident of lucky speculations; but I have never heard of a really wealthy man who became so by digging for gold. Yet some have gone on persistently year after year, in New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand, when one field was worked out travelling to another. For there was a strong fascination in the freedom and romance of the life. I have seen the pale face of an overworked waiter at a large hotel light up with enthusiasm as he spoke of it. He had left England and come to Australia ill of consumption, as a last chance to save his life. Idleness did not mend him, he said, so off he went with the rest to the diggings. The first day his limbs would hardly bear him, but each day he got a little stronger, till at the end of four years he had saved 700_l._ and his life. He had been in very different climates—in New South Wales, Victoria, and Otago—but, strange to say, heat, cold, and wet only helped to cure him, and he never even caught cold, he said, as long as he eschewed a house and was faithful to canvas. Alas! in an unlucky hour he invested his savings in township land; the place did not succeed, and in a few weeks his investment was not worth as many farthings as he had given pounds for it. And it was too late to begin again.

It is over now, the wonderful age of gold, as well as the primitive pastoral age which preceded it. In place of diggers swarming like bees, dignified steam-engines draw the gold from the earth, not for those who toil with pick and spade, but chiefly for that throng of mining brokers, and idle, disreputable speculators who crowd the pavement of the Ballarat ‘Corner.’ Few make money by investing in mines. Of those who do, most have secret information; for there is much trickery mixed up with operations in mining shares, and hundreds have lost by them the savings of more prosperous times. Victoria is no longer the place for men with few possessions beyond youth and energy, and with an antipathy to a high stool in a merchant’s office. Let not any brilliant or laborious young Templar doubt but that Melbourne and Ballarat solicitors, like English ones, have sons and sons-in-law, and that there, as at Westminster, interest and connexion are useful, if not essential, handmaids to brains and industry. Romance is at an end; capital has reasserted its sway, and pride of purse is triumphant. It needs must be so; and doubtless, on the whole, mankind gains. But it is difficult to love humanity in the abstract, and tastes and convictions will quarrel sometimes.

IV.

SQUATTING IN VICTORIA.

It sometimes happens that the commonest circumstances of life in distant countries are scarcely realised at home because they are too much matter of every-day experience to be spoken about. I doubt whether people in England appreciate the fact that the greater part of Australia is, in its natural state, for eight or nine months in the year almost entirely destitute of water. To a new comer it sounds strange to hear an up-country Squatter remark that he has no water on his run yet, but he hopes he soon shall have. Although more rain falls in Victoria than in most parts of England during the year, there are hardly any springs, and few streams except the large rivers, which are few and far between, which run for any considerable portion of the year. Why the rain runs off so fast is not thoroughly explained, but its seems there is an incrustation of the subsoil which prevents the rain from penetrating to any depth. The creeks, as they are called, leave water-holes, some of which never dry up through the summer; but these, also, are far between; and so generally the first business of a Squatter in new country is to construct tanks to receive the rain-water from the roofs of his house and outbuildings, which is his drinking-water, and very good water it is; and the second is to build a dam from six to twenty feet high across the nearest hollow—for almost every hollow is a water-course after heavy rain—and in this way to make a reservoir containing water enough for his sheep to drink all the year round, and be washed in at shearing time. A dam is as much an essential appendage to a station as a barn is to a farmyard.

Probably it is this absence of moisture in the ground, and consequently in the air also, which makes distant objects in Victoria so marvellously clear, and gives such peculiarly brilliant colour to the landscape where the conformation of the ground admits of a distant view. I never saw such brilliant colouring anywhere in Europe. It is the one redeeming feature, without which the scenery, except in the mountainous districts, would be tame and dreary enough. The country is seldom undulating, as in Tasmania. The trees are generally small, stunted, and diseased, except on the ranges; the plains are almost destitute of any trees at all, and vegetation is scanty, except in early spring-time. There is a great plain extending for nearly a hundred miles westward of Geelong almost without a break, so flat and (unlike the fen country in England) so destitute of trees or other objects high enough to break the line of the horizon, that at the height of a dozen feet from the ground you may any day see a hill—and not a high hill either—full forty-five miles distant as the crow flies, looking not dim and misty, but a clearly defined blue patch upon the horizon.

To most people there is something intolerably desolate and repulsive in such a plain. Even to those who are most fond of open country it must be depressing under certain circumstances, notably during a rainy fortnight in winter, or on a hot-wind day in summer. But there is something indescribably grand and enjoyable in the continual contemplation of so vast a landscape. When the sun is high it is an expanse of turf, green in winter and brown in summer; but as the afternoon advances, earth and sky become faintly purple, and crimson, and golden; the colours deepen from half-hour to half-hour, till the sun sinks into its bed of turf in a gorgeous blaze of splendour. There are several shallow lakes upon the plain, some very large, and most of them salt. Coming suddenly upon one of them one evening from behind some little sand-hills which concealed it, the margin for some hundred yards in width dry and coated with mud and brine, no human being or habitation visible, and the full brilliance of the setting sun lighting it up, the scene was (except for the absence of mountains in the distance) singularly like the landscape in Holman Hunt’s picture of the ‘Scape-Goat.’ It is a pity that this kind of scenery is spoiled by cultivation. Cut up into little pieces, a plain loses its vastness, while its monotony is increased.