CHAPTER III

MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE FOR THE GANDER”

WHEN I was a girl I remember many times hearing my father say that he would rather mount a lady on a young, well-broken horse than on an old hunter; that they knew too much, that they had mastered the art of falling soft, and preferred their own way to that of their rider. As a housekeeper, I know I would rather have an absolutely untaught young girl as a domestic than one who held her own views as to how everything was to be done; equally fearing and disliking any new innovation which might possibly mean extra work. For the same reason, if I was a politician, I would rather have my lines cast in a new country, not yet pot-bound by traditions. England seems at times to hover, literally paralyzed, between the devil of:—“They say” and the deep sea of:—“Has been.” I recollect that in the old days at home a ploughman was ordered to run his furrow along a special field from east to west. I can see now the odd, clouded look of bewilderment which came into his face as the order was given to him; then the drawing down of the long upper lip, the set of the obstinate chin, when his protestation that it “wur allus ploughed t’other way” were received merely by a smiling repetition of the command. Finally, his utter bewilderment when the—to his mind—unanswerable argument that it had “allus been ploughed that way, when ferther wur a lad, an’ gran’ferther wur a lad, an’ the owd meyster wur alive,” was met in the same manner.

The merest yokel in Australia could see no reason at all in an argument such as this. Here the people revel in change. They are ready to try anything, and, if one plan fails, another is at once experimented with. Sometimes it may be rather like the progress of a bull in a china-shop, but still it is progress, and the people here find it very difficult to realize the mind of a country which takes up the attitude of a man refusing to change his shirt for fear that he should suffer some chill or discomfort in the process. In the article on the Sydney Congress in the _Times_ of May 24, 1910, the difference between the two countries in many political matters is very plainly stated:—“There is nothing more extraordinary in Free Trade propaganda than the lame contention that we must continue upon a ruinous course because a new policy will involve initial difficulties. That argument is laughed to scorn in Australia. The Australian fears no difficulties. The spirit which leads men to face and overcome obstacles is in his blood. His history and condition are one long record of triumphing over difficulties, and he cannot understand why the complexity of framing a tariff should be urged for a moment in England. He thinks, like many Englishmen, that the historian of the future will contemplate with amazement the spectacle of the Dominions seeking closer unity, while the Mother Country remains coldly repelling their advances.”

A question one very often hears asked in Australia, usually as a joke or sort of catch-phrase, is:—“Where do I come in?” But there is no joke at all about the state of mind which such a question implies. I have often heard new chums say very nasty things about what they call the “self-seeking nature of the people”; and they will point out—when the distinction between the old and new country are being discussed—all that Australia owes to England, how she depends on her for naval protection and for her very life as a nation. But, still, something more is expected from the modern mother than merely boxing the ears of all the other children who interfere with her progeny, and, after all, the obligation is not entirely one-sided. Even if we forget the ready help which was given in the time of the Boer War, we ought not to forget that in Australia many thousands of people, that England confessedly could do nothing with, have been remade into men and women, who—with their children—have gone to the making of a very fine people.

In many ways Australia is more loyal to England than she is to herself. Among private people there always seems very little preference given to Australian-made goods alone, but a very great deal to all goods made by English-speaking people, though naturally those in authority intend to protect their own manufacturers first. Out here Imperial Preference is not a party matter, and in these days to come across even one important question in politics, where the good of the entire country alone is considered, seems like opening a window and letting into a stuffy, gas-heated atmosphere a stream of pure air; while it is for this reason that the defeat of Mr. Deakin—during the last election—has not upset the whole apple-cart, as such a Labour victory would inevitably have done in England.

There is no doubt, I believe, that Australia, as a whole, is in favour of Imperial Preference. At the Sydney Congress, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart were frankly for it, and though the three great Chambers of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide remained neutral, none of the State capitals voted against it, while most of the smaller Chambers were most openly in its favour.

That some of the Chambers were neutral is not to be wondered at. Already Preference rates are extended to 294 items of British goods, coming under the Preferential tariff and paying on an average 24 per cent. less duty than foreign goods of the same kind; the total rebate on British goods in Australia in 1908 reaching the sum of £828,000. Foreign exporters are not blind to what the Australians are doing for their fellows, and in one instance a special discount was offered, equivalent to the amount of Preference given to British-made goods, while every sort of effort has been made to undervalue or dump foreign goods at less than their market value. And yet it is the British manufacturers who have most persistently tried to hoodwink the Australians, English cotton materials having been actually sent to the Continent to be printed and dyed, then back to England to be packed and shipped off as Preferential goods.

Now the stipulation has been made that goods commanding Preference must have not less than 25 per cent. of their value represented by English labour, the tolerance and moderation of the rule speaking well for the patience of Australia, though it certainly does not speak well for English manufacturers that there should need to be any such regulation. It is like having to compel a man, to whom you are paying ten pounds a week, to contribute ten shillings for the support of the wife, who keeps his house in order, cooks his food, and rears his children.

But this is not the only grievance that Australia has against English manufacturers; an even more fatal one is that they simply cannot get what they want. For some years I was working in Melbourne at house-decorating and fitting. My business took me among wholesale and retail tradesmen and importers of furniture, hardware, draperies, carpets, tiles, and the hundred and one items that are needed for the fitting up of a modern dwelling, and from one and all came the same complaint. They could not get what they wanted from the English manufacturers. Goods were not true to sample; there were not a sufficiency of one sort, and, when more was applied for, the buyers were either frankly told that they could not have it, or a different class of goods was sent in its place. Mr. Hamilton Wicks, the British Trade Commissioner, has spoken pretty plainly about the difficulties which Australian houses find in getting their orders properly attended to in England, however much they may wish to be loyal to the Empire. Often it is a case of:—“Oh, anything is good enough for the Colonies; they are used to roughing it out there!” or, perhaps, less flagrant, but none the less irritating, there is an absolute lack of knowledge as to the requirements in Australia; a pig-headed refusal to see that many articles needed here—particularly agricultural implements—are of a necessity quite different from those in use in England. “Give Grandam kingdom, and thy Grandam will give you a pear or apple or a plum,” says England, “and do not be impertinent enough to quibble about its being a trifle overripe or blighted.”

To the people at home who assert—as I have often heard them do—that Australia is a completely self-seeking country, I would recommend a short study of Australian commerce—even of Victorian commerce alone—and of the statistics showing the imports of the last few years, a very brief perusal of which will be sufficient to prove that an infinitely larger amount of Australian money is spent in England, and other parts of the Empire, than in any foreign country. In 1908 Australia spent in imports from British Possessions, including India, £36,319,781, as against £13,479,492 in those from all other countries, including the United States.

In 1904–1908 the proportion of goods imported from England and other British Possessions averaged 72.93 per cent., and from all other countries, including America, 27.7 per cent.—could England itself show as fair a record?

Again, though in 1908, £1,305,602 were spent on German imports by Victoria alone, the value of Victorian goods exported to Germany reached £2,015,536, so that the obligation was by no manner of means all on one side.

[Picture: Dairy Herd and Silo]

Mr. Foster Fraser has two great faults to find with Australians—they are slack, and they are few. Oddly enough, while continually reverting to the thinness of the population in the country districts, he finds fault—to take only one of the many instances—with the fact that the output of butter is nowhere near as great in Australia as it is in Denmark. Denmark, a made country! A country that has been perfecting its dairying industry for years! Why, I remember when I was quite a small child—and that was a long while ago—that the cooking butter used to be brought in little kegs from Denmark—to a pastoral country like England, too! Little Denmark, which, including Iceland, has a population of 2,708,470, with a density of 49.94, as against the immense continent of Australia, with its population, according to the last census, of 4,275,306. Why, Denmark, including Iceland, covers an area of but 55,306 square miles, and Victoria, the smallest state in Australia, 87,884. Put 2,708,470 people—the population of Denmark—into it to start dairy-farming, and then comparisons may become merely odious, and not, in addition, ludicrous. As it is, Victoria alone exported to the United Kingdom, in 1908, butter to the value of £868,068, and that’s “none so dusty,” as her own people would say; while the amount of butter actually consumed there was valued at £1,250,000, and cheese, both consumed and exported, at £100,000.

It seems as if I was “barracking” for Australia as against England, but very far from that. Though I have lived in Australia for years, and though it has helped me to a wider, fuller life than I ever knew before, England is my own country, and still holds my heart. And yet, when one hears, as one so often does, sweeping and wholesale condemnations and criticism—or, perhaps worse, faint praise—given without any realization of what a country really is, and how it has reached the position it now holds, it seems only honest that those who have gained their living through that country, to whom it has afforded friendship, shelter, and consideration, should speak of it as they have found it. A sort of friction seems inevitable between parents and their grown-up children, but the fault is not always and altogether on the children’s side—and, in any case, the friction is only intensified either by interference or well-meant attempts at rearrangement. Australians hate alike interference and pity. If you sympathize with a man or woman out here, it is ten to one that they will inform you that they can do their “own lying awake at night.” Once when a miner died up West his mates put up above his grave these words as a text—and, in truth, there are many worse:—“He did his damndest; angels could do no more.” But, then, the world in general is much like the ultra-tidy housewife of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes writes “that if the Angel Gabriel did come down from heaven, she would be complaining of him, that he dropped his feathers about the house.”

Australia is so much overgoverned that it is really a wonder the broth is not spoilt between the multitude of cooks. It seemed bad enough before Federation, but it was nothing to what it is now, and one wonders that there is anyone left to govern. How long the state of affairs will go on which permits the expense of two Government Houses, and a superfluity of officials, I do not know. It seems, indeed, as if everybody must have been too busy to bother about it, and that the State Governorship remains, like many another archaic institution, simply because so many more intricate complications engage the attention of the people.

Luckily for Australia, the separate functions of her two Houses of Parliament—the Legislative Assembly, or Lower House, and the Legislative Council, or Upper House—are more definitely defined than those of the House of Commons and the House of Lords are at home—or have been till just lately. Still, Australian politics represent a tangled web to the new chum, and one which I have had very little time or opportunity of studying. I scarcely know, indeed, how I ever got started on the subject of Preference, but as the chapter somehow began itself in that way, and as this book is most likely to be read by people at home, who, by some chance, may happily know even less about the matter than I do, a few of the leading points of the game may not come amiss.

Frankly, I confess that the first day I was present at a debate in the Legislative Assembly I was reminded of nothing in the world so much as the trial scene in “Alice in Wonderland”:

“‘No, no,’ said the Queen; ‘sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

“‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

“‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

“‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

“‘Off with her head!’ said the Queen; but nobody moved.

“‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice. ‘You are nothing but a pack of cards.’

“At this all the cards rose up into the air and came flying down upon her.”

The question in the House at that time was, if I remember rightly, something to do with the duty on cloth caps made in Tasmania, and it really seemed astounding that so much excitement could be got out of such a little thing. Everything anyone said was frankly contradicted even in plainer words than “stuff and nonsense!” Everybody seemed to speak at once—or, rather, shout in a vain hope that they might be heard above the babel—and personalities of all sorts were freely indulged in, either to be completely disregarded or replied to by more abuse; often, I must confess, rather wittily put; while, should any orator succeed in shouting down his fellow, even then his troubles were far from ended, his every peculiarity being ruthlessly registered by the Press. The other day I came across an amusing and most characteristic notice of the New South Wales Premier in the _Bulletin_, from which I cannot resist quoting, affording as it does a very good example of this freedom of speech:

“McGowan will no longer be able to complain of getting too little newspaper space. He will get enough; but the Lord help those who have to ‘take’ him, and preserve them from charges of misreporting. For McGowan is the most slovenly speaker in the world. If he’s not, I’d like to shoot the other. Half his sentences are never finished, and his remarks trail round and round his subject like a snake in a hen-coop looking for the exit. His constantly repeated gag is—‘The point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is this.’ Then he suddenly discovers that he has mislaid the point, or left it at home, or in the tram, or somewhere, and while he is trying to recollect what he did with it, he fills in time by rounding off a flock of sentences which he left unfinished earlier in the evening.”

And again:

“The haste of the Fisher Government to do things lately moved Alfred Deakin to describe its proceeding as ‘quick-lunch legislation.’ Poor old Alfred’s variety was ‘fasting man’ or ‘dry-crust legislation.’ You sat down at the table and looked at Alfred’s political bill-of-fare. In about three years a dead waiter came, and you ordered chops. The waiter departed slowly in a state of decay, and fell into dust before he reached the door. Then you stayed around, through geological periods, till Judgment Day, and, looking down from the battlements of heaven, you saw Alfred’s cook still chasing the sheep through perdition. Truly there was no quick lunch about the Deakin methods! In his restaurant the dropped soup took six months to reach the floor, and, as likely as not, you saw Alexander the Great at the next table, for time didn’t matter there.”

One politician who reached the limit in the matter of political amenities, and who has died very recently, was Mr. J. H. Graves. The abuse, the satire, and the damning with faint praise, the awful disclosures, and the still more awful insinuations, that Mr. Graves indulged in, were a perfect nightmare to the House of his day, all the more to be dreaded from the fact that he never spoke at random, that all his shafts were at once winged and barbed by truth, and their course directed by a sure and certain knowledge of the tenderest portion of his writhing victim’s conscience. People said, and, I believe, with truth, that J. H. Graves kept a carefully compiled Doomsday Book, containing the history of every member of the House, with every possible detail of his every mistake and misdemeanour, and all the mistakes and misdemeanours, the scandals and family skeletons, of his progenitors. A speaker in the House cannot be summoned for libel; all that can happen is that he should be called upon to apologize for anything particularly insulting—and Mr. Graves was ready to apologize with cheerful alacrity. There was always plenty more in that fatal book. It is said that Mr. J. L. Purves, by whose death the Australian Bar has lately lost one of its most brilliant members, once got hold of the original book and burnt it; and that, though another was begun, it was so much less voluminous and comprehensive, members ceased, from that time onwards to feel cold shivers running down their backs when Graves’s glance fell upon them; and so much of his power was lost, though in a dispute with another man, who came from the same county as himself, this second book was actually produced in proof of its existence.

“I have never been guilty,” thundered a member recently, in a fine fury of indignation, “of going to the telephone and impersonating another man, and using the information obtained against him in Parliament under the cloak of privilege. But I must say the honourable member for — stands here self-convicted of that action.” I have not the faintest recollection of what it was all about, but it is characteristic; while the title “honourable,” as it is here used, strikes me as rather a meaningless survival in a democratic country. “Hi don’t call ’im the ’onourable,” I once heard an emphatic political opponent declare. “Hi calls ’im the ’orrible.”

“Cabbage-grower!” someone shouted at some public meeting where Mr. Bent was making a speech. “Well, there’s no question about that,” retorted the late Premier beamingly; “the question is, did I, or did I not, grow good cabbages?”

The odd thing is that out of all the schoolboy chaff, and the apparently hopeless babel of mere words, such good measures can be evoked. It is somehow like flinging a medley of unappetizing-looking scraps into a casserole, and, rather to one’s own surprise, evoking a good soup—when all the scum has been removed.

The State Governor, as the Victoria Year Book remarks bluntly, is only expected to exercise his judgment in assenting to, or dissenting from, or reserving of, any Bills passed by Parliament, and the granting or withholding of a dissolution—either of which measures will, for the time being, render him equally unpopular—or the appointment of a new Ministry. Apart from this, his whole duty consists in looking nice and behaving prettily, while by far the most arduous part of the position rests upon the shoulders of his wife. If I was going to choose a new Governor for Victoria—which somehow no one has even thought of asking me to do—I should not even want to see him, though my interview with his wife would be long and arduous. She must dress beautifully, for she is of little use unless she wears things that other women can copy; but she must give herself no airs, while the complete frankness of the criticism which she will meet with may be gathered, with some amusement, from the following description of a garden fête at Storrington, the State Government House:

“The visitors were so eager for the frivol that they arrived before schedule time (3.30). Motors and carriages were politely dissuaded from entering the gates, while Aides peeped unhappily round the pillars of the veranda, and sent agonized messages upstairs. But the Carmichaels were getting into party duds as fast as they could. They had been opening the motor-drive out to Toorak at 2.30, and the lady’s return home and quick change into a dream of a lilac gown had all to be compressed into the one brief hour. When at last the pair came out, the dress—a trailing circumstance of nonchalant coolness—was received with murmurs of admiration. Someone has been redrawing the lines of the Carmichael lady’s figure; it has the new slenderness necessary for the new dressing.”

The ideal Governor’s wife must be of the bluest possible blood—nothing insults a democratic country like playing down to it in the matter of nobodies—and yet she must forget all the class distinctions she has ever known. She must remember everybody, entertain royally, and spend lavishly. There was once a superlatively mean Governor, with a superlatively mean wife, in Victoria, and they will never be forgotten; it is a fault that the people here are not prone to themselves, and which they simply will not tolerate in those whom they consider handsomely paid to cut a dash. I never saw but one public-house called after that particular Governor, and this, in itself, is significant—besides, even it is in a mean back street.

When the Ministry finds it is unable to disentangle itself, when it has not a proper working majority, or is defeated on any matter which it considers vital, then the Premier, instead of tendering his resignation and asking the Governor to “send for” a leading member of the Opposition—as would be the case were he defeated in Parliament or at the polls—asks the Governor for a dissolution, the terms of which are very carefully dictated to him, though at other times he acts mainly on the advice of the Executive Council.

In the Executive Council there are eight salaried Ministers. Four at least of these must always be members of the Council or Assembly, but not more than two of the Council or six of the Assembly; while upon accepting office a Minister vacates his seat in Parliament, though he may return to it without being re-elected. The Council—or Upper House—consists of thirty-four members, being divided into seventeen electoral provinces, each of which returns two members. The member of each electorate who receives the largest number of votes retains his seat for six years, if there is no General Election, the other members retiring after three years.

In the Lower House there are sixty-five members, single electorates being provided for each seat. Universal suffrage is in force; all persons natural-born or naturalized, and untainted by crime, are on the general roll, and plural voting is not allowed. A member of the Assembly receives certain allowances for his expenses, at the rate of £300 a year. This is, I suppose, given that professional or working men may feel free to devote themselves exclusively to a political life, and be relieved from all other business anxieties. In England it may seem quite a lot, but it appears to me—considering the really large incomes to be made in Australia by a thoroughly able man in nearly any business or profession—that it is not enough. It pays the working man, hand over hand, to go into Parliament, for it is not likely that he would make as much at his own job, however good he was at it. But a capable lawyer, say, or doctor, upon whose mental training large sums have been spent, will earn far more than that if he is any good; and certainly, if he cannot manage his own affairs, he will not be able to manage those of his country. So that a successful man, particularly if he is married and has a family to bring up in the same way in which he himself has been brought up, would have to be peculiarly unselfish—almost culpably so—to relinquish his profession for a Parliamentary career. I suppose it would be impossible that members should be paid in proportion to their former earnings and their status in life, but, after all, that would be the fairest thing, and insure the best type of man.

Apart from personal expense, the election expenses of a candidate for the Upper House are fixed at £400, and those of a candidate for the Lower House at £150, while there are strict regulations regarding the manner in which this sum should be spent—viz., in printing, advertising, publishing, issuing, distributing addresses and notices; and on rolls, stationery, messages, postage, and telegrams; on hiring halls and holding public meetings; on the expenses of committee-rooms; on a scrutineer, one only at each booth; and on one agent for any electoral province or district.

Although the power of the Victoria Parliament has necessarily been considerably curtailed since Federation, all matters to do with the internal development of the State are still in its hands; while, apart from Customs and Excise, it retains the power of taxation for State needs and the Public Debt, the State railways, Crown lands, mining and factory legislation; while to the municipalities have now been accorded the Water Supply Trust, the Tramway Trust, and Mining and Land Boards; while the Postal System, all Custom and Excise Duties, and all affairs of Foreign Policy, are under the control of the Upper House.

Any income over £200 a year is subject to income tax in Victoria, with an exemption of £100 up to £15,000. Incomes derived from personal exertions are taxed 3d. for every pound of the taxable amount up to £300; up to £800, 4d.; up to £1,300, 5d.; and up to £1,800, 6d.; over that, 7d.; the incomes derived from property being taxed at double that amount—the tax-collectors seeming to be possessed of a considerable amount of insight. Certainly no one has ever so much as suggested to me that I should pay an income tax, though I am doubtful as to whether this should be taken as a compliment either to myself or my publishers; while I must confess that I have felt at times rather hurt that no one in authority has credited me with possible brains to the extent of over £200 a year.

A short study of the Victorian Land Tax seems to give one a singularly vivid picture of the country, being arranged, as it is, on a basis that would be out of the question at home, for the tax is levied, not on the mere size of the property, but on the amount of sheep that it will carry. Land that will carry four sheep or more to the acre is valued at £4 per acre; land carrying one and a half sheep—which half not being specified—£3; one sheep per acre, £2; under one sheep per acre, £1. All estates above 640 acres, and valued, by this means, at over £2,500, are taxed at the rate of 1¼ per cent. upon their capital value, after deducting an exemption for £2,500—exemption only being allowed on one estate for each owner.

The railways are the property of the State, the first railway-line in Victoria having been opened in 1854. Apart from a few suburban lines, for many years every thought was concentrated on directing the railways towards the mining centres, and very little attention was given to any but the gold producing areas. But gradually, as people began to return to their farms and sheep-runs, and the agricultural possibilities of the State again seemed worth considering, the numbers of railway-lines began to increase, and during the twenty years which followed 1874 no fewer than 2,498 miles of railway were constructed and opened for traffic, since which only 348 miles of line have been added, chiefly in the wheat-growing districts of the North-West.

The whole system of Victorian railways, with its staff of some 13,000 men, is managed under Parliament by three commissioners only—an odd exception to the general overgoverning that occurs in most public affairs.

[Picture: Bringing wheat to station]

People are always travelling in Victoria, seldom staying at home for even a single day’s holiday, while they think no more of going to Sydney for the inside of a week than the average Londoner would of going to Brighton; and it is amusing to remark that the number of passengers carried over the lines in the year 1908 represented sixty journeys a year for each man, woman, and child in the State—though, of course, there are many people who will take three or four different journeys to separate suburbs in one day, to balance the lonely dwellers in the back blocks who have never been in a train in their lives. Still, the average of 150,000 passengers coming and going at Flinders Street Station alone, in one single day, seems to me a very large one.

For the purpose of administering the Land Act, Victoria—and it must be remembered here that I am speaking of State, and not of Federal, affairs—is divided into seventeen districts, in each of which is a land office and officer. These districts include 3,316,727 acres of pastoral Crown land, exclusive of 6,412,500 acres of Mallee land—the entire Mallee covering 11,000,999 acres. This spare land is graded into first, second, and third class land, auriferous and pastoral land; the greater part of the first-class land, with sheltered valleys, suitable for vineyards and orchards, being in the Buln-Buln area, the soil of which is mostly volcanic, and of a warm chocolate brown.

A great many of the large estates in Victoria are being subdivided into farms, the squatters being under compulsion to sell a certain proportion of their property. The Land Branch has now acquired forty-nine properties, which it has subdivided into 1,203 farms, and 589 allotments for workmen’s houses—the question as to who the workmen are to work for apparently not having been very seriously considered—while shortly the Werribee Park Estate of 23,214 acres will also be available.

One knows, of course, that Victoria must be more thickly populated. But one cannot wonder that squatters whose fathers have acquired vast areas of land, who have built dwelling-houses, fenced and planted, invested money in stock, and, in fact, devoted the whole of their life to the care and the improvement of their properties, should feel aggrieved at seeing them taken away from them, chopped up into small holdings, and allotted to men who have never done anything towards the furtherance of the export and import trade, or the gain and credit of their country. Still far above this, it must be most galling of all to have shipload after shipload of emigrants brought out to occupy land which the squatters feel belongs to them—morally, as well as actually, if land ever did belong to anybody, wrested from the wilds as it has so often been by incredible labour and risk of life.

Progress seems always to involve a trampling underfoot. It is a Moloch whose chariot-wheels spurt blood at every turn. Many of the Victorian landowners are not only indignant, they are genuinely aghast; heart-sick at the deprivations of the Land Board, their grievance being aggravated by the undoubted fact that there is still a great quantity of land which is literally no man’s ground, as far as settlers are concerned. I heard one story of a very well-known family in the Western district, the founders of whom, a Scotchman and his wife and two children, journeyed up from Melbourne by waggon, in the days when the whole country was infested with dangerous blacks, and, finding a pleasant, fertile pastureland in the Western country, with rich volcanic soil, well watered, determined to settle there.

It was necessary, however, for the man to go back to Melbourne for implements, provisions, and stock, and all the other necessities of life. If they all went someone might come and snap up the land; in any case, it would be a long and weary journey with the bullocks, and he could get there more quickly and easily alone on horseback. So the waggon was made into a temporary house, and, with ammunition and food enough to last till her husband’s return—which at the quickest would not be before a month were well passed—the woman, an English gentlewoman, with her two tiny children, settled down to hold the land against the possible encroachments of other white settlers; above all, to hold her own life and that of her children against the more than probable onslaught of the blacks, and all the horrors of which they were capable. Some day, for the good of Australia and the Australians, the history of such people ought to be written. Yet it is to land so won and so held that every casual “rouse-about” or street loafer feels that he has a perfect right.

One can in some ways understand the feeling against large landowners better in England, where space is so limited; where people literally heat into anarchy with being packed so closely together; where land was acquired, for the most part, centuries ago, and the proprietors are nice and clean, alike of blood or sweat. But out here it is different. Old men remember the hand-to-hand fight with the desert; the danger, the almost incredible difficulties of transport; and, above all, the self-sacrifice and privation of the women whose sons now hold the land.

[Picture: Milking time on a dairy farm]

It is not the Land Board that one condemns; they are doing what they feel is best for the country, and perhaps will be best for the new settlers, when they have shaken down into their places, though one can but believe that, in the end, the man who is industrious and far-seeing will inevitably acquire more and yet more of the land which the thriftless muddler finds himself unable to manage, when large estates will gather again like snowballs. But it is the average man in the street who talks as if the squatters had done nothing but wallow in luxury for centuries that makes one so mad.

In many of the dairying districts owners of large estates have voluntarily sub-let a great part of their land, and set up butter factories, to which their tenants bring their milk. In the old days all the butter not required by a farmer’s own household would be bartered at the local store for groceries and clothing, the farmers’ wives getting a poor return indeed for it during the spring, when it was a drug in the market; and to such as these the central butter factories have proved a veritable boon, adding enormously to their comfort, and minimizing their labour. In some instances the farms are leased, and the tenant pays rent, but in others the landlord stocks the farm and provides all the implements, while the tenant supplies the labour, and proceeds are divided; one great advantage accruing to the small farm being that the factories pay for the milk either weekly or monthly, while the market is absolutely sure. Every day the tenant-farmer drives up with his milk-cart to the factory door; the milk is taken in and weighed; it is then analyzed, and the value, according to the percentage of cream, is credited to his account; while he drives off with the separated milk—due to from the day before for his poddy-calves—all his responsibility as regards the milk being at an end. Do they use the term “poddy-calves” in England? For the life of me, I cannot remember. Anyhow, it means a calf fed on the same system as a modern baby, this bottle-feeding of young calves being a serious item in the manifold work of a dairy farm.

A Victorian butter factory is a delightful sight. The scrupulous cleanliness, the huge tanks of cream, the vast churns at work, and, above all, the great swiftly-revolving disc of wood upon which the butter is worked. Delicious stuff it is, too, a rich, deep, natural yellow colour, and fresh flavour; infinitely superior to the ordinary home-made product, where the cream is often kept too long, in the effort to collect enough to be worth the churning. Already Victorian butter has reached Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Corea, Arabia, Cape Colony, Natal, Portuguese East Africa, German East Africa, Dutch East Indies, Malay States, Philippines, Reunion, Hawaii, Fiji, and Mauritius—and when I think of the butter we used to have, some ten years ago, when I was in the last-named island, I feel that it and many hundred similar places, have something to thank Australia for. I will not venture to name the country that the tinned abomination, which was sold there under the name of butter, came from, but it was like nothing so much as what the old Oxfordshire ploughmen used to call “dodments,” to “sloime with dodments” being, in their vernacular, the equivalent to “greasing a cart-wheel.”

Oddly enough, Victorian farmers do not take kindly to breeding pigs. I believe, if I ever became an agriculturalist, that would be the one line I should take up, though, as far as I know, I never heard of a woman pig-farmer. However, the assertion that Gilbert White makes in his “Natural History of Selborne” that the progeny of one sow amounted to 300 has always fascinated me, and it seems strange that, with the large increase of all other industries in Victoria—particularly of dairy and fruit farms—the number of pigs has actually fallen, though the prices they fetch are higher than they ever were before. Here, at least, should be a chance for the Irish emigrant further than that of “sitting on the gate.”

A friend of mine once told me that he was driving through a country district with the parish priest, when they passed an old Irishman engaged in this historical occupation. The priest, drawing rein, mentioned some wedding, at which he had lately officiated, expressing his regrets that he had been obliged to leave directly the ceremony was over, and inquired of the old man whether they had a good supper, and plenty of fun after it.

“Sure, yer Reverence,” answered Paddy, his face wreathed in smiles—“we did that. And lashins and lavins ther wur. Buther on bacon!” Lashins and lavins! And so there ought to be for the pigs in the dairy districts, judging from the statistics, which assert that the output of separated milk in the State is 1,385,000,000 pounds, leaving sufficient after every calf in Victoria has been fed to produce 40,000,000 pounds of pork. There’s “buther on bacon fur yez!”

In the early days, apart from gold, wool was one of the chief productions in Victoria, as in New South Wales. During later years, however, it has been surpassed by the combined industries of dairy produce and grain. Still, there are 14,000,000 sheep in the State, mostly merinoes, producing some of the finest wool in the world, particularly the sheep from the bounteous Western district, where the family of Macarthurs—Captain John Macarthur, nearly a hundred years ago, having introduced the first merino sheep from Spain and Great Britain—still flourish, or did flourish when I was last in that part of the world, before the craze for chopping up estates became the vogue. I remember being shown little samples of wool by an old squatter and told the different sort of sheep from which they were cut, then made to shut my eyes, and learn to name the varieties from the feel alone. I would have made a good wool-sorter, he said; and, honestly, I believe it would be a fine trade for women, with their delicate sense of touch.

That special station had been magnificently fenced and guarded from the wind by acre upon acre of gum-tree plantations. There had been a great bush fire just before I was last there, which swept for miles across the open country, destroying or injuring many of the old man’s treasured plantations, and even scorching the creepers off the solid, square-built stone homestead. Every man, woman, and child on the place had worked like fury to stamp it out, and just saved the home; but, beside the fencing and younger plantations, any number of sheep were destroyed, and, I believe, the wool-shed also. Then, a year or so later, just as the shearing was finished, there came a sudden late spell of hard frost and killed 10,000 of the sheep. So a station-owner’s life, even in these days, is not all beer and skittles, as the man at the street corner thinks; and who will make fences and plant trees when the country districts are all a patchwork of small holdings, each owner trying to get a fortune out of his own special little lot? It’s a vexed question all round, but somehow it seems there ought to be enough to pay Paul without robbing Peter.

What a dry chapter! The _Bulletin_ would say it was written by a “Wowser”—a Wowser being an advocate of everything dry, of temperance and all the virtues, who expresses his opinions in such a manner that the good he advocates appears as offensive as he is himself. The Wowser is quite a common species in Victoria, and has even been known to crop up among the highest dignitaries of the Anglican Church.