Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Greater Britain: a Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866–1867

1868; Oxford University Press; Volume: s4-II; Issue: 46 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/nq/s4-ii.46.479-c

1471-6941

Chap Sydney, V Caste, Vi Clties,

Travel Writing and Literature

AT early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbour 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 pas- sengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage.As we flew towards the mail steamer, the Kaikoura, the harbour was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far inland on 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 B 2.4GREATER BEITAIN.[CHAP, 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 harbour 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 1,500 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 connexion 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, GREATER BRITAIN.[CHAP.towards Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night of oven -like heat, the sun rose flaming 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 harbour, 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 if it be 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 Govern- ment 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 colours 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 are 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, i.] SYDNEY.9 on the race-course near the city, where I 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 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 coun- tenance, but the crowd presented several curious types.The fitness of the term " corn-stalks " 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 [CHAP.sequent 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 impos- sible, 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.ii.] RIVAL COLONIES.15 The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the settlement of a tropical country by English- men, 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 Eockampton has not been great.The colony, indeed, has prospered much, quadrupling its popula- tion 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, coloured labour 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 recognise 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 1,000 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 culti- vate the Queensland coast plantations.If, however, in.]VICTORIA.23 of the rival capital.In many senses, Melbourne is the London, Sydney the Paris, of Australia.Of the surpassing vigour of the Victorians there can be no doubt ; a glance at the map shows the Victorian railways stretching to the Murray, while those of New South Wales are still boggling at the Green Hills, fifty miles from Sydney.Melbourne, the more distant port, has carried off the Australian trade with the New Zealand gold-fields from Sydney, the nearer port.Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes from it mineral oil, before the Sydney people have found out its value ; and gas in Mel- bourne is cheaper than in Sydney, though the Victorians are bringing their coal five hundred miles, from a spot only fifty miles from Sydney.It is possible that the secret of the superior energy of the Victorians may lie, not in the fact that they are more American, but more English, than the New South Welsh.The leading Sydney people are mainly the sons or grandsons of original settlers " cornstalks" reared in the semi-tropical climate of the coast ; the Victorians are full-blooded English immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tas- mania, Canada, or Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity to live in the exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest climate in the world for healthy men : Melbourne is hotter than Sydney, but its climate is never tropical.The squatters on the Queensland downs, mostly immigrants from England, show the same strong vitality that the Melbourne men pos- sess ; but their brother immigrants in Brisbane the [CHAP.Queensland capital, where the languid breeze resem- bles that of Sydney are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the " cornstalks."Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph of Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter city are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent.They cannot but admit the present glory of what they call the " Mushroom City."The magnificent pile of the new Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which, when finished, will be larger than our own in London), the University, the Parliament House, the Union and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Exchange, the viaducts upon the Govern- ment railroad lines, all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem built as if to last for ever ; still, they say that there is a certain want of per- manence about the prosperity of Victoria.When the gold discovery took place, in 1851, such a trade sprang up that the imports of the colony jumped from one million to twenty-five millions sterling in three years ;but, although she is now commencing to ship bread- stuffs to Great Britain, exports and imports alike show a steady decrease.Considerably more than half of the hand-workers of the colony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly half the popula- tion is resident upon the gold-fields ; yet the yield shows, year by year, a continual decline.Had it not been for the discoveries in New Zealand, which have carried off the floating digger population, and for the wise discouragement by the democrats of the monopolization of the land, there would have been in.]VICTORIA.25 distress upon the gold-fields during the last few years.The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, and the squatters call loudly for assisted immigration and free trade, but the stranger sees nothing to astonish him in the temporary stagnation that attends a decreasing gold production.The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in the world; the arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic.The brilliant statistician who fills the post of Registrar-General to the colony, had the immense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged ; and, as the Governments of the other colonies have the last few years takenVictoria for model, a gradual approach is being made to uniformity of system.It was not too soon, for British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing.I have seen a list of imports in which one class consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, asafcetida, and astro- nomical instruments ; boots, bullion, and salt butter ; capers, cards, caraway seed ; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves ; maps and manure ; philosophical instruments and salt pork ; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages.Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind.Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but the statistics of these young countries are figure- poems.Tables that in England contrast jute with hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or pit against each other the powers of race and race.GREATER BRITAIN.[CHAP.landed in Australia.The English diggers announced their intention of " rolling up" the Chinese, and pro- ceeded to "jump their claims" that is, trespass on the mining plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt themselves strong enough to purchase claims.The Chinese bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger who had sold them a claim for 50Z.one morning, hammered the pegs into the soft ground the same day, and then " jumped the claim " on the pretence that it was not " pegged out."This was too much for the Chinese owner, who tomahawked the digger on the spot.The English at once fired the Chinese town, and even attacked the English driver of a coach for conveying Chinamen on his vehicle.Some diggers in North Queensland are said to have kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport, as the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with terriers.On the older gold-fields, such as those of Sandhurst and Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the Chinese lies dormant, but it is not the less strong for being free from physical violence.The woman in a baker's shop near Sandhurst, into which I wentto buy a roll for lunch, shuddered when she told me of one or two recent marriages between Irish " Biddies" and some of the wealthiest Chinese.The man against whom all this hatred and suspi- cion is directed is no ill-conducted rogue or villain.The chief of the police at Sandhurst said that the Chinese were " the best of citizens ;" a member of the Victorian Parliament, resident on the very edge of in.VICTORIA.31 their quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as "well-behaved and frugal;" the Kegistrar- General told me that there is less crime, great or small, among the Chinese, than among any equal number