The Australians. A social sketch

Part I. The Pacific Siope

I. Along the Coast 17 II. The Sea-coast Cities 23 III. Culture and Society 39 IV. The Men of Mark 59 V. Two Australian Writers 97

Part II. The Eastern Interior

I. "Up Country" 135 II. The Squatters 143 III. The Selectors 155 IV. The Bush People 165 V. The Land Question ... . . . 1S7 Postscript 235 Appendix [The large bull; of this book is made us from the series of articles of mine on Australian social life which appeared recently in the Fortnightly Review. I have to thank the proprietors of the Review for their permission to reprint this series. I have made any alterations, omissions, or additions which seemed in any way ad vantageous. — F. A.] Cairo, Egypt, Christmas, 1892.

Preface

. The only names of Australians which are at all familiar to the general run of Englishmen are those of cricketers, rowers, and prize fighters. If the individualities of merely the Australian public men who, like many of these others. have visited England, were but half as familiar as those of (say) Spofforth, Beach, or Slavin, Imperial Federationists would not be agitating so helplessly in the dark for such hopeless impracticabilities as they are, and there would be a much more appreciable chance than there is of England and Australia getting to understand one another before they are separated a perpetuity. Let me not seem to depreciate the athletes. Quite unconsciously, of course, these men of

PREFACE.

. 2 brawn have done more to impress on the race, in its different world-scattered habitats, the fact of its solidarity than all the purposeless rhodo montade that has been, and is being, written and spoken by the amateur and professional agitators on this already tiresome topic. A few Englishmen talking nonsense about England to Australians, a few Anglo- Australians talking nonsense about Australia to English men, have now become something very like an organised, self-advertising chorus of social cliques, while timid and narrow-minded political leaders in both countries, aware that all this clamour amounts to nothing, are waiting to see if anything verifiably genuine can yet proceed from it before they declare themselves. Alas, it is not in this way that communities far removed and strange to one another, by reason of in many ways very dissimilar natural and social conditions, escape radical misappre hensions, overcome innate prejudices, learn to understand and trust each other's efforts and aspirations. Were I writing here my impressions as to the wicket-keeping of Blackham, or the bowling of Ferris, the rowing of Searle or of Beach,

PREFACE.

. 3 the boxing and fighting capacity of Jackson or of Slavin, I should know that I was writing for a public certainly interested, and not by any means unintelligent, and my criticism would feel at once a continual stimulus and a continual check. And this not merely because a certain section of the public, which we might call the sporting public, has at some time or other actually watched the performances of Slavin and Jackson, of Beach and Searle, of Ferris and Blackham, but because the whole of it has read a great deal and talked a great deal more, about these individuals and their fellows here and in Australia ; so that, even were I to go on and discuss the style and capabilities of Australian cricketers, rowers, or prize-fighters, who have never been in England, I should still be sure of at least keen attention, and a certain amount of discrimination.

But, when I set about trying to say a few words concerning what seem to me to be the real characteristics of the Austra lians, and the real men of mark in Australian public life, I know it is different. In the first place, not a single name I can mention will be familiar.

PREFACE.

. 4 The one name that can lay even the faintest claims to such a qualified notoriety is that of Sir Henry Parkes, a man whose day is obviously past ; and a iittle while ago, in a weekly paper of standing which piques itself on its well informed gravity, he was spoken of as Sir Joseph Parkes, while in a lighter illustrated periodical we meet him as Sir Henry Parker ! Few Englishmen care to know about these things ; fewer still know. The comment on Australian public affairs, given by our newspapers, always excepting in the matter of sport, is inept. If anything like it were proffered concerning France or Germany, Russia or Italy, the United or even the Balkan States, it would provoke ridicule. All that is heard is the loud-resounding verbiage of the Imperial Federationist agita tors, amateur and professional, grinding the axes of their petty personal fads and social ambitions, worse than the poets who maddened Juvenal by their recitations in the Roman mid-August. If hot fits and cold fits of pessimism and optimism, the result of severe indigestions

PREFACE.

. 5 consequent on swallowing huge quantities of unreliable information, are to form the permanent conditions of the English attitude towards Australia, then the odds are exceedingly heavy that savage misunderstandings will arise between the two communities. Englishmen seem to tolerate nothing further from Australia than the tale which flatters their own foolish national vanity, and still more foolish national prejudices, and this tale the well-to-do Anglo-Australians of England and Australia are ready enough, for sufficiently obvious reasons, to tell them, and to abuse with all the heartiness in' the world those who tell any other tale. To these people the necessity of keeping up the illusions which produce the hot fits, the accesses of enthusiasm for Australian " loyalty " and Australian "prosperity," seem imperative.

Just as the Anglo-Australian of Melbourne rushes away with the English " new chum " whom he has generously engaged to " show round," and proudly points out to him the second-rate imitations of the second-rate results of English contemporary civilisation as being the final fruits of Antipodean effort : so the

PREFACE.

. 6 Anglo-Australian of London insists everywhere that Oceana is a historical record, or that the climate of Melbourne is delectable, or that colonial loans are " as safe as the Bank," or that Sir Henry Parkes is " the Gladstone of the Antipodes." It is part of what the poor fellow takes to be the Australian national stock-in-trade, without which attention cannot be won, let alone riveted. And meantime, what are in reality the actual characteristics of the place and people — what has to be reckoned with in all serious relations with them — -what, in a word, is the true motive power of the budding national life — this, which it is of the greatest importance for at least the public men of England to know and appreciate, is hidden away under indistinguishable piles of false comparisons and falser representations.

I lay no claim in this little book to any other quality than that of candour, but to that one quality my claim, I trust, is absolute. I have tried, to the best of my ability, to tell the simple truth, omitting nothing and setting down nothing, in malice, of a people I love and believe in with all my heart.

PREFACE.

. 7 Were the Australians not well able to bear the severest criticism, then it would be different. There is some excuse for withholding blame when blame reveals intolerable weakness. But Australia is strong — strong in the force of youth, strong in the force of self-confidence and a large expectation, and those who love Australia and believe in the Australian future have no nearer and more urgent duty than to lay bare without a doubt or a fear every phase, every tendency in her national life which may impair that future or chill that love. The only possible union between Australia and England, which shall contain the elements of solidity and growth, is one based on the principle of " Alliance not Dependence." The shadow of such a union has already been created by the groping instinctive de velopments of the race at different ends of the earth, and under conditions largely dis similar.

It will surely require something more clear and conscious to produce the substance. At the present moment the two communities stand, like the two knights in the story, looking at the opposite sides of the same shield.

PREFACE.

. To England it seems of gold : Australia sees it as a more dubious silver. If I have been able, — let it be but for a moment and for one hasty glance, — to draw the English knight from his own strict point of view into the sphere of that of the Australian — then (as the good people say in the old fashioned prefaces), I shall not have written in vain. Cairo, Egypt, F. A. Christmas, 1892.