Round the Compass in Australia

Front matter

SIR HENRY PARKES, K.C.M.G. [Frontispiece. (From a Photo, by J. H. Newman, Sydney, and engraved in the Studio o/ " Black and White.") ERRATA. Page 4, fourth line from top. For " £73,000,000," read " about £573,000,000." Page 95, under illustration. For "Black Trapper," read " Black Tracker." Page 447, in the definition given for "Shearer's Joy." For "bear," read " beer." ROUND THE COMPASS IN AUSTRALIA. BY GILBERT PARKER. LONDON : HUTCHINSON AND CO., 25, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1892. [All Rights Reserved.} Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. DeBicate THIS BOOK OF TRAVEL AND INQUIRY TO THOSE WHO WILL READ IT MOST AND THINK BEST OF IT — TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER.

Preface

. THE first part of the book, including chapters I. to IX., appeared in Harpers Weekly. A considerable portion of the remainder first saw the light in the Sydney Morning Herald; and papers are included which were contributed to the St. James s Gazette, The English Illus trated Magazine, Black and White, and The Illustrated London News. — To the proprietors of these journals I am indebted for per mission to republish. The first part of the book is a review of Australian affairs brought up to 1 89 1 ; the second part is an account of my travels and inquiry not carried beyond the time of their occurrence, and a record of impressions received during the period between 1888 and 1 89 1. The chapter on the granting of responsible government to Western Australia may appear to be superfluous, since the new

PREFACE.

. constitution has been launched ; but there is information in it which, I believe, is as important to a knowledge of the colony as when the question of the Enabling Bill was before the public. It is possible that this work may not be of less general interest because it is written by one who, through many years of residence, is familiar with the life and political conditions of the great sister colony, the Dominion of Canada. And Australia has been viewed from the standpoint of this knowledge. G. P. CONTENTS.

Part I. Chap

PAGE I. Glimpses of Australian Life : The Prologue . . 3 II. Glimpses of Australian Life: In Time of Flood . 17 III. Glimpses of Australian Life: In Time of Drought 35 IV. Rural Australia 53 V. Rural Australia (continued) 64 VI. Rural Australia (continued) . . ... 76 VII. Urban Australia 98 VIII. Urban Australia (continued) 120

Part II. Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Aus

TRALIA ALL. IX. Melbourne and Adelaide in 188S: The Centennial Exhibition 147 X. South Australia in 188S: Forest Conservation . 187 XI. Broken Hill in 1888 CONTENTS. X CHAP. PAGE XIL Queensland in 1889. — At the Capital . . . 213 XIII. The Queenslander and his Heritage . . . 225 XIV. Cairns — The Barron Falls — The Cairns-Herberton Railway 250 XV. The Hinchinbrook Channel — Townsville — Charters Towers 266 XVI. Mackay — Rockhampton — Mount Morgan — Maryborough — Gympie . 291 XVII. The Railways — The Pastoral Industry . . 332 XVIII. Western Australia in 1889-90. — The Voyage to Albany 345 XIX. Northward from Albany to Perth . . . 365 XX. Perth, the Capital — Freemantle — Minerals and Lands 382 XXI. Responsible Government in 1889-90 . . . 405 XXII. Confederation in 1890 and 1891 .... 417 XXIII.

Stray Papers: Art Notes — Frontier Life . . 428 Glossary proem. The Empires of the golden-hearted South Rose, sun-swept, when the Earth was in its prime Theirs was the vigour of a splendid youth, A noontide of great deeds, a gift to Time : Their poets caught the singing of the stars, — We hear the echoes in this later day, — The chords were struck 'mid majesty of wars, And played the prelude to a long decay. Their sun went down ; the North arose to claim The heraldry of power, and there fell The languor of past glory on the name Of all the South ; and wrapped it in a spell : Slow-footed, feeble, all her sons grew wan With looking backward, and they stretched their hands Skyward ; and so they waited for the dawn Of a new sun to shine upon her lands. Long time they waited, and at last there came The crimson streaks ; the morning's rosy palm Was raised in benediction, and a flame Of swinging light shot over all the calm ; And then the Old South strove again to rise, To breathe full-breasted with her ancient might ; But through her striving came the sick surprise That all her strength had vanished in the night.

Yet, as one feels the tramp of armed men Shake the quick world and stir the quiet air, There came the march of puissance once again, — The New South rising with her forehead bare — Her sorehead bare to meet the smiling sun — Australia, in her radiant panoply ; And far-off kingdoms see her work begun, And her large hope has compassed every sea.

PART I CHAPTER

I. GLIMPSES OF AUSTRALIAN LIFE: THE

Prologue

. HOW shall one see Australia ? That question has been answered often enough by men of culture, observation, and literary skill. But the point of outlook has been, in many cases, a metropolitan city and the cheerful comfort which a club-house affords : a dinner at Government House, if the traveller is well accredited ; a run into the country for a couple of hundred miles ; an excursion to the famous Gippsland Lakes and Big-tree Valleys ; a picnic on the beautiful Hawkesbury River ; a look at Broken Hill, perhaps ; a glimpse of a sugar-plantation ; a trip to the Jenolan Caves ; the exploration of Sydney Harbour ; and the thing is done. But it has been done on the arc of a circle. One cannot get into a railway train at some city on the eastern coast of Australia and cross the continent as one can in America, touching cities all the way ; nor as in Canada, fringing prosperous towns.

The population of Australia is massed on the eastern and south-eastern portion of the continent, and the concentration of wealth and commercial force is there. But the source of this wealth and force is not there, the influences really Australian, nor the special characteristics which may be recognised as peculiar to this southern continent. The general wealth has come chiefly from wool-growing. To mining is due a tremendous impetus to settlement, momentary expansions of trade, keenness in exploitation, and some special wealth. There has been taken out of Australia since mining began £73,000,000 worth of minerals, of which half was gold. Mining was Australia's great advertisement, its radia tion of attractiveness. It has proved its special blessing and its accidental curse. Wool-growing and cattle raising are its staple and reliable resources.

But lest what I sketch later may appear a contradiction to this, let it here be stated, that the reliability of the resources is attained by the process of average. One year is not the same as another on this continent, nor one three years the same as another three years. It is, therefore, six years, or five years, at least, on which estimation must be made. In the Land of the Golden Fleece loss and destruction and violent misfortune have success and bountifulness hard at their heels, and in the great average are overtaken by them. The source of the troubles that befall the Australian squatter and ranchman is an un certain rainfall. So far as settlement goes, one-third of the country at least is a desert, a No Man's Land as yet, and sore perils come as encroachment on that desert proceeds.

To see Australia, therefore, one must leave the spots where the clubs and comforts are, and go into the heart of this Greater Britain. It cannot be done in a day. What is written here is the result of nearly four years' travel and responsible inquiry in Australia, as the Special Commissioner of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Times of that country. The best of Australia is in the east. The large rivers and the possible and profitable land are there — -.the land for the many. For there is little profit to a country in the depasturing of 150,000 sheep on square miles of land. Along 1500 miles of the west half of the southern coast of Australia there is but one harbour, and not one river flowing to the sea. There is no Mississippi, no Missouri, no Hudson, no St. Lawrence, nor any Lake Superior or Lake Michigan ; and, far inland from the coast, there is no great watershed.

The River Darling, seventy feet deep one year, is a stream on which a skiff could scarcely float the next. The Warrego, the Barcoo, the Mitchell, the Fitzroy, the Ashburton, and many others are of the same fashion. The centre of the continent should be a land of infinite promise, like the heart of the American continent. It is, however, a land of tested and perilous uncertainty. It is a basin, not a plateau, a vast and arid sponge which drinks up moisture at a marvellous rate, and still is thirsty. None of the rivers, save the Darling or Murray, drain any considerable extent of country. So far as the eye of the explorer could see there were no foundations for dominion. How empire is being wrung from nature, like Hercules wrestling with death, is history that is being written on the face of the land with scars and suffering — but written.

In Western Australia, where Nature has put her minerals, she has sardonically refused water ; where she has given land, pastoral and pro ductive, she has cynically withheld rain ; or as often as not, when sending it, has drowned the gaping country, and submerged the town that but yesterday was feverishly praying for moisture. The broad fringe of two-thirds of the continent is bountiful and blessed, though even on this blessed margin tropical floods occur, which over whelm plantations, wreck villages, and destroy human lives. The casual traveller does not, as a rule, emphasise these things. Perhaps rightly, if he thinks it pleasanter to write praise than history, to speak truly but only of a hospitable and generally prosperous people, of national vigour, of sanguine effort, and of successful squatters and planters.

He has been to a station homestead, but not a selector's cabin ; he has sojourned at a plantation bungalow, but not in a kangaroo-hunter's humpey ; * he has visited the barracks of the station hands, but he has not inquired how many of them had sunk their all in abandoned homestead leases and selections, nor how misfortune battened on them through losses by flood, and drought, and mines, and farming, and wool-growing on a small scale. He does not meet the gentleman kangaroo-hunting and rabbit-killing ; he does not set down how many sheep were lost in the last drought, nor what ruin and desolation the rabbits have made ; how cattle and sheep, reduced by millions to starvation-point, are kept alive by the leaves of the mulga and edible scrubs. The pictures that he could draw, having known and seen these things, might not be pleasant, but they would be true to the life.

" A wealthy Australian " is, in London, as usual a phrase as " A wealthy American." There are good reasons for this. Rich Australians make London their Mecca, as rich Americans do Paris. One seldom hears of a wealthy Canadian ; yet Canada is older than Australia. The difference lies in the fact that Canada has risen from a base of agriculture ; Australia from a base of mining, pastoral, and planting life. Canada has more homes, Australia more fortunes. The Canadian farmer, with his hundred acres and a score of cows, lives in comfort ; the Australian selector often exists in danger. * There is a glossary of words and phrases, chiefly Australian at the end of this book. In the body of the text they appear without explanation or quotation marks. English capital has flowed into Australian cattle runs and sheep-runs, and the banks have stretched antennæ (liable to contract now or hereafter) over parts of the interior.

These statements are broadly put. They have refer ence to the' general lump, not to the special sections. Agriculture is not the plane on which Australian pro gress moves. It is incidental to the natural wealth, not a radical part of it. Australia has no Minnesota, no Manitoba, Ontario, or Montana. From her foundation of pastoral pursuits and mining, with plenty of capital expended, she has naturally had a powerful and successful development. But it must be remembered that the area from which her wealth has been drawn is a large one, and is occupied by only three millions of people. Her time of trial must come too ; and that will be when, her best land taken up, and her coastal population crowding, she has to face the vicissitudes of her unworked and un tempting country. Let us stand now in the centre of Australia, and look forth as if our eyes could scan the continent from rim to rim.

We are at Mount Stuart, where the courageous explorer Stuart himself stood and looked into the unknown lands before him. We are facing the south ; we are looking upon the great Australian Bight, where cliffs, six hundred feet high, " beetle o'er their bases to the sea." For a thousand miles along the Bight there is not a population of a thousand. The enthusiastic spectator might be tempted to exclaim upon the time when that vast coast line should have a wall of masts to front it. But standing here in a waste that no man tills, nor will ever till or feed upon, here are the words of John Forrest,* another ex plorer, coming down an avenue of twenty years : " But * Now Sir John Forrest, for hundreds of miles along the shores of the Bight no vessel could reach or lie safely at anchor." And of the land between us and the Bight, the land where the spinifex waves like ripe corn under the hard monotonous azure, let him again speak : " On our route we passed over many millions of acres of grassy country, but, I am sorry to say, I believe entirely destitute of water."

But that is half a generation ago. This is the remark of John Forrest, Commissioner of Lands in Western Australia in 1889 : " From my own observation, I may safely say that the greater portion of the Eastern Division is not likely to be utilised in the near future ; there are no rivers in the division." Again : " With the exception of a small fringe along the coast, the Eucla Division is unoccupied, and, unless water is conserved, must remain so." Yet these two districts represent 635,000 square miles. Turn now, through this glamorous air, and look towards the west. There nestles a little, but proud capital, Perth, on the banks of the Swan River, one of those short streams found along portions of the Australian coast so often, and of such momentous value. We are 1500 miles from this western capital, and between us and it there lies at least 1300 miles of wanton waste and silence.

There are no birds of song; no rippling streams; no ranging fields of grain ; few wandering herds ; sparse settlements of pioneers. In all that 900,000 square miles of country, known as Western Australia, there are but 45,000 people. Turn slowly towards the north-west. We are looking now upon a country tropical, yet not having all the characteristics of a tropical country — that is, superabund ance of rain. It is a pastoral country, chiefly in a belt of 1 50 miles or so. A little further still, and there is the Kimberley pastoral district and the Kimberley goldfields where an earnest Government is trying, with artesian bore, to induce Nature to render up the fulness of her fountains. But water is hard to get in Western Australia. Still turn, until you are halfway round a circle, and are looking directly north to Port Darwin, just as if, standing in the heart of Kansas, you had begun with the Gulf of Mexico, and turned slowly round to San Diego, to San Francisco, to Portland, to Helena, to Grand Forks.

In that half-circle you have seen " the Arizona desert " ; but you have seen, outside of it, a watered land, with great rivers, vast mountains, and deep valleys. Through every part of it man, the pioneer, can venture and reap reward. But, standing on Mount Stuart, what do you see ? What have you seen ? Here is a railway at your feet being driven across the continent from Adelaide to Port Darwin ; a railway running through a lonely silent land, with good country at each terminus only. But there are, between you and the sea-wall which makes the bounds of that half-circle to your eye, weary oceans of spinifex desert ; endless ridges of scorching sand-hills ; desolating expansions of mallee scrub ; long samphire flats ; chains of salt lakes and thirsty clay-pans ; mulga forests ; acacia thickets ; quartz plains ; deceiving water holes ; alkali marshes ; solitary hills, rising like islands from a grey and changeless sea ; sandstone bluffs and copper cliffs which project in burning menace ; and only one indifferent range of mountains which, rising nowhere beyond 4000 feet, is the source of but few rivers.

Scores of streams in Australia rise in a lonely plain, no mountain near, and wandering on for a hundred miles perhaps, suddenly sink again into some vast subterranean river or sea ; for no heat could so absorb the quantity of water which is drunk up as it flows uncertainly over these plains. With our faces turned to the west, we see a land of no mountains. The plains in this arid centre are lower than the level of the sea. We have looked upon the scene of the sufferings of the heroic and undying explorer, Eyre ; of the devoted Warburton, and of the stalwart and noble Forrest. We have seen the field of the labours of Flinders, Grey, the Gregorys, Gosse, and Giles. And the voice of History from the rugged coast line says : " It is the country Dirk Hartog discovered in the time of Mary of England, and called ' Land d'Endracht ' ; the shore that Edel touched in 1619, and called ' Land of Edel ' ; the territory Viaven visited in 1628, to which he gave the name ' De Witt's Land'; the ' vast and wandering grave ' of Pelsart's mutineers of 1629 ; the scene of Tasman's explorations ; a region which Dampier the buccaneer hailed ; one of the points in Vancouver's compass ; where D'Entrecasteaux raised the standard of his native land :■ and yet since the fifteenth century there are only 45,000 people here.

Here is food for curiosity. Has not, however, the ex planation been more than hinted at, after all ? . . ." Yet this region is not all barren. On the coast and along these short rivers, there is fine squatting country, and some good agricultural land ; and there are minerals also, if they can but be reached and developed. There are men making money too on the coast ; but what are a handful of people in that vast region ? Even in this tenantless waste on which we have looked there are great stretches of grassy plains and fine areas for sheep and cattle. But turn the medal over and read what is thereon : " No Thoroughfare ! " And " No Thorough fare " means " No water." Here, where millions of sheep might feed, a mighty ban is laid. Stretch out your hand. This is a hot day on Mount Stuart. See the specks of moisture in your palm.

That is the proportion of water to this half — this more than From Harper's Weekly.— Copyright, 1891 t.y Harper & Brofj,,,.-. A Camel Train— Thk Interior. half— of the Australian continent. We are dealing with facts now, not with pretty dreams of politicians about " wondrous possibilities," and " unexplored vistas for settlement." For this country which we sec has been crossed and recrossed east and west, and north and south, and under what grim trials, and with what unchanging conclusions they of Western Australia at least know. And the rest may learn. But we have only completed half the circle. We have seen that the course of empire is not always westward. The nomenclature is an evidence of that. Coffin Bay, Anxious Bay, Denial Bay, Cape Arid, Mount Barren, Mount Despair, Doubtful Island — these arc the ominous signs that greet us as we note the scene.

It is not so in America. Explorers of all that continent breathed an atmosphere of hope, of confidence, of achievement, of prophecy. But see the explorers of Australia : Leichardt, the gallant, the for ever lost like Franklin ; Burke and Wills ; the unhappy Kennedy ; the shattered Stuart ; the noble and unfortunate Sturt ; the fated Grey ; the desperate and long-abandoned Eyre ; the heroic Forrest ; the disappointed Lindsay. Have their predictions, generally speaking, ever been discounted ? They walked through suffering to death all too often ; they looked out upon a melancholy horizon ; they could not feel the joy of the gallant Champlain, the brave Marquette, the dauntless Joliette, and the resistless La Salle. But let us now inspect the other half-circle. It is the better half, else the case of Australia would be hard in deed.

In it are all the great cities — Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane ; in it is nineteen-twentieths of the population. America was settled first largely on the east, and the march of progress was westward through and ROUND THE COMPASS LN AUSTRALIA. to a country of rare possibilities. But that would have been natural under any circumstances, inasmuch as the Atlantic coast was so much nearer the great populations of Europe. Holding to this principle, Western Australia should have been expanded first, since it lies nearer to England by three thousand miles than does New South Wales. Western Australia, from the day that real settlement began in the east, has had directed towards it a great deal of energy and capital. But there she lies with 45,000 people and 1,000,000 square miles of land, of which only 173,000 square miles are under lease for agricultural or pastoral purposes.

The fault lies not in its star, but in itself, that it is in such condition. But the view is fairer as we veer round this other and better half, beginning at Port Darwin. Flowing into the Gulf of Carpentaria are longer, deeper, and more frequent rivers than we have seen heretofore. They are not rivers as Europeans and Americans know them, but streams of varying permanency and dcbouchement. And turned to this north-east, we are viewing a colony of striking commercial possibilities. Queensland, like another United States, has within it two fine belts of resources. Gold and silver, timber, pastoral products, sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco, and all tropical fruits are in its northern part ; and coal and gold, pastoral land, wheat land, and the agricultural products of the temperate zone in its southern part.

The heart of the southern half of Queensland is a high tableland, unlike any other portion of Australia, and one sees millions of sheep grazing upon the famous Darling and Fitzroy Downs — downs, indeed, stretching in waving undulations to that portion of its western and southern border, where its pastoral excellence is merged into the invading barrenness of western New South Wales. But look far out to sea at the east. A long beautiful line of white foam meets the eye. That is the Barrier Reef whose coral bulwarks range the ocean for a thousand miles parallel with the coast. Inside it is one long harbour of peace, one stretch of summer beauty in mountain, valley, and tropical jungle. Out at sea even the mangrove swamp, with its deadly damp, looks cool and beautiful. But greater than the beauty of the colony is its wealth.

We are seeing a plane of action 700,000 miles square, and having 400,000 inhabitants, all of whom are working pioneers. The colony began about the same time as Western Australia, but now, besides its sugar plantations and its mineral wealth, it has 13,000,000 sheep, 5,000,000 horses and cattle; and since 1859 there has been taken out of Queensland gold to the value of £21,310,947. Let us pass on. Turned towards the south-east we see the parent colony of New South Wales, begun by those who laboured at the mouth of guns, and who were always spoken of by those they left behind in the Old Land as having " gone to Botany Bay." But from that beginning there rises a structure of prosperous commercial proportions ; a social and national dignity which is only accounted for by the immigration of free, upright, and industrious pioneers.

Sydney lies there, with its 360,000 inhabitants, set on the margin of a renowned shore and harbour. Between us and its centralised forces, its fine architecture, and its progress, there stretch ranges of desolation, weariness, and unprofitableness. But again, between this trinity of misfortune and the city is a land of plenty too ; a land from which over 225,000,000 pounds of wool were exported in 1890. The River Darling, which drags its tortuous mud-banked length along, the third longest river in the world, is the boundary line of prosperity. Between Mount Stuart, where we stand, and it the earth dips. Still farther south, though, let us look, and there we shall see Mount Kosciusko, with its white head 7,000 feet up in the changeless blue, — Australia's one mountain of prominence. There in the south also we see Victoria, the most compact, the smallest, and the most active, in proportion to its size, of the colonies or states of Australia.

Agriculture, pastoral pursuits, mines, and manufacture — these are the sources of Vic toria's wealth. And the city of Melbourne, lying on the shores of Port Phillip, with its 360,000 inhabitants, is Sydney's august rival. About five degrees to east of south of our vantage ground lies Adelaide, at the foot of Mount Lofty, hot, cleanly, prettily built, and instinct with metropolitan life. Now we have completed the circle, and from a dreary centre looked out upon a continent of three millions of square miles, where the Anglo-Saxon is working westward towards his Golden Gate, and northwards towards the sun-line. The reader should now be ready to interpret, with a sense of proportion and conception of broad conditions, the scenario of Australian life, which I shall briefly sketch hereafter.

Chapter II. Glimpses Of Australian Life

: IN TIME OF FLOOD. A FEW months ago word came across the sea that the town of Bourke, among others in Australia, was under water, and that lives and property were being destroyed at war-time rate. On the North Queensland coast, where it rains twelve feet in a year, and sometimes two feet in a day, the flood records are frequent. Plantations float under water, and sheep and cattle arc caught in a wide death-trap. On the River Darling, and in the south generally, the floods are not so frequent. When, five years ago, I set out to pierce the heart of the country, and see the stuff of which Australia was made, Bourke was my first objective point. To it one could get by rail. First we cross the Blue Mountains by the famous Zig-Zag, from which, 3,000 feet up, one looks out upon the Nepean valley, sun-swept, green, and luxurious ; a region of orange orchards and agriculture.

Then we descend upon a tablcland, passing such typical Australian towns as Bathurst, and again down, until a plain is reached where the far interior is seen at its best. This had been a flood-year, and the country should be blooming, buoyant. But through long vistas of ring-barked gum-trees we pass ; through a brown and silent land, broken only by the sight of towns like Byrock, where corrugated iron, canvas, and iron-bark compose the architecture. This is the first touch of the sadness of Australian scenery ; and it was kept up through hot and lengthy hours of travel, broken by a stop at some village or township, sitting gloomily in its red dust. A mounted policeman, a black tracker, a settler on his horse, a shearer knocking down his cheque, or a squatter in his trap, would occasionally give a little life to the scene, but the prevailing feeling was one of melancholy.

Yet over this gloomy area hundreds of thousands of sheep were depasturing and doing well. I had been travelling with a Royal Commission whose duty it was to make inquiry into the question of Water Conservation. It was my good fortune to receive an invitation to travel in their company, since I was going in their direction. Because of this I altered my plans somewhat, and determined to follow where . they led. The Royal Commissioners, Mr. J. B. Donkin and Mr. F. B. Gipps, the secretary, two reporters, a photographer, and myself, constituted the party ; and we seven looked out upon Bourke, one Sunday evening, as it rose from the scrubby plain, and eyed apprehensively the River Darling, which was aflood, and also debating whether to rise four inches more and cover the streets. Had it done so, portions of Bourke would have been floating down towards the Barrier Ranges, as they did the other day.