From Melbourne To Moscow

Front matter

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RARY MASS.

Contents

I DECIDE ON A JOURNEY

THE StToRY oF LIZARD ISLAND

IsLES OF ROMANCE SINGAPORE .

Chapter I I Decide On A Journey

Peculiar Behaviour of some Friends—A Difficult Question— What’s Wrong with Australia ?—The Importance of Being Born in Kalamazoo (Mich.).

a INE, my boy, fine,” said myfriends. ‘“ Tell me, where are you going? ”’

“‘ Oh, the Far East, you know: China, Japan and so on; and perhaps Russia,’ I replied vaguely, with what nonchalance I could command.

“Splendid! Wish I were coming with you. Wonderful place the East. No, never been there, but everybody says so. Rickshaws, and Chinese restaurants, and sing-song girls and geishas. My boy, I envy you. If I were twenty years younger

... But Russia ... no, no, take my advice and don’t go to Russia. . . . Well, in case I never see you again...”

Enemies became cordial and jubilant.

“Ah, Russia,” they repeated thoughtfully, as they mentally measured me for a Red coffin, “dangerous place, Russia. Never know what may happen in Russia, do you? Well, I wish you everything you deserve. Good-bye.”

For weeks this sort of thing went on, friends still wishing to God they were twenty years younger, enemies touching lightly on small-pox, leprosy, cholera, bubonic plague, the astonishingly dexterous stranglers of the East, the peculiar and dangerous redness of Red Russia, and kindred subjects, until one day some one—in fairness it must be said that she was only a child—asked me an intelligent question.

“Why,” she said earnestly, “‘ why are you going away?”

Now I knew perfectly well why I was going away. To sail the Eastern seas in the wake of Drake and Tasman; to drink in the perfumes and gorgeous colours of the Spice Islands ; to poke in odd corners and strange byways of old China and Japan; to walk the streets of Peking once walked by Messer Marco Polo; to stand on the Great Wall of China where Kubla Khan may once have stood, and follow, as far as the eye could, that river of masonry that rises in the heart of Asia and flows on and on, across deserts and garden provinces, mountains and rivers, to the Yellow Sea; to cross Siberia, that land of ill-repute and sombre story ; to walk the streets of Moscow, to explore the Kremlin and stand in that historic Church of St. Basil in the Red Square—all these things I wanted to do, and a hundred others. And so, with the wanderlust upon me, and strange names ringing in my ears, I gazed absently upon that wondering child and said in our rousing British way, “ Oh, just for a change, you know.”’

Between ourselves, I had other reasons. Secretly I considered that I was seeking Life, Colour, Adventure. But I found it a little hard to say so, harder still to explain why I, an Australian with a continent to roam in, could not find these things at home.

In the last minute rush of getting away, all the more crowded because of my lifelong habit of methodically and resolutely neglecting all essentials, the question remained unanswered. But

I DECIDE ON A JOURNEY 13 at last the preliminaries were over. The 590- mile journey to Sydney was behind me; I had watched, a little sadly, Sydney Heads fading into the milky blue of the horizon; and then, for the first time, I realized that the wearisome business preparations, the leave-taking, the perplexities as to route, and so on, were all over, that at last I was on the way. And filled with a sudden exultation, I threw out my arm in splendid gesture and echoed great Czsar’s cry: jacta est alea—the die is cast.

Or at least I would have if I had not seen a steward looking.

* * * * *

II. In their own Country

Brisbane was behind us, Thursday Island ahead, and steadily the Marella steamed northward through the smooth waters that lie between the mainland and the Great Barrier Reef. Every day the sun grew warmer, the breezes softer and more caressing, the islands greener, the vegetation more tropical. To port lay the Queensland coast ; past the other rail slid a maze of islands which might have been built up by the Almighty to the design of R.L.S. Romance was in the very air. Then why, as the little girl had said, was I going to the trouble of seeking it elsewhere? Why, for that matter, did most Australians seek it elsewhere ?

Lying there in the warm sunshine, I resigned myself to indolent contemplation, but could find no satisfactory answer.

And yet the problem isrealenough. Every Australian writer, publisher and bookseller knows that the Australian public, apart from a section which supports one cheap series, does not want Australian books ; and theatrical managers will tell you that no Australian play, regardless of its merits, is what the profession calls a box-office proposition. People may live in Australia and revere Australia, but when they want amusement they turn to plays from the West End and Broadway, and novels about bad men from Skagway and sheikhs who have learned to fox-trot divinely on the sands and owe their Oxford accent (as transpires in the sensational dénouement) to a French-Egyptian mother. There are men writing fiction in Australia to-day whose work, if not exactly masterly, is well up to the standard of the popular novel elsewhere, or even the average best seller. But I doubt if there is one who is making a tolerable living at it. They have to supplement their royalties with hack work while the comforts of this world—the Rolls-Royces and the valets and the houses in Fifth Avenue and Park Lane—go to the people who, from their studies in Chelsea or Kalamazoo (Mich.), deal in desert passions and the doings of good, red-blooded, two-fisted fellows in places where Men Are Men.

For this there can be only two explanations. Either the Ethel Dells and the Clarence H. Mulfords write better—which, as Euclid would have said, in his downright fashion, is absurd; or the Australian reader, forgetting Charles Reade, Marcus Clarke and ‘“‘ Rolf Boldrewood,”’ has accepted the convention that Australia is not one of those countries in which self-respecting novelists of to-day find inspiration. India, for instance, and Japan (more especially since Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti), and Egypt, and Africa, and even the newer regions like Texas and Alaska, and (since the rise of the Tango and Senor Ibafiez) the Argentine Republic.

I DECIDE ON A JOURNEY 15

Why? What is it that decides, for the average man and woman, whether a country is or is not a fit dwelling for Romance? Is it the geography of the place? Then Australia has deserts where even Mr. Rudolph Valentino would have scope ; grassy plains in no way inferior to the prairies of Wyoming or the steppes of Siberia ; forests as dense as those of Canada and trees far bigger; mountains and lakes, in the Blue Mountains, Gippsland and Tasmania, not unlike those of Switzerland ; tropical wildernesses which suggest the Indies or Brazil.

Is it (as it very reasonably might be) historical atmosphere that counts? Then Australia, though a young country and the only continent in which blood has never been spilled in war, has had its share of the stirring deeds, and brave endeavour, and mute suffering, and pageantry and colour that are the stuff of which most histories are made. Botany Bay, Norfolk Island, Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, with their ruins and grim memories ; the Rum Rebellion, the Mutiny of the Bounty, the settlement of Pitcairn Island, the marvellous voyage of Bligh, and all the other purple patches of a period which, for dramatic interest and vivid colour, will bear comparison with the planting days in the Old Dominion ; the two gallant sailors who risked death a score of times in their tiny cockle shell, only to find it at the latter end on shore— Flinders on the very day his great book of discovery appeared, poor Bass (if a doubtful legend is to be believed) as a captive in the silver mines of Peru ; the long line of explorers who thirsted and starved (and in a number of cases died) in the desert wastes in order that the heritage of posterity might be a little fuller for the sacrifice ; the tragic affair of the Eureka Stockade, with an obscure miner playing not unworthily the role of a diggings Hampden ; the still more tragic conflict between black man and white, which in the State of Tasmania has resulted in the complete extinction of a race—a poor race, admittedly, but still human, even as you and I; the great gold rushes and the stories of Broken Hill, Mount Morgan, Mount Bischoff and Mount Lyell—is there in all this no Romance? If not, then let the word be expunged from the dictionary of the novelist and tacked on where it belongs—to the efforts of the scenario writer, reports of mésalliances in the society papers, and ‘‘ Tarzan of the Apes.”

All this I felt, and more, as we skirted Australia’s northern fringe ; but the fact remained that I was going, and I knewjust why. The world having agreed that Australia was a boring land of sand, perpetual drought, devastating floods, plagues of rabbits much given to devouring wire fences, and large, hairy men—the hairiness of Australians in fiction is a subject on which I feel rather strongly— the world having settled all this, I say, I had bowed before tradition, as many a braver soul had done before, and was seeking not only recreation but material elsewhere.

A really strong-minded genius, I knew, would have doggedly stayed at home, dramatized the neighbours and forced the world to come to him. But was I that sort of fellow? ... Something seemed to tell me I was not.

Cree LER LT THE STORY OF LIZARD ISLAND

Mary Watson and her Island Home—The Raid—A Night of Horror—The Flight in the Tank—Thirst—A Bush Mystery—How Ah Sam Died.

T was not long before these random reflections acquired some sort of point. At noon that very day Captain Mortimer, the high-spirited mariner whose habit of winning deck games nearly maddened the already melancholy Mark Twain, invited us to assemble in the lounge, and, pointing to a low island with nothing but a hummock or two to distinguish it from a score of others, told us the story of Mary Watson and Lizard Island. It is just possible that you have already read it, wretchedly mutilated, in de Rougemont’s The Fatal Pearl; but I was rather pleased (as is the way with men who find a theory unexpectedly supported) to discover that not one of a score of Australians on the boat had as much as heard her name. Like most Australians, they could have ~ told you something about Flora Macdonald, one of a million women who have risked and given much for the sake of a handsome face; or Lady Alice Lisle, the aged and feeble lady who had a sort of negative fame thrust on her by a hanging judge ; or even Mary Ambree, whose reputation has looked up a bit since Kipling borrowed a title from the old ballad. But not one of these good and loyal Australians had ever heard of a fellow-countrywoman 17 B who, had she lived in any other land, would have won immortality in song and story, and supplied inspiration, not before it was needed, to the army of writers for the screen.

The romance of Lizard Island begins in 1880, when a young school teacher of Cooktown, in Northern Queensland, married Captain R. F. Watson, a béche-de-mer fisher, and went to share his home amongst the coral isles and treacherous waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Captain Watson had built a home on one of these green dots, with a little garden, a plantation and a plant for curing his hauls ; and he used to leave her, with only two Chinese employees for company and protection, while he sailed away to seek his living. A lonely life it must have been for her, but she bore it with- ~ out complaint, and, with the birth of a child, seems to have attained to something approaching complete happiness.

Then, out of the clear blue sky of an Australian spring, came the calamity that overwhelmed her. On September 1, 1881, Captain Watson set sail for Knight Island, some two hundred miles to the northward; and a few weeks later a party of blacks, engaged on one of their periodical fishing expeditions, put off from the mainland in their canoes and, by evil chance, landed at Lizard Island. They found one of the Chinese working in the plantation, killed him and saved his body for a feast on the mainland, where a black boy long afterwards found his pigtail ; and then they turned their attention to the house. What follows is recorded by Mrs. Watson in her diary.

Sept. 30.—(She writes) Natives down on the beach at 7 p.m. Fired off rifle and revolver and they went away.

THE STORY OF LIZARD ISLAND 19

Oct. 1.—Natives (four) speared Ah Sam in four places on the right side and three on the shoulder. Got three spears from the natives. Saw 10 men altogether.

Mrs. Watson helped the desperately wounded Chinese indoors, bathed and dressed his wounds as best she could, and then, with a revolver in her hand and a Snider across her knees, settled down to defend the house, unaided, against the savages outside. There were times, in that night of horror, when she thought she could hear whispers and soft footsteps, and there must have been many a chilling moment when death and the oven seemed very near. But the dawn came at last, and she was still alive and still sane.

But the position was still desperate. Daylight showed that the blacks were near at hand, and Mrs. Watson decided that, though it was almost impossible to escape, to remain meant certain death. Her judgment was confirmed when the blacks attacked again. Once more she drove them off by rifle fire, and this time they disappeared ; but she surmised—quite correctly, as the looted house afterwards showed—that they had gone for reinforcements and would soon return with a horde that could not fail to overwhelm her pitiful defence. The little party must leave that day or perish.

But how, without a boat? Her eyes fell on the trepang boiler, which had once been half a ship’s tank. She improvised a pair of crude paddles ; dragged this grotesque vessel, with the aid of the terribly wounded but very gallant Ah Sam, to the water’s edge ; loaded it with food, water, clothes, the guns and her money, jewels and diary; and then they put to sea—the craziest craft in history manned by a woman, a baby and a dying Chinese.

What followed is best told by Mrs. Watson.

Oct. 2.—Left Lizard Island in tank. Got three or four miles from the Lizards.

Oct. 4.—Made for the sand bank off the Lizards, but could not reach it. Got on a bare reef.

Oct. 5.—Remained on the reef all day on the look-out for a boat, but saw none.

Oct. 6.—Very calm morning. Able to pull the tank up to an island with three small mountains on it. Ah Sam went ashore to try to find water.

Oct. 7.—Made for another island 4 or 5 miles from the one spoken of yesterday. Ashore, but could not find any water. Cooked some rice and clam fish. Moderate S.E. breeze. Stayed here all night. Saw a schooner bound north. Hoisted Ferrier’s [the baby’s] white and pink wrapper, but did not answer us.

Oct. 8.—Changed anchorage, as the wind was freshening. Went down to a kind of little lake on the same island. (This done last night.) Remained here all day looking out for a boat. Did not see any. Very cold night ; blowing very hard. No water.

Oct. 9.—Brought the tank ashore as far as possible with this morning’s tide. Made camp all day under the trees. Blowing very hard. No water. Gave Ferrier a dip in the sea (he is showing symptom of thirst) and I took a dip myself. Ah Sam and self very parched with thirst.

Oct. 10.—Ferrier very bad with inflammation. Very much alarmed. No fresh water and no more milk but condensed. Self very weak. Really thought I would have died last night (Sunday).

Oct. 11.—Still all alive. Ferrier very much better this morning. Still feeling very weak. I think it will rain to-day. Clouds very heavy.

But the rain which would have meant life to her baby and herself—probably nothing could have saved Ah Sam—did not fall, and when the next day dawned bright and clear she must have known that the end was very near. That day she wrote :

Oct.12.—Norain. Morning fine weather. Ah Sam preparing to die. Have not seen him since 9. Ferrier more cheerful. Self not feeling at all well. Have not seen a boat of any description. No water. Nearly dead with thirst.

THE STORY OF LIZARD ISLAND ar

That, with its stoically bald “‘ not feeling at all well,” was the last entry. Any other woman in a million would have collapsed, perhaps lost her reason, in that nightmare at Lizard Island and the agonies of thirst that followed ; but it was characteristic of Mrs. Watson that she had her mind and her nerves under iron control and methodically kept her diary to the last. It was characteristic of ‘her also that in all those days of horror she set down not one word of complaint or railing against Fate, not even an appeal to the God who seemed to have forgotten her. In other lands and other ages there have been thousands of women more brilliant, thousands who have, by reason of birth or environment, played a greater and more spectacular rdéle in history. But still I say that with the end of humble Mary Watson Australia lost one of its greatest women and the world one of its finest and choicest spirits.

II. The End of the Passage

The epilogue to the drama is soon told. The attack on Lizard Island and the disappearance of Mrs. Watson were reported on the mainland, Captain Watson was found and notified, and a party, in which Captain Watson joined, searched scores of islands where the fugitives might be sheltering. But week after week went by and no trace was found ; and the mystery was deepened by rumours that a white woman was living with the mainland blacks. For a time it was thought that the outcast, if she were not some phantom of a black man’s superstitious mind, might be Mrs. Watson ; but this hideous fear was dispelled when the Byerstown police arrested the woman and found her to be a stranger. Whowasshe? What evil star had led her to these wandering savages, lowest of all the races upon earth? Had she been taken prisoner and reduced to such degradation that she feared to face the pity or contempt in the eyes of her own kind? Or had she joined this nomad tribe of her own free will to gratify some degenerate habit or some atavistic urge ? No one will ever know. In the flight of the police from the blacks she was thrown from her horse and seriously injured. She was taken to the Cooktown Hospital and died there ; and her grim secret, whatever it may have been, died with her.

There is some melancholy satisfaction to be derived from the fact that it was not so with Mary Watson. In January, 1882, a schooner put in ata little coral island for shelter, discovered the tank and the skeletons, and lifted the veil of mystery in which the tragedy had been shrouded. Mrs. Watson had died in the tank with the baby in her arms and the revolver near at hand; and Ah Sam, faithful even in death, lay under a bush close by, with his rifle by his side and the bandages still hanging loosely about his bones.

Mrs. Watson, her child and Ah Sam were buried at Cooktown on Sunday, January 29,1882. It was a public funeral and all classes and colours gathered to pay homage to her spirit and (let us hope) the spirit of the coloured man who, if he had been a crusader of romance, could not have been more faithful or more gallant. The tank in which that fantastic voyage was made was placed in Brisbane Museum, and in 1886 a monument was erected at Cooktown to the memory of the woman whose life and death should be an inspiration to Australians yet unborn.

Chapter III The Empty North

Thursday Island—A Conflict of Colours—The Northern Fringes—First Sight of Darwin—Hot but Healthy— Chinese in White Australia—The Awakening by Night— I See a Corroboree—King Billy Looks Back—A Romance of Industry—The Roaring Days—Dead Darwin—The Problem of the Territory.

E were well inside the tropics and still steam-

ing northward ; and every day the sun

shone fiercer out of a cloudless sky. Then, like a

jade gem in a sapphire setting, came Thursday

Island, with its palms and rioting creepers, its

historic little church gratefully erected by the sole

survivor of the Quetta, its motley collection of

and the tiny garrison which is Australia’s pitiful outpost against the menace from the North.

Thursday Island is a world in miniature. As at Broome, the Chinese and Japanese have a strong hold on trade, more especially the pearling industry ; and in the streets of the little port whites of all the nations jostle brown-skinned Polynesians, the darker aborigines of Torres Straits, blacks from the mainland, yellow men from Canton and Kobe and perhaps now and then a Hindu pedlar ora straight-backed Arab.

Racial feeling at times runs high, conflict is not uncommon and life has that red-blooded quality so dear to people in Bayswater and Brooklyn,

One damsel whose home is now on the island found nothing strange in having seen a boy’s stomach torn open by a shark, or a Japanese run amok with a revolver, or a party of besieged Chinese hack with axes at the black men who surged in at the door and up through the floor with the ferocity of Bishop Hatto’s rats. Neither did she find anything romantic in her previous home—a little island farther south, uninhabited save for her family and so isolated that she and her small brothers had to voyage twenty or thirty miles in a motor-boat to reach their nearest neighbours. An island home washed by the waters of the great Pacific held no lure for her. Her idea of romance, I gathered, was a home somewhere in Mayfair, with the shops of Bond Street near at hand and the great electric theatre signs always beckoning her to the enchanted land round about Piccadilly

Circus. * * * *

II. Australia’s Little East

From Thursday Island we steamed west across the mouth of the Gulf of Carpentaria and skirted Australia’s northern coast. A dull red glow one night showed where a bush fire, started heaven knows how, had been ravaging the dreary wastes of Arnheim Land—the region where de Rougemont, if I remember aright, staged some of his exploits and discovered, amidst other peculiar fauna, flying wombats. We passed Melville Island, noted chiefly for its herds of wild buffalo—descendants of stock landed by the Dutch; picked our way cautiously through a maze of islands, reefs and shoals, and went to bed that night with the Captain’s assurance that at daybreak we would be in Darwin.

It was not yet seven o’clock when I ran on deck next morning, but the sun was already shining hotly out of a burnished silver sky.

“ Port Darwin,” announced the captain, with a sweep of his hand; and, stepping eagerly to the rail, I gazed for the first time upon the place that s world associates with Vestey’s, Bolsheviks and

eat.

‘Like most Australians from the south, I had expected to find a huddle of tin shanties on a desolate sun-baked plain. Instead I saw a big blue lagoon stretching away in the sparkling morning sunshine to encircling green shores. Mangrove trees rose here and there from the water, palms showed clear against the distant skyline, and but for two or three roof-tops gleaming white amidst the green, the whole place looked much as it would have done if it had been stumbled on by Cook.

And the town itself, as I discovered a little later, is as surprising as the tropic beauty of the harbour. Following the leaf-fringed path that winds upward through the palms and mangoes of the hillside, you come upon low bungalows with wide verandahs, protected from the fierce sunlight by the dense foliage of the trees and the creepers that climb luxuriantly about the walls. And Government House, with its cool, spacious rooms, white gravel drive, and tennis court set amongst a riot of flowering trees, is the sort of home of which tired shop girls dream.

But there is another side to Darwin, and though it does not add to the beauty of the place, it certainly gives the little town a picturesqueness and interest that you find nowhere else in Australia except Broome and Thursday Island. That is the contrast of colours—white, brown, black and yellow. In Cavanagh Street you see yellow tailors working at the open windows ; shops of all kinds display quaint wares with Chinese inscriptions ; and as you pass the chattering folk on the pavement, and watch an aged man in a hat the shape and size of an umbrella come trotting across the street with two buckets of vegetables suspended from the bamboo across his shoulders, you might almost fancy yourself in one of the less crowded and less smelly villages of the East.

The Chinese of Darwin seem to do most of the trade and even in bad times contrive to prosper amazingly. Mrs. Urquhart, wife of the Administrator, told me that the jewels and trousseau shown her by one Chinese girl must have cost £6,000 or £7,000. Quite obviously, too, they have plenty of money to spend on idols, thrones and other odds and ends for their big tin josshouse.

Accompanied by an elderly caretaker, I went through this curious building and tried to learn something of its ceremonial. He told me the names of the gorgeously arrayed and fiercely moustachioed gods whose effigies occupy the places of honour, and I managed to gather that “ one year one time priests makem walkabout’’—or, in other words, give the gods their annual outing to the accompaniment of much shouting, beating of drums and other well-known aids to devotion. Last year the procession was ruined by rain, so, like the coolies who beat their josses whenever things go wrong, the Darwin Chinese promptly deposed the chief god and installed another of whom better things are expected.

Some of the Chinese have their own private josshouses.

“How often you pray there?” I asked one fifteen-year-old boy.

‘““ One month two times,’ replied this product of a White Australia in which education is free and compulsory.

Though nearly all born at Darwin and legally as Australian as Mr. Bruce, the Chinese of the Territory mostly speak little English, keep up the connection with China and preserve their Chinese mode of life, even to the extent of huddling together in tin shanties that are neither picturesque nor sanitary.

In these conditions and in the absence of watersewage, it is astonishing that typhoid and diphtheria are practically unknown.

“No germs can live in this air,” one toothless old lady, a boarding-house keeper, emphatically assured me in the course of a half-hour’s monologue. “‘I’ve been in England, Scotland and Wales, and I’ve been here twenty-seven years, and I say ’—she paused and gazed at me suspiciously, but finding no signs of combativeness on my part, went on—“ I say it’s the healthiest place for children in the world. The only people that goes to pieces is them that knocks about with the blacks.”

Certainly the Territory has produced some fine specimens of humanity—most of whom, by the way, look like Greeks or Italians. But it is generally admitted that women and children are all the better for periodic visits to the south.

d

III. A Corroboree

By day Darwin drowses beneath the tropic sun. As night approaches the place awakes. The whites gather at the tennis court amongst the sheltering green trees ; swarms of little Chinese children rush into the streets and play soccer with surprising keenness and skill; and the blacks, after spending the day yarning in the shade of the trees, loaf more energetically at the street corners.

The aborigines around Darwin belong to seven or eight different tribes, but one thing they have in common—their amazing blackness. They have no shine, like the African negro; no trace of the copper or brown of the South Sea Islander. The Territory black, almost alone amongst the peoples of the world, has a skin exactly like soot.

People tell you that the Australian aborigine is one of the lowest beings on earth, but having been fortunate enough to see a corroboree one night near Darwin I can swear that he has at least one virtue : he isa born actor. Ina clearing lit by a huge fire, I found some hundreds of blacks assembled and the performers, numbering perhaps seventy or eighty, already running through their repertoire with the speed and certainty of a well-trained vaudeville troupe.

It was a remarkable performance. There came a monotonous droning from a bamboo pipe ; some one else started an unceasing tapping; and the rest beat time by smacking their hands against their thighs and uttering something between a grunt and a gasp.