Part 6 (1/2)
Rain had been falling heavily, but the girls faced it cheerily at the head of their avenue, many a tree of which bore the flag that told that the soldier it commemorated had been killed. The presentation was made to the Prince by two ladies, one of whom was Mrs. Lucas, the founder of the firm, which she had started on a very small scale, at a time when the miners were beginning to desert the Ballarat goldfield, leaving, in many cases, families behind them. Mrs. Lucas gathered these families around her, and by a system of profit-sharing, attached them to her firm, which is now well known throughout Australia.
This was not the only function at Ballarat. The Prince also received an address standing out in the rain, on a platform in the main street, in the midst of a crowd so large that those in the rear could neither hear nor see very clearly what was going on in front. As the result, both the reading and the reply to the address were much interrupted, a patriotic cornet on the outskirts playing ”G.o.d Bless the Prince of Wales” part of the time while the Prince himself was speaking. The Prince got hold of his audience, after two false starts, however, and to such purpose that the latter part of his speech was listened to with an interest that the rain, which plastered his hair and flattened out his collar, appeared to enhance. The cheering at the end was most hearty. The crowd did not disperse when the speeches were over, but waited in the rain until after the completion of a further ceremony, which took place inside the town hall, where the Prince shook hands with numbers of returned men and nurses. He was again loudly cheered when he came out and got into his car _en route_ to the train to Melbourne.
The rain that was so insistent during the visit to Ballarat was of dramatic importance to the country at large. It broke a long and serious drought, extending over an enormous area--a drought so severe that we pa.s.sed, on the road to Ballarat, way-worn sheep that had been driven three hundred miles in search of fodder and water. They were browsing, on their homeward way, on one of the farmer's stock-routes which traverse Australia from end to end. These cattle-tracks are generously bordered by pastures fenced off from the surrounding country, so as to conserve food for flocks and herds in movement.
Two days later, just three weeks from Australia's mid-winter, the Prince crossed, by train from Melbourne, the chill slopes of the Great Dividing Range, which separates the basin of the Murray river, flowing westward through central Australia, from that of the streams which pour their waters southwards to the coast. On the way, he received addresses at Kyneton and Castlemaine, once gold-mining camps, now not less prosperous dairying and woollen-working centres, the entire countryside turning out to receive him. Thence the train climbed down to a pleasant plateau on which stands Bendigo, city of flowers and dry, healthful breezes, and a centre of large and still exceedingly productive quartz gold-mining.
Enormous heaps of grey ”mullick” shale, and yellow and white tailings here stand amongst beautiful avenues of shady eucalyptus trees, and substantial buildings of stone and brick. One of the cheeriest civic luncheons of the tour was a feature of the day--the Mayor toasting the Royal guest as Duke of Cornwall, Prince of the ”Cousin Jacks,” to whom the development of the Bendigo gold industry is so largely due. A novelty also appeared on the triumphal arches in the streets, which, in place of wreaths and patriotic texts, carried whole bevies of the prettiest girls the city could find. These arches had been built in the form of bridges connecting the porticoes on one side of the street with those on the other. The girls occupied the middle and dropped flowers as the Prince pa.s.sed in his car.
Intensive small culture is so successful about Bendigo, that we were told as much as 300 has been made out of an acre of tomatoes in a single year. Bendigo may thus look forward to a future of agriculture when her reefs are exhausted. Gold-mining brought her population, but her fields and gardens will probably keep it.
Later in the afternoon the Prince, accompanied by the Prime Minister, in overalls, descended the shaft of one of the gold-mines that amongst them keep the mints of the country busy turning out sovereigns that bear on the reverse the effigy of the kangaroo. The Prince thus made the acquaintance of the gold industry which has played so dramatic a part in the history of the Commonwealth. The output has been falling off gradually since 1903 when the value produced was over sixteen million sterling. It still averages over ten million sterling annually however, and is likely long to remain a very important source of wealth.
It was on this expedition that newspaper men accompanying the tour had their first opportunity of becoming acquainted with a number of distinguished Australians with whom they were so fortunate thereafter as to travel extensively. I have already mentioned that the Rt. Hon. Mr.
William Hughes, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, was one of them, his outspoken frankness and caustic humour illuminating and diverting long stretches of the railway journeys. Another member of the Commonwealth Government, closely a.s.sociated with the tour, was the Hon. Mr. Pearce, Minister of Defence, who was supported, whenever the Prince was in naval ports, by the Hon. Sir Joseph Cook, Minister for the Navy, and Rear-Admiral Grant, Senior Member of the Naval Board, authorities who were able to afford the Prince first-hand information about the training and equipment of the forces that have given an account of themselves at once so memorable and so recent. Major-General Sir Brudenell White, Commonwealth Organizer of the visit, Brigadier-General H. W. Lloyd, Brigadier-General Dodds, Commodore J. S. Dumaresq, were also outstanding figures of the party. The Commonwealth arrangements, extensive though they were, represented only a small portion of the organization connected with the Australian part of the tour. Every State had also its own organizer, besides numerous committees--committees for decoration and illuminations, reception committees, committees for dinners and dances, school committees, committees to guide and instruct the British Press. These last-named bodies, to whom the debt of the visiting newspapermen was considerable, consisted not of delegated correspondents but of the editors and proprietors of the leading journals themselves.
These gentlemen also took upon themselves the duty of making known throughout each State the story of the Prince's doings, thus giving to the business of publicity the best and most influential brains available, and placing at the disposal of the Overseas pressmen a constant reference to experience and local knowledge of the utmost value.
[Ill.u.s.tration: JUTLAND DAY AT MELBOURNE]
[Ill.u.s.tration: WITH AUSTRALIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN]
With the Commonwealth Prime Minister an ex-Labour member, and with Labour Governments in power in several of the Australian state legislatures, no one can visit Melbourne, seat of the Commonwealth Government, without coming up against some of the industrial problems and prospects in this country. It has already been mentioned that, at the dinner given to the Prince by the Commonwealth Government, in Parliament Buildings, Mr. Frank Tudor, leader of the Labour Party in opposition to Mr. Hughes' Government, warmly seconded the toast of the Prince's health. I repeat this fact, as it seems to be indicative of the general att.i.tude of Victorian labour towards the Royal visit. The British pressmen had the opportunity of meeting some of the Labour leaders, amongst them Mr. E. J. Holloway, Secretary of the Melbourne Trades Hall, and Mr. D. L. MacNamara, Labour Member of the Victoria Upper House. They are men of moderate views, while full of schemes for bettering the conditions of labour on this continent. Mr. MacNamara is the author of proposals, now forming part of the Australian Labour Party's platform, for revising the Commonwealth const.i.tution, upon lines designed to make the will of the people supreme. He would abolish existing State governments, and divide the States into provinces administered by councils exercising only such functions as might, from time to time, be conferred upon them by the Commonwealth Government, the Upper Chamber in the latter to be done away with, thereby leaving the lower Federal House a free hand to put through legislation beneficial to the ma.s.ses. This scheme, whatever may be its intrinsic merits, is rather of theoretic than practical interest, as there is not much probability of any proposals for increasing the powers of the Commonwealth Government being accepted by the States, which are after all in paramount authority for the time being. It is nevertheless important as showing the constructive nature of problems with which Labour men in this part of Australia concern themselves. Mr. Holloway's activities have been chiefly connected with organizing proposals for the immediate advantage of workers, reducing their hours of work, and increasing their pay. Australian labour is watching developments in England, and a tendency is growing to subst.i.tute friendly round-table conferences between workers and employers for the less elastic processes of strikes and lock-outs which have so often been resorted to in the past.
There was no lack of evidence in Melbourne to show how closely the community, as a whole, is affected by the new distribution of political power. Smoke-room a.s.sertions that industry was being destroyed by the frequency of strikes need not be taken too seriously, since the manifest prosperity of the crowds and the well-ordered activities of the factories did not at the time confirm any such mournful supposition. It is apropos to mention, however, that in Melbourne places of business much capital is locked up in purely emergency apparatus for doing without such public utilities as water-supply, electricity and gas, these arrangements being designed to enable industry to continue during periods of munic.i.p.al inactivity, a fact which is certainly significant of the frequency of strikes in the past. Another noticeable feature is the far-reaching nature of the activities of the unions. In the sub-editorial rooms of the leading newspapers may be seen labour forms, to be filled up even by men holding well-paid appointments upon the staff, giving detailed particulars of hours of duty, overtime and emoluments.
Friendly personal interest, rather than anything deeper, was perhaps apparent in what some of the Labour men said about the Prince. Friendly personal interest was always there, however. Even those who were inclined to ascribe the wonderful reception in the streets to the Prince being ”a good sport, and well advertised,” readily admitted the desirability of the British connexion, and their own cordial wish to keep up old relations.h.i.+ps in this new land. At the time of the Prince's visit correspondence appeared in the Melbourne Press on the subject of alleged Catholic lukewarmness in regard to Royalty, and it must be said that political trouble in Ireland has not been without its echo of difficulty in Victoria, though the extent of anything of the kind might be very easily exaggerated.
The wonder is, however, not that isolated exceptions should be found, but that, with all the divergent political ideals, and conflicting social conditions, necessarily met with in a large city of such recent growth as Melbourne, so generous a measure of warm-hearted loyalty should have been manifested, loyalty in which all sections of the community, including Labour, showed themselves to be in warm accord.
XIII
NEW SOUTH WALES
Towards the end of the visit to Melbourne it became plain that the tension of repeated functions and strenuous journeys had begun to tell upon the Prince. He held out manfully, but was clearly overtired. This was by no means surprising, at all events to any member of the tour party, for all had begun to feel a strain which fell in a degree vastly multiplied upon His Royal Highness.
That well-informed journal, ”The Melbourne Argus,” referring to the matter, said: ”When the programme was arranged, before the arrival in Melbourne, the opinion was expressed in these columns that it was proposed to place too great a strain upon the Prince, and since his arrival it has become every day more evident that human strength is unequal to the tasks which have been set. The Prince has not made any complaint, but has most generously and courageously met all engagements.
Only those in close a.s.sociation with him know the expenditure of nervous force which this conscientious discharge of duty has entailed.”
Eventually the programme was altered so as to give H.R.H. an additional week in Melbourne, free from public engagements. The hope that he would rest, however, was not in any literal sense fulfilled, as he spent his holiday in riding and golf, hardly less tiring than the public functions which the doctor had forbidden him. His staff were lucky if, after a long day spent in the saddle, he could be persuaded not to dance into the small hours. This strenuousness is characteristic. In the _Renown_ he spent much of his spare time exercising on deck or playing squash racquets. A mile run was his not infrequent preparation for a long day of public engagements. It is an attractive habit, but in the case of one subjected as the Prince is, at short intervals, to emotional as well as physical strain it hardly carries the recuperative benefit that it might in ordinary circ.u.mstances. The rest in Melbourne, such as it was, enabled him to carry on throughout the remainder of the tour. He seemed occasionally to take every ounce out of himself, but he ”carried on.”
Melbourne's send-off, when the Prince ultimately left to proceed to Sydney, was, if possible, even more demonstrative than its reception when he arrived. Nine aeroplanes, soaring round the Ionic columns of Parliament Buildings, as dusk was falling, created the first stir in the immense crowd which waited along the road he was to take. Presently distant cheering was heard gradually coming nearer, as his car made its way from the Moone Valley racecourse, where he had spent the afternoon, to the top of Collins Street, where the official portion of the route commenced. Slowly the procession extricated itself from the ma.s.s of people who rushed up to say farewell, and a.s.sailed his car with offerings of flowers and wax Kewpie dolls for luck. A real horse-shoe, tied up in ribbon, was thrown by an admirer unable to get near enough to present it. It was perhaps owing to the good luck it brought that it dropped harmlessly into the bottom of the Prince's car. Eventually, the procession was able to go forward along a barricaded lane kept by the police in the middle of the street. In this s.p.a.ce children raced alongside, and a ripple of waving hats and handkerchiefs kept pace with the cars as they advanced, while the evening air rang with cries of ”Good-bye, Digger”: ”Come Again!” interspersed with clapping and cheering. The Prince stood upon the seat of the car waving his hat through some miles of these demonstrations.
On the wharf at Port Melbourne a farewell address was presented by the local authorities beneath a gigantic arch inscribed ”Australia Is Proud of You.” Here the State Premier and other notables attended, also a guard-of-honour of the Royal Australian Naval Brigade. The reverberation of boots upon the wharf, as the crowd rushed afterwards to catch a last view of the Prince as he went up the gangway of the _Renown_, drowned the sound of a fife and drum band, operated by ladies in MacKenzie tartans, which banged on cheerfully alongside.
The _Renown_ sailed at daylight, escorted out of harbour by a flotilla of Australian destroyers. The voyage was along a hilly sh.o.r.e for the most part covered with forest. The first port of call was in the wide, sheltered harbour of Jervis Bay, the Dartmouth of Australia. Here Sir Joseph Cook and Rear-Admiral Grant, with Captain Walters, Dr. Wheatly and other senior members of the Naval College, received the Prince, who inspected a smart guard-of-honour of cadets, and was subsequently shown over the inst.i.tution, which is well arranged and up to date. The buildings include airy dormitories, comfortable study rooms, convenient lecture halls, commodious laboratories, and s.p.a.cious gymnasium and gun-room, and are built round a roomy gra.s.s ”quarter-deck,” on which the cadets in the course of the afternoon handsomely defeated the best Rugby football team that the _Renown_ could produce. Nothing could exceed the pleasantness and wholesomeness of the atmosphere of this fine naval training college. The life by the cadets is an open-air one, and a more healthy and promising body of youngsters it would be impossible to find anywhere. They are being given a sound education amongst surroundings calculated to impress upon them the beauty and attractiveness of the land whose service they are about to enter. The harbour, at the foot of the college playing-fields, is to be the port of entrance to the federal territory of Canberra. The site of the new capital itself is only some seventy miles inland, a distance which is thought nothing of in this country of magnificent s.p.a.ces. A railway has been surveyed to connect the two places, and a corridor of federal territory had been marked out, so that the entire line, including the port, may be out of reach of any state influence.
The Jervis Bay College is a step in the direction of making the fine fighting s.h.i.+ps, which Australia already possesses, independent of the help of the Mother Country. Boys are growing up there who will hereafter command them, and perhaps build the big naval graving docks, that are so badly wanted in Australian waters, to enable the modern battles.h.i.+ps of Great Britain to reinforce effectually those of Australia in any trouble that may arise in the Pacific.
”What do you think of our harbour?” is as inevitable a question in Sydney as ”What do you think of America?” is in New York. It was soon countered by the demand of the blue-jackets on the _Renown_, ”And what do you think of our s.h.i.+p?” but its relevance was easy enough to understand, when, in the misty dawn, of what was mid-winter in Australia, but might have been a fine June day in England, we reached the high rocky headlands which guard the entrance to these wonderful inland waters.
A flotilla of war-vessels, including two Australian cruisers and a number of destroyers, escorted the Prince's s.h.i.+p into an aquatic amphitheatre. On all sides were beautiful wooded promontories sloping down to the edge of still pearly water. The slopes were studded with home-like villas, each gay in its own garden. Bays and inlets made shaded alleyways in all directions from the central expanse. Slowly the battle-cruiser threaded her way through the deep water marked but by buoys into the inner harbour. Hundreds of decorated motor-boats and dozens of double-decked ferry-steamers crowded round, each one of them a cheerful bouquet of brilliant parasols and fine-weather millinery.