Part 6 (2/2)
Well-groomed men, opulently dressed women, and smartly turned out boys and girls, on one boat after another waved handkerchiefs and Union Jacks, clapped, cheered, laughed, and sang. Bra.s.s bands banged out the National Anthem, and the usual pet.i.tion to the Almighty to bless the Prince of Wales. The Prince waved and smiled in return, from his eyrie above the bridge, while fresh boats raced alongside, and continually restarted the hubbub.
As the _Renown_ advanced up the harbour droves of rowing-boats and flocks of sailing craft added themselves to the now slow procession.
Gatherings of people became visible as dark patches on the white foresh.o.r.e of every promontory. In the case of the rocky headland overlooking the middle harbour, the patch must have been many acres in extent. The _Renown_ dropped anchor half a mile from Farm Cove, a sheltered gap in the encircling hills. The Prince went ash.o.r.e in his launch, through a decorated cheering sea-lane of tugs, ferry-steamers, rowing-boats and yachts. He landed on a shaded beach, the slope behind solidly crammed with people, while beside the water, in a grove of bunting and greenery, were a.s.sembled the most distinguished men to be found in this part of Australia. Those present included the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, the State Governor, the State Premier, Members of the Commonwealth Government resident in New South Wales, the whole of the State legislature, Ministers, Judges in robes and wigs, Admirals and Generals in the last inch of permitted gold-lace.
Immediately behind was a decorated marquee in which were the civic officials, including the Lord Mayor of Sydney in munic.i.p.al robes and ermine, who presented an address. A naval guard-of-honour was drawn up on one side of the marquee, and a military guard-of-honour on the other.
Salutes were fired, bands played, the guards-of-honour were inspected, the princ.i.p.al people were presented. The address was replied to, and amidst much cheering the Prince was conducted up a decorated staircase to the top of the cliff where a number of four-in-hands with large mounted escorts of ”diggers” were in waiting to convey him through the city. The proceedings differed from those on the occasion of the entry into Melbourne in that they took place in bright morning suns.h.i.+ne, instead of in the fading light of evening. The route, including as it did long straight stretches of undulating ground, enabled the brilliant pageant of flags, escorts and pennants to be seen as a whole as the procession jingled through five miles of densely packed people.
The way was kept by returned soldiers and cadets. Triumphal arches, constructed throughout of such characteristic Australian products as wool-bales, corn-sheaves, or balks of timber, dotted it at intervals.
Avenues of white colonnades supported flags and bunting which stretched continuously for miles. Sightseers festooned the parapets, crowded the balconies, tapestried the windows with eager faces, and formed a solid ma.s.s between the wooden barriers of the processional lane and the plate-gla.s.s show-fronts of the business houses.
In substantial Macquarie Street the Prince stopped to greet a terribly large community of crippled soldiers, who sat patiently in motors and bath-chairs by the wayside, attended by nursing sisters. Further on a no less touching spectacle awaited him, in a great gathering of black-garbed mothers, widows and orphans of diggers killed at the front, a pathetic reminder that, of the four hundred thousand soldiers raised by voluntary enlistment in Australia during the war, only one in two escaped wounds or death. Here the pressure was dense; and spectators, we heard, paid a s.h.i.+lling a minute to stand on packing-cases to look over one another's heads.
The route ended on the shady lawns of Admiralty House, where the Prince inspected a great company of war-workers, who stood in ranks of variegated colour, including the red and grey of sisters who served in hospitals overseas, and the white and black of those whose no less devoted labour kept public utilities active at home while the manhood of the nation was in the field. Before entering the building where he was to stay the Prince shook hands with no less than ten wearers of the Victoria Cross.
The reception was over. Perhaps the feature in it which struck the visitor most, next to its magnificence and enthusiasm, was the light-heartedness of the crowds. After the Prince had pa.s.sed, and had been everywhere cheered, Mr. Hughes, the Commonwealth Prime Minister, Mr. Storey, the State Premier, and other ministers who were further back in the procession were subjected to volleys of chaff and counter-chaff from supporters and opponents, in which they themselves joined with the utmost goodwill. Even the cras.h.i.+ng into the harbour, close alongside the reception wharf, of one of the aeroplanes employed on escort duty, upset the equanimity of n.o.body. A motor-launch promptly picked up the soused aviators, who seemed to find the accident the greatest of larks.
The country round was as much interested in the visit as the city itself. For days before the Prince's coming special trains, crowded to their utmost capacity, had followed one another in quick succession into Sydney from localities sometimes hundreds of miles away in the back blocks. One heard of a father who squeezed his family of tiny children into one of these special trains, and was then unable to get a foothold on it for himself. The mites went to Sydney unaccompanied, but lacked for nothing, either upon the way or when they arrived, for every soul upon the train was prepared to father and mother them.
The ten days which followed were crowded with public functions in which what seemed to be the entire population of Sydney partic.i.p.ated outside, if not inside, the place of occurrence. One of the princ.i.p.al was the state banquet in the enormous town-hall. Seven hundred and twenty diners here sat down. Three thousand of Sydney's maids and matrons watched the proceedings from the galleries on either side, and at a given signal after the dinner, when the Prince proposed ”The Ladies,” there was a sound like a vast flight of pigeons and three thousand Union Jacks fluttered into the air. The ladies had responded for themselves. Crowds blocked the wide streets for half a mile round the building, throughout the whole of the proceedings, and took up the cheering again and again.
The toasts of the evening were honoured, not only in the banquet hall itself, but by some hundred of thousands outside as well.
Mr. Storey, the Premier of the Labour Government in power in New South Wales, made a most cordial speech in proposing the Prince's health. He described the Royal guest as a democrat in whose presence he felt no embarra.s.sment in speaking frankly. He welcomed him on behalf of New South Wales, and declared that the Royal family had always shown sympathy with the ideals for which Labour men everywhere stood. In the course of his reply, the Prince said: ”I realize to the full the great part which New South Wales and Sydney have played, and must always play, in the history of Australia. This wonderful city is the cradle of the magnificent development which has made the Australian Commonwealth. The whole thing started here, and in later days you were foremost in the movement of ideas which led to federation. The greatest of all the statesmen who first worked for federation, Henry Parkes, was a Sydney man, and a Premier of New South Wales. The first Australian Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton, also came from New South Wales. It is amazing to think that New South Wales holds two-fifths of the population of the whole Commonwealth and that Sydney holds more than half of the population of New South Wales. That fact alone shows the vast importance, not only to the Commonwealth, but to the future of the whole Empire, of this state and its lovely capital. Sydney is indeed the London of the Southern Hemisphere.”
It is characteristic of Australia that the Commonwealth banquet in Sydney, at which the Prince subsequently made what was probably his princ.i.p.al speech during the tour, was an outwardly less imposing function than was the state dinner I have just described. The Commonwealth banquet was given in one of the upper stories of a fine building in Martin's Place erected under the direction of Sir Denison Miller, founder of that great national organization the Commonwealth Bank, which now handles the entire finances of the central Government, including the raising of loans and the issue of currency.
At the Commonwealth dinner the Governor-General presided and Mr. Hughes made one of those felicitous speeches which have won him a European reputation, though they are themselves surpa.s.sed by his lightning humour and uncompromising common sense in the cut and thrust of debate. ”Time,”
he said, ”circ.u.mstances, and the age-long struggles for freedom by men who held liberty dearer than life, have fas.h.i.+oned the const.i.tution under which we live. The monarchy is an integral part of it. If Britain decided to adopt a republican form of Government that would be the end of the Empire as we know it to-day. The Empire has grown. It is, if you like, the most illogical of inst.i.tutions. It is composed of many free nations very jealous of their own rights, and brooking no interference with these. Yet, to the outside world, it is, in time of danger, one.
And the inst.i.tution which binds all these together is the Monarchy of England.” The Prince in reply declared that there was no finer body of men than those which Australia sent to represent her in the various theatres of the war. He went on to sum up the aspirations of Australia in the words of Sir Edmund Barton, ”a continent for a nation, and a nation for a continent,” and evoked a storm of cheering when he declared, ”I am quite sure of one thing, that as Australia stands by the Empire, so will the Empire stand by Australia for all time.”
The enthusiasm that characterized the Prince's entry into Sydney, and the State and Commonwealth banquets given there in his honour, became if possible more and not less accentuated as his visit wore on. Outstanding everywhere was the tumultuous cordiality with which he was greeted by enormous crowds. The same thing occurred at the races, at the gala performance at His Majesty's Theatre, at the parade of returned men, at a wonderful display by state school-children, also when he entered the chief military hospital beneath an arch of crutches, and when fifty thousand people pa.s.sed before him in the town-hall.
The whole was an experience which can never be forgotten by any of those who had the good fortune to be there. The popular reception in the town-hall was especially impressive. Here, standing on the dais in the centre of this fine building, the Lord Mayor of Sydney alongside, and a number of ministers, judges and soldiers, grouped about him, the Prince, in plain grey jacket suit and soft brown hat, received the salutes of a great mult.i.tude of men, women and children--the blind man led by friends, the old lady who must see the Prince before she died, the baby who would be able to say in years to come that it was present. The people were shepherded past by members of the local police, for whose patience and courtesy it is impossible to express too great admiration, in one long, smiling, curtsying, hat-doffing stream. Numerous barriers had been erected, but there was no crus.h.i.+ng whatever. It was a demonstration of orderliness and public spirit of the very best.
Another picturesque function was where, under the twinkling pendants of the big chandeliers in the ballroom of Sydney's Government House, beneath the portrait of his ancestor George III, and before a brilliant a.s.semblage of naval and military officers, judges, ministers, civic authorities, and members of consular bodies, the Prince shook hands with several hundreds of representative men belonging to all sections and communities of the Australian continent. Interesting also was the day he spent amongst the young folk. It began with a visit to the Sydney Cricket-Ground where twelve thousand children of the local Government primary schools, headed by Mr. Mutch, Minister for Education, Mr. Board, Director of Education, and Colonel Strong, Chairman of the Executive Committee, organized and supervised a picturesque exhibition of physical drill. The children deployed upon the gra.s.s in the centre, where they went through evolutions and exercises, and arranged themselves so as to form patriotic emblems and messages of welcome. Fifty thousand parents and relations occupied gigantic stands around the ground and added a ba.s.s to the treble of the children's cheering.
Later on the Prince proceeded to the University. On the way he pa.s.sed through some of the less fas.h.i.+onable quarters of Sydney, where he was warmly received by crowds consisting largely of artisans, amongst whom his popularity seemed to grow each day he remained in Australia. At the University, a place with fine buildings, in pleasant country surroundings, on the outskirts of the city, he was cheered by some two thousand undergraduates, five hundred girl students, and a big gathering of graduates and members of their families. The great hall, with stained-gla.s.s mullioned windows, dark grained timber roof and grey stone walls, broken by a long array of mellowing oil portraits, where the Chancellor, Sir William Cullen, read an address, recalled the beautiful precincts of Christchurch, Oxford, upon which it appears to be designed.
The feeling of home was heightened, alike by stained-gla.s.s portraits of Cardinal Wolsey and other famous founders of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and by the presence in the a.s.semblage of a number of red and black Oxford hoods amongst the grey ones worn by graduates of the Sydney University. The gathering included a fine body of students in uniform, many of them wearing war-decorations won overseas. The blue and gold flag of the University corps occupied a place of honour at one end.
Replying to the address, the Prince referred to the profoundly important work the Sydney University was doing, and its splendid record in the war, and went on to say: ”The generation which faced the war enn.o.bled your traditions, fine as those already were, and left a great example of personal service to the King and Empire for the present generation to pursue.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE GARDENS, NEW SOUTH WALES]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PERTH, FROM THE KING'S PARK]
Replying later to an undergraduate address read by Captain Allen, M.C., the Prince said: ”You have referred to my comrades.h.i.+p with your own two thousand fellow students who went to the front in the great war, and I a.s.sure you there is no part of my experience which I value more than my long a.s.sociation with those gallant troops, both officers and men.”
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