Part 7 (2/2)
After seeing the steel-works, the Prince was conducted by Mr. MacDougall over a neighbouring wire and nail factory, which claims to be now filling the entire demand of Australia for plain-wire fencing. The firm was preparing to set up additional machinery upon a large scale to make barbed wire which Australia has. .h.i.therto bought in Europe. The significance of this development is considerable, since barbed wire forms the top, as smooth wire does the lower strands, of fences of which hundreds of thousands of miles are already in existence in Australia, and millions of miles more have still to be built.
After leaving the wire-works, the Prince drove in procession, through decorated, crowded, cheering streets, to a sheltered park overlooking the Pacific, where thirty thousand people had a.s.sembled and Mayor Gibson read a civic address. In the course of his reply the Prince dwelt upon the remarkable industrial development of Newcastle. ”Your harbour,”
he noted, ”your s.h.i.+pping facilities and your manufactures have greatly enhanced the importance this district has possessed from the earliest date on account of its rich deposits of coal.”
Leaving Newcastle in the afternoon by train, the Prince returned to Sydney through a pleasant land of tidy orange plantations and ragged blue-gum bush. On the way he held a reception in the city of Gosford, and saw further reaches of the beautiful Hawkesbury river. A record crowd cheered him at Sydney railway station, and along the route to the harbour where he rejoined the _Renown_.
XV
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
The Prince went from Sydney two thousand miles by sea to Western Australia, a state as large as the combined areas of England, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Holland, with a population of less than half a million people to develop this stupendous territory.
On the way, in traversing the Australian Bight, that borders the southern coast of the continent, the _Renown_ encountered weather remarkably bad even for this region of frequent gales. Green seas swept over forecastle and quarter-deck alike. The engines were slowed down.
The big s.h.i.+p strained, clanked, and groaned, but proved her seaworthiness magnificently. The waves were still high in King George's Sound outside Albany, where owing to shallow water the _Renown_ had to lie four miles from land in a wide and but partially sheltered bay.
Where the sh.o.r.e could be seen it lay in rocky gra.s.s-grown hummocks, on which the surf beat heavily. A picket boat conveyed the Prince and his staff through a narrow entrance into the small landlocked harbour, where they landed on a desolate pier, wet decorations flapping dismally in cold wind and spray. The entire population had turned out, however, despite the weather. The Governor of Western Australia, Sir Francis Newdegate, the State Premier, Mr. Mitch.e.l.l, and a number of other members of the Government awaited the Prince upon the pier. The Mayor of Albany read an address from a wind-swept platform in front of a town hall prominently situated on a low hill facing a wide street that led down to the harbour. The crowd here was a varied one. It included traders, merchants, commission-agents, and manufacturers belonging to Albany itself, also large numbers of fruit-growers and farmers from stations in the interior of this prosperous land of orchards and wheatfields. Gatherings of returned soldiers and school children, also nurses and other war-workers flanked the general a.s.semblage. A night train journey followed through rolling country and bush, with arable fields, apple orchards and orange gardens which looked most attractive next morning in brilliant suns.h.i.+ne in the freshest of rain-washed air.
The Prince was cheered by gatherings at many wayside stations, including Parkerville, where a number of children, in charge of gentle-faced sisters in black robes, sang patriotic songs in the chill morning air as the train went through. About noon he alighted at Perth, capital of Western Australia, an extraordinarily beautiful city, with wide streets and solid masonry houses, situated on the low banks of the picturesque Swan River--here so wide as to be almost a lagoon.
The streets were decorated and lined with cheerful people. Those who received the Prince included the Governor, the State Premier, the Mayor, Mr. Lathlain, the Chief Justice, Sir R. MacMillan, the leader of the State Opposition, Mr. P. Collier, the Chairman of the Reception Committee, General Sir Talbot Hobbs, also most of the other members of the local houses of Parliament and of the Perth munic.i.p.al corporation.
The Prince went through the usual inspection of naval and military guards-of-honour, and then proceeded by motor-car through the city, which looked delightfully fresh in bright winter suns.h.i.+ne. The crowd was lined up behind wooden barriers on either side of a lane kept by blue-jackets from H.M.A.S. _Sydney_, also men of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, and returned soldiers, cadets and scouts. The route taken was some two miles in length. It lay through the princ.i.p.al business and residential streets, the crowd extending the entire distance, clapping, cheering, laughing and flag-waving as the Prince went by. The procession disappeared inside the shady grounds of Government House, a place of green lawns and rose-bushes blossoming in the shade of banana-trees and Insignis pines.
Later on H.R.H. visited the princ.i.p.al theatre, where he addressed several thousand returned sailors, soldiers and nurses. He congratulated them on their services, alike during the war and since their return home, where they had shown that they stood for the maintenance of law and order. From the theatre the Prince went on to a big civic luncheon in the Town Hall, where Mayor Lathlain told an appreciative audience of their guest's keen personal interest in the welfare of the people of the Dominions. He also mentioned the fact that the Prince had come as representing ”the dear old Motherland, the heart of the Empire, the land upon whose Navy so largely depends Australia's ability to carry on her peaceful avocations.” H.R.H. was loudly cheered when he rose to reply, and his pleasant little speech evoked the greatest enthusiasm. He felicitated Perth and Western Australia generally upon their wonderful progress, of which much had been achieved within the memory of the present generation. He said he knew Western Australia's record in the Great War, and desired also to congratulate its women--alike those who had gone abroad and those who had worked at home. An invest.i.ture at Government House and a State ball completed the day's work.
The visit to Perth lasted about a week. It had several memorable features, among them a review, when, in a wide thoroughfare bordered by pleasant residences bearing such British names as Ilfracombe, Warwick House, and St. George's Terrace, the Prince stood, framed in a background of crowded grandstands, taking the salutes of a number of thousands of Australians, including a solid contingent of blue-jackets, a yet larger one of returned soldiers, some in khaki, some in mufti, cohorts of cadets and boy scouts, both naval and military, phalanxes of red cross nurses in smart white dresses, and girl guides in a dense column of blue, followed by what seemed an endless procession of children, every school within ten miles of Perth being represented.
From the review the Prince went to Mayor Lathlain's ”people's garden-party” in the National Park. Here upon a dais beneath a statue of his great grandmother, Queen Victoria, in the shelter of big timber-trees, commanding a magnificent view of the city and the river, he stood for an hour while the people of Perth streamed past in column.
Babies were carried pick-a-back on their fathers' shoulders, men doffed hats, mothers and daughters waved hands, handkerchiefs or flags, as they pa.s.sed. One old lady delayed the line to shake hands with him, but accepted the Admiral's clasp as a makes.h.i.+ft, the Prince being too busy taking off his hat and returning eight smiles at a time to have a hand to spare. Everybody was so engrossed gazing at the visitor, every head turning on its neck for a long backward glance after the dais had been pa.s.sed, that hardly an eye was drawn off when a noisy aeroplane, which had been stunting unnoticed in the Prince's honour overhead, suddenly swooped out of intolerable oblivion to within a hundred feet of him.
A further notable function was the State banquet at Perth Government House. Here were present all the leaders of thought and enterprise in Western Australia, politicians, administrators, squatters, settlers, traders, naval and military commanders, ministers, judges, ten V.C.'s, and everybody else who counted. Grace was said by that soldierly episcopal, Archbishop Riley, who, as a Chaplain-in-Chief of the Australian forces in the field, is known and loved from one end of Australia to the other. The Prince's health was proposed by Premier Mitch.e.l.l. After it had been drunk with the usual cheering and waving of napkins, H.R.H. made a speech. ”Your policy,” he said, ”is to draw settlers from the old country, at the same time ensuring that they shall not suffer from lack of experience when they are first put upon the land of their adopted country. I am delighted to hear that you are giving to Imperial ex-service men the same chance of starting life upon the land when they arrive in this state, as you give your own diggers. I can think of no more admirable way than this of continuing the splendid traditions of the war and maintaining our united British spirit.” It was a note which has often been sounded since to appreciation and applause throughout the Empire.
One of the expeditions made from the state capital was by launch down the wide placid reaches of the Swan River, still the haunt of the black swan, emblem of Western Australia, to hold a reception at the port of Fremantle, some ten miles distant, where the river joins the sea. No black swans graced the occasion, only an occasional porpoise leapt alongside the launch as it entered the estuary. The entire population of the countryside lined the banks as the vessel went past, every village, settlement, and factory _en route_ contributing its quota, which in the case of saw-mills, cold-storage plant and electricity works, consisted almost entirely of workmen.
Arrived at Fremantle the entire city was found awaiting the Prince, crowding the pier and lined up along the streets. Naval and military guards-of-honour, with bands, saluted. The chairman and members of the Harbour Trust and the Mayor and members of the city council stood bare-headed as he made his landing. From the pier he was conducted in procession, first to a picturesque display by thousands of children, and afterwards to the big ”Anzac” military hospital where convalescent patients were drawn up with doctors and nurses outside, and where the warmth of the cheers that came from the wards, where he went round the beds of those too ill to move, was more than touching.
Speaking later at a civic luncheon, the Prince looked forward to Fremantle's eventually becoming one of the leading harbours in the Empire, the importance of its position as the first port of call on the western seaboard being emphasized by the completion of the trans-continental railway. Returning to Perth later in the afternoon by motor-car, he was taken through the magnificent National Park, a well-kept forest upland, full of fine timber, including a whole avenue, each individual tree dedicated to some West Australian soldier fallen in the war. Just before entering this park, the Prince pa.s.sed some thousands of children drawn from schools in the Cottesloe, Claremont and Subiaco munic.i.p.al areas, who stood hardily in the rain in the open to wave their flags and sing their patriotic songs.
Still another rewarding expedition was by car to some of the fruit gardens near Perth. Orange groves in the dips and apple orchards on the rising slopes made odd neighbours. The apple-trees were bare, but oranges hung in the golden profusion of Malta or Seville. Fifty acres of this fruit in some cases meant a clear income of over a thousand pounds per annum to the fortunate owner after paying for all labour other than his own. The orchard zone was near the coast. Further inland is one of the wide wheat-belts which feed Australia and furnish a surplus for Great Britain. Beyond this again begin the cattle-stations of the Great North-West. Perth was buzzing with the Great North-West. A commission composed of parliamentarians and publicists had just returned, loaded with information and optimism, from a two-thousand mile expedition through it by motor. In addition the highways were blocked and the views were obscured by mountainous men, full of deep c.o.c.ktails and deliberate conversation, who had descended from this region for the occasion of the Prince's visit. Some of these genial giants worked, as private pasture, areas ranging to over two million acres. They seemed in themselves a sufficient indication of what the country could produce, and an adequate reason for railway enterprise in their direction. In this state land nationalizes may note the character of the movement towards small holdings. It has recently been laid down that no peasant or other proprietor shall obtain a fresh grant of more than one million acres.
Not a long step toward communistic property, but possibly a beginning.
XVI
WHEAT, GOLD, AND LOGGING
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