Part 6 (1/2)
”Go then forth, and fortune play upon Thy prosperous helm.”
--2nd part Henry IV.
When I made my first Home trip, in 1847, I resolved to open, if I possibly could, German emigration to Port Phillip. Quite a number had already been settled, some from the earliest years, in South Australia, where their industry, frugality, sobriety, and general good conduct had made them excellent colonists. This favourable testimony was confirmed to me by correspondence on the subject with my late much-lamented friend, Alexander L. Elder, one of South Australia's earliest, most esteemed, and most successful colonists. My first step on arrival was to write to the ”Commissioners of Emigration,” an officiate since dispensed with, pointing out this South Australian success, and suggesting that a certain charge upon the Colonial Land Fund, authorized in special cases of emigrants--an aid of 18 pounds a head, I think--might be made applicable to German vinedressers emigrating to Port Phillip. In due course, I received a most cordial reply from the secretary, Mr.
(afterwards Sir) Stephen Walcot, to the effect that Lord Grey, then Colonial Secretary, highly approved of the project, and that the aid asked for would be forthcoming for properly qualified German vinedressers. Armed with this letter, I went to Hamburg with introductions to Messrs. John Caesar G.o.deffroy and Son, at that time the chief s.h.i.+powners of the city. They were evidently well disposed, and had been, I think, concerned in the previous out-flow to Adelaide, as they referred me to Mr. Edward Delius, of Bremen, who had been an agent in the work. My visit to Delius resulted in my proceeding at once to Silesia, where I got as far as Liegnitz, whose gilded or tin-covered minarets reminded me that I was approaching the fanciful or gorgeous East. Here I met a number of the peasantry, all eager to hear about Australia, friends of some of them being already there. Hearing that a Moravian headquarters was also there, I introduced myself, stating that I was a subject of, and personally acquainted with, their brother Moravian, Mr. La Trobe, our Superintendent. I found other La Trobes there, his relatives or namesakes. Several of the body spoke good English, and so I got fairly on with the peasantry, explaining as to the cla.s.s ent.i.tled to the a.s.sistance in emigrating, and that to vinedressers only would the aid apply, so as to enable the Messrs. G.o.deffroy to give them a free pa.s.sage. I left them with the understanding that they would make up a party and communicate with Delius.
About six months later I went again to Hamburg, this time to see the first party away. They were in a good deal of trouble, for most of them, in spite of all advice, had clung to old family lumber, things mostly quite unsuited to Australia, and the carriage-cost of which drained their narrow means at every stage. But, worst of all, the cholera was then raging in Hamburg, and it attacked several of the party during some few days, while they waited, under such shelter as they could improvise, until the s.h.i.+p could take them. Delius and I visited them, to cheer them with the near prospect of the suns.h.i.+ne and plenty of Australia.
A rather motley crew was this first German party landed at Melbourne. I fear they were not all vinedressers. But the difficulty was to get them to describe themselves as such, even when they were so. This was almost as hard upon them as for an Indian Brahmin to write himself down a low-caste Hindoo. Upon any pretence they would cla.s.s themselves as of some trade, and one, who doubtless expected great things from it, entered himself, to the serious damage of our case, as ”Doctor of Philosophy.” There was considerable difficulty and delay in getting the grant. Mr. La Trobe helped us as much as he conscientiously could. Of course, the said doctor had to be excluded, and others with him. But eventually a substantial sum was handed to the s.h.i.+ppers, sufficient to encourage them to continue the business.
Several expeditions, larger or smaller, followed. I have no record of their total. One of their great delights was the superabundance of fresh beef and mutton. Our ever-active colonist, Dr. Thomson, of Geelong, who took great interest in Germans, invited a party of them, just arrived, to Geelong, where he gave them a supper upon the gra.s.s around his pretty residence, killing and roasting a large fat sheep, and serving out chops, and all the rest of it, ad libitum. One man was noticed to have eaten a couple of pounds' weight right off, and no doubt he felt, in consequence, like the boy in ”Punch”, just as though his jacket were b.u.t.toned. My late esteemed friend, Mr. Otto Neuhauss, himself one of the emigrating throng, although not of the very first party, gave me, from his complete mastery of English, most material help in managing their affairs. I had afterwards the pleasant duty of recommending him to our first Colonial Secretary, Captain Lonsdale, for a Justices.h.i.+p of the Peace, to the great satisfaction and convenience of his co-emigrant countrymen. I am under much like obligation also to Mr. Brahe, who long acted, and I hope still acts, as a solicitor amongst the Germans.
But the grand prize for these Germans was the acquisition of land.
Accordingly Captain Stanley Carr (then on a visit with the German Prince of Schleswig-Holstein) and myself took up, in trust for such Germans as desired it, and had the means of payment, one of the square miles of surveyed land, as yet unapplied for, about twelve miles north of Melbourne, which was divided amongst them in lots as agreed upon. And there they are to this day, a thriving community. When, in company with Neuhauss, my wife and I visited them in 1857, just before finally quitting the colony, we found considerable progress in the form of a scattered village, with a little Lutheran church, and some show of gardening and cultivation. They seemed delighted to stick to their German speaking, and would not even try to speak English. One amusing feature in the scramble as to allotments was that each tried, in most cases, to get trees, stones, and rocks in preference to clear ground, as if so much additional wealth. The trees might have had value for firewood, but in the other items they had probably more than they bargained for. We secured the land for them at a pound an acre, and the fact of their being so largely settled upon it raised its value at once considerably. All the land thereabout has now risen to many times this first cost. Many more Germans have since, as I understand, settled upon other land.
The exact value of the German immigration to Australia may be to us a differing estimate, but I think we mostly give it a decided welcome.
Lord Grey, as I recollect, was attacked in Parliament by the political opposition for thus spending money on foreigners which might have better gone to our own dest.i.tute, etc., etc. And I myself was repeatedly so attacked, but always in a like merely political opposition way, when anything is let fly at an opponent that will serve the momentary purpose. In the heat of the O'Shana.s.sy contest for Melbourne, for instance, I was accused of having told the Silesian peasants that they were wanted to set an example of sobriety to the drunken Irish. But I easily escaped from that noose by the rejoinder that, if I did say anything of the kind, it must have been of my own countrymen, as an Irishman can never stand to a Highlander at whisky. The true point of the question is the denationalizing of our race, which is so seriously threatened, for example, by the import of Chinese. We know that something of French, Flemish, Dutch, and Danish-Norse, along with a leading dash of German, all grafted on the old British stock, have evolved the modern Englishman. Substantially, therefore, we are only reopening this useful manufacture, which was effectively begun for England fifteen centuries back.
THE GERMAN PRINCE.
”Come of a gentle, kind, and n.o.ble stock.”
--Pericles.
One of the pleasant incidents to vary our social life was the arrival in 1850 of the young Prince of Schleswig-Holstein, to whom there occurred, during the German dynastic confusion that followed the revolutionary year 1848, an opportunity to see the world. Accompanied by his guardian, Captain Stanley Carr, he arrived by one of the Messrs. G.o.deffroy's s.h.i.+ps from Hamburg, having been swayed to some extent in selection of travel route by the fact of German emigration to Port Phillip having commenced the year before through the same firm. The Prince, who was then only of the age of nineteen, and of most amiable and ingenuous look, had that charm of the true politeness of his years, which left you the impression that he thought that everyone was to be preferred to himself. If unfortunate, in the chances of the struggle, in being dropped out of his princ.i.p.ality, he was afterwards compensated in another direction, for not only is his younger brother our Queen's son-in-law, but one of his daughters is to-day Empress of Germany. What a reminder are such changes of the swift pa.s.sing of time and of the crowd of portentous events in these quick-speeding years.
The Prince and his guardian landed, as it were, in my arms, by virtue both of introductions from the G.o.deffroys, and of my position as virtual parental head of the German flock which had begun to stream into Port Phillip. Unacquainted myself with the language, I was ably and untiringly helped, as I have said, by my late friend Mr. Neuhauss. The Prince took the thin disguise of Lieutenant Groenwald, but I never heard that name, except in Captain Carr's official intimation. We all called him the Prince, but he was equally courteous and una.s.suming whatever way we addressed him. It was quite touching to see the harmony that existed between ward and guardian, the one looking up to his sage Mentor with the trustful tractability of a child, the other reciprocating high regard out of the depths of that ultra-Tory sentiment with which long residence within German Court vicinities, and perhaps a natural turn of mind, had imbued him. We have been apprised of this still lingering German high sentiment by hearing at times of the late Emperor Frederick's habit, when Crown Prince, of calling the Princess ”wife,”
and of asking, when looking for her, where his ”wife” was--a transgression of court etiquette so appalling as well nigh to send the queried parties off into a fit. There was another amusing ill.u.s.tration from Captain Carr. He came to me once very considerably disconcerted by the report of a public meeting the day before, at which he, oblivious for the moment of the inevitable omnipresent English free press, had offered some remarks. The ”Argus”, under the undiscriminating democratic pen of Kerr, its editor, had reported that ”Captain Stanley Carr had told the meeting that the King of Prussia had told him” so and so; whereas, as Carr sorrowfully complained, the proper expression should have been that ”an exalted personage in Prussia had led him to understand” so and so. But, added my friend, with manifest comfort, the departure from propriety was so flagrant that, if the report did happen to reach the king's eyes, he would never believe it of him.
Both distinguished visitors honoured me and two of my sisters, who had by this time followed their brother to the land of promise, with a few days' residence at our cottage, with its garden so full of fruit, upon the Merri Creek. When so many other invitations pressed, we were in honour bound to this time-limitation. They were easily entertained with such few elegancies as we could then boast of. But we were bound also, even in mere good feeling to surrounding ambitious maidens, to get up a ball in the Prince's honour. I had my task in discriminating the comparative few of the fair hands that could possibly be placed in that of the guest, for even a prince could not dance for ever, so as to overtake all. On the Prince's part every successive hand was accepted with equal readiness, and every favoured maiden was duly encouraged, or discouraged, by faultlessly impartial courtesy.
BLACK THURSDAY.
”Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire.”
--Milton.
The year 1851 had for us three memorable events: first, ”Black Thursday,” on 6th February; second, the elevation of Port Phillip district into the colony of Victoria, on 1st July; third, the discovery of gold, which was practically and substantially that of Ballarat, during the third week of September.
Black Thursday has been so much written about by others that I had best confine myself to my own experiences. I rode in to business, as usual, from my Merri Creek residence, 4 1/2 miles north of the city. The weather had been unusually dry for some days with the hot wind from the north-west, or the direction of what we called Sturt's Desert, where hot winds in summer, and almost as distinctly cold winds in midwinter, were manufactured for us. The heat had been increasing daily, and this, as we comforted ourselves, was surely the climax which was to bring the inevitable reversion of the southerly blast and the restoring rain, for it was felt as the hottest day in my recollection. In town we did not hear of much that day, although reports came from time to time of sinister-looking signs from the surrounding interior, whence an unusual haze or thick mist seemed to rise towards the cloudless sky. Some few, however, who were more active than others in their trading or gossiping movements, became aware in the afternoon, or perhaps were favoured with the news as a secret, that Dr. Thomson had ridden posthaste from Geelong to Alison and Knight, our early and leading millers and flour factors, to warn them that the whole country was in flames, with incalculable destruction of cereals and other products; whereupon the said firm at once raised the price of flour thirty per cent. The Doctor had certainly earned a good fee on that occasion, and we must hope that he got it.
I returned home as usual after the day's work. Nothing to alarm us had even made a near approach to Melbourne, as our trees were too park-like in their wide scatter, and our gra.s.s too much cropped off by hungry quadrupeds, to expose us to any danger. But feeling unusual oppression from the singularly close heat, for I was attired in woollen clothing, not greatly under the winter woollen standard, and which, by the way, serves to confirm that our dry Australian clime is not to be measured in effect, like most others, by mere height of the thermometer, I proceeded to indulge myself, for the first time in my life, I think, with a second ”refresher” of my shower-bath. Next morning accounts began to pour in from all quarters of an awful havoc, in which, sad to say, life to no small extent was lost, as well as very much property.
There has never been, throughout Australia, either before or since, such a day as Victoria's Black Thursday, and most likely, or rather most certainly, it will never, to its frightful extent, occur again; for every year, with the spread of occupation, brings its step in the acc.u.mulation of protectives. Still these fires are a terrible and frequent evil, and even if the towns and settlements are safe, the destruction of the grand old forests is deplorable, and ere very many years will be, indeed, most sadly deplored. What between the unchecked clearances of the fires, and the unchecked clearances on the part of the colonists, I fear that those n.o.ble gum trees, the greatest and loftiest trees probably in the world, so graphically described by Mr. Froude in his recent Australian tour, will have but a poor chance. He describes also, with equal life, those dangerous forest fires, which are so especially frequent during the ever-recurring ordeals of drought, of which he had a fair sample at the time of his visit. Only think of eight miles of forest burnt in one fire which he witnessed, and such fires frequent occurrences!
Let us in time take warning by the example of the States and Canada, where, in and around the more settled parts, the magnificent primeval forest has entirely disappeared, alike from areas still unused as from those brought into use. When I travelled by rail from Montreal to Toronto, during the British a.s.sociation's Session at the former in 1884, a very large part of the way was through the monotonous and utterly wearisome scene of a second growth of miscellaneous small trees and underwood that had succeeded to the grand original. We were told of one small town which had become famous by its good taste or good fortune in having preserved in its midst one of the ancient monarchs. Well, what could be done to preserve Australian forests? We must not deprive the people of the use of these forests, for there they are for the purpose, as part of the country's wealth, and in quant.i.ty enough for all, discreetly dealt with. I would parcel out the forests, into great clumps, marking off adequate pa.s.sages between each, and only permitting for the present the latter to be dealt with. With the gradual clearing of these intervals, the reserved portions, and the colony generally, might be freed, in great measure, from the risk of fires.
EARLY VICTORIA, FROM 1851.
”Gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold.”