Part 28 (1/2)

The ”Sewing Clubs” of the war-time are at the bottom of a good deal of the ”woman movement” in America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of the Northern States formed themselves into a.s.sociations for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts to the army: the women of a district would meet together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat while they were sewing.

The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally inclined, through the operation of its old interest-begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed them in the ”Timaeus,” along with horses and draught cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he said that all the brutes derived their origin from man by a series of successive degradations, of which the first was from man to woman. There is, however, one strong reason why the English should, in America, have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, retaining them in Australia, where the conditions are not the same. Among farming peoples, whose women do not work regularly in the field, the woman to whom falls the household and superior work is better off than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation in which women were held by our former ancestry. In Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily retrograding upon this point.

It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of the English mind against the labor of what we call ”inferior races” will be found to extend to half the superior race itself. How will English laborers receive the inevitable compet.i.tion of women in many of their fields?

Woman is at present starved, if she works at all, and does not rest content in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupations which society allows her. Where a man can see a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many women as there is room for invade each of this small number of employments. In the Australian labor-field the prospects of women are no better than they are in Europe, and during my residence in Melbourne the Council of the a.s.sociated Trades pa.s.sed a resolution to the effect that nothing could justify the employment of women in any kind of productive labor.

CHAPTER IX.

VICTORIAN PORTS.

All allowance being made for the great number of wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of traffic in the Melbourne streets.

Trade may be said to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while the tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Australian commerce, do not pa.s.s through Melbourne, but skirt it, and go by railway to Williamstown, Sandridge, and Geelong.

Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and become the first port of all Australia, I found gra.s.s-grown and half deserted, with but one vessel lying at her wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-cla.s.s s.h.i.+ps was moored alongside the pier. When the gold-find at Ballarat took place, Geelong rose fast as the digging port, but her citizens chose to complete the railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Melbourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed to control the legislature, and grants were made for the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and brought the trade of Upper Queensland and New South Wales down to Melbourne, in the interest of the ports of Williamstown and Sandridge. Not content with ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set themselves to ridicule it. One of their stories goes that the Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of gra.s.s, that a free selector has applied to have them surveyed and sold to him, under the 42d clause of the New Land Act. Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died, and went to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his knock, asked, ”Where from?” ”Geelong.” ”Where?”

said Peter. ”Geelong.” ”There's no such place,” replied the Apostle. ”In Victoria,” cried the colonist. ”Fetch Ham's Australian Atlas,” called Peter; and when the map was brought and the spot shown to him, he replied, ”Well, I beg your pardon, but I really never had any one here from that place before.”

If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the same as rapid decline would be with us, the famed wheat country around it seems as inexhaustible as it ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving sheet, save where it is broken by the stunted claret-vineyards. Here and there I came upon a group of the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tending and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy cheeks, and s.h.i.+ny pigtails of their native Rudesheim all flouris.h.i.+ng beneath the Southern Cross.

The colonial vines are excellent; better, indeed, than the growths of California, which, however, they resemble in general character. The wines are naturally all Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret, port, and sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better. The Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be bought in Europe at its price, but in some places this wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while the dealers foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of hermitage.

Of the wines of New South Wales, White Dallwood is a fair Sauterne, and White Cawarra a good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Cha.s.selas is singularly cheap; and the Tokay, the s.h.i.+raz, and the still Muscat are remarkable.

Northwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot-hills of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the headquarters of deep quartz mining, and now no longer a diggers' camp, but a graceful city, full of shady boulevards and n.o.ble buildings, and with a stationary population of thirty thousand. My first visit was made in the company of the prime ministers of all the colonies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a conference, but really to enjoy a holiday and the International Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the spending of other people's money which distinguishes colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our disposal, the result of which was that, feted everywhere, we saw nothing, and I had to return to Ballarat in order even to go through the mines.

In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the mining district on each side of Ballarat, I found myself able to discover the date of settlement by the names of places, as one finds the age of a London suburb by the t.i.tles of its terraces. The dates run in a wave across the country. St.

Arnaud is a town between Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also are Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears the name of the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the end of the war, lie to the northward, in the Wimmera.

Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the coast, but free from the sudden changes of temperature that occur in Melbourne twice or thrice a week throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children and to persons of weak health. After two or three days of the hot wind, then comes a night, breathless, heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises, once more fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have seen the shade thermometer in the cool verandas of the Melbourne Club standing at 95 before ten o'clock, when suddenly the sun and sky would change from red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze, dancing up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and across the Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature in an hour to 60 or 65. After a few days of cold and rain, a quiet English morning would be cut in half about eleven by a sudden slamming of doors and whirling of dust from the north across the town, while darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the cry of ”Shut the windows; here's a hot wind,” and down would go every window, barred and bolted, while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and private houses will keep out the heat for about three days, but if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts longer, then the walls are heated through, and the nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers know nothing of these changes. The regular irregularity is peculiar to the Melbourne summer.

CHAPTER X.

TASMANIA.

After the parching heat of Australia, a visit to Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward, and enjoy the charming views of wood and river, instead of having to stand with downcast head, as in the blaze of the Victorian sun.

The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its scenery like that of the non-Alpine districts of the west coast of New Zealand, but softer and more habitable than is that of even the least rude portions of these islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian plains, there is likeness between any green and humid land and the last unparched country that he may have seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks nor homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley. Somersets.h.i.+re cannot surpa.s.s the orchards of Tasmania, nor Devon match its flowers.

The natural resemblance of _Maria_ Van Dieman's Land (as Tasman called it after his betrothed) to England seems to have struck the early settlers. In sailing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County of Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after those at home, according to their situations, from its Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Alban's Head, round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon, with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay.

Hurrying through Launceston--a pretty little town, of which the banks and post-office are models of simple architecture--I pa.s.sed at once across the island southward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmanian Mountains--detached and rugged ma.s.ses of basaltic rock, from four to five thousand feet in height--are wanting in grandeur when seen from a distance, with a foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening, too, in an English colony, to see half the houses shut up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these older portions of the island have worked their lands to death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them into a momentary life. Since leaving Virginia, I had seen no such melancholy sight.

Nature is bountiful enough: in the world there is not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree-ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the same time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tasmania may be said to present on a small area an epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the n.o.blest harbor in the world, all are contained in a country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the South.

Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wellington,--the spurs in the foreground clothed with a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant; the city nestled under the basaltic columns of the crags,--even here it is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and D'Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great s.h.i.+ps in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the world.

The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still more frightful ma.s.sacres of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman's Land has never been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in changing its t.i.tle, seems not to have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the English village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before the recollection of the circ.u.mstances under which the harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Ba.s.s's Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.

We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Battues of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the Queensland settlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out to murder natives unprovoked; they have that provocation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to wait, which the Brazilians wait for now--the provocation of robberies committed in the neighborhood by natives unknown. It is not that there is no offense to punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who know no better. Where one wretched untaught native pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the settlers, ”as an example,” and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other devils'