Anthony Trollope

“ We who have daily news,—as do all of us in England every morning at our breakfast-table,—are sometimes apt to regard it as a bore, and tell ourselves that it would be delightful to have a real budget on an occasion after a month of silence. The only way to learn the value of the thing, is to be without it for a time. In the single item of the price of wool in the London market, the Australian telegraph will be of inestimable value to the colonies. ”

“ I do not recommend the man who is taking out £20,000 to a colony, with the idea of becoming a great man, to go there; but to him who feels that with £200 or £300 he has but little hope in England, and who would prefer independence and property of his own to the composite luxuries and miseries of a crowded country, I think that Western Australia offers perhaps as good a field for his small capital as any other colony. ”

“ I must confess that in Western Australia one hears of doings in days not far remote which lead one to think that any amount of ignorance in a legislator, that any amount of what I may, perhaps, call rowdyism in a chamber, is better than practically irresponsible power in the hands of a would-be mighty colonial officer, removed from home by half the world’s circumference. ”

“ No land can beat it. But for Englishmen in general, that is, for the bulk of the working population of the country, it is I think by no means the best place. A large proportion of our labouring classes cannot even get enough to eat. A still larger proportion are doomed so to work that they can think of nothing but a sufficiency of food. In all the Australian colonies, if a man will work the food comes easily, and he can turn his mind elsewhere. I do not assert that there is no poverty,—no distress. Even in Western Australia the government is obliged to maintain an establishment for paupers. ”

“ It is not the gold that does it,—the absolute value of the metal which is extracted,—but the vitality to trade, the consumption of things, the life and the stir occasioned by those who, with the reckless energy of gamblers, hurry hither and thither after the very sound of gold. The men come, and must live,—and must work for their livelihood, if not in getting gold, then on some other work-field. The one thing wanted is population. Gold, if really found in paying quantities, would be a panacea for all evils in the colony ”

“ I believe that Western Australia has no agent at home, as have the other colonies, a part and perhaps the chief part of whose business it is to facilitate the emigration of those who intend settling themselves in the new colony. Why should we pay an agent to send us emigrants when no emigrants will come to us? That no doubt is the feeling of a desponding Western Australian. And yet the colony has, as I think, with much wisdom offered most alluring terms to emigrants. ”

“ The land is good, and if properly tilled will produce all that is necessary for man’s life. And the land that will do so, though widely scattered, is abundant. I need hardly say that at home in England there are still among us millions of half-starved people,—half-starved certainly according to the dietary of the poorest even in this poor colony,—to whom the realisation of rural life in Western Australia would seem to be an earthly paradise if it could be understood,—to whom it would be a paradise if it could be reached. ”

“ The locality having been chosen in the first place, not by the new-comer, but by the government, sheep-stealing will not at any rate have been the object when the choice was made,—nor the idea that a squatter if harassed sufficiently may at last be induced to buy his neighbour out. Communities will be formed, and communities will make markets. I have sometimes thought that free-selecters like to take their land up far away in the bush, at long distances each from another. There is a wild independence in the doing so which charms. ”

“ There are here also public gardens,—as there are in every metropolis of the Australian colonies. The gardens of Adelaide cannot rival those of Sydney,—which, as far as my experience goes, are unrivalled in beauty anywhere. Nothing that London possesses, nothing that Paris has, nothing that New York has, [Pg 26] comes near to them in loveliness. But, as regards Australian cities, those of Adelaide are next to the gardens of Sydney. In Melbourne the gardens are more scientific, but the world at large cares but little for science. In Sydney, the public gardens charm as poetry charms. ”

“ It may easily be conceived that such hopes as these,—hopes which might be gratified any day by an accident, but which could not assure themselves of success by steady industry,—would lead to a state of feeling which I may best describe as the Micawber condition. If only gold would turn up! Gold might turn up any day! But as gold did not turn up,—then would not Providence be so good as to allow something else to turn up? This feeling, than which none can be more pernicious, is likely to befall every population which seeks after hidden and uncertain gains. ”

“ But it is ill bringing a man out who will not stay when he is brought. If you, my philanthropical reader, send out some favoured tenant or parishioner, your object is fairly achieved whether the man make himself happy in Western Australia or Victoria. But it is by no means so with the colony, when the colony pays. When a colony has paid for three or four hundred immigrants, and finds after a few months that they have all disappeared, and gone to more fortunate lands, the colony not unnaturally becomes disgusted. Then it is that the colony feels that nothing will do but gold. ”

“ I do not wish to be understood to say that I look to responsible representative government as a panacea for all the evils with which Western Australia is afflicted, or that I think that a colony which would perish without that remedy would by that alone be saved from ruin. I have no such [Pg 122] belief in any form of government. It is in Western Australia, as elsewhere, by the people and their energy that the people must be made to flourish. ”

“ The farmer usually owns the land. The system of tenant-farming is by no means unknown in the colony, but it is not popular either with tenant or landlord. The landlord obtains none of those side-wind advantages from his position as owner,—advantages over and above the rent,—which are so valued in the possession and are so dear to the imagination among ourselves. ”

“ The place is by no means a lawless place. Those who emerge from their sentences reformed are encouraged to prosper. Those who come out unreformed are controlled and kept down. But nevertheless the convict flavour pervades the whole,—to the great detriment of that part of the working population which has always been free. This evil is of course curing itself by degrees. The colony receives no more convicts, and the very birth and growth of its young citizens will gradually obliterate the flavour. But this would be done much more quickly and much more effectually by an influx of new blood. ”

“ It is easier for a new country, than for an old country, to get into good ways. No man has visited new countries with his eyes open without learning so much as that. But, not the less, when the observer sees 60,000 people in a new city, with more than all the appliances of humanity belonging to four times the number in old cities, he cannot refrain from bestowing his meed of admiration. ”

“ The wool-grower of Australia watches the price-list for England with an intense and natural anxiety. He can do little or nothing to regulate the market. He cannot understand why it is that the fluctuations should be so great. But he obeys the market, too often with an implicit confidence which it does not deserve. When prices are high he increases his flocks,—and with his flocks he increases his debt also. He is almost negligent how much he may owe if wool be high. ”

“ Struggling against these evils, the colony has not hitherto prospered;—but the question still arises whether something further may not be done to induce men to settle on its shores and till its lands, and gather its grapes and figs, and make themselves fat with its fatness. There are two things which may yet be tried, say the governors and those who are interested,—which may be tried, perhaps, with some greater confidence than can be placed in the Micawber hope for gold, and coal, and pearls. Let us have representative government, and let us have another land law. ”

“ Great as has been the possession of the land, it has not been a source of wealth available for any such purpose. If only it could be used to attract serviceable immigrants, if only it could be equitably distributed among men who would really use it,—not take it for the purpose of bargaining and gambling with it,—if only it could be converted into homes for people who would accept such homes and thus become a nation, the land would then have done all that it should be expected to do. ”

“ In Western Australia it is simply a question of self-preservation. I do not know that any good can be done by soft words in the matter. The colony has never prospered as yet, and is not prospering at present. I have endeavoured in a previous chapter to show, if not the reason for the fact, at any rate the fact itself. At first a scanty population spread itself over a wide district, and, having no extraneous help to foster it, was on the brink of perishing by its own natural weakness. Then it called for extraneous help, and received it in the guise of convicts. ”

“ For myself, I must acknowledge that when I got up about five o’clock on a dark wet morning, very damp, with the clothes and boots on which I was destined to wear for the day, with the necessity before me of packing up my wet blankets, and endeavoured, for some minutes in vain, to wake the snoring driver, who had been couched but a few feet from me, I did not feel any ardent desire to throw off for ever the soft luxuries of an effeminate civilisation, in order that I might permanently enjoy the freedom of the bush. ”

“ I am aware that there is at present great difficulty in getting proper men for the position of legislators in Perth;—perhaps I may go further, and say that as yet these are not to be found in the colony. Men are wanted who can yearly afford to give a portion of their time in the capital for nothing, who shall have trained themselves to think, as legislators, of their country’s good, and not of their own special wants, and who shall be possessed of that patient demeanour and forbearing temper which a legislative chamber demands. I doubt whether such men can as yet be found in Western Australia. ”

“ I have not yet spoken of South Australia, but, when doing so, I will endeavour to show how and why she has prospered.
And then, in another way, the gold-diggings of the eastern colonies have been detrimental not only to the reputation, but to the very existence of Western Australia. Men have constantly gone after the gold. It became almost useless to land emigrants on the western shore. Tidings came of this rush and of that rush, and the new-comers disappeared, soon turning up, as new chums again, in the golden land. ”

“ It will be said, and said truly, that if a people can find a living in a city, with all their wants supplied to them by caterers near at hand, why should such a people encounter the hardships of the backwoods,—or bush, as it is called in Australia? ”

“ Why should not a man stay in town, if he can live in town? We all feel that, as regards any individual man, the argument is good;—but we feel at the same time that cities without country to feed them cannot long be continued; and that a community with extensive means of management, and sparse powers of production, is like a human body without arms or legs. ”

“ Let a man understand that he can have land of his own and live upon it, owing rent to no one and service to no one, subject to no bondage, with no one to order his coming in and his going out, with no tasks laid on his shoulders by another, that he can be altogether free from the dominion of a master, and you open up to his mental eyes a view of life that is full of attraction. ”

“ Men who spend their energy in the pursuit of gold consider the growing of wheat to be a poor employment. And again the squatters, or wool-producers of Australia, who are great men, with large flocks, and with acres of land at their command so enormous that they have to be counted, not by acres, but by square miles, look down from a very great height indeed upon the little agriculturists,—small men, who generally live from hand to mouth,—and whose original occupation of their holdings has commonly been supposed to be at variance with the squatters’ interests. ”