Philip Mennell

“ The attractions which Australia seems to me specially to offer are, to the ordinary­-going man, who looks not so much to palaces and purple and fine linen as the goal of his hopes, as to the humbler, but not less praiseworthy aim of owning his own home and homestead, and of seeing his children, before he dies, lifted up some way on that ladder of social ascent which his own lot forbade him to climb in the land of his birth. ”

“ The want of population is the one thing which keeps Western Australia in the rear rank of the Australian Colonies, and her necessity is thus in the best sense of the word England's opportunity. It is a monstrous absurdity that fifty-four thousand people should be holding—certainly not utilising—a territory which it would be equally ridiculous to deny is capable of supporting several hundreds of thousands, even without those mineral discoveries which, if persistently ex­ploited, would very soon attract thousands from the other colonies, and thus create a consuming population. ”

“ With money to spend on public works, employment will be brisk; and, though I do not advocate the influx of men wholly without capital, it must be remembered that every man who comes to the colony with capital makes room for the arrival of men with none. The colony is just now admittedly on the rising tide, as there is room for the exercise of enterprise in a variety of directions ­ which it would be difficult to particularise, but which colonists of the right mental and physical stamp will soon find out for themselves. ”

“ It will be a stretch of international courtesy indeed if we are to make room for an increasing influx of foreign sweaters into the East End of London by the exportation to the colonies or elsewhere of the British bone and sinew, which has the prior right to what is going in the local labour market. It is not, however, so easy to stem the tide of that rural emigration which is constantly sweeping into the metropolis and rendering work scarcer and food scantier for those with whom life is already sadly too much of a hand-to-mouth struggle. ”

“ To the tourist in search of the picturesque, Western Aus­tralia has few attractions. There is no scenery in the easily accessible parts of the colony comparable with what may be found in a hundred places on the east coast of the continent. There are places that may be called 'pretty,' but nothing grand or majestic. But to the botanist the whole of the southern portion of the colony is a paradise of wild flowers, No other part of Australia produces them in such profusion or in such varieties. ”

“ Guest-chambers having been assigned to us, the good bishop, who bears his eighty years better than common mortals bear sixty, showed us over the garden, with its acres of vines, its golden orange and lemon trees, its flourishing tobacco plants, which supply snuff to the brethren, and its wealth of various kinds of healthy vegetables. Wheat cultivation is carried on over a large area, but the sheep are the mainstay of the mission, the wool-money supplying funds for the purchase of clothing, farming utensils, and other things which are not producible on the spot. ”

“ But the opening of this inland navigation is not favoured by the Fremantle folk, who have great faith in the future of the port, and rather regard Perth as a hostile territory with pretensions which it is their duty to keep in check. The port is certainly a bright and bustling little place, more given over to commerce and its accompaniments than the placid metropolis—where nobody ever seems in a hurry—and is bound to grow in wealth and importance with the certain progress of the colony. ”

“ As one crosses the south-western corner from the natural harbour of the colony at Albany to its less favoured rival of Fremantle, which the exigencies of the capital and the present trend of settlement will, to all appearance, compel the local parliament to convert into the main port for ocean-going shipping, one realises what a tiny area out of the total of a million odd of square miles has yet been subdued by right of actual tillage under the constitutional sceptre wielded from Perth. ”

“ The production of cheese is a branch of industry that has not occupied the attention of many in the colony. At every agricultural show excellent cheeses are exhibited—equal in every respect to the imported colonial article. The industry is, however, not yet established, and may only succeed on a large scale under a factory system. Nevertheless, the Commission can recommend its production at once as an adjunct to the dairy farming in the colony, where the dairy farmer has the ad vantage of a family and cheap labour to give that attention so indispensable to good cheese-making. ”

“ What disillusionises the better class of emigrant, and what makes him feel sorely that he has gone from the frying-pan into the fire, is when, on his arrival from the old country, he is confronted with the fact in all its nakedness that the farmhold to which he has looked forward so hopefully is, after all, only a slice out of an interminable forest, and that it will be two whole seasons before he can get even a small portion of it into cropping order, and that in the meantime money must be found for house­ building, clearing, fencing, and the keep of himself and his wife and family. ”

“ I have ascertained from official sources and the evidence of several old settlers, as well as from personal observation, that the southern portion of your property possesses a climate of the most delightful character for residence and certain agricultural productions. An examination of the map will show how this is secured. As all the southern portion has a large water frontage in the proportion to the area of land thereby affected, with much timber, and a great variety of aspect by hills and valleys, there are some of the most favourable conditions for rainfall and its conservation. ”

“ The selections of the Railway Company will, undoubtedly, embrace the very eyes, or most valuable areas of agricultural land in the colony.
"The settlers along your line of railway are men who, as a rule, commenced with no capital, yet who have struggled bravely through many vicissitudes and years of trouble success­fully, and have eventually made money. They are not a complaining class, but men of individuality and courage, sturdy yeomen, worthy of the old land from which they came. ”

“ Sometimes, but comparatively seldom, the traveller comes upon an open sand plain, covered with shrubs and flowering plants in infinite variety and exquisite beauty, and often, especially in the northern and eastern districts, low scrubby trees and bushes fill the place of timber, but, taking the word 'forest' in its widest sense as wild, woody, and bushy country, Western Australia, as far as I have seen it, is covered with one vast forest, stretching far away into regions yet unexplored. A very large proportion of this is heavy timber country. ”

“ Dairying is certainly in its infancy in Western Australia; and even with a very gradual increase in the population—which, by the by, the latest returns assess at just under 54,000—might be most profitably carried on, the large amount of butter imported from South Australia being some measure of this, and by no means a credit to the energy of the West Australian farmers, who, however, have bad the excuse, as I have pointed out before, that they could make a living easier than by undertaking industries requiring capital to start and constant care and exertion to sustain them. ”

“ Whatever betides, its splendid harbour cannot be taken away from it, and though the preponderance of population and property in the vicinity of the capital, and the convenience of settlers still farther north, has led to Fremantle being regarded as a more desirable port for improvement and development at the hands of the State, it is quite clear that as the colony advances Albany must advance too, being, as it is, the entrepôt of a large portion of the southern district tapped by the Great Southern Railway. ”

“ Surely the West Australians may cry aloud to the redundant population of Great Britain not, 'Come over and help us,' but, 'Come over and help yourselves.' The growth of a community that rests upon an agricultural basis is comparatively slow, but it is sure, and steadily progressive; and, in growing, it builds up a population "With staying qualities, with attachment to the soil, and animated by sentiments of respect for honest labour. ”

“ For the immigrant that Western Australia wants, the man whose mission is to make the wilderness blossom as the rose, the two private railways, built on the land-grant system, have been the necessary precursor. Take the Great Southern line as an example of how these com­panies have paved the way for settlement. The railway, ad­mirably built, carefully maintained, and well furnished with first-class rolling stock, traverses a country that ten years ago was practically unknown. ”

“ Social contrasts are, no doubt, becoming accentuated, and social distinctions defined, even in Australia, but where all are avowedly engaged in the material development of the country, there cannot be quite the same line drawn between the officers and the rank and file of the great army of industry, which prevails amidst the more complicated conditions of the old world, in which everything has had to broaden slowly down from precedent to precedent. ”

“ It certainly would not suit the Company to give the tenant a full holding of the best land, and it certainly would not suit the tenant to get nothing but the worst. In the calculation I have given as to the capital needed for working from 500 to 1,000 acres of land, I am, of course, taking the case of a man who means to go to work gradually, clearing and planting a little fresh land each year, and doing even his fencing by degrees. ”

“ It would be unjust in the highest degree to overlook the fact that in his efforts to make the wheels of constitutional government work smoothly Sir William Robinson has been admirably seconded by the gentleman whose pride it must ever be to have been the first Prime Minister, as Sir Henry Parkes insists he should designate himself, of his native colony. A son of the soil, bred as well as born in Western Australia, Sir John Forrest's name is associated with some of the best exploration work undertaken within its almost limitless expanses. ”

“ Rottnest is a veritable "isle of beauty," sky and sea in the sunny autumn weather vying with each other in the depth and purity of their azure glory. The misanthrope might find at Rottnest a solitude where "none intruded," and where the loveliness of nature might perchance lure him back to the love of his kind. ”

“ Englishmen who know very little of Australian geography and Australians who know very little of the westernmost colony of their own continent, are pretty well acquainted with Albany, which as the first port of call on the way out to Australia, and the last port of call on the way home to England, is much better known to globe-trotters than even the capital of the colony. ”

“ Nowhere is this sample of bush humanity to be seen to more advantage than at a roadside railway station, where, if anything so objectless could be credited with an object, he is trying to put himself forward as the antipodes of all that the train advent typifies in the way of movement and progress. ”

“ Voting papers being allowed on the top of a property qualification, Western Australia is at present the farthest removed of any colony from the one man one vote system which Sir George Grey, the great New Zealand publicist, so much desiderates. ”