AUSTRALIA IN ROSE-COLOUR.
IT is to be regretted that the papers could not, or would not, publish the lecture on Australia, delivered on Tuesday by Miss F. Shaw at the Colonial Institute, its extenso. It is singularly pleasant reading, as well as instructive. Here in London, where we are all murmur- ing, and fearing, and uttering dark prophecies of coming evil, we have a lady with the head of a man, and an almost unequeled experience, who tells us gravely that the prospects of the great island-continent are all bright, and that in the near future a great population of vine- growers and cultivators generally will have worked out the problems which so disturb Europe, and will be living at ease under circumstances which will enable the agricul- turist to be also a gentleman and a scholar. This is, perhaps, the pleasantest division of Miss Shaw's fore- cast. She believe; and indeed sees, that the wonderful fertility of Australia—which is to that of Northern Europe as the fertility of a Richmond market-garden is to the fertility of a Northumberland oat-field- will allow an agricultural population to spring up cmgested, enough to possess many of the advantages now almost peculiar to cities, especially in the way of educa- tion, and rich enough never to be overworked. The Southern Australian who will work can, in fact, make annually £30 an acre ; and ten acres will yield him a pleasant, though moderate, competence through life. This competence will even increase, for almost the whole region will grow the vine to perfection—the bunch of grapes is often a pyramid, weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds —the wine needs nothing but scientific care to be equal to the best in Europe, and owing to the peculiarity of the climate, the fine kinds once thoroughly secured will be exempt from those variations between one year and another which are the despair of European owners of the superior vineyards. Miss Shaw declares that the future she foresees is already approaching, and that the hind who takes to cultivation on his own account, and the gentleman who does the same, tend in a very curious way to approximate towards each other. "Throughout temperate. Australia, and especially in connection with fruit and wine growing, and what is generally known as intense culture under conditions of artificial irrigation, one of the most interesting movements that is to be observed is the tendency to place upon the land a higher class of intelligence than has ever before been associated with agricultural pursuits. The future 'rustic' of Australia will be the descendant of two classes who form at present the most striking elements of Australian society. There is the workman who is determined to better his condition and to leave his family in a happier position than that to which he himself was born, but who does not intend to cease to be a workman ; and there is the gentleman who is prepared to accept manual labour, but who does not intend for that to cease to be a gentle- man. These two classes meet on equal terms upon the land, especially in the irrigation colonies, where science and training are useless without the practical quality of industry, and industry alone without intelligence is out of count. Each class has much to learn from the other. In some districts, where neighbours are rare, they intermingle freely. Their material position is already often fairly equal, and it is easy to see in these new groups of population the foundation of a very valuable society of the future." In the very scrub or mallee land, hitherto pronounced useless, it has recently been found that wheat will grow freely, and in the driest districts it has been discovered that Nature has been only bottling water out of the way of the sunlight, and that when an artesian well is bored the supply is inexhaustible. So deeply indeed is Miss Shaw impressed with the richness of the soil in Australia that she rises almost into poetry, and in the following passage she describes a veritable land of Canaan' as Canaan was before Roman and Saracen and Turk had killed the sources of fertility :— " The climate of Australia is a perpetual summer. There is nothing which can be planted in the soil that will not grow. I have spoken already of the oriental fruits of the tropics. It is almost impossible to speak without what must seem exaggeration of the extraordinary size and beauty of the English fruits which flourish in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. At Orange, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, I was given cherries, black and white, which seemed more like Orleans plums and those little red and white apples that we see wrapped in silver paper in the fruiterers' shops than like any cherries that I had ever seen before. They were exquisite in flavour and sweetness, and the orchards on either side of the road were weighed down with' the heavy crop. In Victoria all the small fruits were equally plentiful and equally fine. By the time I reached South Australia the summer was more advanced, the vintage was be- ginning, and the country, all red and gold with fruit, suggested no other comparison than the land of Canaan as we used to read of it in our childhood. Acres of vines spreading up the hillsides, the summits crowned with chestnut woods and apples, the hollows filled to overflowing with plums and pears, peach trees, apri- cots and medlars, and every fruit that ripens in an English garden. Olive trees bordered an avenue here and there, and oranges were everywhere showing yellow against the dark-green foliage of the orange groves. The Tintara vineyard, of which we see advertisements on all the railway-station walls, is in this por- tion of South Australia, and a branch vineyard is within an easy drive of Adelaide. On the day on which I visited it the ther- mometer registered 105° in the shade. In the blazing sun of the hill sides oxen were dragging waggons filled with the white and purple fruit, and I remember gratefully a certain cool, dimly. lighted cellar where on a table beside wine of a kind which, with all his enterprise, I may Bay that Mr. Burgoyne has not yet sue- ceded in securing for the public, there were heaped bunches of various sorts of grapes. Possibly they were selected bunches; I only know that when I was asked to take one away I had some difficulty in lifting it and I was told that it weighed over twenty pounds. Nor could this have been very unusual, for at the hotel just such a pyramid was put down before me every morning for breakfast."
There is, doubtless, another side to the picture, some observers speaking, for instance, of the degeneracy which often falls upon both hind and gentleman when they take to this easy cultivation ; but it is pleasant for once to hear of the enticing side and to think of the possibility of a million of people living in a great county under perpetual summer, closely packed enough for high civilisation, all educated, and none poor. That seems a possible dream in Southern Australia, and it is one on which Australians, who have no history and therefore dwell in the future, love to descant. Miss Shaw believes that the attraction of this life, and the necessity for utilising the land which now induces Australians to found labour colonies, will ulti- mately extinguish the reluctance to admit immigrants which now marks Colonial workmen, and that there will be room and welcome for the twelve hundred unwanted pairs of arms, who, as Mr. Garen teaches us, are daily added to our population.
This roseate description applies, of course, only to Southern Australia, for in the North, which is within the tropics, Miss Shaw believes a totally different civilisation will spring up, and the most difficult of all problems will at once present itself. Excluding some broad plateaux, the white man in Northern Queensland, and, in fact, in the whole North of the Continent, is unfit for work. It is not only that he dislikes it, but that he cannot do it, being found, when he tries, only equal to a half of a Kanaka, Japanese, or Chinese :— "White men can do profitably a good deal of the lighter and more open work, but when it comes to heavy work under the cane, those whom I have questioned have told me more than once that they do not expect to do much more than half the work of a Kanaka. On one small plantation, upon which they were employed in about equal numbers, and were all on task-work, the Kanakas finished in the morning at half-past ten and in the afternoon at three, while the white labourers, with exactly the same amount of work to do, worked in the morning until twelve, and in the later part of the day .until the moon rose. I was myself in the fields, and noted the hour at which the respective tasks were finished. This fact, combined with the greater reliability of what is generally classed as servile labour, weighs more with the employers than actual cheapness." The white man owns, however, one of the richest soils, which will grow all the produce of the tropics—sugar, rice, spices, and fruits—to perfection, and the result of these conditions must be that he will supervise, but for labour will employ some dark person who, even at a wage of 1,5s. a week, is worth three times himself in capacity for toil. At present, he employs Polynesians, locally called Kanakas, and Miss Shaw testifies heartily to their com- fort and well-being; but in the end, he must draw supplies from a larger reservoir, and either import Japanese, as he probably will do for all the work of artisans, or people from India, where there are millions of industrious agri- culturists without land, whom nothing but the distance prevents from swarming over. A society, in other words, will be formed upon the basis of a servile class, and cannot in the least resemble society on the basis of equality, more especially as, up to a certain point, supervision seems to grow easier with the size of the area to be supervised. It is an aristocracy which will grow up ; and the problem to be solved will be its relation to the servile class, which may range from the Indian system, where the man is free and comfortable, though the master is practically despotic, to a system indistinguishable from slavery. Miss Shaw is very hopeful, owing to the kindly treatment of the Kanakas and Japanese whom she saw ; and if Hindoos are imported, the Indian Government can protect them effectively, as it does in the Mauritius, but the question is not yet settled. It does not wholly depend upon the respective interests of the two parties, but rather on the question whether race-hatred will, or will not, spring up between the races. It has sprung up against the Chinese, who are universally employed and disliked, and it would, we fear, spring up against the Negro. There is much more hope with the Hindoo, who does not rouse in the European any instinctive antagonism, and who will work himself to death on a patch of land ; but it will be half -a-centurybefore we know whether the guiding race and the guided race can bring themselves to live together in cordial amity. Till then, we cannot grow enthusiastic over the future of Northern Australia, or believe that North and South can form a single political community ; but on the future of Southern Australia, we are tempted to agree with Miss Shaw. Englishmen have there an estate where, under a warmer and more serene climate, drinking wine instead of beer and spirits, and freed from the more exasperating evils of poverty, they may develop into a better educated, better tempered, and more joyous people. They will need, however, both discipline and good government, for the one fact which militates heavily against Miss Shaw's pleasant forecasts is that the lad bred in Southern Australia tends to become a " larrikin," the most objectionable specimen of humanity with which the English-speaking world has hitherto been cursed. Perhaps he is only a passing phenomenon ; but his existence is sufficient to prove that even in Southern Australia pleasant and worthy men do not, any more than public buildings in Eden, "grow spontaneous." Miss Shaw should complete her lecture by giving us the seamy side.
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