Greater Britain

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. Somersetshire cannot surpass 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 passed 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 masses 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 noblest 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 ships 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 massacres 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 title, 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 circumstances 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 Bass‘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’ missionaries have done their work.

Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queensland settlers that the “black-fellow” and his “jin” are human. They tell you freely that they look upon the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treatment of the “jins,” or native women, while the “wrens” of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No great distance appears to separate us from the days when the Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the face and arms all the natives they could catch, and gamble them away for wine.

Though not more than three or four million acres out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania have as yet been alienated by the crown, the population has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years. Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum of trade in 1853.

The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but winterless, are content to dream away their lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but less equable clime – Queensland, for example – are energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural cause of decline, Van Dieman‘s Land is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the island. The old free settlers will tell you that the deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van Dieman‘s Land.

Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the shores of which are not to be forgotten in a decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions punished. A day seldom passed without five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a space of five years, during which the prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes administered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or without cannibalism, two were captured with portions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and cannibalism, and seven are reported to have made good their escape, though this is by no means certain.

It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death, they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly thanked God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were known to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death to Macquarie Harbor.

The escapes were often made with the deliberate expectation of death, the men perfectly knowing that they would have to draw lots for which should be killed and eaten. Nothing has ever been sworn to in the history of the world which, for revolting atrocity, can compare with the conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill party during their attempted escape. The testimony of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation to which man can descend. The most fearful thought, when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that probably many of those subjected to them were originally guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent man, four human beings were consigned each year to hell on earth. We think, too, that the age of transportation for mere political offenses has long gone by, yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost received his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid the horrors of Port Arthur.

Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the convict population in any great degree, for the free colonies have always kept a jealous watch upon her emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to Victoria, almost every “Tasmanian bolter” and many a suspected but innocent man was seized upon his landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil within its twenty-foot walls till death should come to his relief. Even now, men of wealth and station in Victoria are sometimes discovered to have been “bolters” in the digging times, and are at the mercy of their neighbors and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled into granting pardons for their former deeds. A wealthy Victorian was arrested as a “Tasmanian bolter” while I was in the colony.

The passport system is still in force in the free colonies with regard to passengers arriving from penal settlements, and there is a penalty of £100 inflicted upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Melbourne. The conditional pardons granted to prisoners in West Australia and in Tasmania generally contain words permitting the convict to visit any portion of the world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive even our pardoned convicts.

It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies have taken in this matter, for to them the transportation system appears in the light of moral vitriol-throwing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn between the action of the New South Welsh and that of the New Yorkers, when they declared to a British government of the last century, that nothing should induce them to accept the labor of “white English slaves:” the Sydney people have enjoyed the advantages of the system they now blame. Even the Victorians and South Australians, who have never had convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The Australian colonies, it might be urged, were planted for the sole purpose of affording a suitable soil for the reception of British criminals: in face of this fact, the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in the spots which their government had chosen as its giant prisons have little right to pretend to rouse themselves on a sudden, and cry out that England is pouring the scum of her soil on to a free land, and that they must rise and defend themselves against the grievous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly the good and evil, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Victorians have much reason to object to a system which sends to another country a man who is too bad for his own, just as Jersey rogues are transported to Southampton. The Victorian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly of the colonial expirees, and shipping them to England in exchange for the convicts that we might send to Australia, was but a plagiarism on the conduct of the Virginians in a similar case, who quietly began to freight a ship with snakes.

The only cure for Tasmania, unless one is to be found in the mere lapse of years, lies in annexation to Victoria; a measure strongly wished for by a considerable party in each of the colonies concerned. No two countries in the world are more manifestly destined by nature to be complementary to each other.

Owing to the small size of the country, and the great moral influence of the landed gentry, Tasmanian politics are singularly peaceful. For the Lower House elections the suffrage rests upon a household, not a manhood basis, as in Victoria and New South Wales; and for the Upper House it is placed at £500 in any property, or £50 a year in freehold land. Tasmanian society is cast in a more aristocratic shape than is that of Queensland, with this exception the most oligarchical of all our colonies; but even here, as in the other colonies and the United States, the ballot is supported by the Conservatives. Unlike what generally happens in America, the vote in the great majority of cases is here kept secret, bribery is unknown, and, the public “nomination” of candidates having been abolished, elections pass off in perfect quiet. In the course of a dozen conversations in Tasmania, I met with one man who attacked the ballot. He was the first person, aristocrat or democrat, conservative or liberal, male or female, silly or wise, by whom I had found the ballot opposed since I left home.

The method in which the ballot is conducted is simple enough. The returning officer sits in an outer room, beyond which is an inner chamber with only one door, but with a desk. The voter gives his name to the returning officer, and receives a white ticket bearing his number on the register. On the ticket the names of the candidates are printed alphabetically, and the voter, taking the paper into the other room, makes a cross opposite to the name of each candidate for whom he votes, and then brings the paper folded to the returning officer, who puts it in the box. In New South Wales and Victoria, he runs his pen through all the names excepting those for which he wishes to vote, and himself deposits the ticket in the box, the returning officer watching him, to see that he does not carry out his ticket to show it to his bribers, and then send it in again by a man on his own side. One scrutineer for each candidate watches the opening of the box. In New South Wales, the voting papers, after having been sealed up, are kept for five years, in order to allow of the verification of the number of votes said to have been cast; but in Tasmania they are destroyed immediately after the declaration of the poll.

Escaping from the capital and its Lilliputian politics, I sailed up the Derwent to New Norfolk. The river reminds the traveler sometimes of the Meuse, but oftener of the Dart, and unites the beauties of both streams. The scenery is exquisitely set in a framework of hops; for not only are all the flats covered with luxuriant bines, but the hills between which you survey the views have also each its “garden,” the bines being trained upon a wire trellis.

A lovely ride was that from New Norfolk to the Panshanger salmon-ponds, where the acclimatization of the English fish has lately been attempted. The track, now cut along the river cliff, now lost in the mimosa scrub, offers a succession of prospects, each more lovely than the one before it; and that from the ponds themselves is a repetition of the view along the vale of the Towy, from Steele‘s house near Caermarthen. Trout of a foot long, and salmon of an inch, rewarded us (in the spirit) for our ride, but we were called on to express our belief in the statement, that salmon “returned from the sea” have lately been seen in the river. Father – , the Catholic parish priest, “that saw ’em,” is the hero of the day, and his past experiences upon the Shannon are quoted as testimonies to his infallibility in fish questions. My hosts of New Norfolk had their fears lest the reverend gentleman should be lynched, if it were finally proved that he had been mistaken.

The salmon madness will at least have two results: the catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a blank sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down and nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the British wasp will be acclimatized in the southern hemisphere. One is known to have arrived in the last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent cheerfulness his one hundred days in ice. Happy fellow, to cross the line in so cool a fashion!

The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and excursions are the snakes, which are as numerous throughout the island as they are round Sydney. One of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: “Parrots is as thick as crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen to sixteen feet long;” but in sober truth the snakes are chiefly small.

The wonderful “snake stories” that in the colonial papers take the place of the English “triple birth” and “gigantic gooseberry” are all written in vacation time by the students at Melbourne University, but a true one that I heard in Hobarton is too good to be lost. The chief justice of the island, who, in his leisure time, is an amateur naturalist, and collects specimens for European collections in his walks, told me that it was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it into Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an hour before he had hung his stick with a rare snake in readiness for the government naturalist, he found to his horror that the viper had been only scotched, and that he had made use of his regained life to free himself from the string which confined his head and neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swinging to and fro, or “squirming around,” as some Americans would say, with open mouth and protruded tongue. When lassoing with a piece of twine had been tried in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and succeeded in killing the snake and much damaging the stone-work of his vestibule.

After a week‘s sojourn in the neighborhood of Hobarton I again crossed the island, but this time by a night of piercing moonlight such as can be witnessed only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heavens, and opposite the moon, was the solemn constellation of the Southern Cross, sharply relieved upon the pitchy background of the Magellanic clouds, while the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firmament elsewhere. The next day I was again in Melbourne.

CHAPTER XI.

CONFEDERATION

MELBOURNE is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace in the center of the city the second great Intercolonial Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are drawing to their close, fifty thousand people – a great number for the colonies – visit the building every week. There are exhibitors from each of our seven southern colonies, and from French New Caledonia, Netherlandish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to remember now that in the colonization both of New Zealand and of Australia, we were the successful rivals of the French only after having been behind them in awakening to the advisability of an occupation of these countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French fleet was anticipated there several times by the forethought and decision of our naval officers on the station; and in the case of Australia, the whole south coast was actually named “La Terre Napoléon,” and surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and occupied by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to the French.

The present remarkable exhibition of the products of the Australias, coming just at the time when the border customs between Victoria and New South Wales have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems to point to the formation of a customs union between the colonies, leads men to look still further forward, and to expect confederation. It is worthy of notice at this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists, as a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate neighbors, just as those of America protect the manufactures of the Union rather than of single States. They tell us that they can point, with regard to Europe, to pauper labor, but that they have no case as against the sister colonies; they wish, they say, to obtain a wide market for the sale of the produce of each colony; the nationality they would create is to be Australian, not provincial.

Already there is postal union, and a partial customs union, and confederation itself, however distant in fact, has been very lately brought about in the spirit by the efforts of the London press, one well-known paper having three times in a single article called the governor of New South Wales by the sounding title of “Governor-General of the Australasian colonies,” to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim.

There are many difficulties in the way of confederation. The leading merchants and squatters of Victoria are in favor of it; but not so those of the poorer or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of being swamped. The costliness of the federal government of New Zealand is a warning against over-hasty confederation. Victoria, too, would probably insist upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of her convict population. The continental theory is undreamt of by Australians, owing to their having always been inhabitants of comparatively small States, and not, like dwellers in the organized territories of America, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous empire.

The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a matter of peculiar difficulty. It is to be hoped by all lovers of freedom that some hitherto unknown village will be selected. There is in all great cities a strong tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise, narrow lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill dealt with by free government, we are told. Englishmen who have been in Paris, Americans who know St. Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the Préfet is impossible, cry out that London, that New York, in their turn need a Haussman. In this tendency lies a terrible danger to free States – a danger avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of the legislature being placed, as in Canada and the United States, far away from the great cities. Were Melbourne to become the seat of government, nothing could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the already gigantic power of that city by choosing her merchants as their representatives.

The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests is a more simple matter. Although union will tend to the earlier independence of the colonies, yet, if federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally than they could be if remaining so many separate countries. They would also be a stronger enemy; but distance will make all their wars naval, and a strong fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition against us, in which it would probably not be the interest of Australia to join.

From the colonial point of view, federation would tend to secure to the Australians better general and local government than they possess at present. It is absurd to expect that colonial governors should be upon good terms with their charges when we shift men every four years – say from Demerara to New South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The unhappy governor loses half a year in moving to his post, and a couple of years in coming to understand the circumstances of his new province, and then settles down to be successful in the ruling of educated whites under democratic institutions only if he can entirely throw aside the whole of his experience, derived as it will probably have been from the despotic sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial governors fit for Australia until the Australian governments are made a separate service, and entirely separated from the West Indies, Africa, and Hong Kong.