it must not be gathered from what i have said in the last two chapters that it is all play and no work in australia. there is a great deal too much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of making real wealth; but still australia boasts of splendid industries which she is working to real and lasting profit.
while i was in adelaide i renewed my acquaintance with a lady and gentleman with whom i had come into contact by a lucky chance during a coaching trip through the blue mountains and new south wales, while i was waiting for the steamer from sydney to noumea. during that trip which, by the way, is one of the most delightful that you can take in any of the five continents, i made the interesting discovery that they not only knew me much better than i knew them, but that they had even named their house[304] after their favourite character in one of my stories. it was through their kindness that i had an opportunity of realising by personal experience the wonderful development of what bids fair to be australia’s greatest and, in the best sense, most profitable industry. the commercial fabric of australia rests upon wool, wine, wheat, and gold, and not the least of these is wine.
one day i received an invitation to go and spend three days at seppeltsfield, which is the centre of one of the largest and most flourishing wine districts in australia. here i became the guest of mr. benno seppelt, whose father was the pioneer of wine-growing in south australia. it was here, too, that i found the most brilliant triumph in cosmopolitan colonisation that i had seen in the course of many wanderings.
we went partly by train and partly by a coach, which landed us after dark on a desperately wet night at a little township about eight miles from the vineyard. here, owing to a telegraphic mistake, we found no conveyance to take us on to seppeltsfield, so we put up at just such a bush hotel as i had been wont to sleep at twenty years before when i happened to have the money for[305] bed and breakfast. the principal attraction of the hostelry was a bagatelle-table on which shem, ham, and japheth might have practised. the bagatelle-room was evidently the favourite lounge of the youth of the township, and the accidental american and i passed a most enjoyable hour playing under the instruction of these gentle youths who would have been considerably astonished if they had seen some of my friend’s performances on a billiard-table. everybody’s business in australia is also everybody else’s, wherein australia does not differ very much from other parts of the world, and the interest that our audience took in us was almost as flattering as their absolutely unrestrained remarks on our play were occasionally the reverse. we began as novices, and gratefully accepted the very freely given hints as to our shortcomings and the way to improve our game. no game, played on that ancient gambling machine, ever improved so quickly, and the talk among our instructors, when they realised that we had been fooling them, gave me the impression that they really regarded us as a couple of sharps who had come down from adelaide with the intention of cleaning the country-side out.
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the next morning the wagonette came over from seppeltsfield and i began to have my object-lesson in colonisation. the country here was very different to what i had seen in the bush at other times and other places. in fact the bush was bush no longer; all was rolling farmland, cleanly cleared and well fenced, arable land alternating with orchards, vegetable-gardens, and tree-belts disposed so as to give due protection to the young crops and fruit-trees. everything was trim, neat, and prosperous-looking. the white houses, surrounded by their broad verandahs, were very different to the selectors’ cabins which i had seen up country on my last visit to australia, and their surroundings were rather those of an english country house hundreds of years old, than of a country which forty years ago was uninhabited scrub.
then came the vineyards. there are between two and three thousand acres of them round seppeltsfield, and every acre seemed to me to be as well kept as an english nursery garden.
this is the history of them, and incidentally of the other wine-growing districts in south australia.
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as long ago as 1829, which, for australia, is quite ancient history, a mr. robert gouger began the colonisation of south australia. his idea was to parcel out the land into small lots and offer government assistance to people who were ready to tackle the task of subduing the wilderness. he failed to get the amount of capital to carry his ideas into practice; the government, as governments did in those days, gave him the cold shoulder, and, for the time being, his projects fell to the ground. five years later the south australian association was formed. mr. gouger was the principal organiser of it. then followed more correspondence with the government, and more of the usual trouble with the circumlocutary departments, and finally the south australian bill was brought before the british parliament. one of the chief supporters of the bill in the house of lords was the victor of waterloo, and the first ship which landed a company of emigrants on the shores of south australia was named the duke of york. as these lines are being written, the duke of cornwall and york is travelling through the new-born commonwealth of australia, as the representative of the emperor-king to[308] give the royal and imperial sanction to the youngest, and by no means the least vigorous of the daughter-nations of the empire. curiously enough, too, it happened that in 1838 mr. george fife angus, chairman of the south australian company, brought out a company of two hundred german emigrants in a ship named the prince george.
after them came more germans, then frenchmen and italians, austrians, hungarians, swedes and norwegians, english, scotch, and irish; the scrub began to disappear, and the wilderness to blossom, not exactly as the rose, but as tobacco plantations. the tobacco was a rank failure in more senses than one. it grew luxuriantly, but its flavour was such that it was very much more fitted for poisoning the insects which settled on the vines which succeeded it than for filling those functions which calverley has so exquisitely described.
the storage house at seppeltsfield, forty years ago.
the present storage house through which nearly a million gallons pass every year.
in ’51, when the tidings of the great gold discoveries in victoria were drawing fortune-seekers to australian shores from the uttermost ends of the earth, the father of my host at seppeltsfield came into the collingrove district and planted a vineyard which was about an acre[309] in extent. not even the luckiest of all the argonauts of the fifties ever pegged out a claim that yielded as much solid and ever-increasing profit as that little patch of land in the south australian scrub. in those days adelaide was a pleasant little town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants; the capital of a province containing sixty-six thousand souls. now it is a stately city with between forty and fifty thousand inhabitants, the capital of a colony with a population of four hundred thousand.
mr. seppelt’s acre of vineyard has grown into more than two thousand, and its produce has increased to eight hundred thousand gallons of matured wine, to say nothing of vinegar and brandy. every year two thousand tons of grapes come in from the vinelands which lie for eight miles round seppeltsfield, to pass through the crushers and the winery into the great vats of the cellars, and thence into the casks in which their juice is shipped to lands which have never seen the southern cross.
after i had been through the whole process of australian wine-making from the grape-crushers—australian wine is not trodden out of the grape[310] by the same process that still obtains in france, spain, and portugal—to the laboratory in which samples of every kind of wine are tested in order to make sure that the process of sterilisation is perfect; and after i had tasted ports and sherries, madeiras, hocks, moselles, and certain specialities native to the vineyard, i said to my host the evening before we had to start away in the grey dawn to catch the train at freeling:
“i have learnt a good deal in the last week, but i want you to tell me now how you managed to put your wines on to the european market and get a sale for them against the competition of the french, german, and spanish wines which had had the vogue for centuries, their vineyards are all within five hundred miles of london, for instance, and here you’re ten thousand miles away. how did you manage it?”
this chapter is not an advertisement of australian wines in general or of the products of seppeltsfield in particular, and therefore i shall not say everything that he told me, but the nett result came to this: when the wine-growing industry of australia began to get a bit too big for australia’s consumption, and when it was found that varieties[311] of european vines produced wines of delicately differentiated flavours, it became a question where markets were to be found for the products of an industry which was growing much more rapidly than the native consumption.
when they found the solution of this problem the australian wine-growers did one of the best strokes of business that ever was done within the confines of real business. by real business, i mean honest business. those who know a great deal more about the subject than i will see much more meaning in those two words than perhaps i do. if australian wine was going to make its way in the markets of the world it had to be wine; in other words, those who made it had to rely for their success and for the interest on the capital and the brains that they had put into the work upon a reversion to principles as old as the days of solomon. they had to make wine from grapes and nothing else. their rivals in the european markets had already learnt everything there was to be known about fortifying and flavouring and chemical essences. they knew how, for instance, german potato spirit could be turned into seven-year-old brandy in a few weeks, and how sherry[312] which had never been within a hundred miles of a vineyard could be made such a perfect counterfeit of the original fluid that a custom’s expert couldn’t tell the difference between a cask worth sixty pounds and one worth six. they made many failures, but in the end they not only got into the european markets, but actually out-sold the home wine-growers who had had hundreds of years start of them.
the australian grape goes into the crusher as grape it comes out as grape-juice, and as grape-juice it crosses the seas and makes its appearance in bottles and flagons on our tables. it has been fermented and sterilised and that is all, and it is not too much to say that, saving these two necessary processes, when you drink a glass of australian wine, red or white, still or sparkling, you are actually drinking the juice of the grape and nothing else; wherefore it may be fairly said that the development of the australian wine industry from very small beginnings, as, for instance, from that one acre first planted with vines at seppeltsfield into the two thousand odd acres of to-day yielding two thousand tons of grapes and eight hundred thousand gallons of wine a year, is just about as good a proof as[313] one can get that honesty is sometimes the best policy even in business.
grape-crushing by machinery at seppeltsfield. the grapes from which australian wine is made are never touched by hand (or foot) after the process of wine-making has begun.
happily there was no speculation about the wine industry in australia. if this were also true of her gold-mines and her wool-crops she would be a good deal richer and more honestly wealthy than she is.
i have seen french colonists in french colonies, germans in german colonies, and colonists of many nationalities under the alien flags of the south american republics, where, as a rule, they do a great deal better than in their own colonies, if they have any, but never have i seen such a perfect realisation of the ideal of cosmopolitan colonisation as i saw during my stay at seppeltsfield.
day after day we drove out along broad roads through the pleasant vineyards and farmlands which lay under the ranges that shielded them from the hot north winds, and every hour or so we pulled up in a village which might have been picked up by superhuman hands out of germany, or france, or holland, ireland, scotland, or england, and just put down there in the midst of what forty years ago was the south australian wilderness.
my host was a german and the son of a german, and he has nine sons, all good australians, true[314] sons of the soil, worthy citizens of the empire who have found all that men seek to find within the wide confines of the pax britannica.
i have a certain reason for using that phrase. i had just come from a french colony which, in the national sense, could only be described as a house divided against itself. there was the conflict between bond and free, between french and english, australians, germans, jews, naturalised foreigners, and those who were still wondering which side of the international fence it would pay them best to sit on, but in the pleasant country about seppeltsfield i found all the elements of international unity and none of discord.
within that eight-mile radius there was an epitome of europe. in one township you might have closed your eyes for a moment of forgetfulness, opened them again and seen yourself in a german town not very far from the banks of the rhine. having a little german at my disposal, i accepted the illusion and found myself drinking good lager beer out of the same old glasses that i had drunk it ten years before in the fatherland, and listening to just the same quaintly turned conversation that i had listened to and joined in during[315] a walking tour down the valley of the weser and over the hartz mountains. the houses were built in the same way, the same beer was drunk to the same toasts and with the same old-world choruses, and i and the accidental american played a game for the championship of england and america on just such a kegel-bahn as you could find behind any country hotel in germany. i won because i didn’t laugh quite as much as my opponent did.
at the end of another drive i found myself in france listening to the soft speech of the c?te d’or and drinking the wine of the country which might have been sent that day by telegraph. a few miles farther on we were in ireland. i am not prepared to say that the mountain dew was actually distilled on irish hillsides, but it was very like the original brew, and the brogue was as rich and pure as any that you would hear between dublin and dingle bay.
men and women of many nationalities were there, founding their own fortunes and helping to found those of an empire of to-morrow, but everywhere you heard the english speech, and recognised the self-restraint and the quiet orderly manners of the[316] anglo-saxon, for though these colonists had come from many lands and had known many different governments they had all come under the influence of that magical power which the anglo-saxon alone seems to possess, the power of making all men his fellow-citizens and friends if he can once get them on his own land and under his own flag. in europe these people would have been enemies, actual or potential; in their own colonies they would have been discontented and home-sick, longing only for the day of their return with a trifling competence; here they were just neighbours working out their destinies side by side on a soil that was common to all, and under a rule which is perhaps the most perfect that the wit of man has yet devised for the welding together of conflicting human interests. if i could only have brought my good friend the director of the administration of new caledonia to seppeltsfield, and taken him for a six days’ driving tour through that cosmopolitan collection of townships, i think he would have understood more completely than he did what i meant when i said to him on the verandah of his house in noumea the day before i sailed:
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“the latin nations have colonies, but they have not yet learnt how to colonise.”
a vineyard at seppeltsfield, south australia.
i left south australia with a regret that was fully equalled by the pleasure with which i had taken leave of noumea, and that is saying a good deal. from port adelaide we trundled round the coast in an exaggerated edition of the old steam-roller that had brought us across the pacific. the only interesting event on the six days’ passage was a scare which the accidental american innocently raised by developing a sore throat and a little swelling of the glands of the neck. of course the rumour that he had brought the plague from sydney went like wildfire through the ship, and i, as his nurse, was looked upon with undisguised suspicion. when i brought him up for a stroll on deck just before we reached albany our fellow-passengers very kindly gave us half the deck to ourselves. i had tried to explain that the period of incubation was twelve days at the outside, and that hence, as we were nearly a month out from sydney, we could no more have brought the plague from port jackson than we could have done from san francisco; but it was no good, and when the sanitary officers came on board at[318] freemantle with the news that the dreaded visitor had got there before us, i think nine-tenths of the passengers would have been well content to see us walked off to quarantine.
in the end the doctor passed us without a stain upon our sanitary character, and our baggage was put into a lighter, tightly sealed up and battened down, and then fumigated. one of our lady-passengers had a pet canary in a cage and there was much discussion as to what should be done with it. its constitution would not stand fumigation, and yet the law said that nothing was to go into the colony without either medical examination or disinfection. i presume the doctor must have compromised either with his conscience or with the lady, for the last i saw of the suspected bird was on the quay, where it was chirping a merry defiance of sanitary regulations, on the top of a truck load of baggage which had neither been inspected nor disinfected.
sanitary officials seem to have the same kind of ideas all over the world. in noumea they burnt down the house of the first white man who died of the plague, but they allowed his furniture to be sold by auction and spread over[319] the town. at freemantle they fumigated your steamer trunk and your gladstone-bag, but they allowed steerage passengers to walk off with swags and bundles which might have held any number of millions of microbes for all they knew.
western australia is a very wonderful young country, and when it settles down to real business and discovers that it is better to get gold than to gamble in gold shares, it will do great things. it will also be the better for the abolition of its ridiculous system of protection. some parts of it will one day be great fruit-growing districts and by way of developing these the government impose a big duty on fruit from other colonies, for instance, tasmanian apples were selling in perth and freemantle at a shilling a pound, although they can be brought across the world and sold in london for fivepence. meanwhile, the westralian sells his fruit at artificial prices, having no competition to worry about. while the import duty enables him to put his prices up fifty per cent. he is quite content to produce half what he could have done. in fact it was this problem of protection which kept western australia aloof from federation for such a long[320] time. some day, when intercolonial free trade follows after federation, the westralian will find his new conditions not quite so pleasant, but a good deal more healthily stimulating.
westralia is popularly described in other colonies as the land of sin, sand, sore eyes, sorrow, and sir john forrest. sir john forrest was one of the men who discovered it. he is now its premier. he also discovered the gold-fields; and he has the loudest voice i ever heard even on a politician. what his connection with his other alliterative titles of his adopted land have been i could not discover. they are most probably creations of the luxuriant fancy of other politicians who would be very glad to have made as much out of the country as he has done.
westralians are called by other colonials “sand-gropers,” and to this they reply with fine irony by describing all other australians as, “t’other-siders,” or “dwellers on the other side of nowhere.” young nations are after all very like young children, they all possess the finest countries on earth and it is only right that they should do so, if they didn’t think so they would go somewhere else, and so new nations would never get made.
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on the whole i am afraid i must say that the new australia did not quite come up to the expectations that i had based on my memories of the old; but i don’t suppose that fact will trouble australia any more than the lack of appreciation of a once distinguished poet and dramatist troubled the atlantic ocean. one thing is certain, no country which breeds such men and women as you find from brisbane to freemantle can help being great some day; and when miss australia settles down a little more seriously to work she will begin to grow very great indeed.
at albany i found the long, white, graceful shape of the messagerie liner australien lying on the smooth waters of st. george’s sound, and in her i made as pleasant a homeward trip as the most fastidious of globe-trotters could wish for. i have often been amused by the pathetic appeals of untravelled englishmen on behalf of british steamer lines. such an appeal usually ends with reflections on the patriotism of british travellers who patronise foreign ships. the fact is that the boot is on the other leg. why are not the british companies patriotic enough to make their[322] boats as pleasant to travel in as french, and german, and american boats are? travellers whose journeys are counted by tens of thousands of miles want to do their travelling as pleasantly as possible, and the pleasantest ship to journey in, is the one that has the fewest regulations. on the messagerie boats you will find none that are not absolutely essential to the proper discipline of the ship and the comfort of your fellow-passengers. while you are on board you are treated as a welcome guest, and not as an intruder whose presence is tolerated because your passage money is necessary to make dividends. you are also looked upon as a reasonable being, capable of taking care of yourself and ordering your comings and goings within decent limits, not as a child who mustn’t sit up playing cards after a certain hour, and who is not to be trusted with the management of an electric light in the small hours of the tropical night when you can’t sleep and want to read. in short, the principal reason why experienced travellers prefer foreign lines to british is simply the fact that they like to be treated as grown men and women, and not as children or irresponsible lunatics. it is not a question of patriotism[323] at all, it is one of commercial consideration on the one side and comfort and convenience on the other.
the first thing we heard when we reached marseilles was the welcome news that the tide of war had turned, and mafeking was relieved.
our company in the saloon was about half french and half english and australian, and a more friendly crowd it would have been difficult to find afloat. we had had the usual concert the night before, and wound up with the marseillaise and god save the queen, and when we set up the champagne for the last time in the smoking-room and drank to b.p. and his merry men, the only man who declined to join in was, i regret to say, an irishman. he was as jolly a compagnon de voyage and as good-hearted a man as you would wish to meet in a ten-thousand-mile trip; but on that particular subject he was a trifle eccentric.
when i left the australien i looked upon yellow jack, as i hope, for the last time, for it ever a man was heart-sick of the sight of a piece of bunting i was of that miserable little yellow oblong.
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the next morning we took our places in the p.l.m. rapide and went whirling away over the pleasant lands of southern france, through lyons, dijon, and ma?on, to paris and thence to calais in trains that were well worthy to run over the same metals as the “south western limited,” and the “overland.”
then came the usual bucketing across the channel, and after that a crawl of seventy-six miles in two hours and thirty-five minutes in a dirty, rickety, first-class compartment on one of the alleged expresses of the amalgamated crawlers. the splendid corridor train of the nord had covered the hundred and eighty-five miles between paris and calais inside four hours; but that was in france. still the “boat-express” did at last manage to struggle into charing cross, and i found myself standing in the familiar strand once more. the thirty-thousand-mile trip was finished, and prisonland with all its new experiences and varied memories was itself now only a memory.
