An Australian Ramble
A Summer in Australia
9781465644480
330 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I send this from the Orizaba, one of the finest, if not the finest, of the fine steamers of the Orient Line that keep open the communication between this country and Australia; and this is how it came to pass. One day last summer I was standing on the deck of a steamer, when a gentleman remarked to me, ‘I come from a country where they have had no rain for nine months.’ ‘Where is that?’ said I. ‘Australia,’ was the reply; and immediately I made up my mind to go there. As is the custom of most of us, I talked the matter over with my friends, some of them in the first rank of the medical world. ‘You can’t do better,’ was the unanimous reply; ‘you will come back ten years younger,’ said they all. Well, surely it is worth taking a little trouble and incurring a little expense, for a man—not to put too fine a point on it—presenting daily a more venerable appearance, to put back the clock, as it were, and to regain somewhat of his manly prime. ‘What can I do for you?’ said the family doctor to the mother of the Rothschilds, when he was summoned to her side; ‘I cannot make you grow young again.’ ‘No,’ was her ladyship’s reply; ‘I know you can’t, doctor; but I wish to continue to grow old.’ And here, just by taking a trip to Australia, and escaping the hardships of an English winter and spring, actually I shall achieve what the mother of the Rothschilds did not dare to hope for. Surely the attempt is worth an effort, especially when, owing to the kindness of a certain firm of publishers who shall be nameless, the question of expense was satisfactorily solved. In these days of school-boards and universal travel a good deal has yet to be learned of our colonies. When I was younger, people in this country were in the most ludicrous state of ignorance as respects the size, area, wealth and value of what it is now the fashion to term the fifth quarter of the globe. At that time, say about 1830, there were not much more than 70,000 in all the land. Then Sydney Smith was writing of it as a region ‘in which Nature has been so capricious, that she makes cherries with the stones on the outside, and a monstrous animal, as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit and a tail as big as a bedpost, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile.’ Listen to Charles Lamb, as he writes, in his ‘Essays of Elia,’ to a friend in New South Wales: ‘What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man? You must have forgotten how we look. Do you grow your own hemp? What is your staple trade—exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists.’ It was at that time the popular belief was embodied by Tom Hood as follows in ‘A Letter from a Settler for Life in Van Diemen’s Land,’ wherein Susan Gale writes to her old friend and fellow-servant in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square: ‘As soon as ever the Botes rode to Land I don’t aggrivate the Truth to say their was half duzzen Bows apiece to Hand us out to shoar; and sum go so far as to say they was offered to through Speeking Trumpits afore they left the Ship-side.’ There is still a legend of a Missionary Society at home sending out a representative to Australia, and so carefully planning his route that he was to preach at Adelaide on the Sunday morning, and at Melbourne, some hundreds of miles away, in the afternoon, and that was before they had a railway. There are many who still think that a colony is a place where men are fortunate, as a late colonial governor remarked, if they enjoy three meals a day and a place to sleep in, where the inhabitants sit down to dinner in their shirt-sleeves, and think it a hardship if they take off their boots when they go to bed.
