The Awful Australian Part 4

"Oh, Mr. Absent Two-Months (Printer, don't forget the hyphen), I can tell you're an Englishman. You're so different from the Australian."

At this Mr. Absent Two-Months will smile smugly, conscious of the higher apprais.e.m.e.nt.

Then he will commend her for her discernment in words.

"Well--er, I was born out he--ah," he will say, "But, you know, I--er have lived in England--haw!"

She just dotes on Englishmen. She likes the way they turn their trousers up at the bottoms.

Then they start. He will agree with her in sweeping depreciation of Australia and all who live in it, and he will tell her what a jolly country England is. She will sigh sympathetically to the cad, instead of calling in the dust-bin emptier to pole-axe him. It would be a more patriotic extreme.

Now how could this kind of woman kindle the spark of patriotism in her children, a.s.suming for the moment that she was prepared to bear them?

How could she instil love of country? She has no pa.s.sion for things Australian. Her mother never adopted the country for a start. She was one of those wistful creatures who called Old England "Home," and her children learnt it right enough.

And these Australian women are now lending a voice in the country's affairs. The word voice is used deliberately. It is about the only thing the Australian will lend the country.

CHAPTER XI.

CLUB LIFE IN AUSTRALIA.

I've been a.s.sured by fellow countrymen exiled in this land that if you take an Australian into your club he'll put his hand in his pocket and ask you what you will have to drink. That, of course, is just a little demonstration, meaning that he feels perfectly at home.

The Australian clubs take on all sorts of names, but the same atmosphere pervades the lot. In some clubs are men who have been members for years who couldn't tell you where the reading-room was. They only know the way to the bar.

But to return to the atmosphere of Australian clubs, I am a.s.sured by friends that it is engendered of a rank and common suspicion that one member is going to endeavour to borrow money from another. One feels the constraint in the air at once, and no one gets jolly and hilarious in consequence, but just "cunning" drunk. A man can't escape the borrower in Australia--and he gauges the standing of a club by the magnitude of the loan a member suggests.

A visitor to an Australian club can never be sure as to whom he is going to meet. If a tailor happens to be in a fair way of business he probably makes the members of some club feel uncomfortable every time a gla.s.s door swings open. Pinero said something derogatory about solicitors in clubs. They're in all Australian clubs. I have heard of a solicitor taking revenge out of an Australian who had been dodging service of a writ, issued from the said solicitor's office, for weeks.

But the Australian guessed the boy with the writ was on the pavement and evaded the solicitor's stare by putting a comic paper between him and it. One also meets the dentist in most Australian clubs.

Some of the developments of the literary club are peculiar to Australia.

For example, on the selection committee of the Johnsonian Club, Brisbane, is a man whose greatest literary effort was the announcement to a gasping audience that "There were no cases set down for hearing at the Police Court this morning." In the same club are many who could not tell you who Boswell was any more than some members of the Melbourne Yorick could tell you what Hamlet killed behind the arras. If you asked after midnight the most literary of them they would, as one voice, say, "A blood-red mouse."

I have been at some loss to know what makes a person eligible for members.h.i.+p at one of the many Australian city clubs. But enquiry has brought to light some "pilling" episodes. I have known a father pilled for members.h.i.+p of a club and his son go through all right. But the father had educated the son up as a sn.o.b. He dressed better than his governor and sponged on him. I have often wondered if the old chap knew what a compliment the members of the club paid him in deciding he was not fit to a.s.sociate with his son.

The languid swell element has invaded all Australian clubs. Publicans'

sons most do congregate in them when people who work for a living are out after a crust. These youths take mental exercise reading the theatrical gossip and social columns of the weekly sn.o.b papers. They are walking encyclopaedias of useless information, and may be trusted to make fools of themselves on all occasions.

They experience a great joy in pointing out to foolish little girls in the street a man in the public eye as So-and-So, "a honorary member of our club." So-and-So, probably an imported actor, however, is blissfully unaware of his advertiser's existence.

These Australian clubs metaphorically tumble over each other to have a distinguished visitor to toady to, and to get a little of the reflected glory they will sign chits for his drinks till all's blue, if he happens to be sufficiently hoggish to keep pace with them.

In the absence of any intellectual powers, the Australian clubman's idea of thoroughly entertaining a guest is to get drunk with him. To put a man to bed--take his boots off and all that--is the height of his hospitality.

Some Australians in their cups to-day will wax reminiscent on the days when "the nights we used to have at the old Bandicoot Club."

There is an expression in Australia, "Blind as a bandicoot." It's at variance with natural history, but most sayings are in conflict with fact in Australia. Truth there dwells at the bottom of an artesian bore.

CHAPTER XII.

THE AUSTRALIAN ON THE LAND.

The man on the land in Australia is represented by two cla.s.ses, the squatter and the c.o.c.katoo farmer. Why the latter is so called I am at a loss to know. He never has a feather to fly with. The squatter is more birdlike. He puts on a lot of "wing," and some of him go so far as to flout a crest.

Many of the squatters of to-day in Australia are the descendants of cattle "duffers," as their nondescript herds amply testify. A fine portly legislator of the present time has a couple of well-stocked stations, and generally looms large in Australian landscape. One day, before he became smug, a neighbour of his caught him with an unbranded calf in his yard, and cried, "Heigh! That calf is not yours!" "No," he called back, "but it will be as soon as the iron is hot!"

I wouldn't like to be an Australian squatter for many reasons. That is, of the old type. There are a few importations of recent years--men with clean breeding and clean money--from England. They're all right. But they are not representative of the cla.s.s. As a cla.s.s squatters are illiterate, and an exemplification of the poet's mock logic that "The man who drives fat cattle must himself be fat"--particularly about the head. They are used chiefly as members of the different Legislative Councils, where they obstruct liberal land laws with much vehemence and bad grammar. They are in the main responsible for the slow settlement of Australian agricultural lands by their relentless hara.s.sment of the selector at every point. The result is a trend towards land monopolies.

New South Wales ill.u.s.trates the case. The evidence and finding of the Lands Scandals Commission showed that a Minister of the Crown in New South Wales accepted enormous bribes to perpetuate this state of things; there have also been land scandals in Victoria and Queensland. In that State 24 men or companies hold 44 million acres between them, and hold this preposterous area so tightly that when Australians complain that it is unfair to judge the country's indebtedness on a population basis they should remember that this sort of thing debars immigration: it rather accentuates the borrowing plight, by causing emigration.

The squatter encourages pests, not people, to settle on the land. It was a squatter who introduced sparrows into Australia, and rabbits, and Scotch thistles, and docks, and the bot fly; also swine fever. A squatter's son is a chip off the old blockhead. When he's about twenty he's sent to England for a brush up, and he either becomes an absentee or returns to help make Australian cities more vicious. As a rule he acquires a beautifully discriminative taste for whisky, and what time he is sober races horses on the most approved spieling method. There was one of him in the Sydney Equity Court recently, who said he had been drunk for eight years, and that the whole of that time was a blank to him.

The evening papers chronicled how many times he had delirium tremens, and how many times he had fits, and how as Vicar's warden he took up the collection in the country church and breathed whisky fumes on the congregation. He sat on the Bench--drunk: he played polo--drunk: he was captain of a volunteer corps--drunk: he read family prayers--drunk: he started races--drunk: he sat on the hospital committee--drunk: when he couldn't do these things he was dead--drunk.

But to the c.o.c.katoo. There is little to be said of him. He spends most of his time growling. He would have you believe that his t.i.tle deeds are in a lawyer's office in perpetuity as security for loans, while the local grocer invariably has a lien over his crops. He is, as a matter of fact, mostly well to do, but the way he lives it is to be hoped will never in its sordidness be known to the other half of the world. His wail for cheap railway freights and seed wheat ceaseth not, and though he has learnt to call himself the backbone of the country he is really a national calamity. In the back country he is little better than his dog.

Francis Adams says his heathenism is intense, and that everyone in the bush is at heart a pessimist. He has almost lost the power of speech, and his jaws move with difficulty when he attempts it. Henry Lawson, an Australian, tells of the intelligence of the bushman at his highest development in a study ent.i.tled "His Colonial Oath." He writes: I recently met an old schoolmate of mine up country. He was much changed.

He was tall and lank, and had the most hideously bristly red beard I ever saw. He was working on his father's farm. He shook hands and looked anywhere but in my face, and said nothing. Presently I remarked at a venture:

"So poor old Mr. B., the school master, is dead?"

"My oath!" he replied.

"He was a good sort?"

"My oath!"

"Time goes pretty quickly, doesn't it?"

"His oath (colonial)."

"Poor old Mr. B. died awfully sudden, didn't he?"

He looked up the hill and said, "My oath!"

Then he added: "My blooming oath!"

I thought my perhaps city rig or manner embarra.s.sed him, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, spat, and said, so as to set him at his ease: "It's blanky hot to-day. I don't know how you blanky blanks stand such blank weather. It's blanky well blank enough to roast a crimson carnal bullock, ain't it?" Then I took out a cake of tobacco, bit off a quarter, and pretended to chew. He replied:

"My oath!"

The conversation flagged here. But presently, to my great surprise, he came to the rescue with: