The Awful Australian Part 5

"He finished me, you know?"

"Finished? How? Who?"

He looked down towards the river, thought (if he did think) and said: "Finished me edyercation, yer know!"

"Oh! you mean Mr. B.?"

"My oath!--he finished me first-rate."

"He turned out many good scholars, didn't he?"

"My oath! I'm thinkin' about going down to the training school!"

"You ought to--I would if I were you."

"My oath!"

"Those were good old times," I hazarded. "You remember the old bark school?"

He looked away across the siding, and was evidently getting uneasy. He s.h.i.+fted about and said: "Well, I must be going."

"I suppose you're pretty busy now?"

"My oath! So long!"

"Well, good-bye. We must have a yarn some day."

"My oath!"

He got away as quickly as he could....

The Australian bushman has, what is generally known as a "rat"; in fact, the lunacy of Australia is most alarming. "There seems little doubt that insanity is slowly but steadily increasing in the States," remarks Coghlan, on the Commonwealth. He is only working on the figures asylum returns show. If only the idiots of the backblocks were included, the mad rate per thousand in Australia--now in excess of that of England--would stagger humanity.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE AUSTRALIAN t.i.tLED PERSON.

Everyone in Australia is in imminent peril of a t.i.tle. n.o.body is safe.

There is no saying whose turn it will be next. When he gets up in the morning the first thing the Australian does is to look at the paper and see if his name is among the list of those knighted or otherwise decorated. The distribution seems to run like a sweep consultation. So many K.C.M.G.'s, so many C.M.G.'s, and so on. Then they put the names of all the people of Australia into a hat and draw for them.

There is no other way of explaining how the people who have t.i.tles got them, or why. In only one instance on record is there a proper fit. It is the particular case of a Sydney publican who sells threepenny beers with a free "counter lunch." He was made a C.M.G. The humour of the lottery once more. It is most amusing to anybody from the old country to see funny little men "Sirred" in Australia.

People whose luck is so much out that they can't draw a t.i.tle make s.h.i.+ft in the meantime with a hyphen. It is just as well that strangers know this for the purposes of answering invitations. Never forget the hyphen in Australia. No "family" is without it. In the early days Brown was hyphenated to Smith with a gyve.

The Australian t.i.tled person is mostly under-educated and over-fed. He is of no particular use except to company promoters, who put his name on the front page of a prospectus. Sometimes he opens a bazaar. He prefers, however, eating at complimentary banquets tendered to anybody whose fellow townsmen think justifies a gorge.

The prodigality with which the people responsible hand out t.i.tles to Australians is no doubt part of the scheme which sprang from the mind of William Charles Wentworth, the originator in the country of "that fatal drollery called representative government." Wentworth was known as "the shepherd king"--the t.i.tular craze again. There was also in Australia a bushranger king. Hall, who was shot by a policeman, was so t.i.tled by the New South Wales Premier of the times, Hon. (afterwards, of course, Sir) John Robertson. Hall owned a station.

But to return to Wentworth's scheme. It was to found "a colonial aristocracy," a House of Peers--"a replica of England rather than America." Martin in his "Australia and the Empire" chronicles the folly.

"The subject," he wrote, "had been for years maturing in his (Wentworth's) mind; he even expounded his views on this question of an Australian House of Lords in a long-forgotten article in the pages of an English magazine...." Yet on this point of creating a brand new colonial aristocracy he failed miserably. The commonest street orator in Sydney could raise a ready laugh by giving a list of the expectant "n.o.bility."

Robert Lowe opposed it in the House of Commons, and his criticism had all the weight of colonial experience, while a young Sydney tradesman, by name Henry Parkes, as Dr. Lang described the Premier of New South Wales, first rose to public notoriety and favour by his diatribes against this feature of Wentworth's great measure.

The young Sydney tradesman afterwards drew a knighthood himself, and didn't send it back to the t.i.tle lottery department of the Colonial Office.

There are certain fat people in Australia who are scant of breath through pursuing the House of Lords' will-o'-the-wisp. Desperate have been the efforts exerted.

The progeny of the innumerable crop of pompous low-order knights and colonial-made Gentlemen in Australia does not benefit to any enviable degree. Living up to a hyphen is bad enough, but when it comes to an order it invariably means an inheritance of debts, ending in pa.s.se daughters becoming manicurists (an occupation not respectable since the gay Lord Quex), and the sons up-country police-court pract.i.tioners, or 100-a-year civil servants. On even footing with the low-order knights are the "honourables." They approximate to Wentworth's House of Peers, members.h.i.+p of State Legislative Councils carrying the t.i.tle. The "honourables" guinea-pig mainly for a living. The t.i.tle also means Government House entree, and rating at functions where there is recourse to precedence. Wives and daughters thus get their hands on the social lever, and so, later on, catch, with great adroitness, the overworked reception smile of Governors' clever consorts. Clever because it must often be so hard to refrain from laughing outright.

I should like to share some of the fun at the various Government Houses after a reception.

It is rather rough on them, though, not to be able to enjoy the comedy while it is in progress. Seldom can they. There is, however, a time on record when they did to the full--so did many others who had a "Burke's Peerage" on their library shelves. The Duke of Buccleugh was cabled to have sailed for Australia. "A t.i.tle!" cried some. "A Duke!" gasped other Australians. Society was agog. But it was only a very well-bred bull s.h.i.+pped for stud purposes.

Is it any wonder that "the commonest street orator" can raise a laugh when Australian t.i.tles are mentioned?

CHAPTER XIV.

THE AUSTRALIAN AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

From a close observation of Australian restaurants I have come to the conclusion that the Australian does not eat his food--he wolfs it. He's not very particular either what he eats. (In Queensland earth is in his dieting scale). What he chiefly wants is something to chew, and he usually bites off more than he comfortably can.

He's argumentative at the breakfast table, and the less he knows about a subject the more he'll say. One of him wanted to argue with me only the other morning on this very subject of eating. The argument turned on the word "dinner," and he let his porridge get cold while he went for a dictionary. "_To dine_," he said, with his mouth full, "is to 'take dinner,' and according to this dictionary that is 'the chief meal of the day.'" That's just it--the Australian regulates it by size; he cannot distinguish between a meal and a dinner.

Delicate gla.s.s, spotless napery, flowers, and above all sparkling conversation--those larger delights!--he does not encourage. He is a mere gross feeder. I am talking now of the man who can afford these things (even the employment of a conversationalist), not of the sixpenny "Dining" rooms, of which Australia is the home. How horrible these "dining" rooms are on a hot day! You can smell them two streets off. If you are brave enough to look in you will see what you usually go to the zoo at 4 o'clock to watch.

There is no restaurant in Australia where you can get a meal suited to the climate, and as for "home" meals, well, if an Australian asks you to his house to dine don't go unless you're an ostrich. Cooking among Australian women is a lost art. The Australian girl goes in for "accomplishments" only. If she is ever called upon to cook anything she uses the frypan.

If I ever set up business in Australia it would be in three "lines"--frying pans, false teeth, and patent medicines.

Everything is washed down in Australia with tea. It is a dangerous beverage as it is made there, in witness thereof are the clayey complexions and dyspeptic noses of the women. Why they don't drink wine, the natural beverage of the country, I never could make out until I tasted the vintages. But they are improving. Some foreigners are making very decent wine in Australia just now; but the Australians won't drink it until it is exported and returns again to the country with a French brand on it. The same remark applies to most things in Australia. They don't manufacture anything. I once dined with a squatter in Queensland, and there was not an article of furniture in the room that had been made in Australia, and not a thing on the table, except the vegetables, but was imported. The table linen, the gla.s.sware, the knives, the crockery--all were imported. The wine was imported, so was the salmon, and the coffee, and his "Missus's" cat was Manx. And yet there wasn't a thing in the room but the raw material could have been produced in the country, right down to the condiments.

CHAPTER XV.

THE AUSTRALIAN POETS.

When I went into the Public Library at Sydney and asked for the catalogue of the Australian poets I thought the attendant, in complying, had handed me the Federal electoral rolls. He said, however, that it was all right. There are just about as many people anxious to make the poetry of the country as there are to make its laws, and among them all they have made a mess of both. Parkes, addressing a public meeting, once said, "I would rather be a third-rate poet than a first-cla.s.s politician." Somebody interjected: "Well, aren't you?" I thank G.o.d when I think of the few awful hours I spent with the Australian muse (or, more correctly speaking, bemuse) that I have read very little Australian poetry. Nevertheless I have read enough to enable me to arrive at a definition of what really const.i.tutes a right to be called a poet, and it is: Any person of either s.e.x who can write in metre without being laughed at. In applying this golden rule it will be seen that there are no poets in Australia except the alleged humorous versifiers.

Sir Henry Parkes, deceased, is generally referred to in the Australian Press as poet, politician and patriot. I haven't the time to inquire into all the other things, but I did spend an hour with his "Fragmentary Thoughts" and "Stolen Moments." They are well worth perusing, and I think everybody ought to read those sympathetic lines "To a Beautiful and Friendless Child; aged four years." The child was aged four years; it is not "an early poem," which fact I thought it just as well to mention before quoting the opening stanza: