THE AUSTRALIAN GIRL.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 27, 1 February 1908, Page 12

THE AUSTRALIAN GIRL.

» AN APPRECIATION. 'After a prolonged stay in England, among girls who cannot make their own clothes, who do not like housekeeping, who do not care for literature, and who have no dplt save themselves, it is rather astonishing to look back upon the Australian girl and remember all she is capable of and periorms as an ordinary everyday matter or course. 1 mean m this no disparagement to the English girl. She is, as we all are, the creature of her environment and circumstance. Probably the Australian girl is a like product. I would . like to speak of her in this place, maybe as a hint, perhaps as a reminder to her more fortunately placed sister overseas. To begin with, the Australian girl is an extraordinarily weJl-read person. She is not often -highly educated, but invariably . well read, and with an instinctive craving for culture that extends not only to those thiugs pertaining to the mind and soul but also to her lithe young body. Nature, for instance, bestows upon her at the start the obvious handicap of a high-pitched though usually sweet voice, and a* horrible tendency to over-use of her pretty npso as an organ of speech. But she remedies that with incredible care, by a thorough study of voice-production. Some of the loveliest speaking voices I ever heard belonged to friends of my_ ow,n in -the Antipodes. The Australian girl has to make her own dresses — indeed, everything she wears is of her own manufacture, from her hats down to her dainty lingerie. , If she did not make these things for herself, she would have to want them, or pay such outrageous prices as only the multi-millionaire can afford. Often enough the Australian father is possessed of great wealth, but neither he not she would feel it a right or proper thing to spend lavishly on things that can be made at home by industrious hands in the long, leisurely Australian days. So she dressmakes, does her own millinery and "white-work.," with no other assistance than a sewing-machine and paper-patterns. I- have seen girls at the Government Rouse 'bails whose frocks would liave oeen a credit to Worth or Paquin, and which were conceived and carried out by their wearers in little verandah workrooms in the bush. I well remember ono dress, vorn by a tall lovely blonde. It was all rose and saffron and grey — a curious and arrestive arrangement of i,he draperies and colours made me enquire how she had arlived at them. "Ah!" she laughed, "it all came of riding home in the dawn on a wet morning. These are cloud colours." Now, ihe English girl' would have been struck by the* colours, but they would never have carried to her any suggestion for a successful ball toilette. She plays and sings more often than her English sister, because Australia is a country where voices abound — the climate makes them — as does Italy ; it is so dry and rare. She rides like an Amazon, and rides anything in the shapo of horseflesh, and is a good shot ; she is courageous, 1 spirited, and graceful in the saddle as she is on foot. The circumstances of her upbringing and life demand a thorough knowledge of all household matters. The Australian girl may own thousands of acres, and have the income of a lord — or such ah incomo as one considers the lord ought to haye — but there is nothing to be done in her house she cannot do herself, and possibly better than those she hires to do it. She car bake and brew, she can cook, her cakes and sweets are things to remember ; she pickles and preserves ; she can wash clothes, iron, and mend them. Sho ran scrub floors, dust, make beds, polish and sweep. She is past-mistress, in fact, of everything the lady of the house ought to kiiow, representing in th& antipodes what the mistress of the English country-house used to be in times gone by. And now I come to a special knowledge that will go far with Australia in days to come, and the lack of which will do more hurt to England as a nation than flame or sword. The Australian girl is a devoted mother, and I she knows all that a young mother ought to know about the baby — befoic it comes, and after. i Her experience begins with her own t little brothers and sisters, for she is her mother's right hand. She baths and dresses them, she plays with them, reads to them, amuses them, nurses I them in sickness, and loves them always ; no woman on earth loves the child more than the Australian. When her own baby comes she takes it into her immediate care fiom the fiist. She nurses it herself — she has made all the pretty little garments with her own hands ; with her own hands t.he clothes it, gives it its bath, feeds it, watches it, tends it till she comes to that breahing-space when it is old enough to leave from time to time. Not till then does she go back to amusements and social duties. Sho puts, everything aside, whatever it may be, for baby. Often enough, marriage means to the girl a departure from all she loves and values ; from luxury and plenty to the grey, wearing struggle of life in the bush, on some • far-off station in the "Never-Never," or, wotso still, on a small selection in new country. In either case, sho 'never sees another wojnan from one year's end till another, unless she journeys for that purpose or the other woman comes to her All the joyful, terrible, awful things that hap. pen in life, and that come mercifully veiled to most of us, mercifully hidden, so that wo cannot quite recognise their terror, come naked, and with bare faces and unbidden limbs straight into the Australian girl's presence Lifo and death, love and fear, march full before her, through the towering boles of the ghostly gum-trees. Her children are born to her in the little log-house bhe may have helped to build with her small hands, and there is no other woman with her tc perform those little tender acts that women need at such times ; no sister's voice to cheer her in the hour of agony, or to ta.te tho little new life if sho turns her tired head, and tho lashes droop over her weary eyes in tho sleep that knows no breaking hero. Behind the log-house, or near it, there will be a small enclosure, planted with those flowers the Australian loves — tearoses, loose-petalled and fragrant, mignonette, and heliotrope. They cover the low mounds midst the grey Australian grasses, and it may be that she herself has helped to dig there, and to covtr up with breaking heftrt the child of faith and love, or the husband of her heart. I know an Australian lady — sweet-voiced, gentle, delicate of limb and feature — who nursed her family through a terrible illness, and buried all her children with her own hands. All &aye one, and last of all her husband, whose dead hand she could hardly unclasp from her own, so worn was she with nursing and weakness. She buried him by tho others, and lay down in the dark, in the silence of the forest to d,& alone. A passing traveller saved her, and her surviving child. She told me this as a woman tells of the loss of happiness, of loved ones ; but not ab if it were an unusual experience or one that marked her out as tragically grand above other women. I believe it is nop an, unusual tbiag-rxtkat gich stories

are all too common in remote places where the woman faces tho struggle of life with none other by her save the husband of her choice. I remember when 1 first camo home, tho long, brave, heartrending, pathetic letters that followed mo s from tlio. I bubh. Girls I had never known wrote to me, telling me how great a boon, it was to them to have a correspondent in the world, somo one who kept them in touch with life. One woman wrote to mo saying all her children were boys, and she had not spoken to another womart of her colour for seven years. She had no servant, their station was 300 miles away from the nearest townsnip. They were very poor — nardly making' ends mcct — and in debt to the bank ; she was cook, laundress, tailor, dressmaker, dairymaid, what not, and her letter ended with a quotation from Plato — in tho original. Said an Australian girl to mo onee — apropos of this kind of thing — "Well! If you marry a man and go to a 'ifeof that kind, full of work; why, you must do It, that's all." That's all! It is the way she looks at.it, you see. Tho fragile, dainty, tender-looking, exotic flower of a girl, in her soft frills and airy muslins ; with her pretty hair all puffed and curled in the latest fashion, and a little determined line between the frank eyes under her pretty hat. She faces life with her husband as women all the world over ought to do — bravely, joyfully, ready for all things, prepared by an expert's knowledge of what is necessary to her dominion, of the- home. Her weapons are laid to her nand — that tireless, busy hand, so small and delicately made. The scheme- shall not fall through lack of skill on her part. Sometimes great riches come to her; great success to heY husband. Then she takes the smooth as she took the rough, as a matter of course, and a thing expected. — F.V.C., in the Westminster Gazette. ,