THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE.

Otago Witness, Issue 1764, 12 September 1885, Page 8

THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE.

TJy Geobgb Augustus Sala.

VIII.-ARCADIA IN AUSTRALIA.

In recording my impressions of Arcadia as I Share found it in these Colonies, I would warn anj readers that I do not intend, in this place at least, to talk of things .exclusively pastoral. There will be time and to spare to discourse of sheep and shepherds, shearing and woolwashing, when we get in right earnest into the bush. Touching the shepherd, indeed, I may have' ere long to point out that the antipodean Paris exhibits rather a tendency to disappear from rather than to multiply on the Australian Mount Ida, and that since the introduction of the system of dividing sheep runs into paddocks, and fencing them .in by means of posts and bars of wire nettftig, the shepherd in the Land of the Golden Fleece has been in a great measure superseded by the boundary rider, that centaur in the employ of the squatter, whose business it is lesb to tend the fleecy gold winners, and direct their patient trotters towards pleasant pasturages, than to count them in view of their being periodically shorn. Touching the lambs \ that which I may have to indite respecting the remarkable process known as « lambing down " — a process, I venture to hope, fast falling into desuetude my remarks thereupon will, I fancy, have more of a social than a pastoral tendency. There is aiothing, I apprehend, about " lambing down " in Theocritus or in Virgil, in Spencer or in Gay. Thus, when I chose the Australian Arcadia as my theme, you are not to look for word pictures of Strephon^and Chloe, and of the happy, peaceful lives which the shepherds and shepherdesses lead among their innocent muttons. The Arcadia of which I propose to treat is to be found under the Southern Cross, not in the rural districts, but in the great cities— notably in Sydney and Melbourne — and a very cheerful, bustling, tasteful Arcadia it is. !

In Melbourne, for example. That marvellous city is endowed with no less than four arcades, which, in their physiognomy, remind you — now of the Burlington and the new arcade between Old. Bond street and Albemarle street at Home, aad now of the Passage dcs Panoramas or the Passage Jouffroy in 1 Paris ; but which, nevertheless, possess a distinctive stamp and character of then: own. Remember that some kind of shelter in. the streets from the sometimes intolerable heat of the sun — sometimes 120deg. in the shade — is one of the prime necessities of this superb climate. There was a notable Spanish ambassador to the Court of James 1., that Gondomar who intrigued gallant Sir Walter Raleigh's head off his shoulders, and who, when one of his Spanish secretaries was returning to his own country, ironically bade him present on his arrival his compliments to El Senor Sol ; " for," added the sarcastic Gondomar, " I have not seen ,that luminary since my arrival in England." I should like to know, could the shade of the ironical Gondomar be permitted to survey the flourishing Anglo-Saxon community in this land of sunshine, what he would think of the Melbournian arcades. Certainly for elegance and picturesqueness they beat those of the old Plaza Mayor at Madrid ; and I doubt whether ever the torrid heat of the Spanish capital in summer can equal that which I am, perhaps, destined to experience in Melbourne. I say, perhaps; for I have as* yet •wandered !twixt Bourke and Collins only in the late autumn and during the winter. But we are getting well into August ; and in September, so I am told, the spring time will be upon us. Meanwhile, for all the jeremiads to which I have listened touching the severity of midwinter in Australia/ — and I admit that I have occasionally found the temperature tolerably sharp up at Tenteffield and Glen Innes, and throughout the district known as New England — I have never revisited Melbourne without finding plenty of blazing sunshine, say, for about four days out of seven, and without being grateful for the gentle umbrageousness afforded by the arcades which lead from Bourke street. Let me see. The first of the Bourke street arcades is the Royal, nearly opposite the Post-office, andwhich-was erected a few years since by the Hon. H. Spensley, at a cost of some £20,000. Further east, nearly opposite the Theatre Royal, a handsome and commodious structure, where MiDion Boucicault is just now drawing crowded houses every night in his most admired plays — notably in the " Shaughraun " and the " Colleen Bawn " — there you will find the second Melbournian arcade, the Victoria, which was built and opened by Mr Joseph Aarons in 1876. The cost, including that of a building called the Academy of Music, was about £40,000. Then, still further on, close to the vast Eastern Market, is the Eastern Arcade, erected by a well-known coach proprietor named Crawford. The admission to all these pretty avenues is free, and they are all open and brilliantly lighted until 10 at night. In this last respect the Melbourne arcades present a pleasant contrast to our Burlington, the gates of which are pitilessly bolted and locked at 8 p.m., precisely the hour when people, especially foreigners, who have just dined would most gratefully appreciate the advantages of a covered promenade. But they order these things differently and better in France — and at Melbourne. Indeed, but for the fact that prohibitions of smoking are conspicuously placarded about in the Royal, the Victoria, and the Eastern Arcades, you might, without any very violent stretch of the imagination fancy on a fine night that Bourke street was one of the Paris boulevards instead of being a track hewed not 50 years ago out of the trackless bush, and that you were a flaneur fresh from the Cafe dv Adder, who had just strolled into the nearest passage to saunter from shop to shop, the contents of which they may have seen five hundred times before, and to rub shoulders with a throng whose faces from long acquaintance should be perfectly familiar to them. But does a Paris boulevard flaneur ever grow tired of sauntering ? No more, I should say, than do the cesantes of the Puerta del Sol at Madrid grow weary of gathering round the fountain hard by the Fonda de Paris— wrapped in their Roman toga-like cloaks, and puffing their eternal jaapelitos — and of muttering and murmuring against the Government of the day, and the insupportable insolence of Great Britain in retaining possession of the Rock of Gibraltar. But that authoritative caveat against smoking in the Melbourne arcades. The flaneur would' be miserable without his londres or his petit bordeaux. To the "mooner" of the Puerta del Sol his papelito or his pit.ro is as the breath of life. His congener the ozioso, who hangs for hours about the Piazza Colonna at Rome, phattering, scandal-magging, and leasing-

making, must needs have his halfpenny cavour or his three-farthing vhyinia to suck and pull at; why then should the frequenter of the Melbournian arcades be deprived of thu solace of the tndian weed ? Unless I din very much mistaken, there is a very good reason for this prohibition of smoking. These graceful arcades are, during the daytime at least, extonsively frequented by ladies and childreiu Whether the creme de la creme df the fair sex in Melbourne patronise the arcades, I have not been long enough in the country precisely to ascertain. Every great city has its varied gradations of nuances of what is or is not considered to be socially comme il faut. The travelling Briton takes his wife or his sister for a walk in the Galleries St. Hubert at Brussels, or in the Galleries Vittorio Emmanuele at Milan ; but it is not considered "the thing" for the shining lights in Brusselloise or Milanese f emalecociety to perambulate the splendid and interesting promenades in questioni All I can say with certainty is that in the daytime the arcades at Melbourne are affluent in well-dressed womankind, and bhat the shops are full of feminine finery and knieknacks, Anglo-Saxon womankind at Home, in the States, and in Australia abhor the odour of tobacco, while in the last-named country indulgence in the weed takes at least two very objectionable forms, in the first instance, cigars at the antipodes, as I have elsewhere hinted, are, as a rule, atrociously bad. In the next 2>lace, the short pipe, charged with the strongest tobacco, and reeking with essential oil, is the favourite calumet both of the beardless, sallow, weedy "cornstalks," with their hats at the back of their heads, and of our fullbearded, broad-shouldered, brawny brother — and master — the Australian working -man. Admission to the arcades being entirely gratuitous, the presence of black-pipe smokers is obviously not a thing to be desired. There is another smoker of black pipes likewise whose absence from the arcades is fortunately secured by the " counterblasts to tobacco " so prudently posted about. The smoker whom I mean is not necussarily a "larrikin" or rowdy. In fact, the larrikin is often a capable young Australian workman, earning capital wages, but who revels in lai'rikinism partially, perhajos, because he is so prosperous and meat is 2±d a pound ; partially, perhaps, because the air is so elastic, and the sun shines so brightly ; partially, perhax^s, because he has devoted a somewhat excessive portion of his ample leisure to the practice of the exciting game of football, so that when he is not in an actual " scrimmage " he mistakes a Chinaman or an old woman for a goal. The black pipe smoker whom I have in my mind's eye is a very degenerate type indeed from the lusty young working "larrikin," who might possibly disappear altogether were Australia endowed — Heaven forfend that such should ever hs the 'case ! — with a large standing army. The lusty young football-playing, wage-eavning " larrikin " would only be too happy to enlist and fight. To all appearance his degenerate offshoot does not mean fighting. He mainly means standing about all day long, and through half the night, at the street corners, smoking, spitting, and belching forth unutterably foul and blasiihemous language. I suppose that the prohibition against smoking and the vigilance of the police keep him out of the pretty arcades. At all events I fail to see him there ; but I see a great deal too much of him at the street corners, and especially near the door of every "pub " which calls itself an hotel. In a local newspaper lately I found the offensive creature at whom I have glanced defined as a " horse-post huggingloaf er." The characteristics of the loafer our American cousins have long since taught all English-speak-ing people to understand ; but what, my readers at Home may ask, is a "horse-post hugger," and indeed what may a horse-post itsalf be? The horse-post may have been a common object in all English towns down to the end of the last century. The streets of London at the period when, according to the, I suppose, apocryphal legend, a certain Warwickshire lad named Willy Shakspeare took care of the nags of the gentlemen who were enjoying themselves at the playhouse, must have been full of horse-posts. The minutiae, as well as the grander features, of history repeat themselves. Even in marvellous Melbourne and sumptuous Sydney, with their thronged thoroughfares, resonant of the wheels of barouches, waggonettes, buggies, carts, vans, and hansoms, the horse-post is a necessity. To this upright of timber is tethered the steed of the man on horseback who has no groom to ride behind him. At Home, save in the outlying suburbs, where the butcher's boy — whistling merrily, of course — on his fast-trotting pony may still occasionally be met with ; and again, save occasionally in St. James' street or Pall Mall, when you come across a mounted orderly riding in from Kensington or Hounslow to the War Office, you rarely meet with what I may call the working man on horseback. In Australia he is iiterally "all over the place," and the prevalence even in crowded city streets of rough - looking horsemen mounted on shaggy steeds has often led me to pause for an instant and ask myself whether I was in Melbourne or in Mexico. But the illusion has been quickly dispelled. In the Australian cavalier I miss the " coach-wheel " sombrero, the striped serapi blanket, the Hispana Mexico saddle, the slipper stirrups, the lasso twined round "the pommel. No, this is Melbourne, not Tenastillan ; yet still, in the Southern Hemibpherc, is the solitary horseman or the steed tethered to the horse-post while his rider is shopping or drinking within doors a conspicuous feature in street life. It is a feature, of course, to which the Australians have grown accustomed, and I may be laughed at for alluding to it ; but to a stranger this prevalent " horseyness "is curiously noticeable. You donot remark it in any American city, save very far west or sonth. In Mexico I have actually seen a beggar on horseback — yes, a long whitebearded old halfcaste Indian varlet in tatters, mounted on a deplorable old candidate for the hospitality of the knacker's yard, and holding forth a battered sombrero while lie mumbled supplications for alms. In other parts of the world beggars on horseback assume another aspect, and sit their saddles in a different fashion. But in Australia I have seen the lamplighter — this was in a country town— going about his vocation on horseback, and looking like a lancer, but with a fiercy cross at the tip of his spear. The scarlet-clad post-office letter-carrier, the errand-boy, the artisan, the labourer on horseback, are common sights ; while at country railway stations I have more than once met with the washerwoman on horseback with a basket of linen at her saddle-bow. As for boys on horseback bringing home grocery or , greenstuff and other household needments, their name is legion. At Rockhampton, in the north of Queensland, lately I saw what was to me a funeral, eminently characteristic of Australian life. The heavse was followed by about a score, of buggies, and then came a cavalcade of at least 50 horsemen, with long white muslin streamers pendent from their hats. The effect as these mounted men ambled slowly over the suspension bridge crossing the beautiful Fitzroy River was to me nobly picturesque. Somewhere I had read of the burial of some old Scottish laird, when there were "two miles of tenantry on horseback

following fcllci bier." tflie description, read I do not know how many years before, came back • to me with the suddenness of a lightning flash, as I watched the bearded men with their white steamers ambling over the Fitzroy bridge. But there is another place in which the Australian horse seems to excel. See him canter. How deftly, gently, easily, the rough-looking fellow on his back seems to manage him. Hear him canter. Yes. The sound of the cantering horse is to a stranger in the land one of the most characteristic of Australian noises. The stillness of the night season is apt to be broken, and, of course, by that mortal foe to sleep, the railway whistle. Then, if you are trying to sleep in an hotel in a small bush township, there is the ear-splitting, jarring, rumbling noise made by the bacchanalians in the bar beneath — the people who won't go to bed, who hiccough hour after hour animadversions upon the designs of Russia and the tergiversation of the late -Gladstone Government. When at last the worthy landlord has got rid of these alcoholized politicians, you begin to think that you will get a little slumber. There are certain native birds — the celebrated "laughing jackass " may be among them for aught I know — that utter the most diabolical cries that it is possible to conceive — unless, indeed, it has been your lot to listen to the hideous ululation, half gobble, half gulp, of the wild turkey. But when the feathered tribe have come to an end of their moaning, and the last house-dog with a troubled conscience has ceased to bark (it is somewhat consoling to know that barking is beyond the capacity of the dingo or native dog, which is only able to whine), there is one more noise which you may with tolerable certainty rcelcon on hearing before you drop off to sleep. It is the sound of the cantering horse. Some belated squatter, may be; .some convivial but cautious stockrider haply, the whole of whose cheque has not been " lambed down " by an enterprising bush publican, and who has refrained from " jumping his horse over the bar" — that is to say, selling his horse, saddle, bridle, and all to the landlord for more drink. Bo it as it may, the sound of the cantering horse is a souud pleasant to listen to in the night season. The even measure of the hoofs on the elastic road — the measure that begins softly and swells as the rider approaches, and so dies away in the distance — softly stimulates drowsiness, and soon lulls you to repose. As recipes for the encouragement of somnolence, give me first the sound of the plashing of a fountain, and the next the sound of a cantering Australian horse. There are many Antipodean sounds with which I have yet to become acquainted. I have not yet heard the famous Aboriginal call of communication known as " Coo-ec " or " Coo.-ey," with the rising inflection on the second syllable. This piercingly shrill " jodel " can be hoard, it is said, at a greater distance than any call of communication uttered by Europeans. The up-country settlers have commonly adopted this curious mode of verbally signalising ; and at a picnic on the edge of the Darling Dowus I have heard a squatter give "coo-ec!" with surprisingly thrilling effect. There is even a story of an Australian lady in London, who, coming out of the Royal Italian Opera one very foggy night, lost her companion and escort, and with great presence of mind raised the cry of " Coo-ec !" which presently brought her friend to her side. Some say that the incident took place in a crowd on London Bridge ; but was there ever a story told yet without half-a-dozen different versions of it being immediately suggested. The last of the sounds nocturnally characteristic of Melbourne I became acquainted with under peculiar, not to say alarming, circumstances. I think that it was the night after my arrival in the metropolis of Victoria that a great fire broke out in a -warehouse in William street, next door to Menzies' Hotel. Both buildings are of stone, and there were some inches of clear space between the wall of the burning warehouse, which was full of combustible merchandise, and the wall of the hotel ; still the propinquity of the incandescent to the unlired edifice was far too. close to be pleasant. There was naturally a prodigious scare among the guests at Menzies', and with mingled feelings the old saw might have been recalled touching our neighbour's house being on fire. Fortunately the fire brigade were early on the scene of action. The local substitute for Captain Byre Massey Shaw, C.8., did his work admirably. The police mustered in force, and did good service. The crowd, although dense, was, on the whole, well behaved. Soon after midnight the firemen had obtained a mastery over the flames. By 3 o'clock in the morning the conflagration had burned itself out, and the estimable Widow Menzies and her guests were able to retire to rest, and to murmur, if they felt so disposed, " For this relief much thanks." But throughout that eventful night I had been conscious of a sound, reiterated at brief intervals, solemn, measured, strident, and, as I thought, minatory. Ib was the sound of a human voice, grimly sonorous, but to my ear at first not articulate. The flames roared; the water from the hose splashed and hissed, and bubbled and gurgled from the main ; the crowd shouted ; the firemen scattered hither and thither ; the crash of broken glass and falling timbers was incessant ; but still the lugubrious chant of that human voice, now near, now distant, relaxed not in its monotonous cadence. Had a new Solomon Eagle arisen, I wondered. Had some member of the Salvation Army felt a call to cry woe to Melbourne. ' At length, when surcease came to the roaring of the flames, when the crowd had dispersed, and the last dog had barked itself mute, the lugubrious chanter had things all to himself, and I could make out what he said. His cry was of polonies. Yes ; polonies. That variety of the sausage tribe is, I hear amazingly popular at the antipodes. Sb are saveloys, so are " small German " ; and far away in a bush township I became aware of a gentleman who vended "trotters." Polonies on the Pacific! Aye, and I should not be surprised to make the acquaintance of a dealer in pease pudding. Pork pies, made after the approved Melton Mowbray recipe, I found at Brisbane, in a fruiterer's shop glowing with the most gorgeous tropical fruits and flowers. Ere Igo home I hope to meet with tripe and cowheel in Tasmania, and with a baked "jemmy" in New Zealand. What does your lordship at home know about polonies and saveloys ? Did your ladyship ever hear of a " jemmy" ? Is it not a housebreakers implement. Carefully baked, a sheep's head is very nice indeed for supper ; but how many folks at home know anything about it and cognate viands, which a refined and cultured community ridiculously disdains as vulgar. In a multitude of respects the Australians are 1 more English than the English themselves. They have not yet learned to be fastidious.

The Tidy House.— The careful, tidy housewife, when giving her house its spring cleaning, should bear in mind that the dear inmates ate more precious than houses ; their system need cleansing, by purifying the blood, regulating the stomach and bowels, and she should know that there is nothing that will do it so surely as American Co. 'a Hop Bitters, the purest and best of all medicines.