J. Ewing (James Ewing) Ritchie - An Australian Ramble; Or, A Summer in Australia

Transcribed from the 1890 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

OR

A SUMMER IN AUSTRALIA

BY
J. EWING RITCHIE
( CHRISTOPHER CRAYON )

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1890

TO
THE HONOURABLE EDMUND WEBB,
BATHURST , NEW SOUTH WALES ,
THE FOLLOWING PAGES, MANY OF THEM WRITTEN
UNDER HIS HOSPITABLE ROOF, ARE
GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED
BY
THE AUTHOR.

The OrizabaReasons for TravellingThe BishopSoda and WhiskyThe Spanish CoastHeroic MemoriesGibraltarWickedness of NaplesPort Said.

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 cant 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 mannot to put too fine a point on itpresenting 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 ladyships reply; I know you cant, 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 tradeexclusive 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 Diemens 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 dont 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. But the greatest fallacy of all is the supposition that in a colony anyone can get a living, no matter how incompetent he may have proved himself at home. We laugh, but are we much wiser now? In Fleet Street last week, as I bade good-bye to a friend, he said to me, I have a boy who will be coming home just as you land. I sent him out with the best introductions. He has been six months in Melbourne and Sydney and elsewhere, and can find nothing to do, and now I have to get him home again. It will be something if, in the course of my letters, and as the result of my inquiries, I shall be able to save fathers and mothers at home the trouble and expense and pain of such fruitless ventures, and it will be better still if I can help men and women at home to understand and realize what is being done by our fellow-subjects on the Australian Continent to plant that great land with Anglo-Saxon civilization and freedom and religionif I can duly describe its cities and their people, their wealth and intelligence, their general activity and enterprise, their inner and public life. According to all accounts a good deal is yet to be told. Even Mr. Froude has omitted much that would interest the reader, and Dr. Dale has left something for the individual who may chance to follow in his steps. The fact is, the subject is too big for any one man.