Chapter XVIII: Brisbane

Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, lies about twenty-five miles from the coast, on the river of the same name. The town is rather prettily situated on some high ridges sloping down to the river. Except in point of size, all coast-towns of Queensland are pretty much alike, and are certainly not pleasant places to live at. They have all the disagreeables of town as compared with country life, and none of the advantages which are to be found in the older-established towns of Sydney and Melbourne. I never knew anyone who was obliged to live in a Queensland coast-town who did not complain of his lot, and wish himself elsewhere; and no Bushman will ever stay a day longer in one of them than he can help. This is not to be wondered at, for the heat and dust in summer are intolerable, and flies and mosquitoes abound. There are hardly any places of amusement of any kind, and the consequence is that in order to kill time, and to counteract the depressing effects of the climate, most of the inhabitants drink a great deal more than is good for them.

The greatest misconception prevails in the old country as to the mode of living generally in Australia; but especially as to the relative advantages of life in the towns and in the Bush. Even amongst the inhabitants of Australia themselves there is no subject upon which I have heard more nonsense talked. The dwellers in the Bush are constantly represented as dirty and degraded ruffians who, from their very manner of living, cannot possibly continue to be decent members of the community, while the inhabitants of the towns are upheld as orderly, industrious, and useful citizens. Comparisons are always odious, and I should never have dreamed of making one so especially obnoxious as this. But it is so constantly done that I believe from mere reiteration it passes for truth.

Were any such idea to gain credence, it would undoubtedly deter numbers of people from going into the Bush, or allowing any of their belongings to do so.

Now, to a country like Australia, at present the development of her back-country is of infinitely greater importance than the growth of her towns, and it should be the object of everyone who is interested in her future to import as much capital and population into the Bush as possible.

In order to give a fair idea of the relative advantages of town and Bush life in Queensland, it may be as well to make a few remarks on the subject. The manners and morals of those who habitually reside in the Bush are undoubtedly not all that can be desired; but to represent them as a class with whom it is impossible to associate without being defiled is unjust.

It is true that a great many people are unable to do so, for there are some in whom the struggle after cleanliness and morality is so feebly maintained that a feather suffices to turn the scale, and these, of course, avail themselves only too readily of the seclusion of the Bush to give full swing to their degrading propensities. By all means let such people keep out of the Bush, if they feel themselves unequal to retaining their self-respect without such assistance as the external influences of a town life afford them.

The importance of such external influences it is impossible to exaggerate, but it is very doubtful whether they are not of infinitely greater value to a man’s neighbours than to himself, if he be such a man as is above described. “A fig for virtue! ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus,” and the man who only washes under compulsion is not likely to derive much moral benefit from his enforced ablutions, though it is of paramount importance to all his associates that he should not be allowed entirely to abstain from the use of soap and water.

But writers on the subject would have us believe that he who journeys into the Bush must leave his religion and his toothbrush behind; and were there a turnpike to mark the entrance to this awful abode, they would no doubt place over it the inscription with which Dante has adorned the gate of inner Hell. We are further given to understand that a short residence in this remarkable region destroys both youth and abilities.

Now youth is such a perishable commodity, and its decay such a fixed law of nature, that no means have as yet been discovered of arresting its departure. It seems rather unfair, therefore, to tax the Bush in particular with promoting it; and as for a man’s abilities, it must be his own fault if he finds them impaired by an open-air life of hard work in what we conceive to be the healthiest country in the world.

Nothing is more common than to hear a charge of drunkenness brought against Bushmen, as if they as a class possessed a monopoly of this vice. That there are drunkards in the Bush is beyond all question, but that they are as numerous in proportion to the population as they are in the towns is very doubtful. Neither is their method of drinking, though equally deplorable, by any means as destructive to health as that pursued by the inhabitants of the towns.

In the first place, a man working hard in the open air can consume with perfect impunity an amount of alcohol that would soon finish off a man leading a less healthy life.

In the second place, the Bush drunkard works hard for his cheque, adjourns to the nearest public-house, and, having drunk it out, returns to work again, to recruit his health and refill his pocket. “Though this be madness, there is method in it.”

Now the town drunkard, and many who would be inexpressibly shocked to hear themselves described as such, indulge in a series of “nips,” the frequency of which increases to such an alarming extent, that at last the fleeting remnant of their brain is barely equal to the effort of elaborating an excuse for swallowing another nobbler.

It is the undivided opinion of medical men that this habit of soaking is far more injurious to the system than getting occasionally drunk. Either is bad enough, of course. Like Cassio, “we could well wish that courtesy would devise some other custom of entertainment.” It is only the fallacy of upholding the sobriety of the towns in Australia against that of the Bush that I wish to draw attention to.

In the columns of the _Queenslander_ I read not long ago a most deplorable description of life in the Bush by an old colonist who signed himself “Musca.” Anyone who read it would come to the conclusion that Bushmen are the only men alive who really know how to drink and to swear.

After drawing a most romantic picture of the benign influence of a “fair and virtuous woman” upon the destiny of man, and deploring her absence in the Bush, “Musca” next proceeded to lay down the extraordinary doctrine that the hardships and privations which the pursuit of duty in the Bush entails must end in “moral degradation.”

This prepares us for his no less startling theory that the “comforts, luxuries, and enjoyments of a town life” are more conducive to health than working in the Bush. The first of these fallacies is so ridiculous as to need no answer. If the second required one, it would assuredly be found in a glance at the relative physiques of the inhabitants of the Bush and of the towns. Health is as conspicuous by its presence in the one as it is by its absence in the other.

How many men have I seen who, having exchanged a life of roughing it in the Bush for the “comforts, luxuries, and enjoyments of a town,” have exchanged with it the exterior of an athlete for that of an anatomical specimen creeping about to save the expense of a funeral. Really I should be ashamed to quote such rubbish, but for the fact that “Musca” is unfortunately only a type of a large class who endeavour to represent the Bush as a place entirely unfit to live in.

The fact is that many men go into the Bush and fulfil their destiny by making fools of themselves there as they would anywhere else. They then return to loaf away the remainder of their existence in a town, and amuse themselves by giving the world a history of their experiences, distorted by the recollection of disappointed hopes, for which they have only their own folly to thank.

The custom of using profane language cannot be too severely censured. But to maintain, as “Musca” and his class do, that the residents in the Bush monopolise, or even excel in this bad habit, argues a very limited experience. Deplorable as is the language of an excited bullock-driver to a refractory steer, it pales before my recollections of the daily conversation of a number of young gentlemen at Woolwich, qualifying to serve in the highest branches of Her Majesty’s Service. While before me rises a vision of more than one “fine old English gentleman” full of strange oaths, which not even the presence of ladies prevents him from using.

In extolling the influence of a “fair and virtuous woman,” we must all sympathise with “Musca,” and with him regret that her presence in the Bush is not more frequent than it is. But we must also remember that all women are not fair, neither are all women virtuous.

Woman’s influence, equally potent for either, is more frequently exerted for evil than for good. Were we to compare the instances where a man’s downward career has been arrested with those where his progress to the dogs has been assisted by the fair sex, numerous as are the former, we fear the latter would greatly preponderate. We must conclude, therefore, that the extreme scarcity of muslin in the Bush is not a matter for unconditional regret.

It is as ridiculous to say that everyone living in the Bush is degraded, as it would be to say that everyone with red hair is a ruffian. The inhabitants of the Bush are no doubt worse in some ways than their neighbours, but certainly a great deal superior to them in others; and I am heartily sorry for anyone who has lived amongst them and has been unable to detect anything of good beneath the rough exterior and somewhat battered appearance that are, to a certain extent, the necessary effects of roughing it. I have seen as kind and generous dispositions and as excellent qualities in a rugged and toil-worn Bushman as I ever expect to see again.

It is the tendency of nearly everyone to hold their circumstances, their surroundings, and their neighbours responsible for failures and mishaps for which they have only themselves to thank. There are temptations in every line of life which no one can avoid. To try and escape from them altogether is as foolish as it is cowardly. But to select a line of life as free from them as possible is open to most people, and, after dispassionate consideration, the Bush would seem to offer as few temptations to go wrong as any line of life that could be chosen. Certainly it offers far fewer than the towns--I am talking, of course, of ordinary mortals. It is impossible to legislate for persons so peculiarly constituted as to feel “morally degraded” by sleeping under a tree and breakfasting off beef and damper. It is not of such choice spirits that I am talking, for whom it would be necessary to construct a Utopia upon a plan hitherto undreamed of, but of the ordinary young man of sound constitution and fair abilities, whom I maintain to have as fair a chance of keeping straight in the Bush as anywhere else, and an infinitely better chance of preserving his health. But both his constitution and his resolution must be of no ordinary strength if he can sojourn for any length of time in a Queensland town without being the worse for it.

The climate of the coast-towns especially is, to say the least of it, a thirsty one. He will be assailed from morning till night with invitations to “step round and have a liquor,” which we all know it is considered the height of churlishness to refuse. Even supposing society in the Bush to be worse than that in the towns, still its existence is necessary to the welfare of the country; and the desire of “Musca” and his friends to keep all respectable and well-educated people out of it is the strangest scheme for the improvement of a community that ever was heard of. It would surely be better if as many respectable members of society as possible were to go there and exert what influence they have for good.

The amount of hard, steady drinking that goes on in all the towns of Queensland is astonishing. Brisbane is no exception to the rule. Bankers and business men, legislators and lawyers, doctors and tradesmen, they all make a practice of every now and then deserting their business and sallying forth to the nearest bar for a drink. Brandy and whisky are the favourite drinks, and the amount a man consumes in the twenty-four hours by this habit of “nipping,” without ever getting quite drunk, is surprising.

No _habitué_ of a Queensland town who wishes to find a business man ever goes to look for him first in his office. If he knows the run of the town, he will start the reverse way round the various public-houses, and if he fails to run the man he is looking for to ground, he will then go to his office, in hopes of catching him before he starts round for another series of drinks.

At whatever hour of the day a man meets another whom he has not seen for say twelve hours, etiquette requires that he shall incontinently invite him to come and drink. This is a custom that pervades every class in the colony, and cannot be departed from without something more than a breach of good manners.

Now, there is no harm whatever in inviting a man to have a drink. The invitation would seem to be prompted by nothing but a feeling of generous hospitality, and as such there is nothing to be said against it. But it assumes a different aspect when a refusal on the part of the man invited is regarded as little short of an insult. And yet such is the case. No matter whether a man is thirsty or not,--no matter if he has just swallowed a drink,--a refusal to swallow another cannot be tolerated for a moment. A more insane custom cannot be conceived; and there is no doubt that numbers of men who have naturally no taste for drinking acquire the habit, and entirely ruin their health, from reluctance to give offence by refusing to drink when invited.

All through Australia, in every class, it is not considered good form for a man to drink by himself. Very few even of the most hopeless drunkards ever do so. The consequence is, that when a man feels inclined for a drink he immediately looks out for someone to drink with him. This accounts in a great measure for the annoyance that is aroused by a refusal.

In America an “Anti-shouting Society” has been formed, the members of which bind themselves never to drink at anyone else’s expense. This is a move in the right direction. Without going the length of forming any society, which always argues a conscious weakness on the part of its members, it would be an excellent thing for Queensland, and for Australia generally, if the etiquette of drinking were so far relaxed as to enable a man to refuse to drink when he does not want to without risk of giving offence.

The great want of Brisbane is a really good hotel. There is a population of over 30,000 residents, besides a considerable floating population of travellers on their way up and down the coast, and squatters down from the country for a few days at a time on business. This is just the sort of population to make hotel-keeping pay. And yet in all the numerous hotels in Brisbane there is not one that can fairly be ranked as third rate.

The attendance and the food are both very bad, and the bedrooms wretchedly small and stuffy. The summer nights in Brisbane are often very hot, and sleep is out of the question in a wooden box no bigger than the cabin of a steamer, so constructed as to allow the snoring of anyone within twenty-five yards to be perfectly audible, but with the worst possible provision for ventilation from the outer air.

There is no doubt that anyone who put up a really first-rate hotel in Brisbane, and ran it upon sound principles, would soon make an enormous fortune. In the meantime, however, the want of hotels in Brisbane is greatly made up for by the hospitality of the people who live there. For several miles up and down the river the northern bank is dotted with the country houses of those who have business in the town.

Many of these houses are delightfully situated, with lovely gardens sloping down to the river. The cool shade of these gardens is a heavenly change from the blinding glare and dust in the town. Bamboos, orange-trees, lime-trees, bananas, and other fruit-trees abound, and their dark-green foliage is illuminated by the masses of gorgeous colouring from the Boganvillea and other creepers which grow here in perfection.

Brisbane possesses a fair club, and supports a theatre, which is visited by a succession of travelling companies. The chief recreations of the inhabitants are standing on the wharf to see the steamers arrive and depart, or going for a walk with the mosquitoes in the Botanical Gardens.

The most entertaining thing I ever saw in Brisbane was a small detachment of the Salvation Army. They were parading the streets in search of truth, and I had the curiosity to go up and examine them closely. Their soul-saving apparatus consisted only of four blasphemous hymn-books, a cracked concertina, and a very faded banner that I think had once seen better days in the form of a kite.

But although their technical appliances were rather defective, fate had been kind in lavishing on them a profusion of those higher gifts that are indispensable to their calling. They all possessed in perfection the whining voice, the vicious droop of the eyelid, and the peculiar expression of petrified rascality about the corners of the mouth, that neither vice nor sickness, drink nor toil, are capable of implanting there without the assistance of a course of open-air piety. I sincerely hope that I did not misjudge them. Appearances are very deceitful, and from a short distance I defy anyone to tell whether the _prima donna_ was shouting “Glory” or had just sat down on a tin tack.

In a few years there will be a railway right through from Brisbane to Sydney. At present (1884) it only extends from Brisbane to Stanthorpe, on the borders of Queensland, leaving a distance of 160 miles to be done by coach to Armadale, in New South Wales. From there the railway runs to Newcastle, a town on the coast sixty miles north of Sydney. Between Armadale and Stanthorpe, and between Newcastle and Sydney, the line is in course of construction. The latter section crosses some very rough country.

In the meantime anyone who wishes to see a marvellous performance in the way of four-in-hand driving cannot do better than travel by one of Cobb and Co.’s coaches from Stanthorpe to Armadale. This firm run a perfect network of coaches all over Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria; and their drivers, for a rough country, are probably the finest in the world. It is perfectly extraordinary how these men will remember every bad place, and hole, and stump over a stretch of perhaps fifty miles, so as to be able to avoid them on a dark night, while going ten or a dozen miles an hour. It is not as if the road always kept the same. Violent storms and floods are constantly washing out fresh holes, and blowing down fresh trees, so that the driver has to remember the road from day to day and from night to night. It is possible that something fresh may have happened in the few hours that have elapsed since he last went down the road, but he runs the chance of this with perfect complacency.

On a pitch dark night there is something awesome in the way these mail-drivers slam through the forest, along what is by courtesy called a road, but which in places is more like a rocky water-course than anything else. An occasional log, or a fallen tree across the track, prevent the road from being at all monotonous. If a passenger has time to do anything but hold on he will be greatly interested. At every turn of the road the glare of a lamp on each side of him will reveal some obstacle or pitfall, which his pilot contrives to avoid with marvellous dexterity. Sometimes he comes to grief, but not half so often as would seem inevitable to anyone who did not know the capabilities of an Australian mail-driver. An axe and a coil of green hide make him independent of any catastrophe short of smashing a wheel, and when this occurs there is nothing to do but to sit down and wait patiently for the arrival of the coach coming the opposite way. They change horses about every ten miles, and, barring accidents, they keep excellent time.

The voyage down the coast from Brisbane to Sydney is a very unpleasant one. There is a break here in the lines of ocean-going steamers which call at all other ports of any importance on the coast of Australia. From Cape York to Brisbane the British India Company run the Queensland mails with a service of very fine boats, averaging nearly 3000 tons, which call off all the Queensland ports.

From Sydney to Melbourne and Adelaide the vessels of the P. and O., Orient, and Messageries are constantly running. But the run from Brisbane to Sydney has to be negotiated in the little coasting steamers of the Australasian Steam Navigation Company, better known as the A.S.N. This Company are the possessors of a flotilla of the most villainous boats in the world. For a long time they waxed fat upon a monopoly of the whole coasting-trade of Australia; and had they chosen to keep pace with the advancing times by improving the class of their vessels, they would now be in possession of as fine a trade as the world ever saw. But want of competition produced its usual effect; and instead they preferred to go on running a class of vessels which never go to sea on a coast like that of Australia without endangering the lives of all on board, and occasionally go to the bottom incontinently.

Up to the present time they have still an enormous trade, as there are many ports in Queensland into which their vessels are the only ones small enough to go. But, if they continue their present extortionate tariff, their trade will be taken away by some more enterprising company better able to understand the spirit of the age. In all their arrangements the A.S.N. display the most profound indifference to the comfort and convenience of passengers.

For example, at Port Mackay or Keppel Bay, where their steamers do not go up the rivers, it is a constant occurrence to be kept waiting out at sea in the tender for sixteen or twenty hours, simply because the Company will not expend a shilling in telegraphing the steamer’s departure from the last port of call.

The distance from Brisbane to Sydney is about 500 miles, and ought to be a forty-four hours’ run. I have lively recollections of the indefinite way in which it can be prolonged by a bad boat in bad weather.

One Tuesday morning I got on board an old egg-shell fitted with paddle-boxes, described by the advertisements of the A.S.N. as “the magnificent full-powered steamship _City of Brisbane_, 450 tons, to sail for Sydney at 10 A.M.” My heart sank as I observed the stormy appearance of the sky, and noticed the steam escaping in every direction but the right one from the boilers, the authorised pressure on which had been reduced from 60 lbs. to 15 lbs. to the square inch.

Quivering like a leaf, the old tub set off down the river at the rate of a well-conducted funeral, and in the course of a few hours, assisted by the tide, we got outside. The only other passengers besides myself were a Roman Catholic priest, nearly dead with consumption, and a man who went into violent _delirium tremens_ a few hours after we left Brisbane. Anything so utterly depressing as that voyage I never wish to see again. The weather, for the first day, was not bad, and with the help of the great Australian current we got on capitally, and found ourselves nearing Smokey Cape. Then it came on to blow, and got worse and worse till the sea and wind were something startling.

At a very early stage of the gale a big sea smashed the saloon skylight, and left us with about a foot of water on the main deck. The priest was sick with monotonous regularity about twice every three minutes, and with a violence that made itself heard above the howling of the storm. The man with D.T. wandered about yelling and howling horribly, and tumbling up against all the fixtures until he had cut his face out of all resemblance to anything human. With his eyes fixed with horror, and the blood streaming down his face and neck, he presented the most dreary spectacle I ever saw. We could do nothing for him, for it was impossible to hold him, and we were at last obliged to put him in irons.

Meanwhile the old boat had managed, in the course of three days and a half, to get down opposite Sydney, but there was such an awful sea on that the captain dared not alter her course to enter the harbour for fear of foundering. It now came on to blow worse than ever, and it is a positive fact that by next morning we had been blown fifty miles back, and found we were nearly opposite Newcastle. Here we lay for thirty hours, without going either backward or forward. Had the wind been a few points more on shore nothing could have saved us, as we were never more than a few miles distant from land. Fortunately there came a lull of a few hours, and we managed to sneak down and run into Sydney just as it came on to blow as badly as ever. We had been five days and a half out from Brisbane, and were running rapidly short of coal.

The man with D.T. expired just as we got into harbour.

Two years afterwards I found the old _City of Brisbane_ still running the same track, the only change in her being a further reduction of 5 lbs. pressure on the boilers. This time it did not blow so hard, and we reached Sydney in three days and three quarters.