[FROM A CORRESPONDENT.]
I MUST recall even the little I have said in a former letter in dis- praise of the Tasmanian climate. In the valleys it may be too mild and enervating, but there are other parts where it is very different. I doubt if in any country of its size in the world there is so much variety of climate, and each variety so delightful.
Go in the coach, for instance, for sixty miles along the high road to Launceston, a road which is still the main artery of the settle- ment, having been made in the old times, with enormous expendi- ture of labour, by huge gangs of convicts, clusters of whose ruined and deserted huts are still to be seen. Then mount your horse, leave highways and civilization behind, and ride westwards along a pleasant grassy road to the foot of a long wooded range, or tier, as it is called. You ascend perhaps a thousand feet and find yourself, not on a ridge or a mountain, but on a high table-land, in a new and uninhabited country and in a new climate. It is the Lake country. Five large lakes, from one to three thousand feet above the plains, are ready to pour down their waters and irrigate the whole island into a garden. The sun's rays are as powerful as on the plains, but the air is fresh, and even keen, and at night for the greater part of the year it freezes sharply. Snow falls there often as early as March, the first month of autumn. There is no fear of relaxing heat there. The grass is greener, too, and feels softer and more springy to ride over. A continuous fence is on each side of the track ; for the country, though uninhabited except by sheep and their keepers, is most of it purchased and fenced now. But it is a dead wood fence of unhewn trunks, with the smaller branches built up horizontally upon them, and, therefore, not an eyesore, like the ugly straight post-and-rail fences ; and, moreover, capable of being easily cleared by a horse at any weak place. Eight miles of this, and a large and beautiful lake startles you by shining not a hundred yards off through the trees, and, almost at the same moment, another lake on the opposite side. Between them is a log hut, the first habitation passed for twenty miles, and out of it appears a fine, active-looking old man, whose privilege it is to stop passers-by for a ten minutes' chat. In Tasmania it is not safe to ask a stranger why he left home, but you may always ask where the old home was, and the old man is soon fall of Oxford, and the boats, and boat-races, and knows (alas !) which boat has been winning at Putney of late years. And so you maygo on day after day. It may be there is nothing strikingly magnificent in this part of the country, but there is not a mile of the track that is not charming in its way. Only you must not lose the track. For some distance the fences of the sheep-runs are parallel to and indicate it, and there is no fear of getting wrong, but afterwards you need some one who knows the country for a guide. For it is seldom that there are landmarks to go by. Once off the track, and there is nothing but the compass or the sun to steer by, and nothing bigger than a hut to aim at. One gum is like another gum, and one wattle like another wattle, and you may come back to the same spot without recognizing it. And there is nothing to eat in the bush, unless by chance you come across a kangaroo, or an opossum, or a kangaroo rat, and have the means to kill and the inclination to eat such food. In old times this part of the country was a favourite haunt of bushrangers, but want of food obliged them to make frequent incursions into the more settled districts, and in all the Australian colonies bushranging was, for this reason, easily extin- guished, where it had not the connivance of some of the settlers. In New South Wales there must be a taste for preserving bush- rangers, for they still flourish there.
Or ride out of Hobart Town, where, perhaps, towards the end of the summer scarcely any rain has fallen for two or three months, and follow the new road to the Huon, over the side of Mount Wellington. As you ascend, on a sudden it is cold and damp, and the road sloppy with wet. The vegetation, too, has changed. The gums are ten times the height of those down be- low, straight gigantic trunks, rising fifty to a hundred feet without a branch. People speak of trunks seventy feet in circumference twelve feet above the ground, but I have seen none so large as that ; I am afraid to guess at their height, the mightiest European trees are dwarfs in comparison. Splitters are at work felling them and clearing away the underwood, and the blows of the axe sound and echo as if in a banqueting hall of the gods. It is sacrilege to fell them, but the gaps made open out a view far away over the tops of the trees below to the mouths of the Derwent and the Huon, the jagged coast-line, the distant capes, and breakwater-like islands, conspicuous amongst them, long, narrow Bruni, where Captain Cook landed nearly a century ago ; and over all the south wind blows cool and fresh from the Southern Ocean, for there is nothing but sea and ice between you and the Pole. Further on the road climinishes to a narrow track, cut amongst the huge gums, and through an undergrowth of almost tropical vegetation, so dense that within twelve miles of Hobart Town it remained till a few years ago almost unpenetrated. There is the sassafras, with straight, tapering stem and branches, and fragrant myrtle-like leaves ; and fern trees, drooping their large graceful fronds, from thick brown or red stems, from six to thirty feet high ; and bright purple nightshade berries as big as cherries, and shrubs without end, and it seems almost without names, except such barbarous misapplications of English names as are in use to dis- tinguish them, till the Heralds' Office of the Linntean Society gives them title, rank, and lineage,—all growing in a dense mass, and baffling even the all-penetrating aim, and nearly all, it is said, (but this, not having seen, I cannot affirm), flowering in the spring-time with a blaze of beauty such as no painter's brush can depict, or tongue or pen describe. Then the track descends a little, and it all vanishes, and the ground is dry as before, and two hours' more riding brings you out suddenly upon the bank of a fine river, the Huon, as wide here and deeper than the Thames at Richmond. A short distance off along the bank is a roughly made landing-stage and a ferry boat, and you must cooe in the best falsetto you can (if there is a lady of the party she will probably do it better) till the ferry- man hears you, and comes, and with some trouble persuades the horses into the boat, and punts you across, and gives you directions how to thread your way through the scrub till you emerge upon a corduroy road and upon the township of Franklin. It is the chief township of the district, the perfection of a country village, with some six hundred inhabitants, stretching along the base of a hill two or three hundred feet high, and fringing the river bank and tiny wharf with its neat wooden houses. The grass is green, and not burnt up and brown, as it is in most places long before summer is over, for here there is moisture enough all the year round. The people here grow apples, and send them off by ship.. loads straight from the wharf to the all-devouring Melbourne market ; and they make shingles for roofing, and shape timber, and saw up the famous Huon pine, which they often have not even the trouble of felling, for the winter floods wash it down from almost unpenetrated bush. Though it is not thirty miles from Hobart Town and civilization, yet westward for seventy or eighty miles to the sea is no human habitation, nothing but bush so thick, so devoid of anything to support life, that of the convicts who from time to time in years past escaped into it from Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast, scarcely any got through alive. Much of it needs only clearing to make fine agricultural land. There are millions of acres to be bought by the first comer at a pound an acre. Yet, out of sixteen and a half million acres which Tasmania contains, only three and a half are alienated, and on this small portion, including the towns, the population is less than one person for thirty-five acres? Can any country be more perfectly delightful? Once mounted (and rich or poor, there is no one who cannot possess or borrow a horse of some sort in Tasmania,) one is free with a freedom known only in dreams to dwellers in the old country of hedges and Enclosure Acts, where to quit the dreary flinty roads is to trespass and to break the law. One's first reflection is on the astonishing folly of humanity in neglecting to inhabit it. Probably, however, not one person in twenty, take England through, would have his or her enjoyment of life materially increased by living in a free unspoiled country, with abundance of space and air, or indeed in natural beauty of any kind ; and doubtless a large majority at heart prefer the shops of Oxford Street, for a continuance, to the most beautiful scenery imaginable. Besides, rich people are too comfortable to change their homes and their hemisphere, and poor people must go where they can find bread as well as beauty. So till the country is found to provide a cure for impecuniosity as well as for less tangible and less generally recognized requirements, it must remain, I suppose, nearly as it is.
The common, and no doubt correct, reason given for its failure in this last respect, is that it is essentially an agricultural, and not a pastoral country, owing to the quantity of timber, and that wheat is too cheap now to repay even a moderate profit on cultivation. Wheat is unnaturally cheap now, because the popu- lar cry in Victoria lately has been for protection, and the Victorian Government to conciliate it, and to nurse their "cockatoo" settlers, has put a duty on corn and other produce which, to a great extent, drives the Tasmanians from their natural and legitimate market. Certainly, at present prices a farmer employing labourers can scarcely make even a bare living. In some places there is land thrown out of cultivation, looking dismal enough. Nevertheless, for common agricultural labourers there is plenty of demand ; a labourer can earn at least three times as much as he can in the southern counties of England. In wages he gets at least ten shillings a week, out of which he has hardly anything but his clothes to buy ; for in addition he has rations, consisting of twelve pounds of mutton, twelve pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of tea; and a log hut, and a garden if he likes, rent free. Fresh corners from England sometimes do not know how to consume so large an allowance of meat, and ask to have part of it changed for something else. But before long they fall into the universal Tasmanian custom of eating meat three times a day, and learn to be glad of it all. At shearing time a large number of hands are wanted at once, and wages are much higher. It is a common thing for a man after shearing is over to give the cheque he has earned, perhaps for twenty pounds or more, to the keeper of the nearest grog-shop, and bid him supply him with liquor there and then till it is all spent. If a man will only keep from drink he can save money enough in a few years to buy land and support himself till his first crop is reaped. He has no labour to pay for, and like the peasant proprietors of Adelaide, who this year have been sending their wheat to England, may succeed where an em- ployer of labour fails. There is land along the north coast rich as any in the world, but heavily timbered. The settler gets rid of the smaller trees and underwood simply by setting it on fire, and sows his seed in the ashes, and gets a fine crop without even ploughing, leaving the larger timber to be felled as he has leisure for it. There are harbours all along this coast, and a railway is about to be made, and before many years are over it will take a heavy tariff to keep the produce of this fertile district out of Melbourne market.
And after all, at the worst, is it to come to this—that a shrewd, strong, hard-working man, with plenty of land of his own, cannot live unless markets and prices are favour- able? Need an Englishman starve now, under circumstances In which a Saxon or a Dane of a thousand years ago would, after his fashion, have luxuriated in plenty ? If so, it is the custom of excessive subdivision of labour, the grow- ing incompleteness in themselves of men and of households, which has spoilt us for settling a new country. Such subdivision of course increases production in a highly civilized country, but it may easily become a source of mental and physical degradation to the producer. Sheffield knives may be the best and cheapest in the world, but we have all heard of the Sheffield emigrant girl, who landing in a new colony, and seeking employment, confessed she Lid never been taught do anything whatever, indoors or out- doors, but pack files. If wheat or other produce will not fetch a profit, cannot a man grow less of it, and instead keep sheep and poultry to supply himself with meat, and on such a soil as this grow perhaps grapes for his own wine, such as it is, and even possibly flax for his own linen ? And if his wife be of the right sort for a settler's wife, and not of the file- packing sort, there will be few things for which he need go to a shop. Such a state of things, if possible, and not Utopian, has at least this advantage, that it saves the wife and young children from the great bane of peasant proprietorship, that of becoming like beasts of burden on the soil, as we see them too often in Belgium and France, with no other thought or employment but how to put the utmost possible pound of manure on the soil, and how to extract from it the utmost bushel in return, to the neglect of all things else on earth. At any rate, it is hardly to be believed that English agricultural labourers will not, sooner or later, have spirit to attempt to solve the problem for themselves one way or another, rather than rest contented with their present condition. The present generation may hope to live to see them asking twice or three times their present wages, and if unable to obtain them, departing for a new, and for them, a freer country.
Unfortunately, some 'working men at home have singularly unpractical ideas about freedom. At least so it appears to us out here at the antipodes, where home questions assume such different relative proportions, and the monthly mail, with its tale of political strife, is so often a weariness rather than a pleasure to read. Franchise questions are trifles compared to land questions out here, and we cannot see the point (even after allowing for rhetorical flourish) of people choosing to call themselves serfs because they have not got votes. It is difficult to understand what conceivable meaning those men could have attached to the word "freedom," who considered that they were asserting or claiming it by parading the streets at the summons of a Beales. To us such an exhibition of franchise-worship—if that be what it means—under such ft high priest, appears like lingering round a golden calf when a promised
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