AUSTRALIA IN THE MAKING.*
A GOOD, popular, and readable account of the early days of Australia—its discovery and first settlement—was much needed, and it is hardly necessary to say that Dr. Fitchett is an ideal writer on such a subject. His well-known power of seizing on the picturesque and salient points—of picking out what corresponds in historical writing to what lawyers call the charg;ng parts of a brief—has been amply displayed in his :a Imirable volumes on the Napoleonic wars and other parts of our Imperial history, and we are very glad to see it thus devoted to one of the great dominions over-seas. The volume The Nee World of the South. By W. H. Fitchett, LL.D. London: Smith, Eider ant Co. [Se.
now before us will assuredly rank among Dr. Fitchett's most interesting achievements, and it has the advantage of dealing with a subject little known to the stay-at-home English reader, and of being written with the enthusiasm and local knowledge of an Australian citizen. The only quarrel which we can have with Dr. Fitchett is that he has failed to realize the hope raised by a remark in his preface, where he says :—
" The story of Australia is a revelation of the political temper and genius of the British race. It certainly represents an experi- ment which, so far, has succeeded brilliantly. A community has been evolved set in conditions so happy—at once so sheltered from external pressure and so absolutely free to seek its own ideals— that it forms a kind of sociological laboratory with, for the most part, the equable temperature—if not always the scientific intelligence and methods—of a laboratory. And if its experi- ments sometimes amuse, they sometimes, too, instruct the rest of the world."
How many of our readers have any real understanding of the political problems treated in this Australian laboratory Could one in a hundred of them explain the meaning of the recent Federal elections, which have placed a Liberal Govern- ment in power with a working majority of one in the Lower House and no majority at all in the Senate P The Common- wealth is now engaged on a most remarkable attempt to deal by way of legislation with the recurrent problem of capitol and labour, yet the cablegrams about the fate of the referenda are practically meaningless to the vast majority of those who read them over here. Australia, as far as we know, is the only country in the world where a serious Government has asked for power to declare any business a " monopoly," and thereafter to purchase it on compulsory terms and run it as a State affair. We are confident that Dr. Fitchett could give us a clear and fascinating account of the steps which have led up to this very curious position. We regret that, in the present volume, he has confined himself to the early history of the country, down to about the beginning of the Victorian era. But the omission is easily rectified by a sequel, and we confidently hope that the reception of this delightful book will be such as to encourage its author to continue his task, to trace the growth of the Australian States and their union twelve years ago into one great Commonwealth, and to depict the steps by which the Australia of to-day, with its great wealth, its enterprising citizens, and, above all, its striking political ambitions, has come into existence.
At the moment, however, we must content ourselves with this first volume of what we hope will ultimately become the standard history of Australia. This volume offers "the story in outline of the making of Australia." It is divided into four books : " Sea Stories," dealing with the first discoveries from Magellan to Bass and Flinders; "Tales of the Early Days," in which some singular incidents of the first settle- ment at Botany Bay are depicted; "Tales of the Early Explorers," sketching the laborious struggles of the first land-wanderers through trackless scrub and down rivers that lose themselves in marshes ; and " Lawless Days and Lives," glancing at those busbranging tales without which no view of early Australia could be complete. With his well-known art Dr. Fitchett has in each chapter picked out the picturesque and entertaining incidents, and his selection is so well made that the result is to give a far truer picture of early Australian life than any more minute and painstaking historian would be likely to present.
For centuries after the Renaissance brought an outburst of maritime exploration in its train Australia was a guess, a myth, a tradition. Early geographers marked on their maps a vast continent—the "Terra Australia Incognita," which is chiefly remembered to-day through Swift's allusion to it—which was supposed to girdle the earth in southern latitudes. Not until Cook sailed right round the world, and drove the stem of his ship from one end to the other of this alleged Antarctic continent, was the belief which had originated in the tenth century finally disproved. What remains of that myth is the largest island, or smallest con- tinent, together with the unnumbered smaller islands which dot the Pacific and the seas of the Spice Islands, as well as the true though far smaller Antarctic continent which we now know to exist around the Pole. When the far-off southern seas were opened to Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch keels, some creeping round the stormy Cape of Good Hope, others finding their way through the Straits of Magellan, but all alike aiming at the barbaric pearl and gold, the rich spices and richer silks of the Far East, the discovery of Australia was a necessary consequence. So vast a range of coast could not be for ever bidden by sea-mists. Too often the explorer out of his reckoning only discovered the rock-bound Australian coast in order to leave his bones on it. Everywhere that coast is dotted with the wrecks of bluff-bowed galleons, whose very name and story are drowned deeper than ever plummet sounded.
A sad ending it must have been to a hopeful voyage—the sudden sound of unexpected breakers, the crash on a stony- hearted shore, the buffeting of the still dreaded surf of the Leenwin, and the quick choking into oblivion. Yet if the risks of that early navigation were greater than we take to-day when we set out for Sydney, so were the prizes. Besides the practical rewards of the Spice Islands, there was always the hope of landing on some enchanted island, some Earthly Paradise or Hy-Brazil of the south, where the kindlier Sirens sang a harmless chant or the fire-warded princess waited for her lucky rescuer. Dr. Fitchett draws a vivid picture of the three racial types to whom the first glimpses of Australia were granted—the Portuguese, who seem to have been genuine explorers of the modern type, seeking for new lands in "That untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever"; the Spaniards, imbued with the religious fervour of the missionary; and the Dutch, on trading bent. It is a curious commentary on these motives that it was a practically-minded Dutchman who first landed in Australia, one Dirk Hartog, of Amsterdam,who reached the coast of Western Australia in 1616, at the island which still bears his name, set up an economical tin plate on a post, and sailed away with the opinion that a land " thinly peopled by divers cruel, poor and brutal nations" could be of little use to the Dutch East India Company. The actual tin plate may still be seen in the Amsterdam Museum, and thus remains "the earliest authentic literary document in Australian history."
We should like to linger with Dr. Fitchett over the later exploits of Dampier and Cook, Bass and Flinders, but we have only space to glance at another aspect of his fascinating book. Everyone who has been to Sydney has paid a visit to the Blue Mountains, with their unique scenery, often recalling Dore's enchanted wood of the Inferno. But those who have jogged in a State slow train to the quaint bydropathic at Medlow Bath—the only hotel known to the present writer where one can get really serious exercise by walking three times a day between one's bedroom and the dining-room- can hardly realize that the Blue Mountains, which are nowhere so high as Ben Nevis, presented an insuperable
obstacle for many years to the colonists in search of wider grazing-grounds. Dr. Fitchett's third book sets the matter in a vivid light :— "It seemed, viewed from a distance, as if any pedestrian might saunter at leisure over that range of blue-tipped hills. But beneath that streak of azure, lying low on the horizon, was a tangle of heart-breaking cliffs and impassable valleys, of vast perpendicular rifts, of river-beds rock-choked—mere traps to the explorer—such as, for difficulty of transit, can hardly be paral- leled elsewhere on the surface of the globe. Hannibal and Napoleon in turn led an army, with all its equipment and bag- gage, across the Alps. But if the great Carthaginian had tried to lead his many-tinted legions, say, up the valley of the Grose, or if the great Corsican had set his war-hardened battalions clambering through the defile by which the Cox breaks through to the Hawkesbury, their armies would have fared worse than they did in the stern passes of the Alps. The Alps and the Apennines, tumbled together, indeed, would hardly form a more hopeless barrier than that hidden in the innocent-looking curve of blue hills on which Phillip looked."
We are inclined to say of Dr. Fitchett's book that he has done for the tangled defiles of early Australian history what Blaxland and his colleagues did for the Blue Mountains ; he has made a smooth road for the tourist, set with noble points of view, and leading to delightful unsuspected nooks of romance.
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