HA RD WICKE'S SCIENCE- G OS SI P. 



173 



A MONTH WITH THE SQUATTERS OF 

 WESTERN VICTORIA. 



By Dr. J. E. Taylor, F.L.S., etc. 



DURING a four or five months' tour in Australia 

 last year, in the colonies of South Australia, 

 New South Wales, and Victoria — a tour that was full 

 of delight from the beginning to the end — nothing 

 stood forth more prominently than a few weeks spent 

 among the Victorian squatters. 



These men are either the original settlers in the 

 country, or their fathers were. They came out from 

 the old country when the voyage occupied six months, 

 when mails only arrived once a year ; when the 

 country was a dense forest peopled by hostile blacks ; 

 and it is almost impossible to imagine that, in 

 Victoria at least, such a state of things existed only 

 half a century ago. The law of natural selection 

 has been in operation in Australia — only the boldest, 

 most adventurous, and strongest men would emigrate 

 to that far-off land. Around the firesides I heard 

 numerous stories, often quaintly told, of the old 

 settling days, when the narrators first " came out " — 

 of their fights with the blacks, the loss of their sheep, 

 from famine and drought, of the long hours of hard 

 work in the sheep-shearing and lamb-marking seasons, 

 or when the wool was shipped or the carcases boiled 

 down for tallow. 



That is all a thing of the past. The squatters now 

 live in magnificent houses, are well supplied with 

 domestics, and own splendid horses. I stayed at 

 some of the houses, which had cost ^30, 000 to build, 

 which were lighted with gas manufactured on the 

 premises, were furnished with cold, hot, and vapour 

 baths, possessed billiard-rooms, studies, &c. ; green- 

 houses or ^•/ajj-houses alone were absent — they were 

 not required, for Nature produces nearly everything 

 out of doors. 



A wonderful country this Western Victoria — 

 rightly named "Australia Felix" by Mitchell, the 

 first explorer. Practically it is an enormous plain, 

 underlaid with partly decomposed volcanic rocks, 

 which latter are well known to weather into the 

 richest soils in the world. This green plain is dotted 

 with timber growth (formerly it was densely forest- 

 clad) ; millions of dead trees, ring-barked to kill 

 them, occupy the ground everywhere. They are 

 vegetable ghosts, black and white — all of them dead 

 gum-trees. These trees are evergreens, and their 

 bark comes off in stringy patches, so that the ground 

 beneath is strewn with dead leaves and bark, and 

 nothing can grow. But as soon as the trees die and 

 the leaves and bark cease falling, grass springs up in 

 abundance, and there is good feed for cattle of all 

 kinds. So the trees are left standing, dead ; and they 

 are the most prominent and monotonous objects in 

 the modern Australian landscape. By-and-bye they 

 will get fewer, for they now form the coal-mines of 



Victoria. Everybody uses wood for fuel, and these 

 dead gum-trees supply the market. 



The use of wood fuel in Australian houses— 

 especially in the large halls of the squatters— gives a 

 very quaint and even antique aspect to the rooms, for 

 the fireplaces are made very large, and resemble the 

 old-fashioned "ingles," where the bairns could creep 

 in and roast potatoes. Great logs of gumwood burn 

 in a white-washed brick hearth, and give out an 

 aromatic odour I shall never forget. These great 

 Australian wood fires seemed to me to be highly 

 conducive to home enjoyment. 



It was what they called winter in Western 

 Victoria when I was there — answering to our January 

 and February. But huge camellia trees, twenty feet 

 high, were covered with flowers, all growing in the 

 open air. Myriads of other flowers were in bloom, 

 and on very sunny days the paddocks were quite 

 sheeted with them. 



Winter though it was, the grass was as green as 

 with us in April. In the early summer the grass 

 grows so rapidly and so tall that you cannot see the 

 sheep feeding in it. There is then a difficulty in 

 feeding it down ; and when it gets woody and dry 

 this tall grass is very dangerous. It soon takes fire, 

 and great and terrible bush fires occur every year. 



The district I visited was between the towns of 

 Colac and Warnambool — a tract about eighty miles 

 long and fifty or sixty wide. But this is only a 

 fragment of the pastoral country, all of which bears 

 the same physical character. 



From out this great fertile plain there rise 

 numerous hills, greened to their very summits — all of 

 them extinct volcanoes. The highest of them is about 

 600 feet. I ascended one of these at Camperdown, 

 and counted from the top no fewer than twenty-one 

 volcanoes. Mount Buninyong and Mount Warren- 

 heip, near Ballarat, were quite plainly visible, and 

 yet they were sixty or seventy miles away as the 

 crow flies. On the other hand, I looked towards the 

 Coast Ranges, eighty miles away. So that, thanks 

 to the marvellously clear and dry atmosphere of 

 Australia, I could thus take in, on the right hand and 

 the left, a circle of view whose diameter was 1 50 miles. 



I stayed with several squatters in the district. 

 They drove me from one place to another, and left 

 me there. Never was prince more welcome ! People 

 in England have very little idea of the luxurious 

 comfort and refinement to be found in the home of a 

 Victorian squatter. For a home it is, in the best 

 sense of that sanctified word. I had always pitied 

 the Australian squatters as men exiled from the 

 world and doomed to spend their lives " in the bush," 

 until I became their guest. Then I wished that I 

 also were a squatter ! But, fortunately or unfortun- 

 ately, I have devoted my life to fossils and plants, 

 and natural history odds and ends, which don't pay ; 

 and the squatters have devoted themselves to merino 

 sheep, which do pay ! 



