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Elinor Mordaunt. On the Wallaby Through Victoria
On the Wallaby Through Victoria
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS IN VICTORIA
CHAPTER II. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MELBOURNE
CHAPTER III. MOSTLY CONCERNING “SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE AND SAUCE FOR THE GANDER”
CHAPTER IV. THE WORKING-MAN AND THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD
CHAPTER V. THE WORKING-WOMEN OF MELBOURNE, AND IN. PARTICULAR THE CHAR-LADY
CHAPTER VI. VICTORIAN YOUTH
CHAPTER VII. ALIEN LIFE
CHAPTER VIII. THE AMUSEMENTS AND THE ARTS
CHAPTER IX. RURAL LIFE, MOUNTAIN, AND FOREST
CHAPTER X. OF THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE, AND OF MELBOURNE GARDENS
CHAPTER XI. PRIMITIVE VICTORIA
NOTES
Отрывок из книги
Elinor Mordaunt
Published by Good Press, 2019
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But I have wandered far from the ship with her furled sails and my first impressions of the new country: the coming and going of Custom-House and Health Officers, the bustle, the sunshine on the quay, and, above all, the curiously homelike Cockney drawl, which is so marked a characteristic of the Australian of to-day, all of which has amalgamated together in my mind, into a vivid and clear-cut picture. It is all very well to write as if I precipitated myself bodily and instantaneously into the hearts and homes of the people, for I did not. I liked them as little as they liked me. And that was very little, for it was a long time before I could be brought to realize that any relation of England could find any possible virtue to be proud of excepting that relationship. That the whole country, indeed, was not a sort of benevolent, though ignorant, country cousin, touchingly anxious to hear all about the head of the family, and be taught the true value of life by any of its scions. As a matter of fact, I had conceived a very clear mental picture of Australia as a burly, farmer-like person, with one hand outstretched in welcome, the other filled with desirable billets of all sorts, which awaited some new-comer, with that wide outlook possible only to one who has rubbed shoulders with the oldest civilization, the completest culture. It took me, indeed, months to realize that what is old, and to our minds completely well established, may be suspected of blue mould. Also that the only relation, likely to be of any use to the impecunious newcomer, is that “Uncle” whom I have discovered to be as outwardly ubiquitous and inwardly suspicious and grudging as in England. Finding, therefore, that everything was going on much the same as though nothing very exciting was expected; and that Australia, as a nation, did not seem to be awaiting me on the quay with open arms, I hustled my few belongings through the Customs, took a cab—the most medieval institution in Melbourne, a sort of closed waggonette, and incredibly rackety—and drove up to a Coffee Palace, which had been recommended to me as cheaper than an hotel.
These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer, the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers and his felt hat well at the back of his head.
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