Southern Lights and Shadows

Interesting must it be to the English reader to mark how large an Australian element is gradually working itself into our current literature. Our fictionists have fallen upon the soil, like so many industrious diggers, and, though merely scratching and fossicking on the surface, have turned up much precious and malleable stuff. Jerrold—who sent young Jericho “out,”—said of the country long ago, that it was a land so kind that if you tickled it with a hoe, it laughed with a harvest; Bulwer, surfeited of Bohn and Pompeii, could find no better place than the Antipodes for Uncle Jack and Pisistratus; Howitt, in a "Squatter's Home," has charmed us more of late than he ever did in the home (or haunt) of a poet; Charles Reade, facile as he was in his English descriptions, has shown, by those nervous Australian touches, that even with him and his art it is never too late to mend; it was to Sydney that Lady Waldemar purposed shipping poor Marian Erle; and—to drop this prefatory prattle at once—was it not to Australia that the great Wilkins Macawber transported himself and his abilities, his twins and his bills! Pleasant enough is it to find Romance thus transmuting this land of sharp and sheer Reality, just as its own central fires have, in Shaksperian phrase,

"Turn'd the meagre, cloddy earth to glitt'ring gold!"

I went to Australia in '55. I had been previously engaged for two sessions reporting in the House of Commons, and my health was rapidly breaking up. Doctors recommended a sea-voyage and a warm climate. Fifteen thousand miles of the one, and 85° in the shade of the other, were sufficient temptations held out by the good city of Sydney to induce me to decide on a run round the world. My original intention was not to stop in the colonies more than four or five months—one summer at most—and, appropriating any flotsam or jetsam of Australian incident which might drift in my way, to cargo the same, and, on my return home, to endeavour to cover the expenses of my journey by a "popular" book on my travels. By the time I arrived in Sydney, however, my health, under the sanitary influences of a long sea voyage, was quite restored; and this agreeable fact, coupled with the aspectable appearance of men and things about me—the many novel developments of character and scene—made me decide on staying, at all events for a year or two, in one or other of the Australian colonies. An engagement on a Sydney journal offering itself at the moment, I at once settled on New South Wales, and, in less than a fortnight after bidding good-bye to the vessel which had brought me to El Dorado, was running through the country, sometimes two hundred miles in the interior, discharging the functions of newspaper correspondent. Since then I have filled various positions and performed a somewhat interesting and varied role of characters—lecturer, government shorthand-writer, playwright, magazine projector, editor, "our own correspondent," and, last of all, candidate for political laurels. I catalogue these several personal items thus early, in order to get over at once what is always a disagreeable portion of a narrative—that which personally concerns the writer—but chiefly that I may be recognised by my readers as—may I say it?—an authority upon Australian matters, before entering upon the main features of this adumbration. I can safely affirm that no man ever strove more zealously to make himself acquainted with a country, than I did with the colony during my two years' sojourn beneath its fig-trees. If I crush the result of my observations and experiences into a duodecimo, it is only because, as an old traveller, I have learnt how to pack a good many things in a small compass. Coming with this much in hand by way of preface, I would fain hope that a brief outline of my observations and impressions of a far-off yet nearly allied country and people, ruled, as that outline is, with probity of utterance and a desire to present the nudest truth, is not unlikely to meet with some attention