FIRST GLIMPSE OF COOLIE LABOUR.

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idea of working in the sun like that (why they could not have been greater fools had they been white men !), that they burst into yells of laughter, making the woods echo again with their shrill ha-ha-hoo, till all the Australian woodpeckers, or laughing jackasses, on the trees around laughed and shrieked in chorus.

My further acquaintance with these men, far from making me feel inclined to laugh, has given me a feeling of considerable liking for them, and has shown me their immeasurable superiority over the degraded and rum-loving race which is either all that remains to us of a widely-spread and perhaps once partially-civilised nation peopling the whole of Australia, or perhaps a mere link in Mr. Darwin's chain of evidence that, after all, the best of us is not so very far removed from an ape.

The South Sea Islands coolie has been and will be a person of great importance both to the Australian settlers themselves and to politicians at home; and my object in writing the present work is to show who he is, whence he comes, and how he is treated in the colony of Queensland, which has now-partly thanks to him-developed an entirely new and flourishing industry, which promises to rival, if not to surpass, sugar-growing in the West Indies.

Years ago, if you wanted to introduce an unpopular subject, all you had to do was to advocate the introduction of coolies; and English, Germans, and Chinamen alike resented the idea of the importation of black labour into Queensland; and not finding any just reason for their objection, would immediately raise the cry of 'slaves!' and point to the late terrible civil war in America, and the millions expended by England for extirpating slavery in the West Indies, and say, 'All this will come on the colony if you allow black labour on any pretext to be established here.'

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About the year 1868, however, several small sugarplanters, seeing that with the then existing rate of wages and scarcity of labour, sugar-growing, in which they had invested all their capital, would never pay, ventured to charter some small ships and to bring over to us the South Sea Islands coolie, fetching him from the large group of islands called the New Hebrides, lying within about ten days' sail of our coast, and densely crowded with a population who, having nothing to do and sometimes very little to eat, spent their whole time killing one another, not as we do in Europe, for the sake of an idea, but for the sake of a dinner.

The 'King Oscar,' 'Spunkie,' Jason,' 'Daphne,' and

FIRST COOLIES IN QUEENSLAND.

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many other little vessels, sailed for these islands, and according to all accounts some of their crews did overstep the bounds of legitimate recruiting for labour. I had no very intimate knowledge of the matter at that time, and Captain Palmer, of H.M.S. 'Rosario,' has already told us his story of the cruise of the 'Daphne,' which-judging from a conversation I had subsequently with one of the crew of that vessel, then a refugee on the Island of Tauna—I believe to be perfectly true, though Captain Palmer failed to convince the authorities at Sydney to that effect. Now that we can look at the subject dispassionately, even the planters will not care to deny that the system, as then carried on, was liable to grave abuses.

At all events the men were brought over, some from the French Loyalty Islands, and some, as I said, from the New Hebrides, and their arrival very soon produced a change in the aspect of the coast country of Queensland. Squatters sold their sheep and bought sugar plantations, foundries for machinery sprang up in Brisbane, trade improved, and the old virgin forest was turned for miles along the coast into flourishing farms.

The English working-man soon found, much to his disgust, that, instead of being indispensable as

heretofore, he could no longer make quite his own terms for wages, and the coolie trade,' as it was called, was made a question at every election, many pledging themselves to support no candidate till he had given his promise to vote for the prohibition of black labour. I remember one planter, on coming forward, being greeted with cries of How much a dozen did you give for them?' till he had to give up the attempt in disgust.

The question as to what we are to do with our colonies has been continually under discussion. Have we not millions of acres of good arable and pasture land, a decent climate, an inexhaustible supply of coal, copper and gold, an easy Government and tolerably wise Ministers, and yet who can say that Australia prospers as she ought to do? who can deny that in any vital point she is so far behind America that no stranger would believe she had been colonised by the same mother-country? It is in vain that her sons wish and drink prosperity to her, that the cry is Advance Australia, and speed the plough!' The plough does not speed a bit the faster, simply because there are not hands enough to hold it. Let the English Government really put its shoulder to the wheel; let it find out that in a well-managed system of emigration lies the solu

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( ADVANCE AUSTRALIA !?

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tion of most, if not all, its growing difficulties, and that it is the great key to the vexed question of pauperism, and the most profitable way of at once educating and reforming what politicians are pleased to call the dangerous classes. While money lies idle in London, and the mere mention of Australian securities makes any capitalist instinctively button his breeches-pocket, and while the poor either starve in the streets or are glad to get into gaols as vagrants, here lies before us a vast country which those same two forces, money and men, would soon convert into a smiling Eden. Let the English Government once organise a system of assisting emigrants that will land them in Australia by thousands with work before them, where it now sends hundreds, and instead of being a distant and unknown world, still popularly supposed to be fit only for kangaroos and convicts, she may yet be a prop to the old country in the not far distant days when she will be forced to look round for an ally in the great wars that are already throwing their dark shadow over us.

But the future of England, politically considered, is not the title of this work. What we have to do with is the present condition of the South Sea Islanders; and in the meantime, till the English