CHAPTER I. Ar early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbour of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew towards the mail steamer, the Kaikoura, the harbour was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far inland on the gale. We had placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he could steer, but, as we reached the steamer's side, instead of luffing up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently before the wind, although our treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us from a coal-hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours the wind moderated, and I reached the Kaikoura just before she sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbour through the boil of waters that marks the position of the submarine crater, I found that there was but one other passenger for Australia to share with me the services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons. "Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Australasian colony to another," I felt inclined to say, but during the voyage and first week in New South Wales I began to discover that in England we are given over to a singular delusion as to the connexion of New Zealand and Australia. my Australasia is a term much used at home to express the whole of our Antipodean possessions; in the colonies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in the way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a congratulatory paragraph on the great amount of the New Zealand debt; the only allusion to Australia that I detected in the Wellington Independent was in a glance at the future of the colony, in which the editor predicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would be a naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or levying contributions upon Sydney. New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country; New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic. Had Australia and New Zealand been close together, instead of as far apart as Africa and South America, there could have been no political connexion between them so long as the traditions of their first settlement endured. Not only is the name "Australasia" politically meaningless, however, but it is also geographically incorrect, for New Zealand and Australia are as completely separated from each other as Great Britain and Massachusetts. No promontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of any New Zealand cape; the distance between Sydney and Wellington is 1400 miles; from Sydney to Auckland is as far. The distance from the nearest point of New Zealand of Tasman's peninsula, which itself projects somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than that of London from Algiers: from Wellington to Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from Manchester to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil. The sea that lies between the two great countries of the South is not, like the Central Pacific, a sea bridged with islands ruffled with trade winds, or overspread with a calm that permits the presence of light-draught paddle steamers. The seas which separate Australia from New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without islands, torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and traversed in all weathers by a mountainous swell. After the gale of Christmas-day, we were blessed with a continuance of light breezes or cur way to Sydney, but never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that seemed to surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw was as often out of as in the water; and, in a fast new ship, we could scarcely average nine knots an hour throughout the day. The ship which had brought the last Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed was struck by a sea which swept her from stem to stern, and filled her cabins two feet deep; and this in December, which here is Midsummer, and answers to our July. Not only is the intervening ocean wide and cold, but New Zealand presents to Australia a rugged coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by a snowy range, while she turns towards Polynesia and America all her ports and bays. No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct as Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian continent by negroes; New Zealand is ethnologically nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zealand to Australia. If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, the countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is one of the groups of volcanic islands that stud the Pacific throughout its whole extent; tremendous cliffs surround it on almost every side; a great mountain chain runs through both islands from north to south; hot springs abound, often close to glaciers and eternal snows; earthquakes are common, and active volcanoes not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and windy; the land is covered in most parts with a tangled jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants; water never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the summer heat is never great; the islands are always green. Australia has for the most part flat, yellow, sun-burnt shores; the soil may be rich, the country good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is an arid plain; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather the thermometer rises higher than it does in India, and dust storms and hot winds sweep the land from end to end. It is impossible to conceive countries more unlike each other than are our two great dominions of the south. Their very fossils are as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna of our time. At dawn of the first day of the new year we sighted the rocks where the Duncan Dunbar was lost with all hands, and a few minutes afterwards we were boarded by the crew engaged by the Sydney Morning Herald, who had been lying at "The Heads" all night, to intercept our news and telegraph it to the city. The pilot and regular news-boat hailed us a little later when we had fired a gun. The contrast between this Austra lian energy and the supineness of the New Zealanders was striking, but not more so than that between my first view of Australia and my last view of New Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy peak of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Ida, while we ran before a strong breeze, in the bright English sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon, the albatrosses screaming around our stern: to-day, as we steamed up Port Jackson, towards Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night of oven-like heat, the sun rose flaming in a lurid sky, and struck down upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless foliage of the Australian bush; while, as we anchored, the ceaseless chirping of the crickets in the grass and trees struck harshly on the ear. The harbour, commercially the finest in the world, is not without a singular beauty if seen at the best time. By the "hot-wind sunrise," as I first saw it, the heat and glare destroy the feeling of repose which the endless succession of deep, sheltered coves would otherwise convey; but if it be seen from shore in the afternoon, when the sea-breeze has sprung up, turning the sky from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land that leads out to the Government House, you catch a glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side, rippled with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with white sails: the brightness of the colours that the sea-breeze brings almost atones for the wind's unhealthiness. In the upper portion of the town, the scene is less picturesque; the houses are of the commonplace English ugliness, worst of all possible forms of architectural imbecility; and are built, too, as though for English fogs, instead of semi-tropical heat. Water is not to be had, and the streets are given up to clouds of dust, while not a single shade-tree breaks the rays of the almost vertical sun. The afternoon of New Year's day I spent at the " Midsummer Meeting" of the Sydney Jockey Club, on the race-course near |