[Editor: This article, regarding Australian patriotism, was published in The Register (Adelaide, SA), 26 January 1910 (i.e. this patriotic article was published on Australia Day).]
Patriotism and pioneering.
It is doubtful if anything in Australia is more urgent than a true patriotism. Everything which tends to the cultivation of a quality so desirable should receive thoughtful attention.
Every one associates patriotism with the battlefield, where men are ready to lay down life for their native land and its welfare. Electors are recognising, but far too slowly, the patriotic importance of the ballot box; but there are other patriotic possibilities indirect and by the way in unsuspected sources which might well be remembered occasionally.
Cannot ordinary railway travelling be considered one of these? Wherever the children go they plead to be allowed to “look out of the window.” Older folk, while not so eager, might be just as interested if they thought.
Moving pictures are an order of the day; but are any of them — Living London or Proud Paris, or any other — equal in interest to the moving pictures framed by the railway sash — real pictures of Rising Australia? In the mind of the average taxpayer, if he thinks of railways at all, the most patriotic thought he has about them is how to make them pay. To him the iron horse is merely the supreme beast of burden. It puffs away and transports passengers up to the hills, over the plains, north, south, east, and west; but it carries very few of them also into the wonderful fairyland of the imagination.
Many years ago an Australian statesman, urging the construction of a railway to a rich but remote part of the State, argued as a justification, “It will add a new province to the colony.” The prediction was abundantly fulfilled. It stated, perhaps unconsciously, one of the truths of the philosophy of railways in new countries, that they help largely to add new provinces to developing States.
The varied pictures from the carriage window of a railway traversing a new country really represent civilisation in the making. It may be seen to-day in a trip to Pinnaroo. Here is the peaceful beauty of the virgin forest or scrub — a rapidly lessening quantity. Here are the rude abodes of sturdy pioneers. Here are the comfortable homesteads which in time reward honest industry. Sometimes you have the slab or mudbrick house, in which the brave couple began the battle, close up against the fine dwelling which marks their victory.
So it is with townships. Here is the simplest hamlet, the Australian township defined once as a store, a “pub,” and a blacksmith’s shop. Post office, church, and school are soon added. In time the towns, larger or smaller, arise as need calls them forth, often with more than mushroom rapidity.
An interesting law in biology — the law of recapitulation — postulates that every living creature, whatever its place in the scale of life may be, must begin at the beginning and recapitulate the evolution of the whole living race that lies behind it. When ages have to be compressed into months, or even weeks or days, there must necessarily be many a short cut and many an adjustment. A similar law can be traced in social life.
The developments that took ages to produce in the first place are reproduced within one generation. It is interesting to meet in a rapidly grown town one who has seen the beginning. Three men stood under an electric lamp in such a town, and one talked back 25 years. “We used to hunt kangaroo then. Where that big two-storied hotel stands we used to get our water out of a big crabhole. We used to camp our sheep where the doctor’s house is.” The latter statement explained what no one had yet explained — why the doctor’s garden was so much better than his neighbour’s.
In 25 years! — all the comforts of civilization — electric lights, telephones, water supply, gardens; in place of no man’s land a delightful town, and after only one generation of brave pioneers! Nor need it be 25 years, thanks to the iron horse, one of the chief agencies making such a recapitulation of civilization possible. Almost anywhere in Australia a railway journey illustrates it.
When F. H. Cowen returned to the old land after his visit to Australia in the Great Exhibition year, he was interviewed and asked, among other things, if he had composed anything during his visit. He shrugged his shoulders and made a contemptuous remark about the eternal gumtree. Had he only known it he had missed the opportunity still unseized by poet or musician of singing the new song of a sturdy people in a wealthy land.
As a matter of fact it is not the eternal gumtree at all. Largely, perhaps too largely, the gumtree is passing away, and the term “the eternal” is most inappropriate in a land of which one of the features most characteristic of the landscape is transition — change. There are marks of topsy-turvydom on every hand — for example, where the miner has left ugly mullock or slag heaps, or where the railway itself has scarred Nature’s gentle face; but already even in such places a healing hand is at work and a new order of beauty is appearing.
A noteworthy feature of a typical Australian landscape are the gaunt, dead, ringbarked trees. In the oldest settlement and near to cities they have practically disappeared, their very bones having been consumed for firewood; but wherever pioneering is proceeding in forest country they still remain, and will for long remain, in a mute pathos of deathly sacrifice.
In broad daylight they are unmistakably ugly, and in midsummer they are a positive menace, in that they give such harbour for the bush fire fiend — itself, after all, a cleansing fire of progress. In the more mystic lights of Nature, however, the old dead trees take on a charm all their own. Massed together and seen from a distance they are like a morning mist. In the glamour of moonlight they appear like ghosts, which will vanish with day. Late in the evening — in the gloaming — or early in the morning crisp and sharp against the coming dawn they stand out in bold silhouette, full of beauty and full of meaning. They are at once a link with the primeval past, a witness to the transition from old to new, and a sacrifice to ensure the richer future. The old life is passing away for a new life to come, and this is the note everywhere.
An alien heart sees and hears mournful monotony, and only that in it all. The Australian interprets things differently. The wind moaning weirdly through the trees on northern plains, the forest giant beating his own breast with his long, loose rags of bark, the plaintive cry of birds in the lonely scrub or deep in secluded gullies — these are not joining in a requiem of despair. They express the sadness of farewell as the old order passes in death and the new order of progress and activity comes in. It is a smoke of sacrifice that rises from forest clearing and mallee rolling, and with it mingles as incense the aroma of pine or teatree from the altar hearths of homes. Death for life. “Why not?”
In imagination journey back and remember how already the waste and unvalued land has blossomed into a very garden of God. Journey forward. Australian patriotism must have the forward aspect. There is only a share by tradition in the centuries of the storied past only one brief century of our very own, but full of energy and resource. There is the future, however, with the new land in which to realize a national individuality. National ideals have to be seen clearly in vision and worked for in fact. All the sacrifice does not lie with the forests or in the past. Each has his duty to others and to all, and it may spell self-denial and sacrifice of personal interests for the general welfare.
Source:
The Register (Adelaide, SA), 26 January 1910, p. 6
Also published in:
The Observer (Adelaide, SA), 29 January 1910, p. 33
Editor’s notes:
F. H. Cowen = Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852-1935), a composer, conductor, and pianist; he was born in Kingston (Jamaica) in 1852, grew up in England, and died in London (England) in 1935
See: 1) “Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen: British conductor and composer”, Encyclopaedia Britannica
2) “Frederic Hymen Cowen”, Wikipedia
gloaming = dusk, twilight
Great Exhibition = [see Melbourne Centennial Exhibition]
hamlet = a small settlement, town, or village; a group of houses
iron horse = a train; a railway locomotive (especially one powered by steam)
Melbourne Centennial Exhibition = an exhibition held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the British settlement of Australia; the exhibition was held in the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne (Victoria) from August 1888 to March 1889
See: 1) “Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 1888-9: Centennial International Exhibition”, JDP Econ Publications and Studies
2) “Item NU 48209: Medal – Melbourne Centennial Exhibition, Australia, 1888-1889”, Museums Victoria
3) “Melbourne Centennial Exhibition”, Wikipedia
mullock = mining refuse, rubbish; dirt, gravel, clay, stone, and other earthen materials which remain after ore has been separated (the unwanted earthen materials are often placed in a big pile outside of a mine, i.e. in a mullock heap)
no man’s land = an area of land which lacks a controlling authority, or land which is not directly or effectively under the control of civilised authority; land which lacks the trappings of civilisation
pathos = compassion or pity; an experience, or a work of art, that evokes feelings of compassion or pity
Pinnaroo = a town in the south-east of South Australia, located near the Victorian border
See: “Pinnaroo, South Australia”, Wikipedia
pub = hotel; an establishment where the main line of business is to sell alcoholic drinks for customers to consume on the premises (“pub” comes from the abbreviation of “public house”)
requiem = a song, chant, dirge, piece of music, or musical service, especially of a mournful nature and slow, used for a funeral, memorial, or commemoration, for the repose (peaceful rest) of the souls of the dead (especially regarding Christian ceremonies for the dead); a lamentation for the dead; a requiem mass for the repose of the souls of the dead
ringbark = to cut away or remove a ring of bark from around a tree, especially so as to kill it (also spelt: ring-bark)
rude = primitive, raw, or rough, or in an unfinished state or natural condition (distinct from the modern usage of “rude” as someone being discourteous or ill-mannered)
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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