Ah me! who has not known and pitied them in this Australian land of ours? The workman\'s Paradise! yet all too well adapted for converting the gently-nurtured waif into the resigned labourer, the homeless vagrant. The gradations through which slowly, invisibly, but none the less surely, drifts to lower levels the luckless gentleman adventurer, are fraught with a melancholy interest. How sad it seems to realise that of the hundreds of well-dressed, well-educated, high-hearted youngsters, fresh from pleasant British homes, who every season land on our shores, a certain proportion will, in a few years of Colonial Experience (save the mark!), be transformed into misanthropic shepherds, ragged tramps, or reckless rouseabouts.
One always sees a few in the men\'s hut at shearing time, owning no higher aspirations than the ordinary station hand, living the rough life of the bush-labourer, relishing coarse tobacco and the coarser jests when the day\'s work is done, hardly distinguishable in dress, tone, and manner from their ruder comrades. Like them, alas! too prone to end each term\'s unrelieved labour by an aimless, ruinous drinking-bout.
It is not that the daily toil, the plain fare, and rude companionship would be in any sense degrading, were they used as means to an end. Did the cadet resolve to save all but the cash absolutely required for clothing and other needs, a small capital might easily be acquired, with reasonable credit in proportion, for which a profitable outlet is always to be found. And a knowledge of the rougher side of Australian life is always valuable wherever his lot might be cast.
289The real social deterioration accrues when the well-born or well-educated man becomes fatally contented with his humble surroundings; when hope has faded out, when ambition is dead, when repeated trials have landed him in deeper failure; when the conviction is only too well founded that for him no higher position is attainable in this world. Nay, that even if attained, he is no longer fitted to occupy it.
Persons imperfectly acquainted with our social system may say, \'Oh, once a gentleman, always a gentleman!\' and so on. From whatever rude environment, he will come forth true to his training, and assume his earlier habitudes as easily as the well-fitting garments which his altered circumstances render necessary.
It is not so, unfortunately. Granted that the exceptional individual emerges from the wreck of his youthful aspirations safe and uninjured, more numerous are they tenfold who reach the shore bleeding and disabled, never to be again but the simulacra of their former selves—hopeless of ever attaining the fair heaven-crowned heights, so near, so tempting of ascent in boyhood; heedless but of the lower pains and pleasures to which they have all unresistingly yielded their future lives.
Much of course depends on the mental fibre of the youngster. If happily constituted, he may defy the most inauspicious surroundings to alter his habits of thought or change his settled purpose in life. One boy, at the roughest station in the \'back blocks,\' will save his money and do his work in a cheerfully observant spirit; he will utilise the spare time, of which he has so large a supply, in reading and improving his mind; he will find out all he can about the working of the station, with a view to future operations when he is promoted to partnership or management. To this he resolutely looks forward. He preserves the manners and the principles which he brought from home untarnished; an easy enough matter, since even in the farthest wilds, among the roughest working men in Australia, a true gentleman\'s mien and tone are always held in respect, which no man loses save by his own act.
Say that he has a few years of hard work and privation, he is sure to rise in life, and eventually, by dint of perseverance and attention to detail, to become the owner of or 290partner in a station. His character for steadiness, efficiency, and industry becomes known from one end of the district to the other. And if those with whom he is temporarily connected do not advance him, be sure that some neighbouring proprietor in need of an active lieutenant will not lose the opportunity.
The young man of less robust self-denial takes station life after a very different fashion. His fixed idea has been from the first that galloping about on horseback, smoking, shooting, and drinking are the recognised pastoral industries by which fortunes in Australia are made. He does not bother his head about the science of sheep-breeding, or the management of that capricious but profitable animal the merino. He forgets messages. He overrides the station horses. He smokes diligently, talks familiarly and plays cards with the men, from whom he learns to swear profanely and acquires no useful knowledge—on the contrary, much that is evil. On his visits to the village or post-town he learns to drink spirits, and thus lays the foundation of a dangerous habit, which, if not checked, may destroy his after-life. At the end of his two years\' experience he is regarded as about on a level with the ordinary rouseabout—hardly as good, certainly no better. On making up his mind to leave for other employment, he is told that he is heartily welcome to please himself.
Occasionally the unsuccessful gentleman, emigrant or colonial, is not distinctly to blame for his fall in social position. He has adopted a bush life, trusting vaguely to be able to get on in one of the numerous ways of which he has heard tell. He tries hard at first for situations suited to his former position in life, finding, however, that no one is in pressing need of an inexperienced youth not brought up to work. Still, if strong and willing, he can earn ordinary wages as a station hand. He learns how to manage the routine work nearly as well as his comrades in the men\'s hut, and by degrees, not being mentally persistent, he adopts the tone and manner of the men who are his companions—not at once, and not altogether, but after a year or two—to a much greater extent than any one would think possible. In a work of fiction some kindly squatter would free the poor fellow from his rough, or let us say uneducated comrades, but in real life no one would risk the experiment. He may 291have been deceived before. He would argue that though the waif might be a gentleman by birth, it must have been his own fault in some way that he was in his present position—most likely drank, gambled, or had done something shady; and this would be true in nine cases out of ten. If he introduced Mr. Waif to his family, or took him into his house if a bachelor, he might, of course, behave well for a time, but one fine day, unable to withstand the temptation of an open sideboard, would be found dead drunk or madly intoxicated on his employer\'s return.
Gradually the unsuccessful one, after a year or two of nomadic life, tramping it from one end of a colony to another, begins to abandon the punctilious habits of his early life. His speech shows signs of degeneration. He talks of people indifferently as \'coves\' or \'cards\'; causerie with him is \'pitching\'; he refrains with difficulty from expletives, and so on. His reading has not been kept up, though, had he cared, it might have been. He is scented unpleasantly with coarse tobacco, occasionally, alas! with the too frequent \'nip\' of alcohol. If he by any chance re-enters civilised life, he shows in a dozen ways that he is no longer in touch with it. He makes things uncomfortable for his friends or companions, and is thoroughly convinced that he is out of place himself.
A youngster of this type came to a squatter\'s station one evening, carrying his \'swag\' like any other tramp. The owner knew that he was or had been a gentleman, but apologised, as he had guests, for not asking him into the house. He was too dirty to be quite exact, and neither in raiment nor in other matters was he then fitted for the society o............