THE 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT
 
 THE PLEASANT CAREER 
 OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE MEUDELL 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD. 
 
 BROADWAY HOUSE: 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.G.
 
 Printed in Great Britain by 
 The Botuering Press, Plymouth.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. FACE 
 
 I. EARLY EXPERIENCES . . .1 
 
 II. LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS . I I 
 
 III. POLITICS, LEAGUES, ASSOCIATIONS, CLUBS. 
 
 THE KYABRAM MOVEMENT . . 34 
 
 IV. BANKS AND BANKERS . . .54 
 
 V. MINES AND MINING. STOCK EXCHANGE. 
 
 OIL QUEST . . . .8l 
 
 VI. FORTUNES MISSED . . .130 
 
 VII. TRAVELS A TABLOID OF TRAVEL . 145 
 
 VIII. PEOPLE I HAVE KNOCKED ABOUT WITH . 190 
 
 IX. AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE . . . 227 
 
 X. EARLY EXPERIENCES. HOTELS, CAFES, 
 
 DINNERS, ENTERTAINMENTS . . 273
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 MY travels in forty countries covering over 400,000 
 miles by land and sea, on over 400 steamships, and 
 through about 600 hotels, allow me to claim I have 
 travelled further than most Australians. Of course, 
 postmen, commercial travellers, sea-captains and rail- 
 way guards have an opportunity of breaking my 
 record for distance. During my travels I have met 
 lots of people who have been everywhere, have seen 
 little, and remembered less. I have not been able to 
 find a better country than my own Australia. The 
 old controversy as to which is the finest harbour city 
 in the world can only be truthfully settled in favour 
 of Sydney, with Rio Janeiro half a length away second, 
 and Naples a bad third. Among the " also rans " 
 are Hobart, Auckland, Queenstown, Quebec, Nagaski, 
 San Francisco, and Hong-Kong, precisely in that 
 order. Before going abroad to view the world I saw 
 my native land fairly extensively and knew something 
 of the South Sea Islands and of glorious New Zealand. 
 There is no such picturesque country elsewhere as New 
 Zealand, although we have in Australia magnificent 
 scenery of a quality unknown to the European. In 
 fact the traveller does not need to go outside Aus- 
 tralasia for sightseeing, or to see the best, get the best 
 or do the best this planet affords. 
 
 vii
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 All these years of travel over the Seven Seas have 
 fixed firmly in my soul and mind the belief that my 
 native land, Australia, is the best country and the 
 Australians are the best people on the globe. The 
 finest people of all the nations are the French, and 
 unlike most other peoples the French as a nation love 
 their homeland, passionately and devotedly. 
 
 The English, the Scotch, the Londoners (who are 
 a curious sect of the British people standing apart), 
 Germans, Italians, Swiss and all those other races 
 from the cold north of Europe have no obsessing love 
 of country. The Irish have mostly left Ireland, but 
 they were forced out. For freedom, for food, for 
 work, for money, they leave their homes as soon as 
 they can. And most of those countries are good 
 places to get away from. 
 
 The Australian is pure-bred, of one race, and that 
 (excepting the French) the best race of them all the 
 miscalled Anglo-Saxon. The latest figures are not 
 available, but those of the 1921 census give the birth 
 places of the inhabitants of Australia as 86 per cent 
 born in Australasia, 10 per cent born in the United 
 Kingdom, and only 4 per cent born in foreign coun- 
 tries. Ours is, perhaps, the purest breed of people 
 living. The strain was a good one too, because only 
 the strong and healthy men and women were able 
 to travel from Europe hither, and speaking generally, 
 the Government immigrants in later years were 
 examined and selected. So the Australian is well and 
 cleanly bred from a good stock, and endowed with 
 
 viii
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 excellent bone and blood. Given these requisites of 
 pure blood and strong bone, it is only necessary to 
 use plenty of wholesome food in a fine climate to 
 produce, physically and mentally, healthy men and 
 women. The Australian is a superior being physically. 
 Other nations do not produce such a high proportion 
 of able-bodied men and women as the Australian 
 nation, because Australians are essentially livers out 
 of doors. 
 
 If our men are in every respect the finest males 
 living, what can be said of our women ? My travels 
 in 450 cities in every region of the globe enable me 
 to judge, and without reserve I can declare the 
 Australian woman is the healthiest, sanest and most 
 beautiful in the wide world. The women of Norway 
 and Sweden are perhaps physically stronger, those of 
 Odessa perhaps in the mass prettier, maybe Grafton 
 Street, Dublin, or Princes Street, Edinburgh, or 
 Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne may offer a few 
 picked specimens of the highest form of womanhood ; 
 yet in the mass our Australian girls and women easily 
 bear the palm as the best and most capable women 
 of all the nations, fit comrades and helpmates of the 
 very best men. 
 
 Our Australian boys and girls are better educated 
 than those of other nations ; and speaking broadly 
 our school system is in its infancy, in a state of flux, 
 from which is being evolved a more complete and 
 advanced educational environment and atmosphere. 
 
 In the matter of education we have been hampered 
 
 ix
 
 CHAPTER I 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 MY father, William Meudell , by descent related to the 
 Hertford family of Seymours , was a highly educated 
 man from Edinburgh who, with William Grant, a crony 
 of his, came to Australia in search of health and gold. 
 At Geelong, Henry Miller who had just helped to es- 
 tablish the Bank of Victoria was on the wharf looking 
 for a couple of " pommies " to work on his farm at 
 Bacchus Marsh. He asked the two white-faced, white- 
 handed young men whether they wanted work. They 
 used the Scottish equivalent of " My oath, Mister." 
 " All right," said Miller, " I want you to take a load of 
 palings by bullock team to Bacchus Marsh." They 
 had no recollection of ever having seen a bullock in 
 their lives, and it took them three weeks to learn 
 bullock driving and swearing, and as well how to 
 travel to Bacchus Marsh. Every morning was devoted 
 to chasing bullocks all over the landscape and then 
 yoking them up. When they reached Bacchus Marsh 
 they were a mass of callosities corns, warts, bunions 
 and blisters all over their hands, arms and feet. 
 " Money " Miller said to my dad, " How would 
 you like to join the Bank of Victoria, Meudell ? " 
 ' That's my profession," said my father, and he took 
 the billet in the Bendigo branch at five pound a week, 
 and slept alongside the gold for eight years. Not 
 very long before he died " Money " Miller, Chair- 
 man of the Bank of Victoria, sent for my father, then 
 the General Manager, to visit him at " Findon " Kew. 
 He found the old man sitting at a green baize card 
 table playing with twenty-five new golden sovereigns,
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 red hot from the mint, delicious to the touch and sight, 
 better than aspirin for a headache and an excellent 
 cure for that universal complaint, tightness of the 
 chest. Old " Money " Miller asked my father to 
 prepare all the requisite papers to make applications 
 to the Supreme Court to wind up the Bank of Victoria 
 and distribute the assets among the shareholders. 
 The old chap was in his dotage, but what a lovely 
 dotage to be in, to just do nothing but sit all day 
 playing with new yellow " Jimmy Goblins," to absorb 
 their glitter and harken to their click and clink. 
 Isn't it a delightful way to spend a long life gathering 
 money, piling it up, seeing it grow without spending 
 more than keeps one alive, and then to pass on to 
 another existence conscious of having made heavy 
 footprints on the sands of time, and indulging one's 
 ruling passion to the utmost right up to the door of 
 death ? It's a curious case of putrefaction of the 
 soul. 
 
 EARLY CAREER 
 
 My father took me into the Bank of Victoria and 
 I learned all I could about the craft in several positions, 
 from " pig-boy " to teller. I learned shorthand to 
 get into head office as secretary to the Inspector, 
 E. G. Harrison, who sent me to Horsham during the 
 wheat season. It was a horrible place full of banks, 
 and inns, poor food, bad drink, too many card- 
 players and betting men, and as rude and crude as 
 a Californian mining camp. So I applied for a billet 
 in the Sandhurst Savings Bank shortly after George 
 E. Emery, the very capable General Manager of the 
 State Savings Bank, joined the service at Castlemaine. 
 Had I stayed in the bank I would have been a 
 senior officer to-day. Eager for personal freedom 
 and better pay, I became a public accountant and 
 was doing well when the late B. J. Fink found me
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 out and offered me the job of assistant manager 
 of the Mercantile Finance Guarantee and Trustee 
 Company, the pivot and headquarters of the land 
 and finance boom then starting on its meteoric 
 career. J. M. Bruce, Stanley Bruce's father, O. 
 Fenwick and J. H. Dodgshun were the directors ; 
 B. J. Fink was Chairman ; J. Me. A. Howden, 
 manager ; and Andrew Lyell, the best accountant 
 Melbourne ever had, was inspector. I learned high 
 finance all right and lost twenty thousand pounds 
 buying the blessed or cursed shares of the Company. 
 
 EARLY LIFE ILLNESS 
 
 The greatest mistake I have made in my life was 
 to believe three doctors that I was dying and ought to 
 give up work. Brought up by my parents on homoeo- 
 pathy I never was able to understand why people 
 had any faith in medicine. Doctors prescribe medicine 
 of which they know nothing to cure diseases in a body 
 of which they know less. Materia medico, and the 
 British Pharmacopoeia should be suppressed by force. 
 Doctors know very little and what they know they 
 use blindly on their patients. They cannot cure cancer, 
 consumption, baldness, or rheumatoid arthritis, to 
 name only a few universal diseases. The few diseases 
 they can cure are mostly mental, diseases of the nerves 
 created by the mind, by thinking and by fear. I was 
 doing a big business on the Melbourne Stock Exchange 
 which was always growing. Working too hard my 
 system ran down and I spat blood. So I consulted 
 a doctor, a member of the British Medical Associa- 
 tion, who said I was ill and must stop work. The 
 second B.M.A. man, looking like a coffin-lifter's 
 helper with a belly-ache, shook his head and asked me 
 whether I had made my will. This put the wind up 
 me, so I stopped work, downed tools and went to 
 London. The first B.M.A. chap said, " You have
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 only three months to live, make your will and go 
 home to Melbourne." That was nineteen years 
 ago. The next B.M.A. member was a big pot, a 
 Royal physician, who also condemned me to death 
 as being in the last stage of tuberculosis. I swore 
 at him gently. I went away for a long sea trip to 
 Burma, Malaya and East Indies on my way home. 
 Fear, fright, funk, those three most deadly and 
 damnable curses and ills that afflict humanity, caused 
 me to give my splendid Stock Exchange business 
 away and thereby ruined myself. However, my 
 mate and I went to Bendigo, lived in the open air at 
 Kangaroo Flat, and I swallowed beaten up eggs and 
 milk to the extent of three quarts a day. I slept like 
 a night watchman, avoided exercise, a thing that kills 
 more people than it saves, and in twelve months I 
 gained three stone weight. After that my diet was 
 crayfish, onions and stout. The hole in my lung 
 filled up, what with I don't know, and all that happened 
 twenty-one years ago. What funny folks doctors 
 are, and what a zany I was to believe their doleful 
 maunderings ! Now I believe that all diseases are 
 mental in origin. A change in the mental outlook is 
 therefore a health force. In a year I gained three 
 stone weight and entirely renewed the vitality which 
 had led to my undoing. Don't need doctors nor their 
 beastly physic, and have only had one illness since, an 
 attack of shingles, which a doctor friend told my wife 
 would take three weeks to disappear. My friend, 
 James Moore Hickson, the celebrated faith healer, 
 attended and cured me, and I went back to the office 
 the next day. Abolish fear from the world and you 
 will abolish disease. Never to be born would be 
 best for mortal man, but hardly one man in 100,000 
 has this luck. 
 
 It is really fiddle-faddle and of no interest to any- 
 body but myself, yet some unlucky mortal suffering
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 from tuberculosis or consumption may make use of 
 my experience in curing myself of the white plague. 
 For the first forty years of life I worked too hard and 
 used up my vitality too quickly. Ever since passing 
 that milestone I have drifted and let things rip and I 
 am much happier. When doing splendidly on the 
 Stock Exchange I caught consumption and a silly 
 ass of a doctor said, " Give it up, shut your office ; 
 make your will ; go away. Your spit is malignant." 
 It might have been, so I gave my seat and my fine 
 business away and went travelling with my mate. 
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCE 
 
 I am glad to admit I have spent a very happy life 
 crammed full of varied experiences. David Mickle, 
 an exceptionally intellectual man, a Victorian Post 
 Office Inspector, induced me to make a complete 
 study of Herbert Spencer's philosophy to gain a 
 groundwork of First Principles. Years after, Alfred 
 Deakin, a friend of Mickle's, who also helped to 
 fashion my reading curriculum, told me he had found 
 Herbert Spencer's philosophy impracticable, and with 
 that I agreed. The only man who could frame a 
 workable system of philosophy would be a lawyer 
 who had been a land shark and who had been a com- 
 pany promoter and had gone insolvent. Deakin gave 
 me much good literary advice and persuaded me to 
 study Ralph Waldo Emerson to get a knowledge of 
 the canons of conduct. So there you are, Herbert 
 Spencer for character building and Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson for framing one's conduct ; copious libations 
 of Herbert Spencer and long banquets with Emerson. 
 And in addition to being thankful for a happy life, 
 love of travel, a product of atavism, derived from 
 Viking ancestors who as soldiers and sailors were 
 moss-troopers, bandits, buccaneers and pirates, nour- 
 ished my desire to see the world. So I have seen the
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 two finest sights on earth : the Taj Mahal fane in 
 India, and Carbine winning the Melbourne Cup in 
 1890, carrying 10 stone 5 Ib. over two miles. 
 
 EARLY DAYS BANK OF VICTORIA 
 
 The best thing ever done by me was to write an 
 essay at the age of fifteen creating that blessed and 
 priceless device, " Australia for the Australians." 
 The most blessed gift by atavism to me was the sense 
 of humour bequeathed through Scottish ancestors 
 who were descended from Vikings. Up to my great 
 grandfather's time they were generally soldiers and 
 sailors. My grandfather and father were Scotch 
 bankers, and the precious endowment of humour 
 which had lain dormant and unused for untold 
 generations seems to have been imbued with life 
 amongst bank ledgers, overdrafts, bills payable, and 
 unpayable, and Head Office circulars, the funniest of 
 all human documents. Like Bernard Shaw, my way 
 of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke 
 in the world. The day I joined the Bank of Victoria 
 in knickerbockers (listen to that first hiss of egotism) 
 the staff assembled to receive me into the craft, and 
 twenty underpaid and overworked bank clerks in- 
 ducted me to their guild in the strong room. Not 
 one of them got over 150 a year, the ruling wage. 
 The chairman, still alive and always laughing, wound 
 up his advice to be a good honest banker like my 
 father, with this warning, " If you ever feel a desire 
 to go wrong, don't prig petty cash or enter threepenny 
 letters as sixpennies, collar 10,000, and be sure to 
 burn the bally books." Years afterwards the secretary 
 of the Bankers' Association, when he heard me tell 
 that story said solemnly, " George, if you ever want 
 to be head of the Melbourne Savings Bank drop 
 funny stories and try and look like Archibald Currie," 
 a dour, sour, Scotch sea-captain and then the chairman
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 of the Savings Bank, who looked as though he never 
 had laughed in his life, yet left a lot of money he did 
 not know how to spend. Most rich men look wise 
 and hold their tongues and their money. You cannot, 
 young man, practise the divine gift of humour and 
 get rich. This world dislikes people who laugh, 
 unless they do it for a living like Harry Lauder or 
 Charlie Chaplin. Henry Ford has never laughed and 
 John D. Rockfeller has never smiled, yet regard their 
 possessions ! Hugo Stinnes, the great German 
 financier, and Jimmy Tyson, the successful keeper of 
 sheep and cattle, died from the same obstruction of 
 their risible organs. If the general managers of the 
 twelve banks that burst in 1891 and 1893 had kept 
 paid clowns to make fun of the valuations of city and 
 suburban land, made by the old-established auctioneers 
 and valuators of Melbourne in the land boom days, their 
 banks would never have closed their doors. Every 
 bank should keep a laughing department where absurd 
 valuations and ridiculous securities could be laughed 
 off the premises. 
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 As a schoolboy I cut my right eye with a knife and 
 lost the sight. For a long time I lived under the over- 
 hanging fear that the good eye would fail through 
 sympathy, so I consulted several leading oculists in 
 London and Edinburgh, and one each in Weisbaden, 
 Homburg, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Venice. All 
 except one advised the excision of the wounded optic. 
 Dr. George Anderson Crichett of Harley Street, 
 London, told me to stick to the invalid eye and for 
 thirty-five years I enjoyed his friendship. Instead of 
 getting stale magazines in Sir George's waiting- 
 room, sherry, port and biscuits were provided, and 
 patients invited by printed notice to help themselves. 
 I think the sherry was '56 and the port a '48, both
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 excellent wines having the effect of clearing one's 
 vision. Resting against a magnificent cloisonne" vase 
 in the centre of the mahogany table was another fine 
 specimen of the printer's art simply mentioning that 
 " patients are politely requested to pay fees by cash." 
 Sir George had specially made waistcoats with roomy 
 pockets. In the port side pocket he put silver coins, 
 and in the starboard one he slipped the sovereigns. 
 Five pound Bank of England notes drifted into his 
 hip pockets. At the end of a busy day Dr. Crichett 
 had a decided list to starboard slightly canting towards 
 his stern. He was a wonderful oculist and a charming 
 man. 
 
 As a young and enterprising tuft-hunter, I desired 
 to see some of the great people of England, so voyaged 
 to Cambridge to call on Professor Sydney Howard 
 Vines, a cousin of my father's. He was an eminent 
 botanist and appeared to be stuffed with the same sort 
 of cotton wool they use to preserve dead mammals. 
 Vine's friends were the sons of Charles Darwin, and 
 his close cobber was Frank Darwin. Calling at King's 
 College, Vine's man told me he was up an oak tree with 
 Dr. Darwin inspecting a new aphis discovered that 
 day, so I strolled down and introduced myself to my 
 professor cousin up the tree. He asked me to go back 
 to his rooms and wait. It was about 12.30 and I was 
 hungry, also young. The factotum told me there were 
 three chops, a pound of cheese, and a gallon of table 
 ale for lunch with a sufficiency of bread. Half a crown 
 proved a big enough bribe, so the unjust steward 
 cooked the chops which I ate and I left the cheese and 
 bread for Mr. Vines who arrived for lunch at 1.30. 
 Luckily Frank Darwin had gone home, and my cousin 
 for one time more was a martyr to science while I was 
 well fed and happy.
 
 MERCANTILE FINANCE COMPANY 
 
 When the late B. J. Fink cajoled me into joining the 
 Mercantile Finance Guarantee Trustees and Agency 
 Company as Assistant Manager, upon the specious 
 plea that he would train me in la haute finance ', John 
 McAlister Howden was the Manager, and I filled 
 the vacancy made when Andrew Lyell, a leading 
 Scotch accountant, left the company. Fink's high 
 finance was pure grotesquerie, something to be 
 laughed at. His idea of high finance was to ask high 
 commissions. Although Howden was a pawky, 
 shrewd man he was controlled by Machiavelli Fink 
 whose knowledge of sound finance was primary with 
 an Asiatic tendency. Well I remember one day 
 after short and sharp negotiations Fink had signed 
 a contract to buy C. J. and T. Ham's old estate agency 
 business for a vast quantity of paper scrip. Cornelius 
 Job Ham had been lying awake thinking it out, and 
 next morning came to the office to plead with B. J. 
 Fink to cancel the contract and let him off". BJ. was 
 hard-hearted and granitic until C.J. wept scalding 
 tears on the new office carpet. Then he went away 
 and brought back Robert Reid, the soft-goods-man 
 of Flinders Lane, who bluffed and blustered and 
 demanded the return of the contract of sale which 
 was legally returned. B. J. Fink was messianic in 
 his conceit and made paper millions with the same 
 ease as a schoolboy builds Meccano bridges, and the 
 millions fell to pieces as simply. 
 
 SAVINGS BANK 
 
 I often wonder what would have happened if I had 
 stuck to the Savings Bank, of which I was a senior 
 officer when I resigned to become a public accountant. 
 I was close up to Mr. George E. Emery, the present 
 able General Manager, to whom the successful
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 expansion of the State Savings Bank of Victoria is 
 almost entirely due. To Emery, more than to anybody 
 else falls the credit for placing the Savings Bank at 
 the top of the list as the biggest and best national 
 savings bank in the world. During my extensive 
 travels in foreign countries I have used my expert 
 banking and savings banking experience to observe 
 and criticize the savings banks of other countries, 
 and the Australian system of keeping and protecting 
 the savings of the poor and thrifty excels all others. 
 It has only one weakness. The Savings Bank should 
 have a department for lending small sums of money 
 to small borrowers, on enlightened and improved 
 pawnshop lines. Why should a man have to pay 
 60 per cent for loan money simply because he is poor ? 
 On the whole it was a splendid thing for me, that 
 being a rolling stone I left the bank to lead a merry 
 life. 
 
 10
 
 CHAPTER II 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 THIS interview with the " Daily Graphic " of London, 
 in 1895, gives a clear idea of " The Causes of the 
 Crisis of 1893." 
 
 " For practical purposes," Mr. Meudell explained 
 to a " Daily Graphic " representative who called on 
 him at 28, Swithin's Lane, " three causes may be 
 assigned for the recent financial collapse. First, 
 there was the fall in prices of wheat, wool, and other 
 staple products of the colony. Wheat, which in 
 1873 sold at 5*. a bushel in Melbourne is to-day 
 only 35., and greasy wool which in 1873 averaged 
 20 a bale, say is. id. a pound, is now only 12 a 
 bale, or 7\d. to %d. a pound. The demonetization of 
 silver and appreciation of gold Mr. Meudell holds 
 mainly responsible for this fall in prices, for he is an 
 ardent bimetallist, and in Melbourne is an active 
 teacher of the doctrine. Then," said Mr. Meudell, 
 " another and more direct cause was the land boom 
 of 18878 encouraged by the excessive influx of 
 British capital into Australia in the form of Govern- 
 ment and municipal loans, bank deposits, and moneys 
 sent by assurance companies for investment on a 
 5 per cent basis. Money was thrown at our heads 
 too rapidly to be absorbed safely, and in order to 
 make a profit funds which carried interest bank 
 advances were made far too freely and without suffi- 
 cient inquiry. Under the Torren's system of registra- 
 tion, title deeds of landed property are more easily 
 dealt with than here, and banks freely lent on a mere 
 deposit of documents, taking a lien on the estate. 
 
 1 1
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Australia is undoubtedly over-banked, but in new 
 countries capital is scarce and all are borrowers. 
 Yes, we might have been over-banked, but it must be 
 remembered that it was the splendid banking facilities 
 which developed the wheat, wool, mining, and other 
 industries. Money," continued Mr. Meudell, " was 
 so plentiful that everyone thought land values were 
 bound to rise enormously. It's an old story this 
 ' land boom ' after all, and those who want to under- 
 stand how it can be worked cannot do better than 
 read Marian Crawford's * Don Orsino,' which describes 
 the land and building crash in Rome a few years 
 back. The immediate cause of the collapse," con- 
 tinued Mr. Meudell, in his clear and concise style was 
 withdrawal of deposits from the building societies 
 which have done valuable work in the past, but on a 
 totally unsound basis and taking money on deposit 
 for short terms and lending for long terms, so that 
 when a sudden rush of withdrawals came funds could 
 not be called in to meet the demand. A similar 
 movement followed against the banks, which were in 
 somewhat similar financial position and well, the 
 result everybody knows only too well. Certainly 
 I think the reorganization schemes adopted by the 
 banks were the best possible under the circumstances. 
 Liquidation of assets was impossible. It might have 
 taken fifty years to wind up some of those concerns." 
 The total losses of the people of Victoria in securities 
 and property during the liquidation period amounted 
 to 200,000,000. That much was visible, and 
 could be reckoned. How much unseen property, 
 chiefly personal, was wiped out it is impossible to 
 estimate. And foreign loans and deposit receipts 
 were the stimulus that led to over-building and over- 
 buying. There were thousands of empty offices and 
 thousands of vacant blocks of land. Every day the 
 newspapers reported sales of city properties at i 500 to 
 
 12
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 ,2000 a foot, the rentals of which worked out at 
 2 and 3 per cent. After all, the interest test or the 
 yield test is the only one to apply to values of land or 
 buildings. The other day 2500 a foot was paid 
 for a Melbourne city building which shows 4 per cent 
 net return by rentals. The new owner cannot raise 
 the rent, because there are nearly 4000 offices in old 
 and new buildings vacant in Melbourne to-day. 
 
 When I was assistant manager of the Mercantile 
 Finance and Guarantee Company, I wrote a good many 
 prospectuses of companies at the behest of B. J. Fink. 
 The most splendid specimen of the art of imagining 
 the basis of a prospectus ever perpetrated in Australia 
 was my draft of the Australian Assets Purchase Com- 
 pany, capital, j5, 500,000, to take over and liquidate 
 the landed properties in houses, cottages, farms, sub- 
 urban subdivisions, city lots, blank broad acres held 
 by the late G. W. Taylor of Prahran, one of the 
 most notorious land boomers. It was a rare farrago of 
 high-priced rubbish, and every title or option had 
 been mortgaged to a bank, a building society, or to a 
 life assurance company. Our company held a bundle 
 of equities of redemption. G. W. Taylor went up 
 to London before the scheme materialized and the 
 Board of Directors, all well-known men of the time, 
 let the Australian Assets Purchase Company slither 
 to oblivion. Saw Taylor in Cornhill, London, in 
 1895 an< ^ had a hearty laugh when he unfolded a 
 scheme for securing emigrants in the United Kingdom 
 to send in here to settle on orchards and bee farms in 
 the suburbs of Melbourne, especially on the Glen 
 Iris line ! G. W. Taylor was once Mayor of Prahran, 
 a council celebrated in those days as a graduation 
 college for land boomers, a most amusing type of 
 speculators, who were nothing, knew nothing, and 
 had nothing. 
 
 The land boom and banking collapse was born in 
 
 '3
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 1886 when the Service-Gillies Government brought in 
 a bill to borrow 20,000,000 for alleged reproductive 
 public works, that blessed trilogy of words which 
 always spells disaster in Australia. It ended on 
 Sunday, 3Oth April, 1893, when two ignorant and weak 
 politicians, the late J. B. Patterson, the then Premier 
 of Victoria, and G. D. Carter, the Treasurer, lost their 
 heads and issued a Government Gazette declaring as 
 bank holidays, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thurs- 
 day and Friday, ist to ^th May, 1893. This silly, 
 senseless, stupid action forced upon Patterson by 
 Carter, an extremely self-conscious and withal ignorant 
 man, caused the banking edifice to topple and crash. 
 The National Bank shut down next day, the Colonial, 
 Victoria, Queensland National, Commercial of Sydney 
 and City of Melbourne broke in that order. There 
 was no need for the Commercial of Sydney to shut, 
 but Thomas Dibbs, the General Manager, closed as a 
 matter of expediency to strengthen his bank's position. 
 On Friday, 2ist April, 1893, there was a " run " in 
 Sydney on the Bank of New South Wales, Commercial 
 Banking Company, City Bank of Sydney and Govern- 
 ment Savings Bank of N.S.W. Sir George Dibbs, 
 premier of New South Wales, unlike the weakling 
 politicians of Victoria, Patterson and Carter, wisely 
 visited the Savings Bank and guaranteed the deposits 
 on behalf of the Government of New South Wales 
 and the " run " and the panic were stopped. Yet 
 such an important event is not included in the official 
 Year Book chronological table from 1788 forward. 
 Such was the policy of hush and secrecy. 
 
 The easiest marks as borrowers were the building 
 societies and the land and estate agents, and they had 
 a right royal time asking for and getting advances. 
 In those halcyon days nobody was ever refused a loan 
 by a bank manager. So the banks opened agencies in 
 Scotland, Ireland and England, and borrowed millions 
 
 14
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 on deposit receipts for eighteen months and lent them 
 out in Victoria for thirty years, and a great deal of the 
 money for eternity. It wasn't a mad or pessimistic 
 or despondent thing to do. It was one calling for 
 laughter, for merriment, for jocosity. Why should 
 the good-humoured borrower explain to the dismal 
 bank manager, irritated and worried by Head Office 
 letters and circulars censuring him for not lending 
 money fast enough, that though he had paid i a 
 foot for land at Coburg or Glen Iris or Mentone that 
 it was not in his own opinion worth the 10 a foot 
 of his own valuation. Bankers love bills to discount 
 and the land boomers had heaps, piles, bundles of 
 bills in tin boxes and blue and yellow carpet bags. 
 If a suburban estate was turned over and sold five or 
 six times at a paper profit, that meant five or six sets 
 of bills owing on one property, enough to fill twelve 
 baskets full. Nobody dared to laugh at these insane 
 transactions, nobody was brave enough to say, " All 
 this business is frenzied, delusive and pure buffoonery. 
 There must be a smash." And there was. Prices of 
 houses and lands jumped higher and higher, day by 
 day, nay, hour by hour, and more and more people 
 were drawn into the maelstrom, into a true Walpurgis 
 ride to sudden wealth. In 1888 there were exactly 
 1,000,000 people in Victoria mostly under twenty-one 
 years of age, and five years later, after at least 
 1 00,000,000 had been poured in molten gold down 
 Moloch's throat, there were only 133,266 more 
 inhabitants, chiefly babies. Rateable property in 
 cities, towns and boroughs went up by leaps and 
 bounds from 53 to 86 million pounds sterling in 
 five years, while the rateable property of shire councils 
 jumped from 71 to 108 million pounds in the five 
 years 1886-1890. It was all so dashed funny, 
 because there was no solid foundation for all this 
 paper wealth. Production did not increase part passu,
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 nor overseas trade, nor exports, nor shipping, except 
 that imports increased literally horribly. During 
 1886 and 1 8 90 in Victoria railways costing 8 ,000,000 
 and 486 new churches and chapels were built. To 
 me it was all so ridiculous and amusing, and the best 
 of the joke was that none of the leaders of the people 
 in Press, Parliament, Church, or on the platform, 
 ever uttered a single word of warning about the 
 coming debacle, the terrible catastrophe so close at 
 hand which brought ruin to tens of thousands of 
 decent people and nearly smashed Victoria. Bank 
 assets rose from 41,000,000 in 1886 to 63,000,000 
 in 1891. Deposits grew from 3 1 ,000,000 in 1 8 8 6 to 
 40,000,000 in 1891. After that they fell away and 
 did not reach 40,000,000 until 1907, or twenty-eight 
 years later. I am writing of what I know because I 
 went through that critical period on the inside in a 
 finance company and in a property company as an 
 executive officer, and when the panic stopped I was a 
 member of the Stock Exchange. 
 
 One of the prime causes of the collapse of the 
 land boom was the lax management of the Melbourne 
 building societies, which were as plentiful as fleas. 
 Owning his own home was a craze in those parlous 
 and perilous days of land sharks and building society 
 bounders. In September, 1889, tne "Building 
 Societies Gazette " published what it named " An 
 imposing array of figures." And so it was. Fifty-six 
 societies had shareholders' capital for 3,270,773, 
 earning 7 to 1 6 per cent with paper reserve funds of 
 S 1 7>9%7- They took deposits from the fool public 
 to the extent of 5,353,730, bearing 4 to 7 per cent 
 interest. Bank overdrafts, the basis of the whole 
 deplorable business, totalled 314,856, and there was 
 very little actual cash in the tills or tellers' boxes. 
 That their fellow-citizens thoroughly believed in 
 home comforts and manly independence, they bor- 
 
 16
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 rowed upon the undoubted security of houses and 
 land the magnificent sum of 8,482,944. It was a 
 gem in the middle of the paean of joy, the io triumphs ! 
 of this journal of the building societies then rotten 
 with corruption, and drunk with false valuations, 
 slithering blindly to oblivion by liquidation ! They 
 are indeed noble institutions ! They enable citizens 
 to become the proud possessors of that great blessing 
 a home of their own, and they are an impregnable 
 bulwark against anarchy, revolutions and strikes. 
 Why, because their assets amounted to 20,000,000, 
 soon to vanish into thin air ! And the house and land 
 valuations of those days were jocular and mirth 
 inspiring. 
 
 Met a man in Elizabeth Street in 1891 who was 
 manager of a soap and candle company. He said, 
 " Bought that two-story building in Flinders Lane 
 this morning for 37,000, and just sold it for 56,000." 
 While I stood and laughed merrily his face fell and 
 became with gloom overspread. ' That works out 
 at 1000 a foot and you sold it at about 1500. How 
 cynical," I guffawed. That gambler ultimately made 
 a composition of 68,293 with his creditors and 
 promised them one penny in the pound, which he 
 never paid. His father and uncle " competed," as 
 it was jokingly called in those unreal days of the 
 Barmacides, for a total sum of 381,779, at a penny 
 in the pound. All three eventually died wealthy. 
 The utter absurdity of the financial situation in those 
 bank-boom days never struck any of the frowning, 
 dismal general managers. The boom began with 
 the banks who inflated land values all over Australia, 
 though chiefly in Victoria. Between 1886 and 1891 
 the Service Gillies Ministries floated 16,000,000 
 of loans in London, and these two Premiers did more 
 harm financially to Victoria than all the other Premiers 
 since responsible government added together. Neither 
 
 '7
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Service nor Gillies ever laughed or joked. They 
 were too superior and became the political heroes of 
 the moneyed classes. About the same time the 
 Commercial Bank of Australia under Henry Gyles 
 Turner and John McCutcheon began an inglorious 
 career of aggrandisement. They started out to show 
 the hypochondriacs who managed the National, the 
 Victoria, the Australasia, the Union, the London, the 
 English and Scottish banks how to create business 
 and open branches. To supply new capital for these 
 objects the Commercial Bank appointed agents to 
 receive deposits in all the big cities of the United 
 Kingdom and chiefly in Scotland. Their interest 
 rates for fixed deposits were most alluring 3 per cent 
 for three months, 4 per cent for six months, and 
 5 per cent for one year. The result was that an 
 avalanche of money was poured into the London 
 office of the Commercial Bank which carried interest 
 from the date of deposit and consequently had to be 
 lent out on this side quickly. The bank here implored 
 its customers to take overdrafts, to discount bills, or 
 to lend money to their country clients, to borrow it 
 quickly and to lend it how they pleased. Flinders 
 Lane doubled its travelling staff, and with the cheap 
 7 per cent money the warehousemen over-imported 
 goods extensively and backed country storekeepers 
 without limit. 
 
 Fortunately I was writing regularly on banking 
 and public: statistics and got to recognize signs of 
 financial weaknesses, so I rented a box in the Safe 
 Deposit and when the last bank had failed, and the 
 forty-seventh building society had gone into liquida- 
 tion, I had saved nearly one thousand sovereigns. 
 They came in very handy and satisfied once and for 
 all any desire one may have had to become a miser. 
 To-day the same cycle of financial prodigality is being 
 run by the people of Australia. These huge empty 
 
 18
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 buildings, those new unwanted railways, these superb 
 private homes and public hotels are being built with 
 the savings of the community, with the deposits of the 
 savings banks, the life assurance societies, the trustees 
 companies and the banks. The monstrous public 
 debt of over 1,200,000,000, owing by 6,000,000 
 people, mostly babies, is a finger-post pointing to 
 trouble, disaster and suffering. City and suburban 
 values are inflated, and all the vacant land within 
 twenty miles of the Melbourne G.P.O. has been sold 
 at prices that discount its value for twenty-five years. 
 
 ALEXANDRA THEATRE 
 
 Here is one example out of hundreds of mad loan 
 and building contracts I saw put through during the 
 insane land boom. A clever old Frenchman, Jules 
 Joubert, away back in the era 18601890 acted as a 
 promoter of exhibitions in the cities of Australia and 
 New Zealand with varying success. Tiring of travel- 
 ling Joubert concluded he would build a good theatre 
 in Melbourne, a city then as now without a really 
 modern theatre. He came to the Mercantile Finance 
 Company to be financed, being friendly with B. J. 
 Fink, the Chairman. Fink's only anxiety was to earn 
 high-sounding commissions for the company, and he 
 would charge 20 to 25 per cent for putting through a 
 10 per cent loan if it were big enough in size. Joubert 
 induced him to back his theatre building enterprise, 
 and thus the Alexandra Theatre was born. When 
 nearly finished things began to look a delicate shade of 
 dark blue in high finance, according to Fink, and the 
 Alexandra Theatre contract was suddenly broken. 
 Being assistant manager of the Mercantile Finance 
 Company and having learned an awful lot about 
 theatres from a coign of vantage outside the stage 
 doors of several, I was given control of the " Alick " 
 Theatre, now called Her Majesty's. Our only trouble 
 
 '9
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 was to find money for the gas bill of fifty pounds a 
 week. Dan Barry, an entrepreneur or actor manager 
 of those times found the gas money and rented the 
 theatre at one peppercorn a week, which he never 
 paid, being so small and so useless. Barry put on 
 blood-curdling, heart-jerking melodrama at 3^., 6d. 
 and is. for gallery, dress circle and stalls. I did my 
 share by getting 100,000 tickets on tick from a 
 printer and employing a corps of unemployed to 
 distribute them in the suburbs. At night these 
 propagandists were given free supper and beer to 
 act as claquers in the very best French style. We 
 ran the show for three weeks and the only people who 
 were really disappointed with the financial results 
 were the gas company board of directors. I came to 
 the conclusion that to conduct a theatrical business at 
 a profit calls for the services of large quantities of 
 money. The Alexandra Theatre was built on a 
 building lease granted by the owner, George Porter. 
 It was afterwards bought and completed by J. C. 
 Williamson. Never forget asking George Porter to 
 join me in a sherry and bitters at the Athenaeum Club 
 once and he called for a pint bottle of French Hock 
 which cost me i os. Another costly aperitif to remember 
 was when, just before dinner at the Athenaeum Club, 
 I asked Sir Edmund Barton to have a sherry and he 
 ordered a bottle of Romance Conti Still Burgundy, 
 then the dearest and finest wine of its kind, but not a 
 drink to be taken in sips. It cost me IQS. 6d. for that 
 " shout." 
 
 Fortunately there was very little booming of 
 
 farming or grazing lands, and the following list of the 
 
 lords of Victorian soil in 1894 is worth reproducing. 
 
 Since then most of these big estates have been cut up. 
 
 Chirnsides owned in acres ... ... 279,946 
 
 Robertson's 207,097 
 
 Russell's 202,197 
 
 20
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 Sir W. J. Clarke owned in acres ... 177,952 
 
 Moffat's ... 176,874 
 
 Wilson's ... 175,872 
 
 Austin's ... 175,854 
 
 Armytage's ... 125,425 
 
 Manifold's ... 119,572 
 
 Ware's ... 105,104 
 
 Laidlaw's ... 103,852 
 
 E. Crossley ... 80,500 
 
 J. Winter ... 80,400 
 
 J. Bell ... 73,102 
 
 Staughton's ... 60,309 
 
 J. L. Currie ... 66,102 
 
 J. McPherson ... 62,194 
 
 W. & A. Armstrong ... 52,241 
 
 Simmons Bros. ... 54,622 
 
 W. McCulloch ... 55,663 
 
 Gumming Bros. ... 50,011 
 
 The late Sir M. H. Davies and I were living at the 
 Athenaeum Club when the land banks and building 
 societies were crumbling down. At breakfast time 
 M. H. took his seat looking blithe and debonair, spic 
 and span, smiling withal sombre at heart. Hidden 
 behind the " Argus " he would whisper, " How 
 dreadful ; another bank closed its doors. Tut, tut, 
 very sad." Or, " Did you see the Lath and Plaster 
 Building on Sand Society has stopped payment ? 
 Shocking, isn't it ? Waiter, a little more buttered 
 toast, very hot and very buttery." The poor chap 
 had been up all night at the death of one of these 
 flimsy, cranky, pseudo banks, or unsound building 
 societies, which went down and out like wheat before 
 a harvester. That breaking up of the small land 
 jobbing companies lasted about a month with a daily 
 killing. And M. H. Davies became invisible. Then 
 the big banks and companies began to sway sideways 
 and topple over. They were based on sand and false 
 valuations, and the finance companies especially were 
 
 C 21
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 corrupt and rotten at the heart. And from stupidity, 
 mistaken for stoicism, the public did not commit 
 suicide or shoot or maim or punish any of the guilty 
 financiers. 
 
 Forty-seven of these rotten building societies fell 
 out with a dull silent thud, just like Abaddon, the 
 destroying angel, into the bottomless pit of bankruptcy. 
 Nowadays the State Savings Bank has taken the place 
 of the building society system, which was good in 
 theory and badly managed in practice. Some of the 
 biggest societies were the City of Melbourne, deposits 
 342,469, Federal, deposits 523,689, Melbourne, 
 deposits 456,363, Victorian Permanent, 682,576, 
 Premier 540,000. Building societies' snares were 
 usually paid to 5 and stood on 'Change from 6 to i o, 
 being a favourite popular investment. They all 
 touted and advertised for deposits. One old squatter, 
 Tommy Robertson, from the Campaspe, took a trip 
 down to town and went up and down the street 
 peering into the tables of interest rates allowed for 
 fixed deposits which were exhibited in the windows of 
 the building societies. He made a list of six societies 
 which allowed 7 per cent on twelve months deposit 
 receipts, and deposited 5000 in each, 30,000 in 
 all, which he ultimately lost altogether. The Premier 
 Building Society was the first to smash, and the tale 
 of corruption and mismanagement earned for the 
 secretary, James Mirams, a short term in gaol. Of 
 the making of many tables of figures there is no end, 
 and much study of them is a weariness of the flesh. 
 On 3ist December, 1889, tne zenith or apex of the 
 land boom, there were sixty-seven building societies 
 doing business in Victoria with various objects. 
 There were permanent investment, mutual, terminat- 
 ing and benefit building societies. Capital, investing 
 shares, terminating shares, reserve funds and un- 
 divided profits amounted to 4,365,786, while these 
 
 22
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 institutions held 5,578,359 of public deposits. 
 What with overdrafts and mortgages, the building 
 societies were custodians of the public money to the 
 extent of over 11,227,207. Where are those 
 millions now ? Certainly the societies had lent 
 10,000,000 to people to buy homes. One society, 
 the Premier, the first to close its doors, had paid up 
 capital of 268,618. On this it raised a crazy super- 
 structure. Deposits were 652,702, and it owed 
 on mortgages of freeholds 715,993. Total liabilities 
 on account of capital and liabilities were 1,682,687. 
 The Secretary, the late James Mirams, failed for 
 338,000. Amongst the hundreds of prospectuses 
 I have written during forty years' connection with 
 companies mining, industrial and financial three 
 please me most because of their audacity. The first is 
 the prospectus of the Mercantile Investment Trust, 
 capital 2,500,000, in 500,000 shares of 5, Directors, 
 B. J. Fink, J. M. Bruce and J. M. Howden. The 
 object of the Trust was to pool investments so that the 
 investor would not have all his eggs in one box, 
 that is he would buy one hundred shares in each of 
 five stocks, instead of 500 shares in one stock. We 
 never launched this company because I had skedaddled 
 to another financial group. The prospectus is dated 
 June, 1888. Then in London in June, 1889, I drew 
 up the prospectus of the Guarantee Society of Aus- 
 tralasia, capital 1,000,000, its object being to 
 guarantee the punctual repayment of the principal 
 and interest of mortgage loans made by British 
 companies in Australasia. It died still-born, no 
 flowers and private interment. The land boom was 
 due to over-borrowing and over-speculation, and it 
 was engineered by bands of marauders who conceived 
 schemes of such gross dishonesty that the fortunes of 
 multitudes of honest people were endangered. The 
 wages of the bread-winners and the workers were 
 
 23
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 sapped by traitors. The leaders of the boom were 
 mostly extremely pious men and almost invariably 
 they were teetotallers. To-day they would be called 
 " wowsers." Like all extremists in conduct and 
 ideals the chief land boomers were narrow, illiterate 
 and uneducated. Mankind has always been a flock 
 of sheep. Those with little money blindly follow 
 those with much. Therefore the business of finance 
 is largely in the hands of men of wealth. As R. L. 
 Stevenson wrote of the missionaries, " Their faculty 
 of humour is very small," and so with the land boomers 
 while filching money from the public they put into 
 active practice their principles of Puritanism and 
 hatred of all pleasure and its votaries. The three 
 best hotels in Melbourne, at the instance of James 
 Munro, James Mirams and J. W. Hunt surrendered 
 their licences, and the Grand, the Victoria and the 
 Federal Hotel became coffee palaces. From 1887 to 
 1890 there was a systematic writing up of land and 
 house property throughout Australia, though chiefly 
 in Melbourne. In 1892 there were 418 insolvencies 
 in Melbourne of which 77 were declared by firms. 
 Total liabilities were 7,800,000, and assets 
 3,975,000. There were 248 compositions within 
 two years nearly all made with banks and land specu- 
 lators. The devil's brigade of lawyers figured largely, 
 and some families contributed three or more composi- 
 tions. One notable family of five brothers each made a 
 " compote " for insignificant payments from one 
 halfpenny to one shilling in the i. Twenty-six 
 finance companies with total capitals of 10,000,000, 
 of which 5,200,000 was paid up, went bung owing 
 12,000,000 on deposits and debentures. No wonder 
 every individual in the community suffered directly 
 and indirectly. Huge losses were made by the fire 
 and life insurance companies and the State Savings 
 Bank on their mortgages, and by mutual consent they
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 were all hushed up. And individual instances of fraud 
 and forgery were kept quiet, so as not to upset the 
 public and lose its confidence. Plato called the world 
 a City of Pigs, and Melbourne during its boom years 
 could have been so described justly. Besides excessive 
 Government borrowings out in London between 
 1886 and 1890, another catastrophe hit Australia 
 and nearly toppled her over the precipice into a 
 financial abyss. 
 
 The land boom was encouraged by the exces- 
 sive influx of British capital into Australia in the 
 form of Government and municipal loans, bank 
 deposits, and money sent by Scotch life assurance 
 companies for investment at 5 per cent. Money was 
 thrown at the Australian banks too rapidly to be 
 absorbed safely, and in order to make a profit on 
 funds that carried interest, bank advances were made 
 far too freely and without sufficient inquiry. Money 
 was so plentiful that everyone thought land values 
 were bound to rise enormously, and so the future was 
 discounted to an alarming extent. Liquid capital 
 became fixed, confidence was lost, and steady with- 
 drawal of deposits became a universal panic. ~The 
 first speculator to buy suburban land cheaply by the 
 acre and sell it by the foot was C. H. James, a grocer 
 in North Melbourne. James made a good deal of 
 money at first and if he had only tackled subdivisional 
 land on the foreshore of Hobson's Bay, or in Toorak, 
 Malvern and Caulfield, instead of selling pocket- 
 handkerchief allotments in the Fairfield Ivanhoe 
 districts, he would have made ten times what he did. 
 C. H. James lost most of his money in the Dominion 
 Bank, whose fine office building, still one of the best 
 in the city, now belongs to the Royal Insurance Co., 
 414, Collins Street. Frank Stuart, of Lincoln, Stuart 
 and Co., drapers, was one of the first into the arena 
 of the land boom. He was an intellectual of excep-
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 tional clarity of thought and good judgment and 
 landed a fortune. When the boom reached zenith 
 Stuart, against his better judgment, was induced to go 
 into it again and lost much, but not all, of his previous 
 profits. G. W. Taylor, a land agent, once Mayor of 
 Prahran, was another pioneer boomer. He was a 
 weak, excitable man with unbounded confidence in 
 himself, and he managed to impress bank managers 
 and building society secretaries to the extent of about 
 5,500,000 worth of land and houses. Sir Matthew 
 Henry Davies, a solicitor, once Speaker of the Legisla- 
 tive Assembly, was a leader of investors all through 
 the boom and made two million pounds profit on 
 paper. He was an able man of singularly fine presence 
 and charming manners. Davies founded the Mercan- 
 tile Bank with a capital of 400,000 which smashed 
 badly at the finish. There was a prosecution of the 
 directors for issuing a false balance sheet, quite an 
 ordinary custom at that time. Very few balance 
 sheets of banks or companies interested in landed 
 securities were honest during the boom period. 
 Sir Bryan O'Loghlen refused to allow the directors 
 to be tried by a judge, although Mr. I. A. Isaacs, his 
 Solicitor-General, now a Federal High Court Judge, 
 recommended the matter should be proved. Sir 
 Matthew Henry Davies was ably defended by Mr. 
 Theodore Fink of the firm of Fink, Best and Phillips, 
 then a rising lawyer. The Davies group was deeply 
 interested in the Australian Deposit and Mortgage 
 Bank, the English and Australian Mortgage Bank, 
 the Freehold Investment and Banking Company, 
 the Victorian Mortgage and Deposit Bank, Henry 
 Arnold and Company, the Gascoigne Investment 
 Company, and the General Land and Savings Com- 
 pany and numerous building and land societies not 
 listed on the Stock Exchange. Far and away the 
 ablest of all the land boomers was Benjamin Josman 
 
 26
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 Fink, M.L.A. for Maryborough, who before the 
 boom began was practically king of the furniture 
 trade of Melbourne. Fink began work as a boy in 
 Maurice Aron's furniture shop in Elizabeth Street, 
 known as Wallach Brothers. B.J. played the piano 
 divinely and his job was to produce music from ten 
 pound German pianos to sell them to suburbanites 
 for forty to fifty pounds. Fink sold pianos as other 
 men sell crayfish and peanuts, quickly and easily. 
 When the boom opened he was interested in the five 
 leading furniture shops of Melbourne and was worth 
 250,000, solidly and unencumbered. He was 
 making twenty thousand pounds a year, and why he 
 went into the land boom cesspit is not understandable. 
 B. J. Fink was a subtle, astute man of business of more 
 than ordinary capacity, as sagacious as he was audacious, 
 a man of vivid imagination and of restless energy in 
 carrying out his schemes. He should have stopped 
 outside the boom vortex and when the smash came he 
 might have gathered in four or five million pounds' 
 worth of goods and properties. Instead he com- 
 pounded with his creditors for 1,520,175, having 
 assets worth 500,900, and paying a dividend of 
 one halfpenny in the pound. Of all the financiers 
 I have met in Australia or abroad, B. J. Fink was 
 easily the cleverest of them all. He had no equal in 
 Australia in la haute finance. Unfortunately for me 
 he lured me from an accountancy practice, where I 
 was making 750 a year, to become assistant manager 
 of the Mercantile Finance Guarantee Agency Com- 
 pany, Mr. J. McA. Howden being the manager. 
 Fink carried a black bag in which were mining scrip, 
 bank shares, Crown grants, bond warrants, pro- 
 missory notes, debentures, bank deposit receipts, 
 mortgages, an olla podrida of saleable things. He 
 would say, " Here you are, George, take this title 
 round to the Savings Bank and get them to prepare 
 
 27
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 a mortgage for ten thousand pounds, and I will call 
 in to-morrow and sign it." Or " Here are a thousand 
 National Bank, George, get Billy Jones, the share 
 broker, to sell them and send me a cheque to-morrow 
 morning." J. McA. Howden, manager, of the 
 Mercantile Finance Company, was an extremely able 
 man, who did not keep his head when values started 
 to rise sky-high. At one time Howden held a million 
 pounds' worth of saleable scrip and property. He 
 was son-in-law of the best accountant Melbourne ever 
 had, Andrew Lyell, a shrewd Scotchman of much 
 common sense and fine business acumen. Thomas 
 Bent, an ex-Speaker and ex-Premier of Victoria, was 
 another celebrity who made a lot of money dealing in 
 land. As secretary to many meetings where big 
 deals were discussed amongst the big city financiers I 
 saw a good deal of Tom Bent, and I never heard him 
 suggest any sharp practice or propose anything dis- 
 honest. 
 
 J. M. Bruce, the Prime Minister's father, was one 
 of my directors, and he too was a man of utmost 
 integrity and of unblemished character. A lot of 
 rich Flinders Lane people followed Bruce, Fenwick 
 and Dodgshun into shares of the Mercantile Finance 
 and " dropped their bundle." Other notable land 
 boomers were William Bruce, the cricketer ; Bob 
 Beeston, share broker ; H. T. Clarton, G. C. Clauscen, 
 C. W. Derham, Alfred Dunn, H. H. Drysdale, 
 Raynes, W. Dickson, Senior, A. F. Dean, P. H. 
 Engel, Theodore Fink, A. J. Fuller, F. Gillman, 
 William Greenlaw, J. M. Gillespie, A. Goldberg, 
 A. H. and W. H. George, J. Harris, M. Herman, 
 H. H. Hayter, J. A., Theo. and J. H. Kitchen, S. G. 
 King, Stephen King, R. H. Lemon, E. W. Lightfoot, 
 W. A. Mclntosh, A. D. Michie, R. Neave, F. M. 
 Palmer, Richard Shann, W. R. Skene, W. L. Smith, 
 A. Stewart, W. G. Sprigg, C. F. Taylor, John Turner, 
 
 28
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 Joseph Woolf, Whittingham Brothers, George Withers 
 and many others. It is curious to note how many 
 solicitors were drawn into the land boom. The 
 fortunes they first won were Cadmean victories which 
 ultimately ruined them. The only man who made 
 money out of the land boom bought and sold for cash, 
 and those who bought on credit either made com- 
 positions with their creditors or went insolvent. To 
 everyone else the boom was a volcanic calamity. 
 Man is chiefly a two-legged bird with feathers to 
 be plucked, and the general public is largely com- 
 posed of people who itch to be plucked by clever 
 schemers. 
 
 One of the most powerful factors in creating 
 Victoria's land boom was the ring of fifty-six building 
 societies operating in Melbourne. They acted like 
 self-raising flour, blew themselves up quickly and 
 subsided when fully baked into flat lumps or total 
 loss. The directors and secretaries of the building 
 societies in Melbourne in 188691 were in a class 
 by themselves. All of them were earnest temperance 
 workers, and therefore abjured alcohol, wore black 
 broadcloth clothes, the customary suits of solemn 
 black, drank too much water and over-ate themselves 
 and had too large families. Mostly both directors 
 and secretaries were elders of kirks, members of 
 chapels, bethels and churches, knew nothing, were 
 nothing and lost nothing. Their ignorance of the 
 ordinary rules of lending money miscalled finance was 
 colossal. The big idea in those unlettered days was 
 that every citizen should own his own home and buy 
 it on building society tables, most of which were 
 actuarial swindles. It was a mistaken policy then 
 as it is more so to-day for each struggling citizen to 
 try to own his own small uncomfortable little house. 
 All the inhabitants of the other great cities in the world 
 then, as now, lived in comfortable, commodious flats, 
 
 29
 
 tenements or apartment houses, well built, well warmed, 
 easy to get at and easy to leave. 
 
 In 1888 this deponent found himself assistant 
 manager of the ill-fated Mercantile Finance and 
 Guarantee Company, whose 3 shares were selling 
 at 8. The chairman, B. J. Fink, suggested buying 
 some shares to make my position more stable. So 
 through his broker I bought two thousand shares 
 at 8 and fell in. Within nine months the last of 
 my shares were sold at 25^., and the frying pan 
 becoming too hot for me I jumped into the fire when 
 another financial group offered me 1200 a year to 
 rearrange the affairs of a leading land and property 
 company, the Australian Property Company. 
 
 After ten hours' audit, the balance sheet showed 
 me the Company would be insolvent if much money 
 was not raised quickly. Within seven days the 
 directors got bona fide conservative valuations of their 
 properties from leading Melbourne valuators show- 
 ing a marketable value of about a million pounds. 
 Next day the P. & O. s.s. " Oceania " took me to 
 London, en route to Edinburgh to float 400,000 of 
 debentures, in a frame of mind closely resembling 
 something blithe, buoyant and debonair. In Edin- 
 burgh I called on David Beath, a Flinders Lane 
 soft-goods-man, who held a big parcel of shares in 
 the company and after excellent family prayers and a 
 meagre breakfast at his home, we assailed the hardest- 
 headed Edinburgh firm of Scotch accountants ever 
 born in Aberdeen and got them interested in my 
 request of 400,000 in cash. I took my letters of 
 instructions and valuations to an extremely powerful 
 firm of Scotch Stock Brokers in London who agreed 
 to float the Home and Colonial Assets and Debentures 
 Corporation and issue debentures for 400,000 
 secured on Melbourne land and buildings valued at 
 1,000,000. They were called city properties, the 
 
 30
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 best known of them being the building at the corner 
 of Flinders Lane and Elizabeth Street, once called 
 Australian Building and previously the English and 
 Scottish Bank. Most reluctantly one had to agree 
 to cut four stories off the top of the fifteen-story 
 building, plans of which I carried in a golf bag. 
 Also we excised a safe deposit that had been ordered 
 and built by Milner and Company. In three days 
 I had secured underwriting letters for 400,000 of 
 debentures and in three weeks the company was 
 registered ! (This seems an appropriate place to 
 emit another hiss of egotism, loud and prolonged.) 
 Fancy being able with divine aid to extract 400,000 
 in cash from a Scotch group of financiers in so short 
 a time, without a hem or a haw, or even a dinna ken ! 
 It was a veritable financial battle of Bannockburn, 
 won by a green inexperienced youth of Scotch descent, 
 with a grossly enlarged fund of Australian cheek, 
 or would audacity be a less harsh euphemism ? When 
 I got home the directors neither thanked me nor paid 
 me any commission, although I had saved them, all 
 leading public men, from utter financial ruin ! So I re- 
 signed. One curious consequence of the terrible wiping 
 out of millions of pounds' worth of assets was that the 
 heads of the banks and the directors directly responsible 
 for misjudging the financial position did not suffer 
 and were not punished. Not a single general manager 
 was dismissed, as they all should have been, and both 
 the ignorant and the dishonest directors were allowed 
 to remain on the directorates. The sufferers by the 
 damnable cataclysm, damnable because avoidable, 
 were the middle class people of the community, the 
 thrifty, the saving, the respectable. They were 
 ruined by the thousand because their deposited money 
 was raped from them under one-sided banking 
 reconstruction schemes sanctioned by too complaisant 
 judges, and their homes and properties were torn 
 
 3'
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 from them by blundering liquidators. The settle- 
 ment of the land boom took place in an inferno of 
 dishonesty and ruthlessness. Those who had com- 
 piled the biggest schedules of positive debts and 
 negative assets got off scot free and in hundreds of 
 instances were able to ensure future freedom from 
 monetary worry by concealing assets of all sorts from 
 their creditors. A complete list of the alleged honour- 
 able men who made shameful insolvencies would 
 startle their descendants and amuse the rest of the 
 community. 
 
 In the financial history of all times there never has been 
 such a disgraceful financial failure as the Australian 
 land boom or one on such a grand scale. The total 
 losses by institutions and individuals approached 
 200,000,000 sterling, or nearly half the country's 
 wealth. One of the worst compositions with creditors 
 was made by the general manager of the Colonial 
 Bank of Australasia, who failed for 113,789 with 
 assets of a nominal value and offered to pay 6d. 
 in the pound. Very seldom were these purely im- 
 aginary dividends paid by the insolvents in that 
 dishonest period known as the land boom. This 
 man's judgment of property values must have been 
 warped and false, so there is small wonder his 
 bank failed when its advances were based on wrong 
 valuations. In the thick of the mad, insane banking 
 boom I never could properly orient my mind to under- 
 stand the psychology of the banking leaders who 
 were the lenders of money to the gambling speculators 
 most responsible for the foolish unwarranted inflation 
 of land values. The only man with whom I used to 
 discuss seriously the absurd chopping and changing of 
 city and suburban land allotments was my father who 
 protested to his directors of the Bank of Victoria 
 against loans to the champion land boomers like 
 B. J. Fink, G. W. Taylor, Thomas Bent and W. L. 
 
 3*
 
 LAND BOOM AND LAND BOOMERS 
 
 Baillieu. Old " Money " Miller, unfortunately for 
 the Bank of Victoria, was in his dotage and off the 
 Board or it would never have collapsed. My father's 
 reward for prophesying the downfall of his bank 
 was removal to London from the general managership. 
 When the smash came every bank manager showed 
 himself to be a tin man painted to look like iron. 
 
 33
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, ASSOCIATIONS, 
 CLUBS. THE KYABRAM MOVEMENT 
 
 OF all the seven political leagues I have helped to 
 establish, the most interesting was what was called 
 the Kyabram movement for Parliamentary reform 
 and State retrenchment. A public meeting was held 
 at Kyabram, a small country village in the Goulburn 
 Valley, Victoria, on I3th November, 1901, and it 
 took the agitators five months to get going. Directly 
 I thought their circulars had taken effect amongst 
 country shire councils and public bodies, I asked 
 George W. S. Dean, then the cleverest election 
 secretary in Victoria, to help me to divert the move- 
 ment to Melbourne. Samuel Lancaster was Chairman 
 of the Kyabram Committee, and B. Goddard and 
 C. H. Wilson were joint hon. secretaries. For months 
 I had been writing in " The Age " suggesting a 
 reduction of State members of Parliament because 
 Federation ought to have meant less state spending. 
 Mr. A. J. Peacock was Premier of Victoria, and Dean 
 and I knowing him, knew he would be too feeble to 
 stand up against a country demand for reform and 
 retrenchment. So we got the Kyabram leaders to 
 consent to explain their policy at a public meeting in 
 Melbourne. Dean and I ran the show and Henry 
 Butler of Sargood and Company, soft-goods-men, 
 found the thousand pounds. The meeting on the 
 1 7th April, 1902, was a brilliant success. We formed 
 the National Citizens' Reform League and in seven 
 days enrolled two thousand members. Within six 
 months we had established 214 branches. Our 
 
 34
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 programme demanded a reduction of the members 
 of the Legislative Assembly from 95 to 46 ; of the 
 Council from 36 to 23, and of the Ministers from 
 10 to 5. The Peacock Ministry was displaced by 
 the Irvine Cabinet Irvine, Shiels, Murray, Bent, 
 McKenzie, Taverner, Cameron, MacLeod and Kirton. 
 At a General Election on the nth October, 1902, 
 Mr. W. H. Irvine, backed by the National Citizens' 
 Reform League, swept the country, winning 64 seats, 
 the Opposition holding 18 and the Labour Party 13. 
 It was a ding-dong go and two dozen " old hat " 
 politicians were wiped out for ever. If George Dean 
 and I had not annexed the Kyabram agitators and their 
 pet agitation, nothing would have been done and 
 there would still have been 95 M.L.A. I suffered 
 seriously in health, made large numbers of enemies, 
 and lost half my Stock Exchange clients. However, 
 I carried out an item of public service so nothing 
 matters. Previous to Kyabram I founded the Young 
 Victorian Patriotic League, and there we secured 
 two thousand members in three weeks. The league 
 fought one election for economy and lay down and 
 died. After Kyabram I started the People's Liberal 
 Party which perished from lack of funds. No political 
 association can ever succeed and become permanent 
 without plenty of money. Enthusiasm is a poor 
 vote-catcher, and mere patriotism is valueless, but a 
 strong banking account can win seats every time. 
 
 The gravest and most serious of these political com- 
 mittees was the Constitutional Association, and there 
 I was the youngest member of a body which controlled 
 the existing, but dying, Conservative Party in politics. 
 My colleagues were R. Murray Smith, Robert 
 Harper, Walter Madden, Edward Langton, F. T. 
 Derham, W. F. Walker and M. R. McCrae, now of 
 Dalgety's in Sydney. For a few years I sparkled as 
 an official of the Australian Natives Association and 
 
 35
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 originated half a dozen suburban branches. I had 
 plenty of fun making inflammatory speeches about 
 the decadent British Empire, the glorious destiny of 
 Australia, and the superiority of the native-born 
 Australian. Between whiles I was the instigator of 
 public meetings to advocate occupying New Guinea 
 and the New Hebrides, to oppose French convictism 
 in New Caledonia, to prevent the A.M.P. Society 
 opening an office in London, and to support Aus- 
 tralian Federation. That section of my life was 
 always amusing and sometimes exciting. Never 
 forget one political meeting I had called in the Town 
 Hall, Collingwood, to expound Kyabramic economy. 
 Of course the audience wouldn't give me a hearing 
 till John Hancock, M.L.A., a genial, kindly soul said, 
 " Give the little bloke a chance for five minutes. He 
 won't do anybody any harm." You could have heard a 
 pin drop and a few apt allusions to the grandeur and 
 merits of every Australian in the Collingwood electorate 
 won me a host of transient friends who cheered me to 
 the echo when I sat down. We used to fight about 
 nothing at the A.N.A. meetings and I am sorry I gave 
 up close connection with it because it is the only 
 public body worthy of my support. When the late 
 George Dean and I conspired to get the Kyabram 
 economy movement into our hands, Mr. William 
 Irvine was Premier of Victoria and Messrs. William 
 Shiels and Thomas Bent were Ministers. As the 
 first step towards public economy the National 
 Citizens' Reform League, of which I was a founder, 
 made the first plank in its platform, the reduction of 
 members from 95 to 46 for the Legislative Assembly. 
 At the General Election the Irvine Cabinet won 
 64 seats and was able to reduce the assembly to 65 
 members at which it now stands. Shiels and Bent 
 offered to help me to win a seat and like a fool I 
 declined. My election with the support of the
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 Government and the National Citizens' Reform League 
 was a certainty. My subsequent political life was 
 bound in shallows and miseries, and I lost both my 
 health and my business by mixing in politics as a 
 nonentity instead of as a sitting politician. Of the 
 making of many political leagues there is no end, 
 and much politics is a weariness of the flesh. Here are 
 some of the many political bodies and societies I have 
 helped to direct, and of several of them I was prime 
 mover. National Liberal Association in Bendigo in 
 1880, Young Australian Liberals in 1885, Constitu- 
 tional Association, People's Liberal Party, National 
 Citizens' Reform League (Kyabram), Young Vic- 
 torian Patriotic League, Financial Reform League, 
 Bimetallic League, Legion of Relief, and Middle Class 
 Party. Ten scrap-books containing thousands of my 
 speeches and articles representing forty years of public 
 work are my only monument. I have never had a 
 vote of thanks, a banquet, or a bouquet, though I 
 hope some day to become a J.P. ! 
 
 Before the days when political parties were organ- 
 ized and subsidized, I stood for Parliament in a 
 country pocket borough called Grenville, a decayed 
 mining district near Ballarat, and made a decent 
 showing at the poll. Encouraged by the falsity of 
 that voting I tried single-handed to win the seat and 
 failed badly. It was not the fault of the electors for 
 they didn't understand me nor my highfalutin about 
 the rights of man, the need for good public finance, 
 the evil of too much borrowing by the Government, 
 and woman's right to vote. I talked above their heads 
 and they voted for the local candidate every time. 
 It served me right to the extent of three hundred 
 pounds per election spent in a fortnight each time. 
 My excellent platform work began to pall on the three 
 audiences a day, so I hired a grey horse and buggy, 
 with a gramophone and operator and sent him to 
 
 D 37
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 every one of the thirty decayed hamlets in the electorate 
 to deliver my speech. As he interspersed the speech 
 with comic songs and humorous recitations the 
 children loved it and followed him in hundreds like 
 the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But as William Trenwith, 
 the greatest of all the Labour tribunes of that epoch 
 said to me, " Meudell, they don't understand you and 
 they'll wooden you." And woodened I was. Before 
 starting for Grenville I called on David Syme of the 
 " Age," the greatest of all the political leaders of his 
 time, and he promised me the powerful support of 
 his influential newspaper. My speeches were reported, 
 but the desirable leading article describing my wonder- 
 ful sagacity, extraordinary intellect, and god-like 
 personality, was never written, and I fell like Lucifer, 
 Belial, Apollyon and other chaps of that sort into the 
 bottomless pit of obscurity. Even since my last 
 political defeat I've been laughing heartily whenever 
 I think what a lot of fun I could have bought with the 
 three hundred pounds I spent on election expenses. 
 
 Like everybody else alive I am steeped, soaked, 
 pickled in vanity, yet not so badly conceited as to 
 avoid admitting I made one grave mistake in an 
 active life. I descended into politics and became 
 besmirched in business. By taking a leading part 
 in the Kyabram movement for public economy I made 
 armies of enemies and lost battalions of clients. No 
 man can become a successful politician and prosper 
 in business. The money I spent trying to get into 
 Parliament, and the time I wasted outside my office 
 would have been far better spent seeing the dream 
 city of Samarkand or taking a trip to Kashmir or the 
 West Indies, or even to Bali, in Dutch East Indies, 
 the island of the most beautiful women. Very few 
 politicians are educated as men, or trained for law- 
 making. No man should be permitted to stay in 
 Parliament after the age of sixty. Old men are the 
 
 38
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 main cause of Britain's decadence, and one recalls 
 the present leading English statesmen when one wants 
 a hearty laugh. Newspapers made gods of tin men 
 painted to look like iron, such as Asquith, Lloyd 
 George, Churchill, Amery, Balfour, Chamberlain, 
 Baldwin, all slaves of tradition shackled by ritual and 
 convention. And what a mess they made of the 
 war, the army, the navy, the peace and Great Britain's 
 trading supremacy ! 
 
 HE FINDS LITTLE RIGHT 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells delivers the negative side of his 
 gospel in what he calls " an outbreak of auto-obituary," 
 which occurs in the last chapter of his book, " A Year 
 of Prophesying." " I am against the clothes we wear 
 and the food we eat, the houses we live in, the schools 
 we have, our amusements, our money, our ways 
 of trading, our ways of making our compromises and 
 agreements and laws, our articles of political associa- 
 tion, the British Empire, the American constitution. 
 I think most of the clothes ugly and dirty, most of the 
 food bad, the houses wretched, the schools starved 
 and feeble, the amusements dull, the monetary 
 methods silly, our ways of trading base and wasteful, 
 our methods of production piecemeal and wasteful, 
 our political arrangements solemnly idiotic. Most 
 of my activities have been to get my soul and some- 
 thing of my body out of the customs, outlook, bore- 
 doms, and contaminations of the current phase of 
 life." On the positive side Mr. Wells makes this 
 contribution to the housing question : " Plans have 
 been made that show beyond dispute that the whole 
 population of industrial London could be rehoused 
 in fine and handsome apartment buildings, with 
 night and day lifts, roof gardens, and nearly all the 
 light, air and conveniences to be found in a Kensington 
 flat, at hardly greater cost than would be needed to 
 
 39
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 choke all the ways out of London with a corresponding 
 spread of Wheatley hovels, and so great an amount 
 of space could be saved by so doing, that half the area 
 of London could be made into a playground and 
 garden." The familiar objective of Mr. Wells's 
 hopes is, of course, a confederation of all mankind to 
 keep one peace through the world. I do not think 
 that the League of Nations at Geneva is ever likely 
 to develop into an effective World Confederation. 
 It is much more likely to develop into a serious 
 obstacle to such a confederation. The sooner now 
 that it is scrapped and broken up the better for 
 mankind. 
 
 When the United States rebelled and threw the 
 German soldiers of the English kings out of the 
 colonies in order to get control of as much of the land 
 of North America as possible, the custom of transport- 
 ing convicts from England to America was stopped 
 for ever. One thousand convicts a year had been 
 shipped to the Southern States for about a hundred 
 years. It was one form of getting rid of political 
 agitators, ne'er-do-well sons of aristocratic families, 
 and pickpockets who stole pennies and purloined 
 bread or meat from shop doors. All the rest of the 
 malefactors were hung. There were three times as 
 many convicts sent to America as to Australia. When 
 the colonies were taken over from them, the English 
 authorities sent Captain Cook to find a place far 
 enough away to make a safe prison for poachers, 
 sturdy beggars, pick purses, shop lifters, republicans, 
 Communists and reformers. The rest of the real 
 wrong-doers Bill Sikes, Jonathan Wild, Jack Shep- 
 pard, Dick Turpin and suchlike were hung at 
 Tyburn, near Maida Vale, London, or at the cross- 
 roads, or in the Tower of London, or at Newgate 
 Street off Holborn, just outside the Old Bailey prison. 
 Captain Cook conferred a benefit on this old world 
 
 40
 
 never before or since equalled by finding this good 
 Australian continent, superior to all other countries 
 in its varied climate, soil and fertility, the perfect 
 nidus for a better race of people. Brutal, low-class 
 English officers came with shiploads of these petty 
 prigs and food thieves and created a penal system 
 which dehumanized them. Of the early military 
 Governors of the Australian colonies one cannot 
 write too bitterly. It has become a rooted custom of 
 historians to praise and idolize these early governors 
 and treat them as able administrators and clever 
 executants. The truth is the contrary. Of hundreds 
 of governors sent from London to Australasia, perhaps 
 ten or a dozen were decent civil servants who tried to 
 do their best. All the rest were brainless duffers or 
 worse. Of the nine governors-general since 1901 
 there may have been one who stood above the ruck. 
 The rest were quite ordinary little men who earnestly 
 strove to ape the manners and methods of royalty and 
 create a mimic court composed of rich but quite 
 ordinary women-folk. One governor-general, Lord 
 Hopetoun, who has been praised to the skies and 
 above them, resigned in a huff because the Govern- 
 ment questioned his bill for the entertaining of the 
 present King and Queen. Very shortly after he 
 died leaving a cold million pounds of dross ! Both 
 governors and government houses and the whole 
 paraphernalia of pompous snobbery which they stand 
 for, ought to be wiped out. What use are they in a 
 community where nearly every one works, and some 
 day the others will be made to work by law. Every 
 Chief Justice is capable of signing Crown grants and 
 leases, and sub-editing Government Gazettes, and 
 if need be of deciding constitutional questions by a 
 mere yea or nay. The seven governors cost the 
 country about 100,000 a year, which when saved 
 would support six good brass bands in the six capitals.
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 India and England are the two countries where the 
 caste system flourishes luxuriantly, and where the 
 people in the various classes or castes dislike or hate 
 those not in theirs, mildly and virulently. To the 
 pernicious caste system is due the two distinguishing 
 features of life in England and India, snobbery and 
 poverty 50 per cent snobs and 50 per cent paupers. 
 Human nature not being changed for better or worse 
 since man was first created we shall never entirely free 
 ourselves from the yoke of the snob, yet we may 
 try here to palliate it. 
 
 Great Britain's cardinal weakness is her poverty. 
 It is a striking paradox that the richest country in 
 the world is also the poorest. Sir Henry Campbell 
 Bannerman once told the House of Commons that 
 one-fourth of the population of the United Kingdom 
 was never sure of to-morrow's food. It has been 
 reckoned that there are ten million people in Great 
 Britain on the brink of starvation, not sure of the next 
 meal. In no other country in the world is food so 
 scarce and so scanty. In India, China and Japan 
 there is no such lack of food as in the Old Country. 
 In England and especially in London the poor are 
 always on view : gaunt, meagre and ravenous, crawling 
 furtively along every street north and south, east and 
 west, licking their lips before bakers' windows. To 
 an Australian this constant contact with the spectre, 
 famine, this eternal brushing against the foodless and 
 hungry and famished, stalking after skins and pips 
 and stalks, prowling round dark corners to prospect 
 bins and refuse boxes, is awful and pitiful ! Great 
 Britain does not grow enough food to feed her people. 
 She prefers to import it, and nearly three-fourths of 
 the food consumed comes from abroad : salted, 
 frozen and fusty. The land is there, the soil is fertile, 
 the labour is abundant, and Britain could, if she 
 chose, grow all her own food as easily as France and 
 
 42
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 Germany. No, she prefers to send her coal, cotton 
 and iron to foreigners and depend on them for what 
 she eats. Her peril of being easily starved out, either 
 in war or peace, could be made to vanish under ten 
 years of scientific protection. Meanwhile the few 
 grow richer while the many starve ! The Coal Strike 
 proved beyond question there is not more than ten 
 days' food supply in Great Britain. The mere 
 thought is appalling. Ten days' food for those who 
 can buy, and no food at all for the ten million starvers, 
 should a blockade ever occur ! And the ten millions 
 have full minds with their empty bellies and nourish 
 rebellious thoughts. The War and the Coal Strike 
 allowed the flocculent human matter to rise to the 
 surface, and the dregs and the scum floated about the 
 streets of the towns and cities evil, hollow and desperate. 
 What would happen during a ten days' siege ? Poverty 
 is the primary cause of labour unrest everywhere. 
 The cant cry of the present day is, " There is unrest 
 everywhere," and the compelling cause is poverty. 
 The magazines, the books, the press, all teem with 
 statements of the unrest and discontent now raging 
 through the world. The upheaval of the discontents 
 proceeds apace. Everywhere in the old countries has 
 arisen the cry for more wages, shorter hours, and 
 cheaper food, and this clamant demand comes from 
 one class only, the working class, or more properly, 
 the workers' class. For, barring the idle rich, we are 
 all working men and women nowadays. The present 
 time is the reign of ideas, and these ideas are seething 
 bacteria-like in the minds of the workers. The 
 history of humanity is the history of revivals, mainly 
 religious. The present-day revival is political, not 
 religious, in character, marked, however, by the same 
 enthusiasm, the same ferocity and fanaticism as every 
 revival that has gone before. The wage-earners have 
 at last learnt the value of unity, of co-operation, of 
 
 43
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 alliance. All along they have known what they 
 wanted ; to-day for the first time they know how to 
 get it. 
 
 SNAKE VALLEY ELECTION 
 
 In Australia we have 7 parliaments, 7 governors, 
 62 ministers, 647 Members of Parliament, and the 
 total cost of parliamentary government is 1,150,000. 
 About 150 new laws and several hundred minor 
 enactments are passed every year. About 4000 
 candidates for Parliament stand for election, so that 
 politics in Australia is a lucrative industry. It is also 
 a cruel tax on a population of 6,000,000, half of 
 whom are under 21 and have no votes. It is an 
 expensive game like golf, motoring and card-playing. 
 Usually the man with the most money wins. Having 
 been a defeated candidate several times I know the 
 cost of an election and much about its humours. I 
 was the first candidate in Australia to use the phono- 
 graph during an election, and a bucolic constituency 
 threw me down with a thud. At a decayed, rotten 
 borough with 30 names on the roll my paid secretary 
 organized a committee of 13 to collect votes and see 
 them polled. The campaign lasted 10 days and 
 the publican sent in a bill for refreshments, chiefly 
 beer, for 13. There were 4 votes cast in my favour. 
 I paid the bill without demur. Six months later the 
 hotel-keeper sent me the same account again, so I 
 returned him his receipt enclosed in a letter much 
 hotter than the hobs of hell. 
 
 ASSOCIATED BIMETALLIC LEAGUE 
 
 The founding of the Bimetallic League was another 
 sportive effort of mine carried out after years of study 
 of the question of the demonetization of silver, started 
 by Bismarck to hurt France. It was mere filibustering 
 by old Bismarck, the leading pirate of universal 
 history. He destroyed silver as a medium for paying 
 
 44
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 debts and harmed every debtor nation in the world, 
 including my beloved native land Australia. Mr. 
 Francis A. Keating of Messrs. Gibbs, Bright and 
 Company, and now of Anthony Gibbs and Sons, 
 London, encouraged me in my bimetallic career. 
 Keating was a specially able and highly educated man, 
 and what he said about bimetallism I believed. We 
 formed a Bimetallic League and got Moreton Frewen, 
 the famous English political economist, to address a 
 public meeting in Melbourne, and for a year I wrote 
 and speechified about bimetallism and dazed and 
 hypnotized my audiences. It was splendid fun for 
 me, because I used bimetallism as talking practice 
 against the day when as Treasurer of Victoria I would 
 deliver my first budget without notes and despite 
 the help of the permanent Treasury officers. At the 
 elections I tackled in order to enter Parliament, I was 
 splendidly beaten by a grocer, a school-teacher, a 
 shearer and a fruiterer ! No undertaker ever opposed 
 me, or his unpopularity amongst really live voters 
 would have helped me to " wooden " him. 
 
 I have a genius for working dead horses on a big 
 scale first, brown coal, next, hydro-electricity, then, 
 petroleum, and finally, oil-shale. Have stuck 
 tenaciously to each in turn without earning a shekel. 
 The most disappointing of my fighting campaigns 
 for recognition by investors was of course that for 
 oil. The most interesting was my struggle to raise 
 money in London to work brown coal in Victoria, 
 totalling forty thousand million tons, for all it is 
 worth, not alone for electricity, but for gas, briquettes, 
 ammonia and other by-products, all saleable at a profit. 
 We made briquettes at Yallourn, then Morwell, in 
 1892, and sold them in Melbourne for i a ton, and 
 if the blessed banks had not made such asses of 
 
 45
 
 themselves by closing their doors, the Gippsland 
 Coal Company would have been making briquettes 
 all these years while sitting behind a reserve fund of 
 1,000,000. Then I met the active antagonism of 
 the coal importers who are also the shipping ring. 
 They have always fought against brown coal enthusiasts 
 and decried brown coal and briquettes. The toll 
 levied yearly by the Newcastle, New South Wales, coal 
 companies on every Australian industry has had a 
 choking effect, and still the throat of industry is 
 garrotted by them and can only be freed from the 
 coal Thugs by a successful national briquette manu- 
 facture. There is only one good story arising out of 
 the creation of the electrical enterprise at Morwell, 
 Yallourn. It was late one night towards Christmas 
 when the Enabling Bill was before the House of 
 Assembly. The Premier, W. A. Watt, rushed in 
 to A. A. Billson, the Minister of Railways, and said 
 excitedly, " W.L. says that Bill must be put through 
 to-night." W.L. being W. L. Baillieu, M.L.C., 
 who has pulled the strings of the marionettes com- 
 posing every State Ministry for twenty-five years. 
 It was just laughable because no explanation was 
 given about the Bill or its objects ; members never 
 knew any details of costs or expenses, and a raw, un- 
 considered scheme compiled by two foreigners, Thomas 
 Tait, Chief Railway Commissioner of Victoria, and C. 
 H. Mertz, an Anglo-German electrician of Durham, 
 England, was passed in one night simply because 
 W. L. Baillieu said so ! The original estimate was 
 2,250,000, and so far the scheme has cost over 
 10,000,000, and will be capitalized at 15,000,000 
 before it turns the corner and begins to pay ! Which 
 confirms my life view that most public men know 
 nothing of finance or business, and their reputations 
 as great personages is mostly poppy-cock woven by 
 the newspapers. 
 
 46
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 CLUBS 
 
 Out of four hundred members of the Athenaeum 
 Club of Melbourne, when I was elected in July, 1889, 
 only seven are alive to-day. It was a really first-class 
 club, well managed, comfortable, and, excepting at 
 the French Club, there was no better dinner in 
 Melbourne. The Athenaeum Club was founded by 
 James Hay who was a front ranker as a comprador, 
 his equals being Archibald Menzies and W. C. 
 Wilson of Scott's Hotel who were Hay's friends and 
 contemporaries. The French Club was founded by 
 Dr. James George Beaney, a leading surgeon, fifty 
 years ago, and his two pals, the Denis Brothers, then 
 leading Melbourne jewellers. Beaney wore diamonds 
 all over his clothes wherever there was a peg to hang 
 them on. His dinners were rare and recherche, 
 precious as the apple of the eye, and like his diamonds 
 of the first water. Nobody knew how to order a 
 dinner in Melbourne in those days until Lacaton, 
 at the Maison Doree, and Halasy and Denat, at the 
 Cafe Anglais next to the old " Argus " office, taught 
 the land boomers which was the right end of the 
 asparagus to nibble, and that poulet en casserole was 
 the summit of deliciousness. At the Australian 
 Club founded by my father-in-law, John George 
 Dougharty, M.L.C., and his bosom friend, Sir 
 James MacBain, M.L.C., when I was a member, 
 the dinners ordered from the chef carte blanche, 
 given by Charlie Gates, the solicitor, of Taylor, Buck- 
 land and Gates, were too ethereal almost to eat. Yet 
 were they duly eaten. I remember that Charlie 
 Gates had thirty-six pairs of boots in his bedroom. 
 What a remarkable man ! 
 
 As a young man I liked belonging to clubs and 
 had a mania for founding leagues or associations. 
 That was before my illusions were changed into 
 delusions. There is one basic club law which ought 
 
 47
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 to be taught the novice and impressed on every 
 clubman at his initiation, just as certain canons of 
 conduct were sunk in my memory, when I became a 
 neophyte in the best religion of them all, Freemasonry. 
 That primary rule is that what happens in a club must 
 never be referred to outside. That club law is not 
 kept in Melbourne, where I have belonged to about a 
 dozen clubs. It is a practice with ignorant club 
 members to carry home talks about their fellow- 
 members to their wives, and next day, whether the 
 story relates to drink, gambling or conduct, every 
 woman in the suburbs knows all about it. The 
 Melbourne Club is the most exclusive, and the 
 Australian the best in Melbourne, though the Athen- 
 aeum is comfortable, and the Commercial Travellers' 
 Club superior in its building and appointments. 
 The Royal Automobile Club is merely a mistake, 
 for motorists should be united only in business and 
 not in social union. Many of the Melbourne clubs 
 are simply drinking dives. San Francisco has some 
 fine modern clubs, and so has Los Angeles. The 
 Pacific Union Club on Nobs Hill in San Francisco 
 is one of the finest clubs out of the 1 50 I have been 
 attached to throughout the globe. The Family 
 Club, the Bohemian, and the Olympic in San Francisco 
 have no imitators in Australia, nor have the Australians 
 created a club like the Athletic Club in Los Angeles, 
 or the Bath Club in London, where swimming baths 
 are a feature of the club. Excepting the Royal 
 Automobile Club on the site of the old War Office in 
 Pall Mall, London, there was no modern club-house 
 last time I was there. The Londoner prefers a dingy, 
 dark, dull house for his club, which he describes as a 
 branch of his home, and so it usually is and very like 
 his house. Since the old St. George's Club in Hanover 
 Square, I have been made honorary member of a 
 large number of London clubs, in clubland and in the 
 
 48
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 city. The best dinner was to be had at the Constitu- 
 tional, the best luncheon at the City Liberal, the best 
 afternoon tea at the Authors' Club, while the Savage 
 Club wins the palm for the best talkers and the oldest 
 whisky. The most grandiose club in the world is the 
 Jockey Club I attended in Buenos Ayres in the Argen- 
 tine. It is a palace of magnificence de haul en has. 
 
 The Author's Club at 2, Whitehall Court, London, 
 founded in 1891 by Sir Walter Besant, elected me a 
 member because of my high authorial attainments as 
 a contributor of quips, cranks, and wanton wiles to 
 the Sydney " Bulletin " for forty years. The Monday 
 night dinners were featured in imitation of the cele- 
 brated Savage Club Saturday dinners. It is an 
 excellent and amusing method for giving the obscure 
 a glimpse of the mighty under the dynamic pressure of 
 fairly well-cooked food aided by only middling 
 brands of fermented and spirituous liquors. In this 
 way one saw and heard Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Parkin, 
 Professor Arminius Vambery, His Excellency, Lord 
 Lee Ching Fong, Sir William Ramsay and Mr. 
 Henniker Heaton of Sydney. The Author's Club 
 was an icy sort of cave where one trod on one's own 
 tiptoes and suppressed both smile and laughter. 
 There was nothing really to laugh at, except the 
 atmosphere, and I used to sit reading London 
 " Punch " and rumbling with laughter internally. 
 Not at " Punch's " wit, which to an overseas humorist 
 looks as though it would make a new sort of concrete 
 pavement, heavy, strong and lasting. " Punch " is 
 completely English, typical of the race that for a 
 thousand years has braved the battle and the squeeze 
 for trade and for lending money. The English no 
 longer is a nation of shopkeepers. It can't keep shop, 
 but, oh my, it knows how to lend money, and inci- 
 dentally how to annex large areas of land, chiefly 
 jungle and forest belonging to other people. The 
 
 49
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 late Charles Garvice was chairman of the committee, 
 and the most notable of the authors was Poulteney 
 Bigelow, with whom I travelled once in the East 
 Indies, Hall Caine, Andrew Carnegie (whose mono- 
 graph on " Steel and how to make money out of it " 
 has never been published), Francis Gribble, Rider 
 Haggard, Anthony Hope, Cutcliffe Hyne, Morley 
 Roberts, Franklin Lieber, the author of a very heavy, 
 well-bound telegraphic code, and myself. 
 
 No travel book worth while that touches upon 
 London life would be perfect without a reference to 
 the famous Savage Club, the tryst of London's clever 
 men-authors, artists, play-actors and intelligentsia 
 as a caste above the bourgeoisie who swarm in the 
 world's metropolis and make it so dashed respectable 
 and humdrum. The middle-class people of Britain, 
 taking themselves and their caste so very seriously, 
 are never vulgar nor outre. They may be droll, comic, 
 farcical, laughable, at the same time they respect the 
 conventions, pay their rates and taxes, half fill the 
 churches, and all of them honour the King. Often 
 have I been a guest of Savage Club members, and the 
 best story one can tell without breaking club law was 
 told me by E. J. Odell, a Savage Club celebrity, 
 bon vivant, bon viveur et bon raconteur. One night 
 about eleven he went into the bar and to his horror 
 saw Phil May holding a whisky and polly in each 
 hand laughing merrily at nothing. " Time to go home, 
 Phil." ' With pleasure, Odell," so they left suddenly 
 and slumped into the ancient growler Phil May hired 
 by the year to take him anywhere day and night. 
 At Phil's house in St. John's Wood he made Odell 
 comfortable in the spare bedroom, taking care to leave 
 a syphon of soda, a one-twelfth of a dozen of Dan 
 Crawford, and a box of matches alongside the bed. 
 Then Phil May slipped out back into the four-wheeler 
 and headed for the Savage Club. Odell got tired of
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 being asleep so he aroused himself and left the house 
 with the idea of going back to the Savage for a dock 
 and a doris. Being penniless he walked from St. 
 John's Wood down the Maida Vale Road to the 
 Adelphi Terrace and arrived at the club at about 
 one a.m. Odell told me he had to laugh heartily 
 because in the same bar entertaining the same members 
 with the same japes was Phil May sticking tightly 
 to a whisky and polly in each fist ! What a precious 
 story. I have had many delicious sprees in clubs in 
 all corners of the earth and without telling tales out of 
 school, a thing I detest, one particular night at the 
 Family Club in San Francisco was the wittiest I have 
 ever attended. Had a bonzer all-night revel at a 
 club in Quebec, Canada, with Frank Carrell, a news- 
 paper proprietor, and felt the joy of seeing a member 
 ejected who said to me laughingly, " You come from 
 Australia, don't you, where the English send all their 
 criminals ? " " Yes," I said, " that was a bad habit 
 of the early English who sent Walter Raleigh and 
 Captain Cook round the globe looking for suitable 
 prisons for their criminal relatives and so made use 
 of Canada, the Southern States of America, and 
 Australia." Then they fired the poor devil down the 
 stairs quite rudely and unjustly. 
 
 ASSOCIATIONS 
 
 The very best service I ever rendered to my fellow- 
 labourers in the vineyard of the Lord was when I 
 inaugurated the movement to get better pay for bank 
 clerks. Being born in a bank and knowing how 
 badly my father was paid by the Bank of Victoria, who 
 gave him eight hundred pounds a year as general 
 manager, I made a solemn vow to agitate for better 
 pay and more humane conditions for bank clerks. 
 I tried several times to get into Parliament where I 
 would have agitated for a Royal Commission on the
 
 subject. My fellow-conspirator was the late Melville 
 Calder who was allowed a salary of five pounds a week 
 after thirty years in the Bank of Victoria. Mel. and 
 I frequently discussed the formation of a bank clerks' 
 association, but we never could get any of our pals to 
 join our revolution. They were all afraid and said so. 
 By the head of a leading bank I was warned not to 
 have anything to do with the agitation openly. I 
 mentioned my project to a friend who took the risk, 
 got a few insurgents together, and launched the 
 Bank Officials' Association. They ignored me alto- 
 gether instead of giving me the secretaryship. Of 
 course higher salaries were bound to come, yet some- 
 body had to begin asking for them, and to Mel. 
 Calder and myself is due the honour of beginning 
 this excellent reform which led to the proper treatment 
 of bank employe's, better pay, better housing and 
 better pensions. 
 
 A.N.A. 
 
 In my callow days as in my mature, when I lived 
 on ideals and illusions, I was intensely patriotic and 
 too fond of writing and lecturing. I was an ardent 
 missioner for the Australian Natives' Association. 
 Never missed a meeting of the Melbourne No. i 
 Branch, read papers, started debates, helped to open 
 six suburban branches, and to organize meetings on 
 national problems like the New Hebrides, New Cale- 
 donia, New Guinea, Federation of Australia and so 
 on and so forth. Being a Savings Bank officer with 
 excellent prospects in the service I avoided politics, 
 until I found most of the men I was associated with 
 in the A.N.A. were working towards Parliament 
 through the A.N.A. Jeff. Connelly, an extremely 
 brilliant young solicitor in Bendigo, was a mate of 
 mine in the Young Australian Liberal Association, and 
 I found out his chief idea in boosting the A.N.A. was 
 
 52
 
 POLITICS, LEAGUES, CLUBS 
 
 to use it to get into Parliament. That he would have 
 got there and been Premier of Victoria was a certainty. 
 The two Barretts, Sunderland and Field, passed into 
 politics through the A.N.A. ; and so did George 
 Turner, J. L. Purves, Dave Hennessy (afterwards 
 Lord Mayor of Melbourne), Dr. T. P. Mclnerney, 
 W. A. Watt, G. H. Wise, J. Hume Cook and 
 Arthur Robinson. Particularly did Alick Peacock 
 carry the A.N.A. banner all day and sleep in it all 
 night, and it has paid him well. After a field night 
 with my mentor, Alfred Deakin, at an A.N.A. 
 meeting, I consulted him regarding the wrong use 
 of this patriotic and friendly society for political 
 ends. When I said I would resign, Deakin advised 
 me to stick to it. However, I dropped out and the 
 A.N.A. has fallen from grace as a national society 
 and has become a safe sick and burial association. 
 Our politics would have been superior if the A.N.A. 
 had retained its leadership of the Australian born. 
 But it has been badly officered and now it is a 
 feeble shadow of what it might have been, a great 
 national brotherhood, and has become a good benefit 
 society in these latter days when all friendly societies 
 are tottering to extinction. 
 
 53
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 AMONGST my collection of Meudelliana is one 
 essay I read before the Bankers' Institute of 
 Australia, of which I was an associate, entitled " Is 
 the Bank of England Safe ? " which brought me much 
 ignominy and many snubs. My argument then was 
 that the bank did not hold enough gold and the 
 result of its efforts to attract gold by raising the bank 
 rate of interest did harm to the trade and commerce 
 of London and Britain. I was merely forty years before 
 my time. The war proved that credit was the thing 
 and gold only fustian. The war was run on paper, 
 and the political economists, when I lay at the breast 
 of enlightenment, told the world that gold was in- 
 dispensable, therefore the Bank of England was safe 
 and I was wrong and deserved being kicked. Now 
 I repeat that the control of the money market and the 
 power to raise the rate of interest arbitrarily is brigand- 
 age, pillage, and buccaneering, which causes immense 
 loss every year to the merchants, traders and business 
 people of the Empire. The Bank of England should 
 be cut adrift and told it was unworthy to be a national 
 bank, because it wilfully uses its control of the dis- 
 count and interest rate to harm the whole business 
 community. The raising and lowering of the bank 
 rate in London is the chief financial scandal of the 
 greatest wrong-doing to the world's trade and com- 
 merce that is perpetrated by the seemingly honest 
 men who are directors of the Bank of England. 
 
 My first experience of a bank was acquired as a 
 baby born in Sandhurst. My father was gold buyer 
 
 54
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 and accountant in the Bank of Victoria during the 
 first gold rush. In eight years he personally bought 
 over one million ounces of gold, and no man outside 
 the Royal Mint ever did that in history. Gold was 
 everywhere : on and just under the surface in flakes, 
 as dust, in cubes, in lumps, as small specimens 
 attached to quartz, like sparrow-hail and duck shot, in 
 alluvial form in every creek and river, shaped in big 
 nuggets or little ones, all over the land. Gold could 
 be washed or picked or dollied or sluiced in every 
 creek in Bendigo. Then when the first diggers 
 swept the banks, basin and valley of the Bendigo 
 Creek, clean and goldless for ten miles in length by 
 two miles wide, they cleansed all the tributary creeks 
 of the perilous stuff and there was no aftermath or 
 gleaning. When the diggers began not to see the 
 gold they started digging down from the grass to 
 twelve feet in the pipeclay where more and more 
 gold was won for little effort. I have seen two holes 
 at Long Gully twelve feet deep from which my father 
 bought 1200 worth of twenty-two carat gold from 
 four men who had worked exactly four hours each. 
 My first remembrance of seeing gold was when my 
 father one rainy day filled his red bandana handker- 
 chief with a mass of clay taken from the peak of a 
 white pipeclay pyramid. We were on our way to 
 the Presbyterian Church at White Hills on that 
 particular Sunday and it would have been heterodox 
 to wash off the 18 ounces, worth, 72 on the Sabbath. 
 In Golden Gully, near Golden Square, where gold 
 was first discovered in 1851, and in Long Gully and 
 California Gully, I have been shown holes (not shafts) 
 which yielded in solid gold two thousand pounds' 
 worth in a day ! The dirt was easily mined with pick 
 and shovel, and directly a claim was gutted it was 
 abandoned. Those early gold seekers took care to 
 leave very little gold behind ! The diggers led a 
 
 55
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 dirty, rough, uncomfortable life because of the want 
 of water for drinking and washing. They worked in a 
 lovely grass-lined forest free from snow and wild 
 beasts, in a climate perfect except in summer and in a 
 country lacking only good society, just as hell lacks 
 water and good society. The Bank of Victoria, 
 Bendigo, bought vast quantities of gold, both quartz 
 and alluvial, all of the highest quality. Smelting was 
 carried on almost continuously in the bank smelting 
 house right under my bedroom window. For years 
 I saw gold in every shape, size and condition, from 
 nugget to ingot, and so much and so often, as to 
 become familiar with it, without feeling the slightest 
 contempt for the stuff man loves the most of all 
 inorganic things. When very young, one became 
 accustomed to the arrival at all hours of the bank's 
 gold buyers, both officers and agents laden with the 
 precious stuff. The gold escort by coach to Melbourne 
 was just before my advent, and the less picturesque 
 escort in a railway carriage full of armed police and 
 clerks was the mode of transport. It is a simple boast 
 to say I have seen more gold weighed for one escort 
 than the whole of the last generation of young 
 Australians have seen in their lives. Gold made 
 Victoria, Victoria made Australia, and Australian gold 
 made the present British Empire. Without Aus- 
 tralia's gold from 1852 to 1872, London could not 
 have become the open gold market of the world, and 
 her shipping and foreign trade would not have been 
 on the vast and overwhelming scale made possible 
 by the possession of gold for paying foreign debts 
 and drafts. Banking and shipping have made Britain 
 great, but without gold her banking and shipping 
 could not have expanded so enormously or so quickly. 
 Truly her merchants and manufacturers, thanks to 
 the invention of steam, were ready to capture the 
 world's commerce and markets, and Australian gold 
 
 56
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 largely helped Britain to conquer them. Gold mining 
 has been allowed to perish in Australia, and the world's 
 output is declining gradually. It needs no second 
 sight or gift of prophecy to foresee the revival of gold 
 mining, because the nations must have gold to pay 
 their debts to one another, and until a better standard 
 than gold is found and universally adopted, the world 
 must get gold whatever it costs to win ! Nowadays 
 in South Africa and Australasia ten penny-weights of 
 gold per ton does not pay to produce. Without 
 hesitation I predict the mines will soon be satisfied 
 with ten grains to the ton rather than not mine for 
 gold. The period of paper money and inflation will 
 very soon fade out into an epoch of repudiation and 
 cancellation of paper currency and paper bonds, 
 and the people of the earth will go back to the use 
 of gold as the basis of exchange and currency. Gold 
 and human nature are two unchangeable things. 
 Without gold and enough of it this civilization will 
 decay and die, and as it is an imperfect framework 
 for humanity it will not matter if it does disappear. 
 My father was frequently moved from one branch 
 to another chiefly where the gold lay thickest. The 
 banks made huge profits buying gold at 2 IQS. an 
 ounce and selling it in London at 4 ! One rest 
 from the never-ending gold buying my father had 
 when he was sent to Warrnambool to recover a mass 
 of doubtful debts due by the squatters who originally 
 took up land at los. to ^i an acre and ran a few ill- 
 bred sheep on stations that were neither cleared nor 
 fenced. Warrnambool was the market town for the 
 squatters within a radius of a hundred miles. They 
 were mostly Scotch and Irish peasants or shepherds 
 and very few of them were educated. There was 
 precious little blue blood and very few aristocrats in 
 the Western District in those days, though there were 
 plenty of kindly, hospitable and respectable farmers 
 
 57
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 and graziers, and none of them were very rich. In- 
 crease of population made many of these people wealthy 
 in course of time, and land valued by the banks then 
 at 30*. and 2 an acre is worth 15 to 20 to-day. 
 A lot of nonsense has been written about the hardships 
 of these pioneer squatters, the majority of whom led 
 pleasant, easy lives free from anxiety and hard work. 
 As a class they were narrow, uncultured, and not 
 public spirited. 
 
 To return again to the bank collapse in Melbourne 
 during the height of The Terror of 1893. Let me 
 recapitulate the position after the crisis. Twelve 
 banks of issue suspended with total liabilities of 
 103,315,214, including deposits for 81,331,223 ; 
 47 building societies, over 100 land banks, property 
 and investment companies and innumerable land 
 syndicates, at a guess 500, were dragged down to 
 the dust after the Walpurgis night dance of over- 
 borrowing, over-lending, and over-valuation. The 
 destruction and ruin of thousands of hard-working, 
 respectable people was horrific. The Dark Age of 
 Victoria lasted for ten years, and the havoc and 
 wreckage was not cleared away for thirty ! Yet 
 nobody was punished for causing the cataclysm and 
 destroying hundreds of homes. Not a single land 
 valuer was sent to gaol. Only one unworthy bank 
 or building society manager " did time," whilst most 
 of them made dishonest compositions with their 
 creditors, hid house and shop property away in their 
 wives' names and generally began again with light 
 hearts their occupations of fleecing the public on the 
 Stock Exchange or in the real estate market. The 
 only bright spot in Victorian industry all through that 
 insane banking and land boom was the fact that 
 eighty-four gold and silver mines remained on the 
 dividend list and kept thousands of poverty-stricken 
 people in bread and butter, but no circuses. Our 
 
 58
 
 women were more heroic than the men and went out 
 to work in thousands to keep the poor old ruined 
 people in the mansions and cottages in food. 
 
 There was no panic leading up to the gigantic 
 failure. The extinction of the banks was due to a 
 quiet weeping away of deposits, a silent, secret system 
 of drawing a cheque for your current account or 
 fixed deposit and paying it into the Union or the 
 Australasia or the New South Wales. There were no 
 frantic runs on the banks, and no frenzy was shown 
 openly by depositors. It was first come, first paid, 
 and the bank liquid assets and coin simply faded away. 
 It was a good thing there were no Treasury or Com- 
 monwealth Bank Notes in those days to bolster up 
 rotten institutions, because every bank that broke 
 completely ought to have done so. Indeed some of 
 them should not have been allowed to re-open. Some 
 of the defunct banks simply annexed their customers' 
 deposits and wrote off 90 per cent of their over- 
 drafts " Convey," the wise call it steal ? foh ! 
 a fico for the phrase ! The humour of it. Nobody 
 was punished and everybody suffered except the men 
 who engineered the financial downfall of an innocent 
 public. The ruin was almost universal and the 
 Australians, specially the women, took their losses 
 and misfortunes smiling, and kept on working. 
 Nobody was killed or hurt and only a very few of the 
 perpetrators of the ruin committed suicide. The 
 leading valuators of those days should have gone to 
 prison. 
 
 On Friday, 2ist April, 1893, there was a "run" 
 in Sydney on the bank of New South Wales, Com- 
 mercial Banking Company of Sydney, City Bank 
 of Sydney, and Government Savings Bank. Sir 
 George Dibbs, Premier of New South Wales, 
 visited the Savings Bank and guaranteed the deposits, 
 yet such an important event is not included in the 
 
 59
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 official chronological table from 1788 forward. 
 Such was the policy of hush and secrecy. In 
 Melbourne the National Bank of Australasia closed 
 its doors on Saturday, 3Oth April, 1893. The chief 
 debtors of the bank were B. J. Fink, Chaffey Brothers 
 of Mildura, Sydney land companies, and the Midland 
 Railway of West Australia. The National Bank 
 paid out 650,006 worth of coin in four weeks 
 preceding its collapse. Finally the Commercial 
 Banking Company of Sydney, Australian Joint Stock 
 Bank and City Bank of Sydney stopped and re- 
 constructed. In Queensland in May, 1893, the 
 Queensland National Bank, the Royal Bank of 
 Queensland, and the Bank of North Queensland 
 shut up shop. Undoubtedly one prime cause of the 
 Victorian banks tangling up their affairs was an 
 alteration of the banking law on the advice of a Royal 
 Commission on banking in 1887, permitting any 
 bank, however chartered, to advance money directly 
 on mortgage instead of by collateral security. 
 
 In Sydney, Sir George Dibbs, Premier, did the 
 wisest thing possible by issuing a Gazette on Monday, 
 1 5th May, 1893, declaring bank notes then in circula- 
 tion to be legal tender. It is worthy of noting that 
 on 3 ist March, 1893, all the notes of all the banks 
 in all the Colonies (a word I hate intensely) only 
 amounted to 4,818,766. Nowadays note circulation 
 verges close to 55,000,000, and is the main cause 
 of high prices in Australia and the high cost of living. 
 A wise Commonwealth bank governor would call up 
 or sell on the open market all the 27,000,000 of 
 Commonwealth and State stock, treasury bills, deben- 
 tures, and fixed deposits he holds, and recall that 
 much of the note circulation. It was terribly bad 
 and dangerous financing to issue notes by way of loan 
 to these impecunious and badly managed State 
 treasuries. With how little wisdom are our public 
 
 60
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 finances and banking functions managed ? The 
 newspaper press is largely responsible for these very 
 ordinary men who have been Governors of the 
 Commonwealth Bank, Prime Ministers and Premiers, 
 and bank general managers losing their heads from 
 adulation and the universal process of lick-spittling. 
 Most of the heads of banks and alleged able leaders 
 of finance and capitalists I have met or heard about 
 are a pretty poor lot of ordinary men and very few of 
 them are educated or intellectual. 
 
 There was absolutely no need for the Commercial 
 of Sydney to close, but Thomas Dibbs, the general 
 manager closed as a matter of expediency to get the 
 chance to strengthen his bank's position. Years 
 previously Dibbs told my father he could close all 
 his branches, keep Head Office open, and pay 10 
 per cent dividend out of the bank's station properties. 
 The City of Melbourne Bank only had 1,000,000 
 on deposit in Melbourne the day it shut up, and 
 3,750,000 on fixed deposit in Scotland. It was 
 latterly a badly managed concern with a Board of 
 elderly directors. Old men who want to sleep in the 
 afternoon and do not watch the general manager and 
 the overdraft lists sharply are a menace. 
 
 There were plenty of amusing incidents during the 
 enforced bank holiday decided by the late G. D. Carter, 
 then unfortunately Treasurer of Victoria. Carter was 
 a whisky merchant who was quite untrained in finance 
 though he sustained his ignorance with a colossal 
 conceit of himself. I went into the Bank of Austra- 
 lasia the day it defied the Government holiday pro- 
 clamation to shake hands with John Sawers, the 
 superintendent, who was an old friend of my father's 
 in the early days of Victorian banking. While standing 
 there I noticed Mars Buckley, the draper, come in 
 with two of his shopwalkers dressed in customary 
 suits of solemn black each carrying two large leather 
 
 61
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 trunks. Mars drew 10,000 in sovereigns, filled 
 the bags and toddled across to the Safe Deposit. 
 Whatever might happen to the Bank of Australasia, 
 " old Tapes and Ribbons " was determined to be 
 safe. I didn't blame Buckley, because I had lodged 
 1000 in gold in the Safe Deposit nearly two years 
 before the debacle. Some dreadfully irregular things 
 were done during the boom and winked at by those 
 who knew better. One signature to the transfer of 
 a city property was forged, but whether the forger 
 knew it was wrong it was impossible to discover. 
 
 BANKS 1893 
 
 In 1893 Australian banks had 79,000,000 on 
 deposit, 54,000,000 in Australia and 25,000,000 
 in London. These banks did not close : Bank of 
 Australasia, Bank of New South Wales, Union Bank, 
 Royal Bank, Bank of New Zealand, all of which 
 ignored the moratorium or holidays gazetted by the 
 Government of Victoria. There were twenty-six 
 land, finance and mortgage companies with nominal 
 capital 10,000,000 : paid up 5,200,000 and 
 debentures issued for 12,000,000. This is the list 
 of banks which stopped payment, reconstructed and 
 re-opened : 
 
 Suspended. 
 
 Federal Bank of Australia ... 
 Mercantile Bank of Australia 
 Commercial of Australia ... ... 5th April, 1893. 
 
 National cf Australasia ... ... ist May, 
 
 English, Scottish & Australian ... 1 3th April, 
 
 Australian Joint Stock ... ... 2ist April, 
 
 London Chartered ... ... 26th April, 
 
 Colonial ... ... ... 6th May, 
 
 Bank of Victoria ... ... i oth May, 
 
 Queensland National ... ... 1 5th May, 
 
 Commercial Banking Co. of Sydney ... 1 6th May, 
 City of Melbourne ... ... lyth May, 
 
 Standard Bank ... ... ... 28th April, 
 
 62
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 The City of Melbourne and Standard Bank were too 
 hopelessly rotten to re-open, so they stayed shut. 
 The Federal and Mercantile banks went bung much 
 sooner. 
 
 FEDERAL BANK 
 
 The downfall of the Federal Bank was the most 
 disgraceful climacteric of the disastrous banking and 
 land boom of 1886 to 1893. The head and front of 
 the whole offending was the late James Munro, the 
 champion of the teetotal party of the period. Munro 
 used this position and his building society business 
 to push his politics, and used his politics to push 
 railways through suburban lands he and his clan, 
 clique or ring, had bought beforehand. So the 
 Clan Munro founded the Federal Bank with the 
 help of J. B. Watson, the tri-millionaire gold miner 
 of Bendigo. The Federal was a bank of issue, a 
 savings bank and a building society. J. B. Watson 
 had 10,000 shares at the start, and the other chief 
 shareholders were : 
 
 James Munro ... ... 4363 shares. 
 
 William McLean, Ironmonger ... 4000 
 
 W. McLean & Jenner ... ... 1000 
 
 John Robb, Railway Contractor ... 8310 
 
 A. T.Robb . ... 3350 
 
 Whittingham Bros., Graziers ... 4100 
 
 
 " Table Talk," a fearless Society paper, published 
 the following facts : 
 
 "James Munro, his sons, sons-in-law, and his clan 
 of non-drinking, church-going friends borrowed all 
 the capital of the Federal Bank, 500,000, and nearly 
 all its deposits. Donald Munro had nine overdrafts 
 amounting to 161,237. Donald paid 6d. in the i." 
 
 " Mr. G. Munro, a third son, owed 8000. The 
 Hon. James Munro himself owed 30,141 and on 
 
 63
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 account of his station (per Crellin) 38,702. The 
 other directors had the following overdrafts : 
 
 {. 
 
 John Robb ... ... ... 21,000 
 
 John Whittingham ... ... 7,000 
 
 Whittingham Bros. ... ... 18,000 
 
 William McLean ... ... 55,297 
 
 Davies and W. McLean ... ... 7,000 
 
 Mrs. McLean ... ... ... 231 
 
 Kew Land Company (McLean) ... 4,764 
 
 The "Table Talk" account continued : 
 
 " The list of the overdrafts in the Melbourne office, 
 representing Mr. Munro's introductions, includes 
 the following accounts, which we publish, without 
 expressing any opinion as to their value as assets. 
 The public, however, are entitled to know some 
 particulars, and any man of business may judge 
 which of the debts will be available for collection at 
 20J. in the 1." 
 
 I 
 
 Australian Alliance Investment Company ... 7,105 
 
 W. L. Baillieu, trust account ... ... 2,580 
 
 E. L. Baillieu ... ... ... 1,867 
 
 J. G. Baillieu ... ... ... 5,084 * 
 
 W. L. Baillieu ... ... ... 28,034 
 
 R. F. Baillieu ... ... ... 945 
 
 R. L. Balding ... ... ... 5,188 
 
 Crellin (James Munro's station property) ... 38,702 
 
 Davies and McLean ... ... ... 7,000 
 
 A. G. Hall ... ... ... 4,067 
 
 A. G. Hall ... ... ... 1,337 
 
 A. G. Hall ... ... ... 15,000 
 
 Heart of Preston Estate Co. (Baillieu) ... 13,700 
 
 Henry George, Limited ... ... 10,300 
 
 64
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 Kew Land Company (McLean) ... 4,764 
 
 J. A. Kitchen ... ... ... 7,000 
 
 Latham and Ashton ... ... ... 17,172 
 
 Latham and Baillieu ... ... ... 10,484 
 
 Munro and Baillieu, special account ... 20,734 
 
 Munro and Baillieu, lease account ... 7,600 
 
 Munro and Baillieu ... ... ... 70,209 
 
 Alexander Munro and Company ... 28,526 
 
 Donald Munro ... ... ... 26,161 
 
 Hon. James Munro ... ... ... 30,141 
 
 G. M. Munro ... ... ... 8,000 
 
 William McLean ... ... ... 55,297 
 
 Mrs. McLean ... ... ... 231 
 
 Queen Investment Land Company ... 31,837 
 
 John Robb ... ... ... 21,000 
 
 W P roperty Company ... ... 20, 150 
 
 Whittingham Brothers ... ... 18,000 
 
 John Whittingham ... ... ... 7,000 
 
 Total 565,215 
 
 Hon. James Munro formed a company called the 
 Real Estate Mortgage and Deposit Bank to take over 
 his own land speculations like the Chatsworth Estate, 
 the Strathfieldsaye Station, the Narbethong Estate, 
 the station in the Northern Territory and Kimberley, 
 W.A., the La Rose Estate and other freehold pro- 
 perties on which the ascertained loss was 608,500. 
 The report of the liquidators of the Real Estate Bank 
 showed that over 1,000,000 had been lost under 
 James Munro's management. He actually had 
 himself appointed Agent-General for Victoria in 
 London. His estate was sequestrated : liabilities, 
 94,066 ; assets, 43,960. These were only remnants 
 of his widespread foolish speculations, and the amount 
 he got from banks and institutions must have been 
 colossal. The following list is taken from " Table 
 Talk" of 9th June, 1893, edited by a singularly 
 
 65
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 clever man, Maurice Brodsky, who married the 
 sister of B. J. and Theodore Fink. For his fearlessness 
 Brodsky had to retreat to London, and so did Benjamin 
 Josman Fink who was threatened with assassination. 
 When B. J. Fink died in London he left 250,000, 
 chiefly made up of feathers from his nest, called 
 Fink's Building, corner of Elizabeth and Flinders 
 Street, Melbourne. By the way, three valuable corners 
 of Melbourne had, it is alleged, faulty titles, and it is 
 alleged all three were acquired by adverse possession, 
 that is, by fencing them in and paying the rates 
 for sixteen years, hoping the dead owner would 
 never return. Fink's Building was one, the State 
 Savings Bank, corner of Collins and Spencer Streets 
 was another, and the Liverpool Buildings, corner 
 of William and Bourke Streets was another of these 
 vacant and unclaimed lots. The late Nathaniel Levi, an 
 old bill-poster, owned this latter block, recently sold it 
 to the British Imperial Oil Company and renamed 
 Shell Corner, but playfully known to the wits on the 
 village green as Blood Suckers Building. 
 
 At one point of the smash period the " Argus " gave 
 data relating to sixty-seven private compositions 
 under Section 151 of the tenth part of the Insolvency 
 Act. The defaulters were mostly barristers and 
 solicitors with liabilities 3,800,982, assets 1,023,830 
 and deficiency 2,777,152. Under forty-seven 
 arrangements only 65,821 was paid on the total 
 liabilities of 2,280,807 ' Half of the " compotes " 
 offered to pay from one farthing to threepence in the 
 pound, most of them never paid a bean, a pepper- 
 corn, or a mustard seed ! The " Argus " estimated 
 the total liabilities at 4,500,000 to 5,000,000. 
 My list of 248 " compotes " runs up to 15,000,000, 
 and even then it was only part of the story ! The 
 favourite offer to pay was one penny in the pound ! 
 And even in those far-off times I have heard men 
 
 66
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 thanking God for " our strong Supreme Court 
 Bench." Pooh ! These liquidators never got any- 
 where near the precincts of the Supreme Court. 
 The insolvencies were all smothered in bank parlours 
 and lawyers' offices ; smothered, stifled, strangled and 
 buried with extreme unction. 
 
 THE CYCLOPAEDIA OF VICTORIA 
 
 The Honourable William Lawrence Baillieu, repre- 
 senting the Northern Province in the Legislative 
 Assembly of Victoria, is a member of the well-known 
 firm of W. L. Baillieu and Company, auctioneers and 
 estate agents, 375, Collins Street, Melbourne. He 
 was born in Queenscliff, Victoria, in the year 1859, 
 and is the second son of the late Mr. J. G. Baillieu, 
 one of the early pioneers of Queenscliff. He was 
 educated in Queenscliff, and in 1874, at the age of 
 fourteen, entered the service of the Bank of Victoria, 
 Queenscliff, and was engaged in banking pursuits till 
 the year 1885. In that year he started business as 
 auctioneer, etc., in conjunction with Mr. Donald 
 Munro, under the style of Munro and Baillieu. 
 This firm was carried on with considerable success 
 till 1892, when Mr. Baillieu withdrew from the 
 partnership and started operations on his own account. 
 In 1897 Mr. A. S. Baillieu was admitted as a partner, 
 and in 1899 Mr. H. Scott was admitted, the firm 
 having carried on business since under the style of 
 Baillieu, Allard and Company. Mr. W. L. Baillieu is a 
 director of the " Herald " Company and the Carlton 
 United Breweries Company. In 1891 he was elected 
 to a seat in the Legislative Council, in which he 
 represents the Northern Province. He married in 
 1887, Bertha, a daughter of Edward Latham, the 
 well-known brewer, and has a family of six children. 
 His wife is dead. 
 
 67
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 BANK MANAGERS IN BOOM 
 
 The four bank managers who did the most harm 
 during the banking boom were Henry Gyles Turner 
 and John McCutcheon of the Commercial Bank of 
 Australia, Alfred Priestly of the Federal Bank, and 
 Colin Longmuir of the City of Melbourne Bank, all 
 deceased. They were an amusing quartette who com- 
 peted keenly and stupidly for banking business. They 
 bid against one another for deposits in England, Ireland 
 and Scotland, and when they got them in millions, 
 enacted a harlequinade and scattered overdrafts, 
 loans, and discounts right and left on the just and the 
 unjust alike. The quality of the security was not 
 strained, and credit dropped like the gentle rain from 
 heaven upon the tag-rag and bobtail men of straw 
 who were conducting a feverish land boom among 
 themselves based upon false, faked, and untrue 
 valuations. Having an overdraft of 40,000 against 
 security for 60,000 worth of mushroom land, banks 
 and building societies' shares, I contracted a fell 
 funk and went and sold everything I had and gave 
 it to the poor banker. Would you believe it, he up- 
 braided me, told me I was hurting him with his 
 board by paying off my advance, and implored to 
 begin all over again to any extent I cared to name ! 
 Like those other over-rated and highly-extolled bank 
 managers, he had been led away by the paper pros- 
 perity born of foreign deposits and foreign loans. 
 Like them he banished care and caution and became 
 daft. 
 
 The Australian Deposit and Mortgage Bank was 
 rather a superior sort of small bank which made 
 advances on land and houses. When it failed J. M. 
 Davies, a sound business lawyer, drafted a scheme of 
 reconstruction and arrangements with its depositors 
 under which the bank re-opened and went on with its 
 
 68
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 business. Soon after the Commercial Bank of Aus- 
 tralia collapsed and J. M. Davies practically copied 
 the A.D. and M. Bank scheme with which the 
 depositors and shareholders of the Commercial were 
 shackled. It was one-sided and unjust, especially 
 to those who were compelled to take shares for 
 deposits. It took the Commercial Bank thirty years 
 to pull round. Its ordinary shares for many years 
 were despised till a strong group of Australian brokers 
 in London began to buy up the ordinary shares now 
 worth about 325. and cut a great fortune out of them. 
 During the entire period of convalescence the Com- 
 mercial Bank has been just as carefully managed, as 
 it was disgracefully managed during the boom period. 
 These men did not practise pococurantism or the art 
 of keeping cool and not worrying. They were 
 feather-weight financiers and their actions brought 
 the whole financial structure of Victoria to disaster. 
 
 WILLIAM MEUDELL 
 
 Dr. Black was the founder of the Bank of Victoria, 
 and the Hon. Henry Miller the first chairman of the 
 bank. " Money " Miller made a protege of my father 
 simply because he could rely on him. The old man 
 was as straight as a gun barrel, and although he was 
 genial and popular he had plenty of moral courage 
 and could say " No " quite easily, an attribute most 
 of us haven't got, but which is essential in the make- 
 up of a good bank manager. Twice my governor 
 saved the Bank of Victoria from smashing. It had 
 only .250,000 paid up and a moderate expansion of 
 the advances meant trouble, if they threatened to 
 become fixed or frozen instead of being liquid. One 
 day about 1867 the old man got a hurry call to go to 
 the Head Office and meet Mr. Miller and Mr. John 
 Matheson, the general manager. He was ordered to 
 Warrnambool by the first boat, in those faraway 
 
 F 69
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 days the s.s. " Edina." With six balls of quicksilver 
 at home, yclept children, it couldn't be done. When 
 the governor got to Warrnambool he found a sticky 
 mess. A firm of live stock auctioneers, Macgregor 
 and Co., had got the squatters and farmers of the 
 Warrnambool district to go in for dealing in sheep 
 and cattle and to buy and sell on bills. Everybody 
 would endorse anybody's bills, and especially Mac- 
 gregor's who had won the hearts of the three local 
 bank managers by discounting bills endorsed with 
 full recourse by men then struggling to improve 
 Western District sheep stations which to-day are 
 enormously profitable to their grandsons. My father 
 found overdrafts and bills discounted for over 80,000, 
 or one-third of the capital of the Bank of Victoria in 
 a comatose condition, unpaid inactive accounts, 
 growing instead of shrinking. My father got into 
 the collar, fixed his haims on tightly, nailed up his 
 swingle-trees, girded up his loins and started to pull 
 his clients and his bank out of the mire. It was a 
 hard unpleasant task, but by nursing the good men 
 and getting rid of the bad, he recovered the bad debts. 
 The new managers of the other two local banks did 
 fine team work with him, and they all got out of the 
 bog, thanks of course to the rich land they held as 
 security. As a kiddy I used to go with my father to 
 squatter's homes to hold the ponies while the old 
 man talked finance and clips and crops, just as though 
 he was a partner of these young men, mostly Scotch, 
 who loved and trusted him. The proof is that my 
 father personally administered six deceased estates 
 totalling 750,000, without losing one penny of 
 principal or interest, and if he had cared he could 
 have had double that number and value of estates as 
 sole executor. Within four years, he had pulled the 
 business back to normal and was then sent to Bendigo 
 to square up a heavy list of bad debts which were 
 
 70
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 crippling the bank, mostly owing by defunct mining 
 companies, in those days all limited and not no 
 liability, who had a habit of stopping work and, rather 
 than make calls, of letting the overdraft r.i.p. He 
 recovered about ,50,000 of bad and doubtful debts, 
 and his reward was the general managership of the 
 Bank of Victoria at 800 a year, a house over the 
 bank in Collins Street for my parents and six sisters. 
 Imagine the meanness of a board of directors that paid 
 its chief manager ,800 a year to handle 10,000,000 
 of assets and liabilities ! 
 
 The Bank of Victoria was founded by Dr. Black 
 and Hon. Henry Miller, better known as " Money " 
 Miller, who learnt banking and money lending in 
 the Union Bank, Hobart. It is said Henry used to 
 lend money to his fellow-clerks at slightly over the 
 current rate charged on overdrafts. For years the 
 paid-up capital of the Bank of Victoria was only 
 250,000, and old " Money " held most of the shares. 
 When the Vic. burst wide open on 9th May, 1893, 
 the published list of shareholders showed that the 
 Millers held only a trifling handful of shares, Edward 
 having 380, Albert 390, Septimus 324, and William 
 Henry 276 worth 5 each, 5 uncalled, out of a 
 register of 120,000 shares. Sir W. J. Clarke was 
 the biggest holder with 2058 shares. Which reminds 
 me I had a glass of sherry with Sir W T illiam at the 
 Athenaeum Club about an hour before he collapsed 
 to death on a tram in Collins Street. As I was elected 
 a member of the Athenaeum Club in July, 1889, 
 I am well within the first dozen members still alive 
 out of 400 in that year. A fine club, the Athenaeum, 
 composed of real leaders in every walk of life. 
 Although I met all the celebrated men of the day 
 there, club law forbids me to tell any tales about 
 them.
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 W. KNOX AND JOHN ALSOP 
 
 Of all the business men with whom I have been 
 connected during my meteoric career, William Knox 
 was easily one of the very best. With all his 
 mannerisms he was shrewd, just and always kindly 
 and helpful. The Broken Hill silver pioneers were 
 fortunate in getting him to be the driving force of 
 the new industry. If Knox had remained in the 
 Bank of Victoria he could not have failed to become 
 general manager. He had plenty of tact and a deep 
 knowledge of human nature. Another fine character 
 amongst leading men was the late John Alsop, actuary 
 of the Melbourne Savings Bank, with which he was 
 connected all his life. He laid the foundations firmly 
 and well of the present State Savings Bank system 
 by opening suburban branches and pursuing an 
 active advertising policy. Because I was the first 
 Victorian to win Isaac Pitman's shorthand certificate, 
 Alsop made me his assistant, and I have a scrap book 
 of twenty-five pamphlets on thrift, which I wrote 
 for him, besides hundreds of newspaper letters, and 
 each was a brilliant coruscation of literary gems 
 adapted from Samuel Smiles, Charles Spurgeon and 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the virtue of being thrifty, 
 and how good it was for the young. All these authori- 
 ties saved their pennies, let their pounds rip and died 
 poor. This much sank into my bones and filled up 
 lesions in my brains. Save all the money you can in 
 early youth and middle age, and spend it on what 
 gives you happiness. Big estates and probate duties 
 are merely lack-lustre joys only suitable for wowsers 
 and dullards who cannot realize the joy of living in 
 the present, because their thoughts, conduct and 
 actions are concentrated on what they will do in the 
 eternity after death. Carpe diem, enjoy to-day, ought 
 to be tattooed on the chest of every babe which sur- 
 
 7*
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 vives the critical age of twelve months. These 
 pamphlets of mine were distributed from house to 
 house by three returned soldiers from the Crimea 
 and the Indian Mutiny. They pushed them under 
 doors, put them in letter boxes, under the mats, 
 through the keyholes, everywhere except down chim- 
 neys, literally in millions. In five years Alsop had 
 doubled the number of depositors' accounts and set 
 an archaic, half-dead institution on the high road of 
 prosperity. When I suggested I might go round 
 the world at my own expense to find out how other 
 savings banks were behaving, the trustees gave me 
 nine months' leave, and I visited as many savings 
 banks in Europe, Great Britain, the United States 
 and Canada as time allowed. The net result was 
 nothing. Savings banks abroad were a hundred 
 years behind the Melbourne Savings Bank in book- 
 keeping, advertising and service to depositors. And 
 they are to-day. Like our Australian banking system, 
 the Australian Savings Banks lead the world. Denial 
 of this is difficult, because in every civilized country 
 on the globe I have seen and observed these 
 banks of the poor. That trip cost me 250, 
 while my second world's tour ate up 1000. 
 When my father was general manager of the 
 Bank of Victoria in Melbourne, he was presented with 
 a letter of introduction by a new chum early one 
 Monday morning written by the young man's uncle, 
 whose famous family had extremely large sums on fixed 
 deposit in the London office of the bank. The 
 youngster was a typical product of an English public 
 school : well groomed, quite illiterate, very athletic, 
 and enormously superior to everybody. He was 
 affable, courteous and ignorant ; in fact, a real scion 
 of a true British aristocrat. He said he wanted 
 to learn banking, so my father handed him over 
 to the paying teller who set him to work sorting 
 
 73
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 crumpled notes. Entering the over-crowded teller's 
 box with its piles of gold and silver and hillocks of 
 notes, Monty loudly exclaimed, " Bai Jove, what a 
 lot of munnay ! " That was all he uttered from ten 
 until one o'clock, when the teller told him he might 
 go out to lunch and be back at two. The well-groomed 
 cadet of a noble family never came back and has 
 never been seen in Melbourne from then till now. 
 When the paying teller tried to balance his cash at 
 four o'clock he found he was 2500 short in notes 
 of assorted denominations, singles, fives and tens ! 
 His uncle was advised by cable of the episode and his 
 reply authorized the bank to debit his account for 
 the missing amount. 
 
 Ned Kelly was a man born out of his time with no 
 education excepting his great knowledge of the 
 Book of the Bush ; his leaping thought, rapid action 
 and fertility of resource marked him as a clever 
 fighter who in a modern war could have entered as a 
 private and ended as a general. 
 
 His father had been a convict, but not a convict 
 of the brutal type. Rather his offences against the 
 law were of the kind natural to a new country of few 
 fences. The lifting of horses, and the duffing of 
 cattle were not crimes generally execrated. In fact, 
 they were the crimes from which many a great pastoral 
 family in many countries have dated their beginnings. 
 
 His mother naturally accepted the commercial 
 morality of her husband and of her times. Her only 
 crime was to protect her children from pursuit of the 
 police, then more hated than in more settled times, 
 and probably deserving some of the hatred. She 
 was in gaol when her son was under sentence of 
 death, and her last words to him are recorded to 
 have been, " Ned would die like a Kelly." 
 
 Ned Kelly's first brush with the police and his 
 first convictions were the matter of lifting a horse. 
 
 74
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 In his youth he knew Power, the bushranger, an 
 inoffensive, old, bad man. When released from his 
 first imprisonment the dislike of the " currency 
 lad " for that which he regarded as his oppressive 
 supervision by the police made his course rapid down 
 the latent ways of crime. 
 
 The cold murder of Sergeant Kennedy put him 
 outside the pale ; after that he shot the traitor, Aaron 
 Sherriff, who had been in his pay and was about to 
 sell him to the police. Ned Kelly shot Sherriff at 
 the door of SherrifFs house, while the police who 
 were there to " take " the outlaw, Kelly, cowered 
 in a back room. From that time Ned Kelly became 
 more daring and intrepid ; he knew the value of 
 speed to the moment ; he struck swiftly and moved 
 swiftly to a place fifty or one hundred miles from the 
 scene of earlier robberies, paralysing a slow-moving 
 police force whose heart was not in the chase which 
 had such a dangerous animal for its quarry. At the 
 end a train-load of police sped from Melbourne to 
 capture an outlaw gang that had no resources but 
 those it made, and the police in the fight that ended 
 the gang at Glenrowan even used a cannon. 
 
 I met the Kelly gang only in their works and 
 through Ted Living, my fellow-bank clerk. At one 
 time Living was accountant at the bank of N.S.W. 
 branch at Jerilderie, a small N.S.W. town north of 
 the Murray River. The Kellys had already robbed 
 three banks and had been posted missing four months 
 until suddenly and early on a Sunday morning they 
 appeared at Jerilderie police station. The Kelly gang 
 rode into the police yard and bailed up the three 
 policemen whom they locked in the cells. Then the 
 Kellys donned the policemen's Sunday clothes. In 
 full sight of the public they spent the day in the 
 precincts of the gaol and Ned Kelly escorted the ser- 
 geant's wife to the Roman Catholic church on Sunday 
 
 75 '
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 morning and stood guard while she dusted the church 
 before the visiting clergyman arrived. All day the 
 gang held the police and not a townsman knew. On 
 Sunday night they cut the few telegraph wires leading 
 from the town, telephones and automobiles were not 
 then invented. Tartleton, the manager, and Living, 
 the accountant and teller of the Bank of New South 
 Wales, had been at near-by stations spending Saturday 
 and Sunday, and they rode to the bank early on 
 Monday. Tartleton went upstairs for a shower bath 
 and Living got out his cash and sorted his notes. 
 The junior clerk had left the front door ajar. Ned 
 Kelly walked in a little before ten and placing the 
 muzzle of a Brown Bess rifle against Living's temple, 
 ordered him to put up his hands, which Ted did with 
 much zeal and rapidity. Ned said, " Gimme yer keys," 
 and Ted replied with the swiftness of a flashlight, 
 " All right, Mr. Kelly." By this time Steve Hart 
 had been upstairs and collected Tartleton at the 
 point of his rifle from under the shower. Tartleton 
 dropped his soap, threw up his arms and said, " Won't 
 you let me dry meself." " No bally fear," said Mr. 
 Hart. " Come along down as y'ar." And come as 
 he was he did in nine and one-fifth seconds by the 
 stop watch. Mr. Ned Kelly then filled two saddle- 
 bags from the safes and tills with notes and gold 
 valued at j 15,000. A big heavy canvas bag took 
 his fancy, and he was about to drag it along when 
 Living smilingly remarked, " Them's coppers, mis- 
 ter/' ' That be damned for a yarn," said Ned, but 
 he drew a jack knife, used for trimming his nails 
 and cutting tobacco, from his pocket, cut the bag 
 and punted pennies with his boots all over the bank 
 floor. " Come and 'av a drink," said their genial 
 host, Mr. Edward Kelly, so they left the bank to its 
 fate, disdaining to take title deeds and overdrafts, 
 loans and advances, and crossed the road to the 
 
 76
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 public house. Dan Kelly and Byrne had rounded up 
 every man, woman and child in the village and put 
 them in the pub. The police had been given some 
 tucker and beer and were left in the lock up. They 
 missed all the fun that day. 
 
 Just as the gang entered the hotel corridor, Dan 
 Kelly had drawn a bead with his gun on the publican 
 who had suggested that Daniel was tipsy. Ned threw 
 his brother's rifle up and the bullet was shot into the 
 ceiling instead of through Boniface. One shearer 
 had a concertina and another a riddle, so the bar room 
 was cleared and everybody danced. The Messrs. 
 Kelly generously bought drinks for all hands, most 
 generously and frequently, and by noon both cellar 
 and bar were empty of anything to drink. Living 
 managed to slip out the back door over to the bank 
 stable, got his horse and rode like Steve Donoghue, 
 Tod Sloan and Frank Dempsey, not gracefully but 
 very fast, towards Deniliquin to break the news. 
 When he reached the telegraph office his favourite 
 prad fell down dead. He bought it as a colt for 
 five pounds. Very bravely Ted pushed on with the 
 good work, took the first train for Melbourne, and 
 turned up at ten o'clock precisely next morning before 
 one Walsh, the inspector of the Bank of New South 
 Wales in Melbourne armed with a huge red and yellow 
 carpet bag. Walsh, without looking up said, " What's 
 that for," and Living brazenly replied, " Want more." 
 " More what ? " said Walsh. " Cash," hinted Ted. 
 " Mr. Kelly took the lot on Sunday." " Oh, did he," 
 said Walsh, and without taking breath, said, " Mr. 
 Living, why are you absent from your branch without 
 leave ? ' Of course the newspapers had answered 
 that for Ted. However, old Walsh said, " Go back 
 at once to Jerilderie by the noon train." Then he 
 relaxed, and Ted and I spent a joyous night with the 
 lads of the village (and some of the lassies) telling 
 
 77
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 about the vile and rude behaviour of the Kelly gang 
 in collaring fifteen thousand of the " best," mixed 
 and all that it was. Ned Kelly gave Living an account 
 of his life written in his own blood. This we tried 
 to sell to the Melbourne newspapers, but the best 
 offer by Sam Winter of the Melbourne " Herald " 
 was only five pounds, so Living kept the MS. which 
 was afterwards lost by a friend. Tartleton was so 
 angry with Walsh's harsh reception that he resigned 
 from the bank. By midnight on Tuesday neither 
 Ted's halo or mine fitted nicely, but we both agreed 
 the Kelly gang ought to have made the event a 
 quarterly affair. 
 
 When the popular Kelly gang of bushrangers were 
 successfully dodging the Victorian police, the banks 
 took more than ordinary care not to be stuck up. In 
 the tiny branch at Corop where I was, we were fur- 
 nished with ancient pistols and one hundred cartridges 
 each with elaborate instructions how to load and fire 
 them. Mine were all used to shoot swans in Lake 
 Cooper, and I felt safe as a marksman because Ned 
 Kelly was three times as big as a black swan. The 
 north-eastern district of Victoria was the Kelly's 
 stronghold and the Oxley branch of the Bank of 
 Victoria was an isolated outpost in Kelly land. There 
 was a staff of four, one being a new junior from head 
 office, called Gaff George, who was eager to shoot 
 a Kelly or two to get the rewards. An old gentleman 
 named Lane, a director of the bank, senile and 
 nervous, visited the Oxley office to inspect the 
 strategic plans laid down for shooting and catching 
 (preferably shooting) the desperadoes Ned and Dan 
 Kelly, Steve Hart and Steve Byrne. Old Lane 
 rehearsed the staff in the manoeuvres to be followed 
 when the Kellys called, which by the way they didn't. 
 ' You, Mr. Wallis, will stay in the manager's room 
 and on the first alarm will aim through the door at the 
 
 78
 
 BANKS AND BANKERS 
 
 easiest object." ' You, Mr. Sutherland, the teller, 
 will drop on your knees directly Mr. Edward Kelly 
 enters the front door, seize the revolver provided by 
 head office, and kill Kelly without delay ; then you 
 will run out to the stable, mount your grey horse 
 (for which the bank allows you twenty pounds a year 
 fodder allowance) and ride swiftly to Oxley for the 
 police." ' You, Mr. Williams (the ledger-keeper) 
 when you notice Mr. Daniel Kelly pointing his rifle 
 at you, you will instantly fall to the floor of the ledger 
 desk and shoot him without wasting time." " And 
 you, Mr. George, will take your weapon from the 
 drawer and aim at Mr. Byrne or Mr. Hart, whoever 
 may first appear. I trust you are practising marksman- 
 ship assiduously, Mr. George, and you know it is 
 your duty to protect the bank's property." They went 
 through the defensive action several times, but the 
 last time GafF George, who stuttered badly was 
 choking inwardly. Old Lane said, " And now, Mr. 
 George, when the Kellys enter the bank chambers, 
 what will you be doing ? " " Well, Mr. Lane, I 
 really think I would be still sitting on my stool making 
 a mess of things." Poor young George was trans- 
 ferred to Head Office for want of respect to a senior 
 officer, and the Kellys never called. 
 
 COMMERCIAL BANK 
 
 When this bank failed in 1893 ^ should have stayed 
 shut. It was in a most awfully putrid state, for out 
 of 13,000,000 of assets only about 2,000,000 was 
 realizable. The bank was able to reopen because 
 under its scheme of reconstruction the Supreme Court 
 allowed it to annex 2,000,000 worth of customers' 
 deposits and turn them into preference shares at 
 4 per cent. The ordinary capital left from the wreck 
 was only 95,619, and the lucky holders of ordinary 
 shares were so protected by an unjust scheme of 
 
 79
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 reconstruction that they now draw the bulk of the 
 profits. For many years the ordinary shares hung 
 round 4^. because no dividends could be paid till 
 the old debts of the bank were completely cleared 
 off. Now they are 335. and within three years four 
 issues of these los. ordinaries have been made and 
 nothing has been done to increase the dividends of 
 the preference shares, whose money was taken from 
 them by force. I was nominal plaintiff in a case 
 brought against the directors to stop them paying 
 dividends on ordinaries. We lost the case although 
 Sir William Irvine, C.J., and Justice Mann, then 
 leaders of the Bar, presented our arguments mag- 
 nificently well. 
 
 80
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MINES AND MINING. STOCK EXCHANGE. 
 OIL QUEST 
 
 THIS is the proper place to tell the story of how one 
 great gold-mining fortune was begun. Naturally I 
 was a fine baby, and as there was no need to drink 
 typhoid water, I throve mightily. We lived in a 
 small bluestone bank building near the Bendigo 
 Creek, and George Lansell, the Quartz King, started 
 making soap and candles in Forest Street, behind the 
 Oriental, New South Wales and Union Banks. He 
 made a villainous smell and my mamma thought the 
 rank compound would affect my health, so she 
 persuaded papa to get the other bank managers to 
 join the Bank of Victoria in buying Lansell out and 
 tearing his soap works down. He took one thousand 
 pounds cash and put the money into the Adventure 
 and Advance Mine, struck it rich till he gathered 
 two million pounds from his mining and put them 
 for " safety first " in Government and municipal 
 debentures. If he had made only highly scented 
 soaps he might never have gone into quartz mining. 
 Lansell had an overdraft in the Bank of Victoria just 
 before he struck gold in the Garden Gully United 
 Tribute Companies. Head Office told my father 
 to call up the account against his wishes. He gave 
 Lansell a fortnight's grace and gold was struck in 
 two of the shafts during the period. Within twelve 
 months Lansell took 200,000 of gold out of those 
 tributes and paid off and closed his account. Six 
 months later he showed my dad a twelve months' 
 deposit receipt of the Union Bank for 125,000. 
 
 81
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 J. B. Watson was another lucky digger. From 
 the Kent Mines he won twelve tons of gold worth 
 4.00,000 from between the 300 and 500 levels. 
 Altogether J. B. Watson made and left a fortune of 
 nearly two million pounds made quickly and invested 
 shrewdly in Melbourne city property. The sight 
 of nine little Watson boys and girls and nine little 
 Meudells marching like eighteen Christian soldiers 
 hand in hand to the Rev. Dr. Nish's Scotch kirk in 
 Bendigo must have afforded plenty of fun to the 
 angels above. The first big cheque I ever saw when 
 I was a bank " pig-boy " on the exchanges was for 
 25,000 signed by J. B. Watson for a mortgage over 
 Billy Heffernan's Shamrock Hotel, Bendigo. The 
 signature looked like a sketch of a hot-water radiator. 
 Barnet Lazarus, a quartz miner who owned the two 
 Lazarus gold mines at New Chum, did well and left 
 80,000. He killed himself by doing his own retort- 
 ing and inhaling quicksilver fumes from the amalgam. 
 Old Barnet should have allowed somebody else to do 
 the retorting or ought to have worn a glass mask. 
 My father was his executor and when Dan Lazarus 
 came of age seven years later the estate was worth 
 1 20,000, or ,40,000 each to Sam, Abe and Dan 
 Lazarus. For doing that Sam and Dan each gave 
 my father 50, and Abe sent him a letter of thanks 
 from London without any enclosure. 
 
 STOCK EXCHANGE, COLLINS STREET BUILDING 
 
 In 1887, j ust as tne Broken Hill boom was failing 
 and fading away, the committee of the Stock Exchange 
 of Melbourne allowed itself to be swayed by that 
 arch land boomer, B. J. Fink, then a member of 
 committee. B. J. persuaded them to buy from some 
 obscure land syndicate the land opposite the existing 
 Stock Exchange then housed in a tumble-down 
 building owned by Messieurs Miller (Ted, Sep and 
 
 82
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 Albert) and now belonging to the Commonwealth 
 Bank. The Mercantile Exchange, a first-class news- 
 paper and advertising concern owned by H. Byron 
 Moore, W. H. Waddell, and J. E. Gilchrist occupied 
 the hall in front, and the Stock Exchange sessions 
 were held in a ramshackle, dark, stuffy room at 
 the back. Most of the trading was done in a small 
 vestibule, ten feet by eighteen feet, opening into 
 Collins Street. Seats on the Exchange had sold up 
 to 2,500 and the committee thinking the boom was 
 first cousin to perpetual motion lost their heads, 
 bought the land from the E.S.A.C. bank and erected 
 a fool of a building for an Exchange which cost them 
 280,000 and kept the Stock Exchange dog-poor 
 for the same time nearly as it took Moses to cross the 
 desert with the children of Israel, about forty years. 
 The A.M.P. Society lost a lot of money on the "mort- 
 gage " as B. J. Fink used to call that form of security. 
 The purchase of the land was a wrong deed and the 
 erection of a costly, dark, dull building was a pure 
 act of treason to the members. Later I helped to 
 save the Stock Exchange Building Company a big 
 sum of money. The Australian Property Company 
 had bought the old E.S. and A. Bank at the corner 
 of Flinders Lane and Elizabeth and pulled it down 
 and started a fifteen-story building before they had 
 arranged for the money to finish the job ! That was 
 one of the maddest things done in the mad boom 
 era by a board of the city's leading men. They 
 tempted me with a salary of 1600 a year to take 
 the managership of their company, and I told them 
 money could only be raised in London to finish the 
 Australian Building and pay off the bank overdraft. 
 I raised 400,00 for the Australian Property Com- 
 pany in London and got no thanks and worse still no 
 brokerage ! A safe deposit had been ordered from 
 Milner and Company of Manchester and a deposit 
 
 83
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 of 1000 paid. Part of the strong room was packed 
 and about to be shipped. Promptly I forfeited the 
 deposit, paid Milner's another 1000, and they can- 
 celled the contract. That action of mine saved the 
 Stock Exchange Safe Deposit from failure and its 
 profits kept the Building Company alive for many 
 years. 
 
 BROWN COAL 
 
 Away back in the pre-smash days when banks 
 burst wide open and overdrafts were closed with a 
 click I became interested in brown coal, its uses and 
 its possibilities. My handbook and vade-mecum 
 was the parliamentary report of the Royal Coal 
 Commission of 1891. My brother, William Grant 
 Meudell, was the pioneer of the Morwell brown 
 coalfields now called Yallourn. We were interested 
 in several boring and mining companies and for 
 many years shepherded brown coal areas in Gipps- 
 land, so as not to be out of it when brown coal was 
 making fortunes for everybody interested in it. I 
 became obsessed with ideas of its potential value, 
 and as I was making pots of money in those boomy 
 days I spent some on a trip to Europe to see brown 
 coal mines for myself. In Germany, Austria, Bel- 
 gium and France I saw brown coal being mined and 
 used raw and in briquette form. That was thirty-six 
 years ago, and to-day the Yallourn people are pottering 
 round on the fringe of the science of using brown 
 coal and are still throwing money away in a tinpot 
 shed at Fitzroy, called a research laboratory, in a 
 futile attempt to find out what the Germans have 
 known and been using for fifty years ! What a 
 funny farce the history of brown coal in Victoria has 
 been, played by oafs and officials still in their pupilage. 
 The drill has located thirty thousand million tons 
 of brown coal in Gippsland of varying calorific value, 
 
 84
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 and the brown coal industry is still in the experimental 
 stage ! Another trip I made out to London to form 
 a company to work the big brown coal deposit on 
 George Chirnside's Werribee Park. I formed one 
 of the strangest syndicates ever collected in London, 
 headed by the powerful A. E.G. Company, or General 
 Electric Company of Berlin to put up or lay down 
 half a million pounds to open a brown coalfield to 
 supply electricity from Laverton to Melbourne. 
 Directly Thomas Tait appointed C. H. Merz as 
 consulting electrician to the railway department my 
 syndicate declined to go ahead and the project failed. 
 Thereby I lost what is known on 'Change as a wad of 
 money. C. H. Merz has drawn from the Victorian 
 Railways Department 221,000 in fees and com- 
 missions for reports and consultations. Some of 
 that might have been mine. ' Tidapa," as they say 
 in Malaya, ' Why worry ? " I missed another 
 fortune. That's all, well " Nitchevo," it doesn't 
 matter. Altona is a much better brown coal body 
 than Yallourn and is only ten miles from Melbourne 
 compared with ninety to Yallourn. Ultimately 
 Yallourn will be abandoned and Altona will be 
 operated to supply drier brown coal and cheaper 
 electricity at half the cost. There are splendid possi- 
 bilities in the brown coal deposits near Adelaide, 
 South Australia, and near Welshpool, Victoria. 
 
 STOCK EXCHANGE 
 
 The Broken Hill Silver Boom was just reaching its 
 climacteric when William Knox suggested I should 
 join the Stock Exchange and do his business and that 
 of his most intimate friends of the Broken Hill crowd. 
 These half-dozen big shareholders and directors 
 formed a syndicate called the Barrier Ranges Associa- 
 tion, and I was given most of their orders. Knox 
 gave me 2000 to buy my Exchange seat, and I 
 
 o 85
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 had 2000 of my own to open an account with the 
 Bank of Australasia. The first day I took 200 in 
 commissions and at the second session I lost 50 
 by buying 100 Central Broken Hills instead of selling 
 them. In three months I paid my debt to William 
 Knox and record this action of his as by far the 
 kindest I have experienced in life. He was an 
 exceedingly able man despite certain idiosyncrasies 
 and his intuitive knowledge of psychology enabled 
 him to select as his lieutenants to handle the extensive 
 and growing business arising from the creation of the 
 silver mining industry, such able men of high character 
 and sound sense as Alfred Mellor, Thomas Rollason, 
 John Brandon, Colin Templeton, F. M. Dickenson, 
 James Campbell, John Bristow, C. L. Hewitt, and 
 many others who were attached to the powerful 
 Broken Hill organization from the very outset. On 
 two occasions I went to London with Mr. Knox and 
 acted as his secretary in connection with his missions 
 on behalf of the Broken Hill Proprietary and the 
 Mount Lyell Railway Mining Company. 
 
 When I joined the Stock Exchange silver mining 
 was proceeding vigorously in Zeehan, Dundas, Whyte 
 River and other fields on the west coast of Tasmania, 
 where 44 companies were being worked. In 1891, 
 1 68 gold mining companies were operating : 
 
 Bendigo ... ... ... ... 84 
 
 Ballarat ... ... ... ... 21 
 
 Smeaton and C res wick ... ... ... 10 
 
 Timor (Duke group of mines) ... ... 5 
 
 Miscellaneous in a dozen Victorian districts ... 36 
 
 Now South Wales and Queensland Gold Mines 1 2 
 
 1 68 
 
 If it had not been for the gold mining industry 
 Victoria would have disrupted and gone to pot for 
 
 86
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 twenty-five years, and when I hear imported Governors, 
 modern Members of Parliament and Pommy visitors 
 of more or less distinction talking disparagingly of 
 mining, one cannot help sneering, laughing and 
 gibing at them and all such ignorant people. Amongst 
 the New South Wales gold companies were two in 
 which we had " corners " Bear Hill, Hillgrove and 
 Earl of Hopetoun. A " corner " is a most amusing 
 and highly exciting event in a Stock Exchange. I 
 took part in four of them, the other two being Round 
 Hill Silver Company at Broken Hill and Duke of 
 York Company at Meredith. A " corner " is not 
 played like golf, or Mah Jong, or croquet, or rounders, 
 it is not nearly as simple and stupid as these games, 
 but vastly funnier. The plan is to form a syndicate 
 to buy, take off the market and put in a Safe Deposit 
 box all the scrip possible up to more than half the 
 register. Then the market price is put up and down 
 and sometimes over sideways to encourage the inno- 
 cent to " spec-sell " or " bear " them. When the 
 mug speculators (the world is full of them, for they 
 are born at the rate of ten a minute all the time) are 
 well and truly over-sold and the last scrip certificate 
 has been imprisoned, the price is steadily bid up to 
 an impossible and false value and held there. Notices 
 to deliver scrip at once are sent to every broker who 
 is over sold and he has to go to the syndicate, confess 
 he has sinned, and pay whatever the syndicate chooses 
 to exact. When Tommy Arnfield, once a butcher 
 boy in Bendigo, cornered Duke of York shares, several 
 brokers came to him crying to be let off, and being 
 an ex-slaughterman, and therefore pained to see 
 tears, Tommy compounded for merely nominal 
 prices and the corner was gradually dissolved. There 
 were 200,000 shares in Bear Hills and J. S. Vickery, 
 one of the very shrewdest brokers we ever had, 
 made up his mind the register was too large to
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 " corner." It wasn't and Vickery had to pay up, it 
 was said 10,000, to be released from his bargains. 
 Fitzgerald Moore, another brainy member, an engineer 
 by profession, engineered the Round Hill " corner " 
 and squeezed extremely able and crafty members like 
 G. W. Staples, Tom Luxton, C. Von Arnheim and 
 others. The Earl of Hopetoun corner was worked 
 on a commission by an outside broker, Colonel 
 Alfred Wilson, who afterwards distinguished himself 
 in the Boer War. It was only a small affair. It is 
 surprising some of the present generation of share- 
 holders don't plan a corner just for the fun of the 
 thing. None of them have the courage of the old 
 gold-mining crowd, like Jimmy Taylor, M. B. 
 Jenkins, J. R. Rippin, Arthur Sprague, Dev. Call, 
 Dave Green way, Tommy Luxton, or J. B. Simmons. 
 These old diehards never took the trouble to teach 
 the young eagles to fly, so these young eagles do 
 not live in eyries. They are content to live in hen 
 coops and make $s. commission out of bonds and 
 debentures. There have been no great men on the 
 Stock Exchange since Agammemnon. The shouting 
 that once tore open hell's concave has died down, 
 and the din and dash of conflict for speculative stocks 
 has passed into the limbo of oblivion. G. W. Staples 
 was a truly great operator, full of knowledge about 
 every stock, primed with early news from every mine 
 of importance in Australia, and quicker than light- 
 ning or radio in acting. Staples was a king amongst 
 share dealers. He would quote a buying and selling 
 price for almost any active stock, and he was a god- 
 send and a fountain of blessings to a commission 
 broker like myself who had a host of small clients' 
 orders to transact. Staples took 30,000 Commodore 
 Vanderbilts from me one night at market price i$s. 
 and had sold them all by next evening at up to jCi. 
 He thought nothing of buying any number of Broken 
 
 88
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 Hills up to lOjOOO, and some of my best bargains 
 were made with him privately because Staples was an 
 honourable gentleman and dealt justly. He left 
 Melbourne for the London Stock Exchange when at 
 his zenith, and has never been replaced either as an 
 operator or as a creator of business. Another splendid 
 operator was Bill Clark, of Clark and Robinson, who 
 was talented in feeling the course of the market. 
 The broker with the best nose for a good or a bad 
 market was Billy Jones who learnt sharebroking at 
 Ballarat, where he failed three times. Like Clark, 
 Jones drifted to London after he made his pile. 
 Then there was Harry Karlbaum who joined the 
 Melbourne Stock Exchange from Adelaide, and 
 being possessed of high courage cut a fortune out of 
 the timid speculators, whose name is legion. 
 
 The gradual decline in prices on the Stock Exchange 
 between end of 1889 and 1892 cast its shadow 
 before the fiasco of 1893. Here are the figures 
 showing the total shrinkages in each section in 1892 : 
 
 L 
 
 Six Banks ... ... ... 4,500,000 
 
 Banking & Financial Institutions ... 8,500,000 
 
 Melbourne & Silverton Tram Co. ... 8,500,000 
 
 Breweries ... ... ... 1,000,000 
 
 Metropolitan Gas Co. ... ... 1,000,000 
 
 Miscellaneous Companies ... ... 2,500,000 
 
 Building Societies ... ... ... 4,000,000 
 
 Davies' family group of Companies . . . 3,500,000 
 
 Broken Hill Silver Companies ... 3,000,000 
 
 36,500,000 
 
 As an illustration, Goldsborough, Mort and Com- 
 pany ji paid shares fell to 2J., although the last 
 dividend in 1891 was 10 per cent. Goldsboroughs 
 
 89
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 owed 2,599,382 on debentures A and B issues. 
 A friend of mine bought B debentures 100 paid, 
 in quantities at 40 through me and held them for 
 a fortune. In January, 1892, the shares of coal, 
 brick, and coffee palace companies were unsaleable, 
 and thereby 1,273,802 of paid-up capital was tied 
 up and became fixed and unfruitful. Fortunately 
 gold mining was active in Bendigo, Ballarat, Smeaton 
 and Creswick, Timor and all over Victoria. This 
 table ought to be recorded for sake of permanence. 
 
 The following figures from a circular I posted 
 broadcast in April, 1896, gives a faint idea of how 
 bare land was used to make scrip as gambling counters 
 and then boomed by bad men like myself. These 
 leases were all " weaners " to the Mount Lyell 
 Company, and most of them have since been absorbed 
 by the big company and have produced payable 
 copper ore : 
 
 Shares Market Market value 
 Company. Issued. Price. of Mine. 
 
 North Mount Lyell ... 600 *45 87,000 
 
 Lyell Consols ... 100,000 12/6 62,500 
 
 Mount Lyell Extended... 600 90 45>ooo 
 
 Lyell Pioneers ... 3,ooo 8/5/0 24,750 
 
 Lyell Blocks . . . 50,000 8 /- 20,000 
 
 Lyell Tharsis ... 24,000 io/- 12,000 
 
 Tasman Lyells ... 30,000 9/6 14,250 
 
 Melbourne Tramway Company shares was a 
 stock very cleverly worked by those in control. By 
 a successive series of " watering " the stock, that is 
 by giving shareholders the right to apply for new 
 shares at a price under the market price, and by 
 increasing dividends to boost prices. Trams were 
 put up to 8 5-f. for the i share, paid up to ics. with 
 IQS. uncalled. It was the most brilliant sequence of 
 attractive coups ever employed on the Stock Exchange 
 
 90
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 of Melbourne. The business done throughout the 
 land boom for nearly ten years in Melbourne Tram 
 shares was literally enormous. Tens of thousands of 
 pounds were put into the 960,000 shares that were 
 issued from time to time out of 2,000,000 authorized. 
 At 8 a share, Trams were once worth 7,680,000 
 on the market, a simply fabulous price and rotten to 
 the core. Hundreds of people were ruined when 
 the shares fell away to 8j., and at no time in the 
 career of this spectacular stock were they ever worth 
 more than i. The company was well managed by 
 F. G. Clapp, H. A. Wilcox and W. G. Sprigg. The 
 latter died in 1926 leaving 100,000. In 1893 in 
 the land boom Sprigg made a composition with his 
 creditors for 150,172 at 4^. in the i. 
 
 BROKEN HILL 
 
 Towards the^ close of the land boom other stocks 
 besides those connected with land dealing suffered 
 depreciation, mainly because holders wanted cash, 
 therefore gold and silver mining shares were flung 
 on the market. During the month of March, 1890, 
 the depreciation in the values of nine leading silver 
 mining companies was over five million pounds ! 
 It suited me very well because I had just got home 
 from out in London and had found splendid agents 
 interested purely in Australian stocks on the London 
 Stock Exchange. The pioneer of the business of 
 selling Australian shares in London was the late 
 F. W. Prell, a Melbourne merchant, who very 
 cleverly used Australian scrip to pay his London 
 obligations and made profits on his local purchase 
 of shares. The first sharebroker to sell Australian 
 shares of all sorts in London was myself, and when 
 the banks broke I bought bank deposit receipts in a 
 big way chiefly in Scotland. The winter climate in 
 
 9 1
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 London prevented me joining the Stock Exchange 
 there, and several offers of partnership were made to 
 me because of my special and intimate knowledge of 
 Australian companies. Had I stayed in London 
 I could easily have made a fortune quickly for that 
 reason. 
 
 Three good things did I do on the Stock Exchange. 
 I proposed that the Exchange should endeavour to 
 secure that a proportion, if not the whole, of every 
 Government, Metropolitan Board of Works, and all 
 other public and municipal loans should be floated in 
 Melbourne. My resolution was opposed in the 
 room, the only supporter being a man of wide vision, 
 E. Millard, an old Ballarat broker. My reason for 
 proposing such a radical change was that I had 
 happened to be in London when E. G. Fitzgibbon, 
 chairman of the Melbourne Board of Works, was 
 negotiating in Throgmorton Street. I heard a 
 conversation between two leading bond brokers who 
 openly and laughingly told me they were going to 
 squeeze Fitzgibbon, who was a new chum in London 
 and green at the loan raising game. They made him 
 pay 4 per cent and sell the loan at 98. The money 
 could have been got much more cheaply and with 
 less expense for brokerage, etc., in Melbourne. The 
 next Board loan was raised by the Melbourne Stock 
 Exchange, and the custom of local loans was thereby 
 established, and had grown to large dimensions. 
 Nobody ever gave me any money or thanks or flowers 
 for my idea. Another, the third, of my schemes 
 beneficial to the Stock Exchange was the establish- 
 ment of the system of arbitrage in shares between 
 Australia and London. During one of my numerous 
 visits to London I made arrangements with a leading 
 firm of stock brokers to send them daily orders to 
 sell shares in the principal Australian companies on 
 the London Stock Exchange. The first stock we 
 
 92
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 dealt with was Broken Hill Proprietary Company, 
 which at that time had no London office. The object 
 was to buy the shares here in a quiet market and cable 
 a selling order to London at a price above Melbourne 
 value. Gradually we enlarged the number of stocks 
 by offering Metropolitan Gas, Melbourne and Silver- 
 ton Trams, and occasionally a few Mount Morgan 
 shares. The business was most profitable and we 
 never made any loss, because we got from 5^. to los. 
 a share above the buying price here. When Mount 
 Lyells came on the list we did a roaring trade before 
 the London register was opened, an action in which 
 I was personally interested, being in London at the 
 time. Mr. F. W. Prell, the remarkably clever Mel- 
 bourne merchant, was in the field before me using 
 Australian shares to settle his exchange transactions 
 in London and New York. That is to say, he sold 
 shares at a profit in London to meet drafts on time 
 for goods. Another scheme of much importance 
 to the Stock Exchange was suggested to my friend, 
 F. T. Derham, then Postmaster-General of Victoria. 
 In 1 889 in Berlin I noticed and made use of the " rohr- 
 post," a system of sending letters and telegrams by 
 pneumatic tube across the city. These tubes, now 
 universal, were not at that time used in any other 
 city, because I made inquiries at post offices in Paris, 
 London and New York and elsewhere. Mr. Derham, 
 who was a splendid business man, and then the active 
 head of Swallow and Ariell, one of the world's greatest 
 biscuit manufacturers, seized my suggestion, and the 
 first pneumatic tube between the Stock Exchange 
 building, then about to be opened, was laid to the 
 G.P.O. in Elizabeth Street. It has been a great 
 convenience, and has saved much time in despatching 
 sharebroker's telegrams. For that discovery I got 
 neither reward nor thanks. Later on F. M. Dickenson, 
 my partner on the Stock Exchange, and I placed 
 
 93
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 before the Post Office Department an option I had 
 secured from the Exchange Telegraph Company of 
 London to establish a " ticker " system of sending 
 quotations and news by tape from the Stock Exchange 
 all over the city. Our offer was turned down flat by 
 the Post Office authorities and I lost a good commission. 
 Hon. W. A. Zeal, M.L.C., an ex-railway contractor, 
 was Postmaster-General, and being ignorant of the 
 use and value of the tape machine for the quick 
 distribution of news, he sneered at the idea and turned 
 us down. Zeal bossed the Legislative Council of 
 Victoria for many years. He was as aggressive as a 
 bull-ant and could bite as keenly. 
 
 Mr. William Knox, first secretary, then director, 
 of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, a life- 
 long friend of mine, suggested I should join the Stock 
 Exchange, and offered to pay for a seat. With his 
 powerful influence I was elected a member on the 
 1 5th January, 1890, and paid 2000 for my seat. 
 B. R. Harris, a son-in-law of Mark Moss, a well- 
 known city moneylender, paid 2500 just afterwards 
 and holds the belt for the record price. There are 
 129 seats on the Stock Exchange of Melbourne and 
 only enough business for 29 members. Until the 
 Exchange is reorganized the value of the seats will 
 never reach 2500 again. The members will not 
 employ or pay agents, touts, or runners to create 
 orders for them, according to the custom of every 
 Stock Exchange outside Australia, and consequently 
 their business is small and circumscribed and the total 
 done is contemptible. About ten big firms do 90 per 
 cent of the business while 119 members sit round 
 and watch them doing it. It is a purely farcical 
 and nonsensical state of affairs. So I joined the 
 Stock Exchange and went through several years of 
 exciting, tense work, seeing fortunes made and lost, 
 and men made poor by dabbling in the market. I 
 
 94
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 discovered the first sound principle of speculation to 
 be that success awaits the man who is not always 
 speculating, but who watches his chance in one 
 stock either to buy or to sell, and preferably to sell or 
 to " bear " it. Money can be made on the Stock 
 Exchange only in this way. Take one stock at a time. 
 Never attempt to juggle with three or four, or thirteen 
 or fourteen as some gamblers do so foolishly. Not 
 once did I observe a man make money on the Stock 
 Exchange who was interested in numerous stocks 
 at one time. The fool who thinks he can win every 
 time with any stock he fancies, invariably ends by 
 losing his money and frequently by being bankrupted. 
 The sensible gambler, and there are very few of this 
 species, learns everything he can about one stock, 
 gets the best expert advice about it and then acts 
 or does not. Most people buy and sell shares on 
 straight tips, street tips, advice from brokers holding 
 the shares themselves, or they are influenced by 
 newspaper information, which is generally carefully 
 prepared for the public by those who control the 
 company. Another sound principle to be laid down 
 for investing, is never to buy bank shares or shares 
 in any company liable to calls. My experience has 
 been that most prudent investors avoided bank shares 
 as being too risky. At the end of the land boom 
 came a very iliad of woes, a train of disasters. In 
 that day I cast my idols to the bats and moles. The 
 banking crisis and collapse followed closely on the 
 heels of the obliteration of the building societies with 
 which Melbourne was engorged. These societies 
 were generally managed and directed by men without 
 any financial knowledge of monetary training, and 
 they were the easy prey of sharp land and estate 
 agents, jerry builders and land boomers. A building 
 society can only succeed under the most careful 
 management and by keeping closely to the business 
 
 95
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 of lending money to bona fide house-holders and 
 repelling speculators as borrowers. During the 
 debacle an opportunity occurred of reducing the 
 number of banks, and several of them should have been 
 wiped out ruthlessly. A mistaken sympathy was 
 exercised and several dangerous institutions were 
 permitted to exist. Through avoiding dealing in 
 bank shares and land bank scrip I got through the 
 tumult for 2 IQJ. calls due on Real Estate Bank 
 shares. That was all the money I lost as a share- 
 broker after the smash. 
 
 Two of my best exploits were working on the 
 Stock Exchange for the issue of local loans, and 
 going to London to arrange to export scrip from the 
 Australian market to the London. There were very 
 few other share brokers in that business then, and 
 there were no Baillieu's, or Robinson Clark's in 
 the game. I did very well and ought to have stuck 
 to the buying of shares in Melbourne and selling 
 them by cable in London the same day. I have 
 made as much as IQJ. a share on Melbourne Trams, 
 Mount Lyells and Silverton Trams, and occasionally 
 did better even than that. Cabling was costly and I 
 had a specially fine code by which I have sent as many 
 as eighty-five words by one message at a cost of IGJ. 
 I found one Queensland broker in London doing a 
 roaring trade in Australian scrip. He made 100,000 
 in three years and foolishly started " punting " stocks 
 on his own account and lost it all. Am still hoping to 
 see the day when Australian borrowing in London 
 will be restricted and when all loans, old and new, 
 will be raised in the Commonwealth. There is a 
 silly craze nowadays to try and build Rome, meaning 
 Australia, in two or three years. Slow growth is 
 sound growth. 
 
 Though many hundreds of competencies have 
 been made out of mines, and though gold mining 
 
 96
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 is the quickest of all methods of making a fortune, 
 most of the big fortunes of Australia have been made 
 by corruption and chicanery. The public, meaning 
 the small investor, gets no consideration when it 
 comes to scuttling a mine to buy in cheaply after 
 a drop, or in the other usual instance, where the reef 
 is " covered up " till the persons in control have 
 secured enough shares cheaply. An old gold miner 
 I met years after the coup of his life told me he had 
 covered up a rich reef successfully when a great mine 
 was on its last legs for working capital. He did not 
 report his find and the mine was closed down. Ten 
 years later he got possession of the mine, uncovered 
 the gold reef and in a short time made 50,000. 
 Another Bendigo miner after firing a shot uncovered 
 a quartz reef that looked like a jeweller's shop. He 
 quickly concealed it with mullock, crawled slowly 
 to the shaft, signalled for the cage, and with both 
 hands on his stomach told the underground boss 
 he had a bad attack of dysentery and must go home. 
 There he put on his Sunday suit of broad-cloth, 
 went to the Beehive, where the Stock Exchange met, 
 and through his broker bought thousands of the shares 
 in the Great Extended Hustlers which very shortly 
 soared from is. 6d. to 7 IOJ. He invested most of 
 his winnings in a big terrace of houses which the 
 ribald and the under-bred brokers named Diarrhoea 
 Terrace. He lost all his money on the Stock Exchange 
 and died in poverty. 
 
 MOUNT LYELL DEBENTURE ISSUE 
 
 When the Mount Lyell mine had been fully 
 opened up and proved it had no capital left for develop- 
 ment, William Knox took an office in St. Swithin's 
 Lane, London, right opposite the iron gates leading 
 into New Court and Rothschild's Bank. There I 
 acted as his secretary and as pro tern, secretary of the 
 
 97
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Mount Lyell Company. Knox's visit was to raise 
 money either by shares or by debentures to build a 
 railway from Strahan to Mount Lyell and to erect 
 treatment works. The Rothschilds called in J. Hays 
 Hammond, an American mining engineer of much 
 tonnage and high status. Knox went confidently to 
 the conference which lasted half an hour. He offered 
 50,000 Mount Lyell shares at 3 their face value, 
 a proposal quickly turned down when somebody 
 held up a cable from Melbourne quoting the shares 
 the day before at 27 s. So that settled that. Hays 
 Hammond was unfriendly towards the mine's pros- 
 pects although he admitted that Dr. E. D. Peter's 
 report was technically sound. He would not listen 
 to any debenture scheme and advised further prospect- 
 ing to find another rich pipe of ore in the mine like 
 the one which the year before had yielded about 
 150,000 cash to the Mount Lyell Company. The 
 business went fut and Knox went home ill and dis- 
 appointed. George McCulloch and I saw him off 
 at Victoria railway station, London, en route to Mar- 
 seilles, and George said, " Poor old Knox ; he will 
 never reach Melbourne alive." He did, however, 
 and lived to make Mount Lyell a highly successful 
 enterprise. As with Broken Hill Proprietary, the 
 Mount Lyell mine was fortunate in having directors 
 above suspicion and thoroughly capable secretaries 
 in F. M. Dickenson and Alfred Mellor. 
 
 The Stock Exchange as the deus ex machina in the 
 drama of commerce has violent ups and downs. 
 One year business will be brisk and extensive and the 
 next year there will be nothing doing, and excepting 
 a few of the big firms, sharebrokers are idle and 
 workless. There are for too many members for the 
 volume of business, not of course all active. If the 
 Committee had bought and extinguished fifty seats 
 when the price dropped to 250, after the bank smash
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 in 1893, seats would have been worth 5000 to-day 
 instead of 1700. The chairmen from the first year 
 of the reconstructed Stock Exchange have been, 
 F. W. Howard, W. Noall, Walter Slade, Joseph 
 Thomson, R. H. Clarke, J. McWhae, W. J. Roberts 
 and Forster Woods. The best operators when I was 
 a member were G. W. Staples, Dave Thomson, 
 H. G. Evered, F. D. Call, M. B. Jenkins and myself ; 
 who they are to-day I don't know. An operator must 
 be quicker than lightning in saying, " Buy," " Sell " 
 and " Yes." It is far quicker than the bidding at a 
 wool sale. The brokers are a decent lot of men, 
 liberal in the cause of charity, and that of good fellow- 
 ship. Their best feature is the sacredness of their 
 verbal agreements. A sharebroker's word is his 
 bond and that will account for good unto him in the 
 hell where most of them generally go. 
 
 MINES 
 
 Captain Charles Sturt, the Australian explorer, 
 found Broken Hill in 1844, and Charles Rasp, the 
 boundary rider on Mount Gipps' station, rediscovered 
 it in 1883. A mining prospector told him it was a 
 hill of mullock, that is of worthless stone. In thirty- 
 five years the "Hill of Mullock," the despised Razor- 
 back, paid in cash and share dividends 13,452,388, 
 and in wages 13,000,000 ! In 1883 a syndicate 
 formed in the house of the manager of Broken Hill, 
 George McCulloch, decided to peg out the whole of 
 the Hill of Mullock, and they finally secured seven 
 leases. They were seven poor men : Charles Rasp, 
 George McCulloch, George Urquhart, George A, W. 
 Lind, Philip Charley, David James and James Poole. 
 The original seven shares became fourteen paying 
 los. a week in calls. In 1885 the Broken Hill Pro- 
 prietary Company, Limited, was registered in 16,000 
 shares of 20 each, issued as paid up to 19. The 
 
 99
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 directors were : George McCulloch, Bowes Kelly, 
 D. W. Harvey Patterson, Kenneth E. Brodribb, 
 William Jamieson, W. A. Horn, J. W. Bakewell, 
 William R. Wilson and S. F. Hawkins. All except 
 Harvey Patterson were poor men, while he owned 
 Corona Station, covering 3,200,000 acres and carrying 
 80,000 sheep. Later on W. Knox became secretary, 
 and Duncan McBryde and W. P. MacGregor 
 directors. Through W. Knox I had the good fortune 
 to be associated with most of the big holders of the 
 Broken Hill group of mines. Never had I a better 
 friend. 
 
 BROKEN HILL THE GAME OF EUCHRE FOR A SHARE 
 
 In 1884 William Jamieson bought three shares 
 in the original syndicate which owned Broken Hill 
 for jno, jioo and 100. One night he called on 
 George McCulloch to pay him for the last share at 
 100, and found an English " new chum " named 
 " Fairie " Cox bargaining with McCulloch for one 
 of the original fourteen shares in the syndicate for 
 which McCulloch was asking 200. Cox was 
 chaffing Mac. by offering him 100. After a lot of 
 airy persiflage Cox raised his bid to 110, and 
 McCulloch stood pat for 200. Finally Cox offered 
 to play Mac. euchre whether he gave him 120 or 
 200. Mac. agreed, and the following evening the 
 historic game of euchre was played and won by 
 " Fairie " Cox, afterwards a prominent racing man 
 in London, so he bought for 120 a share that repre- 
 sented within six years on the market 1,250,000. 
 McCulloch got out of his loss by buying a share from 
 one of his station hands for 90 cash, thus making 
 30 on his game of euchre. 
 
 In 1883 the Broken Hill mine had unexpectedly 
 disclosed silver ore of an extraordinary richness, 
 and a group of Scotch back-blocksmen found them- 
 
 100
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 selves enriched by magic beyond the dreams of 
 avarice. Mile after mile on the line of lode was 
 floated into public companies, and the shares of 
 good mines and wild cats alike formed counters in 
 the terrific boom in values which ensued at the Stock 
 Exchange of Australia. In 1885 I went to the Hill 
 of Mullock, called Broken Hill, and beheld primitive 
 mining which startled me. Nobody knew anything 
 about silver mining, and the directors and managers 
 were learning their business at the expense of the 
 mines. Without exception every mine was being 
 mismanaged. Unsuitable machinery, ignorant miners, 
 wrong methods, above and below ground, and an 
 appalling want of knowledge of the value of the 
 different ores combined to make Broken Hill present 
 a pitiable picture. The Broken Hill South mine, 
 with a market value of one and three-quarters of a 
 million pounds had a shaft 80 feet deep and was 
 being worked by a man, a boy, and a horse, with a 
 whim and bucket. The 100,000 shares in this 
 company were assessed by the public at 17 los. 
 each. Wild cat mines miles north and south of the 
 Broken Hill mines had shallow shafts, neither 
 machinery nor water, and market values of anything 
 from a quarter of a million upwards. Here was a 
 chance to make money quickly, and the young 
 speculator quickly availed himself of it. I sold the 
 17 los. shares persistently, and when a lull in the 
 boom occurred covered my sales at a profit of several 
 thousand pounds. Neither in the land boom which 
 followed the Broken Hill boom nor in the Zeehan- 
 Dundas, Mount Lyell, Kalgoorlie, or Chillagoe 
 booms which came after was ever such a chance 
 offered for easily making money out of the ignorance 
 of the public then blindly following alleged leading 
 men who knew absolutely nothing about silver 
 mining. There have been booms of magnitude in 
 
 H 101
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Australia, and there will be booms of greater magnitude 
 again times without number. When mules have foals, 
 or crows turn white, it is likely such a combination 
 of enormously rich mineral deposits, stupendously 
 ignorant mining men and a stupid investing public 
 may be crystallized out of such fortuitous atoms. 
 Only one Broken Hill mining squatter, George 
 McCulloch, came solidly out of the boom, having 
 sold a quarter of a million pounds' worth of Broken 
 Hill shares at their highest and bought pictures of 
 great artists who were in delicate health. Death 
 doubles picture values, and the crossing of the Stygian 
 ferry by celebrated painters made McCulloch's collec- 
 tion one of the most valuable in London. The day 
 before Vicat Cole, the famous English landscape 
 painter, died, George McCulloch bought every one 
 of Cole's pictures held by the art dealers and auctioneers 
 and of course they doubled in value soon afterwards. 
 
 MINING 
 
 One of the closest shaves I ever had of making 
 a shocking lot of money quickly was when William 
 Macmurtrie, brother-in-law of William Knox, brought 
 to my office John Godkin, the prospector, who dis- 
 covered the Hampden Copper lode at Cloncurry, 
 Queensland. Godkin had pegged out three leases 
 and we went quietly to work and formed three small 
 syndicates among three groups of the leading men 
 of Melbourne. David Syme of the " Age " was the 
 chief of one syndicate, Malcolm MacEacharn of the 
 second, and Alfred Tolhurst, a sharebroker, brought 
 his friends into the third. The three syndicates were 
 formed and the money paid within three days. We 
 had overlooked William Knox and the mighty 
 Broken Hill crowd in picking our shareholders, so 
 mark, lo ! and behold, next week a telegram was 
 published from H. H. Schlapp in Cloncurry advising 
 
 102
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 Knox that " much work had to be done before the 
 extent of the lode could be known," which was 
 obvious as everybody knew. Yet one after another 
 of the investors " cray-fished " out of the ventures, 
 and we had to return their money ! The Hampden 
 mine proved to be a great copper producer, and all 
 the best ore came out of our three blocks ! What 
 do you know about that ? 
 
 Recollect two occasions when I made a lot of money 
 by going down mines to see for myself. Once the 
 late A. E. Wallis of the Bank of Victoria and I went 
 to inspect the Cordillera Mine, west of Goulbourn, 
 New South Wales. We hired a light buggy and pair 
 of horses and drove them hard and fast to the mine, 
 shares in which were 7 IQJ. We arrived in time to 
 go through the mine with the night shift and con- 
 cluded the amount of work done and the ore in sight 
 did not justify the price. We went back to the rough 
 bush pub, took two beds just vacated by two miners 
 on night shift, tied our pyjama legs and arms with 
 string to keep out the pulex, and slept like tired 
 policemen. Next morning we drove back to the 
 Melbourne train and passed two buggies with the 
 directors of the Cordillera Company Josh Cushing, 
 Phipps Turnbull and Fitzgerald Moore who had 
 with them G. F. H. Schuler, then chief of staff on 
 ' The Age." Schuler had lived in Bendigo and 
 knew his mining. The second buggy contained a 
 distended supply of food and Heidsieck's dry mono- 
 pole in case the horses ran out of grass and water. 
 Directly I got back to the Stock Exchange I oversold 
 and specked 2000 Cordillera's and bought them back 
 under 5, not so bad for a three days' trip. Another 
 funny episode occurred at Wood's Point, a gold 
 field then in its second childhood. Got there one 
 Christmas Eve, having done fifty miles in a buggy 
 without a hood in a three-inch fall of rain all the day.
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 At dinner the room was crammed with miners in from 
 the jungle to knock down their cheques. I had earned 
 a bottle of " boy " and picked on Krug, a sweet wine 
 dear to the hearts of the demi-monde of Paris, whence 
 I had just come. The bloke alongside poured the 
 precious fluid over his corned beef and cabbage, and 
 turning to his mate said, " Gor blimey, Bill, the 
 blooming termater sauce is gawn bad." The room 
 rocked with laughter. Jim and I became friends, 
 and I used his information to knock the stuffing out 
 of several overvalued stocks on 'Change. At midnight 
 I was roused from sleep to go and meet a deputation 
 in the " dead-house " up the yard. My reception had 
 been carefully staged. There were four stark naked 
 men standing silent, smiling, silly, but not berserk, 
 on their heads in the four corners, and three more 
 nude musicians playing the fiddle, concertina and 
 Jews' harp. My " shout " was three dozen bottles 
 of beer at is. 6d, a piece. 
 
 Then came along another huge chimera, known 
 to the public as the Chillagoe Copper Mines and 
 Railway Company, a venture blessed with the patron- 
 age of some very big personages in the mining world. 
 And lo ! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. The 
 public played " follow my leader " in a mad, hare- 
 brained rush, and shares jumped from half a crown 
 to two pounds. At top price they were sold in 
 thousands chiefly to London by the big holders. It 
 was sending owls to Athens with a vengeance. Oft- 
 times the jingling guinea helps the hurt that honour 
 feels. Is it not lawful for them to do what they will 
 with their own ? as the Apostle of old asked. Once 
 again I stood upon Achilles' tomb and heard Troy 
 doubted, just as time will doubt of Rome and by 
 that time be tired of following leading men into 
 mining companies. I kept clear of the Chillagoe 
 company and warned my clients so that when the 
 
 104
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 crash came we were not bitten by the snapping of the 
 trap. As cold water is to a thirsty soul, so is good 
 news from a far country. Sensational reports were 
 circulated in favour of the mine, and after London 
 had provided the debentures and bought most of the 
 shares the Chillagoe Mines were found to be a collec- 
 tion of meagre surface shows. Then came a series of 
 damaging reports, some public, some private. There 
 was, in fact, a terrible talk about lentils. Shares 
 toppled from 40^. to nothing, and several big fortunes 
 were made while the losses were well spread over a 
 large body of shareholders. The Chillagoe Com- 
 pany's fate is merely another illustration of the maxim 
 that investors should never buy shares in a mine 
 where thousands of miles separate the directors and 
 the mine manager. For a mine to be successful the 
 directors and the manager must be in close touch. 
 Occasionally and very rarely, as in the case of the 
 Mount Lyell Company, the manager (Robert Sticht) 
 was an exceptionally able man. The directors are 
 merely administrators. Then it may be safe enough 
 to hold shares in a mine at a distance. My records 
 are full of details of mines which failed because 
 the mining manager was too far away to be controlled 
 by anybody. 
 
 MOUNT LYELL 
 
 My first visit to Mount Lyell Mine, near Mac- 
 quarie Harbour, Tasmania, was in 1893, when I 
 went across in a steamer of 125 tons in thirty-three 
 hours to Strahan. A stormy crossing in the Irish 
 Channel mailboat from Holyhead was my worst 
 sea trip up to then. The beastliness of that trip to 
 Strahan is indescribable. Of twelve small cockle 
 shells, mere bum boats driven by a kettle full of steam, 
 in which I made many trips to the west coast of 
 Tasmania, six were wrecked, and that was their fore- 
 
 105
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 ordained destiny. On a pure bred Clydesdale palfrey, 
 with feathered legs and a capacious back, it took me 
 ten hours to cover the thirty-one miles from Strahan to 
 Mount Lyell. They were mere bridle paths, not roads, 
 over which we stumbled, down " Kelly's Stone Stairs," 
 and over a rocky torrent called " Roaring Mag." 
 We slipped down 400 feet in one mile and clambered 
 up 600 feet in the next. It was a ride of horror, 
 tempered by a perpetual feast of gorgeous scenery. 
 Bill Dixon and Jim Crotty, who found Mount Lyell 
 in 1883, deserved every penny of their ultimate 
 reward, for it was a hell-uv-a place to get to. F. O. 
 Henry, the storekeeper at Strahan, who " grub 
 staked " Bill Dixon, once quietly slipped a small 
 blacksmith's anvil into one of the tucker bags, and 
 Bill carried it the whole thirty-one miles, grunting all 
 the way without knowing wherefore he should grunt. 
 Frank Gee Duff, whom I met in New York living 
 obscurely in 1919, introduced Mount Lyell to Bowes 
 Kelly, William Knox and William Orr, whose Broken 
 Hill winnings had been sadly depleted. These 
 three paid .25,000 for 50,000 shares in a company 
 of 150,000 after H. H. Schlapp, metallurgist of the 
 Broken Hill Proprietary Company, had examined 
 Mount Lyell and reported favourably. Next to 
 Robert Sticht, the greatest metallurgist who ever 
 came to Australia, stands H. H. Schlapp as a thoroughly 
 experienced scientist and a gentleman. Sticht was 
 easily primus inter pares, and to his unrivalled skill 
 Mount Lyell's success is due. Schlapp recommended 
 that Dr. E. D. Peters, Junior, an American expert 
 on pyritic smelting, should be imported to report 
 on the best way to work Mount Lyell. He came for 
 the small fee of 1250, and his report is a mining 
 classic. I had the luck to travel with Dr. Peters in 
 Tasmania. He was short in stature, round in figure, 
 grizzled in mien and a typical Bostonian in speech 
 
 1 06
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 and conduct. Peters told O. G. Schlapp, nephew of 
 H. H. Schlapp, and then mine manager of Mount 
 Lyell, to put down a winze on the footwall. This 
 unearthed fabulously rich ore worth from 1000 to 
 2500 ozs. of silver to the ton. One chunk of ore 
 assayed by Ward, the Tasmanian Government analyst, 
 gave 8765 ozs. of silver, 45 ozs. of gold and 19 per 
 cent of copper per ton. The average value of the 
 ore was 3 ozs. silver, 3 ozs. gold and 5 per cent copper 
 per ton worth 3 a ton. That pipe or rich ore saved 
 the company as it was most difficult to raise capital 
 because of the ignorance of mining investors concern- 
 ing such a low-grade pyritic deposit. Dr. Peters 
 estimated there were 4,600,000 tons of ore in the 
 Lyell mass worth 15,292,920. A similar mine, the 
 Rammailsberg in Germany has been working for 800 
 years. 
 
 OIL QUEST IN AUSTRALIA 
 
 When I think about the speeches I heard Lord 
 Roberts make urging the British public to gird up 
 their loins and prepare to repel a German onslaught, 
 it reminds me of the repeated warnings given to 
 Australia by leading sailors and soldiers like Lord 
 Jellicoe, Admiral Henderson, Generals Birdwood and 
 Fitzpatrick that this country should strive to secure 
 an oil supply of its own so as to be independent of 
 foreign sources of petroleum products. There is 
 bound to be war in the Pacific Ocean within the next 
 twenty years, and when it comes Australia will be 
 weak and helpless, an easy prey to a raider or an 
 invader unless she has a domestic supply of petrol 
 for her aircraft and submarines. There is not a 
 reserve of petrol in the Commonwealth which would 
 last more than two months. There is no reserve of 
 fuel oil at all for the use of the Australian Navy. 
 We have no domestic supplies of lubricants, benzol, 
 
 107
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 or engine kerosene. Our automobile industry is 
 like a subverted pyramid, plenty of cars, trucks and 
 tractors and no petrol to run them with. It is farcical 
 and would be laughable if it were not so damnably 
 dangerous. When war in the Pacific is declared, it 
 matters not by whom, every automobile in Australia 
 will stop dead, because the Government would have 
 to put an embargo on their use, and commandeer 
 every gallon of petroleum products in the Common- 
 wealth. The Australian Navy, its submarines and 
 its warships could not leave their harbours, and the 
 Australian air force would be as impotent as a cut cat. 
 This all sounds strong, yet it is true. Australia is 
 placidly standing on thin ice over a deep abyss because 
 it lacks the first instrument of defence petroleum. 
 My travels round the Pacific, from Japan to Patagonia 
 and from Vancouver to Invercargill, enable me to laugh 
 at the journalists and publicists, who have never been 
 outside Australia, and who daily write and utter 
 cautions and warnings against the Japanese and their 
 urgent desire to take this big continent from us. 
 To me it seems childish blatherskite. The Japanese 
 would need one thousand vessels to transport men 
 and enough food to effectively occupy this vast 
 territory. They cannot ever try it, because they 
 have not got the money, and the second solid reason 
 why the Japanese will not for a long time to come 
 attack Australia is that it would be a signal for the 
 white races of the world to band together to sweep 
 back the rising tide of colour. No white nation 
 could afford to stand back and watch the Japanese 
 trying to effect a landing in Australia. For their 
 own sakes they would come to the rescue without 
 being invited. If the Japanese occupied Australia, 
 not a single tribe of white people would be safe from 
 destruction. The whites of the world would come 
 at a run to help us so as to save their own skins. The 
 
 108
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 Japanese know better than to do as Germany did, 
 and by defying the world call loudly for defeat. 
 Day after day we Australians are told we must not 
 rely on Great Britain for help if we are attacked. 
 Lord Burnham said it and so did Lord Salisbury. 
 The feeble Press delegation was almost as weak as 
 the gimcrack British Parliamentary party, and both 
 of them continually told Australia she would have 
 to help herself in any warlike trouble, because she 
 could not depend on the British Navy for protection. 
 This silly bleating advice became a parrot cry with 
 both these visiting missions, and my reply to the 
 craven threat that Australia cannot defend herself 
 without the aid of Britain is, " In that event what 
 is the use of belonging to the British Empire, if 
 Australia cannot call upon every soldier and sailor in 
 that Empire to come and help her in time of trouble." 
 No, there is no chance that the Japanese will ever 
 risk a descent on Australia, for the defeat of the 
 Spanish Armada would be a marionette show alongside 
 the annihilation of the Japanese fleet. My dread is 
 that some day this century the United States will 
 want Australia as a spillway for its surplus population 
 and as a land of exile for its negro citizens. Only 
 25 per cent of the people of the United States are of 
 British descent, and the other 75 per cent are people 
 from seventy-five different races who hate the British 
 intensely and therefore hate the Australians. The 
 only nation we have to fear is the American, which 
 leads right back to this grave problem of where we 
 are to get an independent and domestic oil supply. 
 Without plenty of petroleum products Australia is 
 vulnerable. With enough oil we could face the 
 world at arms and keep our country to ourselves 
 against all comers, whether Great Britain came in or 
 stood out. There is no difficulty about getting oil 
 inside Australia. It is not a question of the cost of 
 
 109
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 getting it when our existence as a people is concerned. 
 If petrol cost us, to make here from coal and oil shale, 
 los. a gallon, and if fuel oil from the same substance 
 cost us 25 a ton, we ought to have it, and we must. 
 It is simply a question of money to build the retorts 
 to extract crude oil from coal and distil it from oil 
 shale and lignite, of both of which materials we have 
 the richest, if not the largest, deposits on earth. 
 Twenty million pounds would be a molecular sum 
 to spend to make sure of our national safety and 
 perpetual independence. AUSTRALIA MUST HAVE 
 
 HER OWN OIL SUPPLY BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE WHATSO- 
 EVER AT ANY COST AND QUICKLY. 
 
 OIL SHALE TASMANIA 
 
 If I missed a fortune over brown coal I feel sure 
 I ought to make its substitute out of oil shale. For 
 years I have been intrigued by the rich possibilities 
 of treating successfully the tasmanite or kerosene 
 shale deposits of Northern Tasmania. About 25 
 million tons have been proved by boring, running 
 from 35 to 45 gallons of petroleum to the ton, averag- 
 ing in the laboratory about 40 gallons to the ton. 
 The sole drawback to the oil shale deposits of Tas- 
 mania is a thin band of mudstone lying between 
 the upper and lower seams of oil shale. This mud- 
 stone carries only about 5 per cent of oil, yet it has 
 to be mined and treated along with the shale, thereby 
 increasing the cost of treatment, and pulling down 
 the average oil contents of the shale. So far no 
 satisfactory retort has been operated, and the con- 
 tinuous failure of retorts working at Latrobe has 
 cast a slight upon the prospects of the oil shale 
 industry. It is a simple question of finding the 
 right retort, and that must come in course of time. 
 Then Tasmania will employ an army of miners 
 delving unceasingly to supply the vast quantities of 
 
 no
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 shale that will be wanted for the batteries of retorts 
 working day and night, year in year out, without 
 stopping. 
 
 BROWN COALS ALTONA, MORWELL 
 
 I have wasted a lot of time and money hanging on 
 to the development of the brown coal industry of 
 Victoria, which sooner or later must become one of 
 the most important industries in the State. It was 
 during one of my earliest tours through the continent 
 of Europe forty years ago I saw brown coal being used 
 as briquettes and as raw fuel in special locomotives 
 drawing freight trains. I got the usual bee in my 
 Scotch bonnet about brown coal and began a study 
 of it and its uses directly I came home. Since then 
 I have made three voyages to Europe to raise capital 
 for the Altona and Laverton brown coal fields, an 
 infinitely superior deposit to Morwell, alias Yallourn. 
 Altona is ten miles from Melbourne, Morwell ninety, 
 and in that factor alone lies the immeasurable 
 superiority of Altona over Yallourn. My mistake 
 was in not joining forces with W. L. Baillieu, who 
 forced Morwell into the W. A. Watt government 
 when A. A. Billson was Minister of Railways. Parlia- 
 ment was not properly informed about the project, 
 yet once it was started, it seemed impossible to stop 
 it, and finally the working out of this important public 
 work was handed over to the wrong set of men, who 
 were provided with the wrong lot of executive officers. 
 Primarily then as now, from first to last, Morwell 
 (Yallourn) should have been treated as a brown coal 
 mine demanding special scientific knowledge and 
 skill to work. Instead it was looked upon as an 
 electrical undertaking, and the character, quality and 
 faults of the brown coal deposit were never properly 
 examined. It is not Sir John Monash's fault, and 
 he is not to blame for the disagreeable mess the 
 
 in
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 chief executive officers and their inefficient administra- 
 tive commissioners have made of Yallourn. The 
 syndicate I formed in London to develop Altona 
 and provide a proper electrical supply for the State 
 investigated Morwell years before the Electricity 
 Commission was established, and the firm of engineers 
 who reported upon it has neither peer nor equal in 
 London Messrs. Kincaid, Waller, Manville and 
 Dawson. Sir Philip Dawson, M.P., is easily the 
 leading electrical engineer in the British Empire and 
 his verdict was in favour of Altona and against opening 
 up Morwell, alias Yallourn. 
 
 OIL QUEST 
 
 On a trip to California, during my wild-goose 
 chase after petroleum, lasting over nineteen years of 
 fruitless search for oil in Australia, I took a secret 
 process for distilling oil so as to yield a higher quantity 
 of petrol, or as the Americans call it gasoline. I 
 placed the process before eight leading oil companies 
 in California and had the good fortune to meet their 
 chief chemists at the various demonstrations of the 
 process which failed to appeal to them, because it 
 was imperfect. And when on another occasion I 
 interviewed a dozen or more leaders of the petroleum 
 industry to ask them to take an interest in the search 
 for oil in Australia and provide men and money, I 
 made numerous acquaintances who showed me much 
 kindness and gave me plenty of information and 
 advice, but no capital. Amongst them were the 
 following heads, all notable men, all wealthy and 
 influential : 
 
 Captain John Barneson, of General Petroleum Corporation. 
 W. E. White & A. P. Bell, of Associated Oil Co. 
 B. D. Adamson, of Balfour, Guthrie & Co. 
 F. D. Boyce, chemist, for E. L. Doheny. 
 
 112
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 Dr. V. Bredlik, chemical engineer, Foundation Oven Co., 
 
 New York. 
 
 E. L. Cope, hydraulic engineer, San Francisco. 
 E. Dobell, Union Tool Co., Los Angeles. 
 E. J. Dyer, Union Oil Co., Los Angeles. 
 E. B. Kimball, General Petroleum Co., San Francisco. 
 M. V. Quigg, Independent Oil Producers' Agency, Los 
 
 Angeles. 
 
 H. M. Storey \ 
 
 J. Lander I Standard Oil Co., of California. 
 
 Dick McGraw j 
 
 J. Gallagher, Shell Co., of California. 
 A. Sclater ) 
 
 and Union Oil Co. 
 
 E. W. Clark ) 
 
 Far and away the most interesting oil magnate I 
 met was E. L. Doheny of Los Angeles, the lord and 
 master of the oil industry of Mexico. He was as 
 hard to approach as a lyre bird or a wild deer. It 
 took me six days to get into his private office and 
 reminded me of Mark Twain's effort to get past the 
 janitors to see an old friend of his in a New York sky 
 scraper. After being rebuffed by half a dozen 
 lackeys, Mark Twain, when asked what his business 
 was with the great man, said, " Tell him I've come to 
 ask his hand in the bonds of holy matrimony." 
 Mark was passed into the presence. By patience and 
 tenacity, on the fifth day of waiting I reached Mr. 
 Doheny who was snowed under by dividend cheques 
 he was signing. He was a small, thin, quiet, gentle- 
 manly little man, kindly and courteous. He heard 
 my proposal patiently that he should embark on 
 the quest for petroleum in Australia. My extempore 
 speech had been prepared during the five days of 
 waiting and utterly failed to convince this extremely 
 sagacious suzerain of illimitable oil fields. " Mr. 
 Meudell," he said, " in Mexico alone I have a hundred 
 
 "3
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 years work for my Pan-Mexican and other corporations 
 are capitalized at a round forty million pounds." 
 E. L. Doheny it was who saved the British Navy 
 from utter destruction by supplying it with oil from 
 his Mexican wells direct to British fuel bases. If 
 Doheny had been unfriendly to Great Britain it is 
 certain Admiral Tirpitz would have received Jellico, 
 Beatty et </., and their fleets in Hamburg. Doheny 
 was the saviour of England's honour. He told me 
 he had diverted the whole of his oil resources from 
 Mexico across the Atlantic, and it was done without 
 fuss or noise. Mr. Doheny was educated as a lawyer, 
 and after repeated drilling failures he struck oil in 
 a back-yard in Los Angeles, a spot I visited as though 
 it were a holy shrine, or as sacred as the black stone 
 of Mecca, the Kaaba. When the pile of cheques 
 was nearly signed Mr. Doheny produced a tumbler 
 of water and a thin captain biscuit and apologized 
 for starting his lunch. He explained that he suffered 
 from weak digestion and could eat very little solid 
 food. Fancy a clever, intellectual man of his calibre 
 being afflicted with a physical weakness which short- 
 ened his pleasures and destroyed his joie de vivre. 
 He kindly invited me to bring my wife and come for 
 a week's tour with him over the Californian oil fields. 
 We were booked to sail for home within a week, so 
 I had to decline his offer. Fancy being so fragile as 
 not to be able to eat crayfish, jugged hare, roast 
 goose and pineapple any Saturday night one fancies 
 them ! E. L. Doheny is a gentleman, and besides 
 he owns 50,000,000. Yet he cannot get tipsy or 
 eat like a glutton. So I went back to the Hotel 
 Alexandria and ordered a chateaubriand or porter 
 house steak, twelve inches square, underdone, and 
 garnished with six sorts of vegetables and assimilated 
 the mess to my protoplasm without a qualm or a 
 quake. 
 
 114
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 PETROLEUM, NATURAL GAS, OIL SHALE 
 
 Although an obscure, unpopular and unknown 
 citizen it is pleasant to reflect I have been able to be 
 useful to my native land by employing my pen for 
 nearly forty years in drawing attention through the 
 newspapers, of which there are nine hundred pub- 
 lished in Australia, to certain neglected natural 
 resources. Long ago, while travelling abroad, I 
 became obsessed with the idea that Australia was 
 in a perilous position because it had no oil wells of 
 its own. This was first made clear to me at the first 
 automobile show ever held in France, at Paris in 
 1898, when my wife and I spent a day examining 
 the embryonic motor cars, the infants of the new 
 industry. It is certain we were the first Australian 
 couple to see the first motor show and are probably 
 the only Australians who saw it. The petrol supplied 
 then was costly and scarce, because kerosene was the 
 constituent of crude petroleum in most demand, 
 and not petrol, the lighter volatile spirit. And that 
 became condensed in my brain as a great and abiding 
 thought. After all these years we are not much 
 further along the road of complete independence of 
 the oil suppliers of other countries. Supposing war 
 broke out in the Pacific between the United States 
 and Japan, or between the United States and Aus- 
 tralia, what would be the effect on this Common- 
 wealth ? Where would we get the oil which is the 
 life of all industry and vital to human life itself ? 
 Where would we get the petrol or the kerosene, or 
 the greases, or the fuel oil, which are so necessary to 
 existence because they are essential to all machinery ? 
 Of course a certain amount would be brought in, 
 yet a practical oil blockade would exist round our 
 coasts. It is dreadful to contemplate, and so simple 
 to realize the straits of this great country. There is
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 no problem of national work so important as this 
 question of finding or making oil within our own 
 boundaries None. Borrowing, migration, building 
 development, railway making, not one of them is so 
 vitally important as the duty of establishing a domestic 
 oil supply. And it is all the more regrettable that our 
 Seven Governments are doing nothing because we 
 possess the means to create an oil supply here at 
 home. No geological survey is being made by any 
 Mines Department of any likely petroliferous region, 
 and not a single Government borehole is being 
 drilled, nor one Government at work distilling oil 
 from coal or shale or lignite. Yet of these carbon- 
 aceous substances Australia has vast resources so 
 far not fully delimited. We don't know how much 
 coal, brown coal and oil shale we possess, yet every 
 ton of it carries more or less crude oil. 
 
 Petrol, called gasoline in the United States, costs 
 tenpence a gallon there and half a crown here. Pack- 
 ing, insurance, freight, handling and duties do not 
 amount to more than one shilling a gallon, and as 
 gasoline only costs one penny a gallon to make in 
 the United States of America, the profits made by 
 the big oil-refining companies, who are importers 
 here, must be enormous. With profits on kerosene, 
 greases and lubricants, the total profit earned here 
 must be simply extraordinary. The two big men of 
 the foreign oil group are E. E. Wagstaff of the 
 British Imperial Oil Company and H. C. Cornforth 
 of the Vacuum Oil Company of U.S.A. Wag- 
 stafF is an extremely shrewd expert in oil with 
 nothing to learn about handling men and markets. 
 He is a Londoner, and Sir Henri Deterding, the 
 Dutch-German Napoleon of Petroleum, picked out 
 Wagstaff specially to build up the Royal Dutch Shell 
 Company's business in Australia. And right nobly 
 has Wagstaff done it. Cornforth is not so profound 
 
 116
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 as Wagstaff, yet he is exceptionally clever, and is 
 ably supported by his lieutenant, H. M. Hamilton, 
 a Scotchman. All three pleasant, genial gentlemen 
 are paid bigger salaries than the Governor-General 
 of Australia, and make most admirable enemies within 
 our gates, preying as they do upon Australia's trade 
 and commerce. 
 
 SOME GREAT MEN 
 
 One of the ablest and most efficient men I have 
 known abroad is Captain John Barneson of San 
 Francisco, who was born at sea and educated at the 
 Sydney Grammar School. His father owned his 
 own sailing ship and traded between Australia and 
 England. Young Barneson was trained as a seaman, 
 and following his father's occupation owned and 
 sailed his own ship. He married a Sydney lady and 
 drifted to the United States where he became con- 
 nected with the American Army in the Philippines 
 as a Commissary-General. Barneson was attracted 
 by the oil business and settled in San Francisco as 
 founder of the General Petroleum Corporation, 
 recently merged with the Standard Oil Company of 
 New Jersey. Under Barneson's shrewd direction 
 the Corporation developed in an amazing manner 
 in a very short time. At one time it was short of 
 capital so Captain Barneson went to London and had 
 arranged for more money when the War broke out 
 and his negotiations fell through. Nothing daunted 
 Barneson stuck to his guns and beat off all his enemy 
 troubles. He has, of course, become a naturalized 
 American and Australia has lost for ever an Australian 
 of commanding ability and integrity. Barneson was 
 director of twenty-three companies when I first 
 presented my letter of introduction to him from 
 Alfred Deakin. The other precious letter I carried 
 from Deakin was honoured by Sir Wilfred Laurier, 
 
 i 117
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 then Prime Minister of Canada, who, like Captain 
 Barneson, was exceptionally kind to my wife and 
 myself. 
 
 Tom Whaley, a Canadian oil-driller from Petrolia, 
 Canada, an engineer trained on California oil fields 
 was sent to me by John Moffat, the best-known 
 mining man in Queensland. Moffat wanted to drill 
 in a deposit of kerosene shale on the coast of Queens- 
 land, near Rockhampton, and Whaley advised him 
 that it was not done in the best of oil society. When 
 John Moffat died the old custom of grubstaking 
 prospectors with food and material to roam the wilds 
 looking for minerals and metals died with him. I 
 have known dozens of these useful old-time prospec- 
 tors, the scouts of the mining army. Without them 
 mining could never have expanded and flourished in 
 Australia. Tom Whaley came to Melbourne, and 
 I adopted him temporarily and took him through the 
 western district of Victoria. Afterwards I sent him to 
 South Australia, and I personally inspected every 
 locality he thought had a chance of having petrol 
 lying perdu. Encouraged by an excellent work on 
 the geology of South Australia by Father Julian 
 Edmund Woods, parish priest at Penola, South 
 Australia, published in 1862, I took a fancy to the 
 region between Mount Gambier and Kingston, 
 South Australia, as a likely oil-bearing locality, and 
 so dreamt another dream of Alnaschar. Whaley took 
 charge of a bore-hole near Kingston and drilled to 
 noo feet without success. I became part owner of 
 oil licences over 60 square miles, or 38,400 acres, 
 near Whaley's bore. To give my chateaux in Spain 
 an earthy foundation it was my practice to take up 
 as much land as I could get near an active bore-hole 
 directly drilling started. In all the nineteen years 
 I wasted looking for oil, and not finding it, I pegged 
 leases or took out prospecting licences over tens of 
 
 118
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 thousands of acres. If oil had been struck in any 
 quantity anywhere in any of the States I could not 
 help making a fortune, and not a small one. No man 
 ever engaged in a bigger gamble with zest and gusto 
 all the time. Life was gay, life was exhilarating, and 
 my alias was Croesus. I often wonder what I would 
 have done with so much money if I had won it. Even 
 the great Napoleon could not dine twice a day. Some 
 day, somewhere, petroleum will be found deep down 
 when the drillers are supplied with proper geological 
 maps and reports made by Australians. Not one 
 visiting foreign geologist, and not a single official 
 geologist, has seemed to be worthy of being trusted 
 to tell the truth about the existence of oil in Australia, 
 and their advice has mostly been bad and prejudiced. 
 After numerous visits to Tasmania it seemed full of 
 likely spots for boring. There are wide and deep 
 deposits of tertiary and sedimentary rocks all round 
 the island in the valleys of ancient rivers and lakes 
 where oil ought to be found in its right nidus. At 
 time of writing not one single oil well has been sunk 
 in Tasmania with proper modern drilling appliances 
 worked by qualified petroleum engineers. Until a 
 first-class Australian engineer, who understands petro- 
 leum mining, is given the right machinery with 
 proper plans and maps, and endowed with enough 
 money, it cannot be said there is no flow-oil in Aus- 
 tralia. My experience has made me prejudiced 
 against oil experts who are strangers and outsiders, 
 and I don't trust them. Tasmania has great reserves 
 of coal of all kinds and oil shales and lignites of low 
 and high grades, and Tasmania will yet become a 
 country famous for its oil industry. A number of 
 quite unimportant people, from the national viewpoint, 
 must die and get out of the way before Australia is 
 ready to produce oil. Especially must all foreign 
 and semi-foreign oil companies be sent away or put 
 
 119
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 out of business before Australia will get a chance to 
 find oil. The basin of the Rivery Murray must 
 contain more or less petroleum because from the 
 beginning of time it has been draining an extensive 
 basin of 10,000 square miles and carrying the detritus 
 and alluvium towards the sea. Yet no proper effort 
 has been made to locate oil in the River Murray 
 valley. No proper bore-hole has ever been drilled, 
 and no geological survey ever made. What shocking 
 treachery to Australia's future ! Once I applied for 
 100 square miles of the bed of the Coorong to prospect 
 it for oil from jetties as I had seen practised at Summer- 
 land in California. It took a year to get a title, and 
 by that time a local company had struck excellent 
 road metal in three holes nearby. How much land 
 in the Coorong district of South Australia I held by 
 scrip and by licence from time to time it is hard to say, 
 perhaps 50,000 acres. A thimbleful of crude oil 
 found there would have made me a tri-millionaire in 
 one night, and the shock would certainly have turned 
 my hair glossy black ! The most likely spot to find 
 oil on our big continent is in Central Australia where 
 for ages the rivers draining Queensland and New 
 South Wales have been depositing earthy sediments 
 containing foraminifera, the true bacilli of petroleum, 
 along the two ancient beaches made when a sea ran 
 diagonally from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Great 
 Australian Bight. If this, my book of memorabilia, 
 is not all used up in bath-heaters, some bookworm 
 in the next century will republish this prediction. 
 Among other oily will-o'-the-wisps I have followed, 
 I went once to New Caledonia after oil leases, and 
 took some concessions to San Francisco for considera- 
 tion by some heads of the oil world. Their experts 
 did not like the serpentine formation from which the 
 oil seepages emerged, so that failed. Another time I 
 went by rail to Bunbury, in West Australia, and in 
 
 120
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 two places saw oil expressed from algae floating on 
 water and valueless. Visited Albany, one of the finest 
 harbours on the planet, and found that bitumen was 
 deposited on the floor of the harbour which had 
 floated in from the ocean. All the asphaltum or 
 bitumen I have received from Cape Raoul, in Tas- 
 mania, to Cape Leeuwin, the farthest point in West 
 Australia, comes to the surface of the sea after a 
 submarine disturbance on the continental shelf deep 
 down below, and yet scientific ninnies and zanies have 
 reported that it must come from Trinidad, at our 
 very antipodes, borne hither on ocean currents, and 
 I still laugh at them though I have lost, or rather not 
 gained, any fortune from my oil quest. 
 
 NATURAL GAS VICTORIA. 
 
 Not one Australian in a hundred knows that 
 natural gas is the cheapest and best of all the agents 
 used for lighting, heating and power. Very few 
 Australians know that the gas generally used in the 
 United States and Canada is chiefly natural and not 
 coal gas. We are so accustomed in Australia to use 
 gas made from coal that little or nothing is known of 
 the superior natural gas which exists in many places 
 far apart in the Commonwealth. Drilling for oil at 
 Lake Bunga, Lakes Entrance in Gippsland, Victoria, 
 the bore-hole produced an excellent natural gas of 
 good quality and unlimited quantity. Unfortunately 
 the drillers never tried to shut oflF the water, so the 
 gas for over two years has been forcing its way to the 
 surface through a column of water iioo feet high. 
 If the pressure exerted against the gas by this water 
 were removed a most valuable gas field would be 
 uncovered. I worked incessantly to get investors 
 the public and the Government interested in this 
 valuable discovery without any result. The gas 
 field covers 800 square miles and will some day be 
 
 121
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 utilized. Meanwhile the natural gas is blowing into 
 the air and I have missed a pot of money. 
 
 DESTRUCTION OF BENDIGO GOLDFIELD 
 
 It has not been often in the history of this com- 
 munity that half a dozen men have been given the 
 power to destroy a goldfield. That power has been 
 used in a hideous manner by a few men to wipe out 
 mining in Bendigo, where 80,000,000 of gold was 
 raised in seventy years. In 1916 an elaborate pam- 
 phlet was compiled by E. C. Dyason, son of Isaac 
 Dyason for many years George Lansell's superin- 
 tendent, advocating the amalgamation of about fifty 
 mines in order to economize, to reduce mining costs, 
 to save labour, to sink new shafts, to introduce modern 
 mining methods which were badly needed, and 
 generally to improve the position of mining in Bendigo 
 and add to its wealth and population. Not one 
 single promise, not one prediction, has been fulfilled. 
 Instead of progress a policy of destruction was in- 
 stituted, machinery and equipment were stripped, 
 dynamited, broken up, torn down, dismantled, turned 
 into scrap metal and sold. Gradually the mines 
 were drowned by the rising water, and one by one 
 they were abandoned until to-day there are only 
 three working of the forty-eight mines taken over 
 by the Bendigo Amalgamated Goldfield Company that 
 undertook to do wonderful things. The net result 
 of the Bendigo Amalgamated Company's efforts has 
 been the destruction of what was left of the industry. 
 Of forty-eight mines that were ultimately brought 
 under one control, only two are now working. In 
 the others the plant has been stripped, iron castings 
 dynamited, steam engines broken up, winding and 
 pumping plant dismantled, batteries destroyed, and 
 rails, trucks and tools sold. Machinery and equip- 
 ment that would now cost 250,000 to replace has 
 
 122
 
 been passed out as scrap iron. The mines are flooded 
 out and drowned ! Water is rising in all the aban- 
 doned mines. It is within 100 feet of the surface. 
 The cost of installing pumps to take the place of those 
 that have been destroyed or sold would be three times 
 its value at the time the Amalgamation took the 
 mines over. Along one line of reef covering three 
 miles there are twenty shafts, and if a company 
 started to work one of its claims it would have to 
 begin by pumping out the whole of the shafts along 
 that line. The mines that did not come into the 
 scheme are on the New Chum line of reef. That 
 line which has been opened up for four miles is full 
 of water. Nothing more damnable in wanton destruc- 
 tion has ever been done in Australia. 
 
 Bendigo was a grand goldfield which yielded 
 70,000,000 of gold between 1851 and 1921, say 
 in seventy years. It has had as many as 200 
 mines working at the same time of which 105 paid 
 dividends. The war crippled the mines ; the world 
 stopped using gold in favour of paper ; the cost of 
 living and of materials arose tremendously, and gold 
 mining became unprofitable. The directors of the 
 numerous gold mining companies, in order to keep 
 going, used dynamite to blow up, tear down and scrap 
 machinery which was sold as old iron. Poppet 
 heads were sold for firewood and the utmost care 
 taken to destroy every vestige of anything that would 
 indicate the existence of a once great gold mine. 
 The mines were allowed to fill with water and the 
 great gold mining field of Bendigo was stabbed where 
 it lay by its lawful protectors. Whatever view 
 historians may take of the mean and dastardly 
 destruction of a fine industry and good city, as a 
 native of Bendigo I protest against the vandalism of 
 its massacre. 
 
 123
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 TARNAGULLA NUGGET FIELD 
 
 To the end of 1926 from 1851, in seventy-five 
 years, just a man's lifetime, Victoria produced 
 318,000,000, three hundred and eighteen million 
 pounds' worth of gold ! Fools and economists call 
 gold-mining " the robber industry," overlooking its 
 great value as the very foundation and moving power 
 of Victoria and of Australia, and turning away from 
 the romance in mining. Here is one romantic story 
 out of many I could tell. The Poverty Reef at Tar- 
 nagulla, Victoria, ranks as one of the richest gold reefs 
 in the world. The yield of gold from this reef often 
 went as high as 50 ounces to the ton and became 
 richer as it went down. From the surface to 400 feet 
 the reef was 20 feet thick, and this big mass of stone 
 averaged 6 ounces to the ton throughout. The 
 amount of gold taken from four claims along the line 
 of reef for only 141 feet yielded 1,500,000 ! Welsh- 
 man's claim gave a profit of 270,000 to nine share- 
 holders who worked it themselves. There has been 
 no such hill of gold in history. The nuggets of pure 
 gold found in the Tarnagulla and Dunolly districts 
 were fabulous. The Welcome Stranger nugget 
 found ten inches below the surface sold for 10,000. 
 The Welcome nugget found at Bakery Hill, Ballarat, 
 was sold for 10,500. The Blanche Barkly nugget 
 was worth 7000, and it was 96 per cent pure gold. 
 At Canadian Gully, Ballarat, in 1854, two new chums, 
 only two months in the colony, found a 1619 ounce 
 nugget at 60 feet which fetched 6400. Two other 
 immigrants just landed unearthed a solid lump of 
 gold weighing 1008 ounces, worth 4080 ! At 
 Back Creek, Taradale, digging to 12 feet, a party of 
 three divided 3000 for a week's work. But why 
 continue to emphasize the lucky side of digging for 
 gold. In 1852, in Victoria, gold valued at 14,000,000 
 
 124
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 was raised by a population of 86,000 people ! Think 
 of it ! What do you know about that ? There is no 
 record of money-making like it in the history of this 
 planet. Nor Great Britain, nor America, nor South 
 Africa can tell any tale of glory like the vast produc- 
 tion of wealth from gold mining in Australia. And 
 fools call it a " robber industry." Without gold 
 mining Australia would still be a sheep run peopled 
 by selected British criminals, lording it over a half- 
 caste population of black fellows and mean whites. 
 Without Australia's gold Great Britain would be 
 to-day a small huckstering and money-lending 
 nation, like the United States, lacking a navy, wanting 
 in ideals and over-crowded with half-educated humans. 
 By reason and because of her gold output, Australia 
 stands forth to-day as the very best of the new nations 
 of the earth. 
 
 THE OIL QUEST IN AUSTRALIA 
 
 In 1907 at the summit of my career, overwork 
 from stockbroking and politics combined, brought on 
 consumption and three doctors predicted my sudden 
 death. So I left the Stock Exchange and went travel- 
 ling to find health after spending twelve months 
 living on milk and eggs in the open air. My first 
 knowledge of petroleum came to me in Burmah, 
 where an inspiration clutched me by the brain that 
 there might be an oil-field to be found back home in 
 Australia ! What a dazzling prize to win ! What a 
 magnificent ideal to find oil for my beloved native 
 land ! And what a grand gamble ! If I struck oil 
 I might equal the wealth of J. D. Rockfeller or J. P. 
 Coats or W. D. Wills ! (There was no Henry Ford 
 in those days.) Merely thinking of the gigantic 
 reservoir of money, fame and power at the far end of 
 the search for oil, brought back my health. And 
 I set out blithely on the biggest adventure any little 
 
 125
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Australian has ever attempted. It was a grand 
 gamble, for if any of the numerous drilling companies 
 had struck oil, the fortune I would have cut out of 
 the Stock Exchange must have been colossal, because 
 the Australian is the best and pluckiest gambler on 
 earth. Gambling to him is inherent and instinctive, 
 part of his heredity. For were not the Australian 
 pioneers gamesters and adventurers ? So my mate 
 and I went all over the earth looking at oil-fields and 
 oil-wells, and I learnt the business side of petroleum 
 mining, the most fascinating because the most risky 
 of all the great industries. All the time I was reading 
 about petroleum and when I formed my first syndi- 
 cate with a modest capital and an immodest name as 
 the Standard Oil of Australia it made people laugh. 
 That syndicate floated the Australian Oil Wells Com- 
 pany, no liability, which provided funds to raise 
 capital for a drilling company I christened the South 
 Australian Oil Wells Company, N.L. still extant. 
 My friends scoffed, my enemies laughed, and so did 
 I. True I was a crank, yet so was Colonel Drake 
 who first struck oil by drilling in Pennsylvania in 
 1859. It took fifteen months to form the company, 
 and it was accomplished by my incessant work in the 
 Australian press and by means of a box of lantern 
 slides of " gushers " and oil wells (a very few dry 
 holes) to illustrate thirty-one lectures I delivered in 
 Victoria and South Australia. Finally I secured over 
 2000 shareholders by my own persistent efforts. Never 
 did I sell fewer than ten bob's worth of the is. shares. 
 That would have been demeaning a great enterprise. 
 After my meetings I used to fill up application forms 
 and take the cash. At one small farming centre a 
 " cocky " farmer was so excited and bedazzled by 
 the bright future I painted with a broad brush, and 
 of the easy fortune he ought to seize, that he gave 
 me a ten-shilling note along with the names of his 
 
 126
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 five daughters for one is. share each ! There may be, 
 but I don't know of any Victorian who has written 
 more prospectuses or helped to float more companies 
 of all sorts than myself. To form that little group 
 of three oil-prospecting companies was the hardest 
 promotion job I have ever tackled. And by the time 
 the job was finished every one of the 882 newspapers 
 then published in Australia, had received from me 
 at least half a dozen articles, paragraphs, or circulars, 
 some of them even more. Hercules, Roget the 
 Thesaurus man, Webster the dictionary chap and 
 Sir Walter Scott combined never worked so hard at 
 easier tasks. We began a policy of blind stabbing 
 because none of the likely oil-bearing country in South 
 Australia had been surveyed or mapped geologically. 
 Even to-day there is no complete geological survey 
 in any state in the Commonwealth. Our official 
 geologists have surveyed the gold fields and produced 
 geological plans, but nothing has been done towards 
 a complete geological reconnaissance of the country 
 for other minerals. And this is the right place to 
 call the omission a dastardly disgrace. 
 
 After a long voyage with my mate through India, 
 Burmah, the Malay States, and the Straits Settle- 
 ments, we decided to come home to the best country 
 and the finest people in the world, by way of the 
 Dutch East Indies. In those days one could travel 
 from Singapore to Java and right round the East 
 Indies, New Guinea and British Papua by the Nord 
 Deutscher Lloyd line of steamers, surely the very best 
 passenger boats on the seven seas in those days. We 
 both cling firmly to that dictum, and what married 
 couple in the world are better able to judge by com- 
 parison and give that opinion. We had sailed on all 
 the leading lines of all the maritime nations British, 
 American, German, French, Austrian, Dutch, Belgian, 
 Japanese, Italian and Turkish on every great river
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 and across every great ocean. For comfort, quiet, 
 sociability, food and attention the N.D.L. steamers had 
 no equal, although some of the Messageries Maritime 
 and the P. and O. boats are fairly comfortable for 
 passengers. Perhaps it was the snobbery and flunkey- 
 ism of the British, American and Canadian steamers 
 that was repellent. There is a long list of apt words 
 to use to describe travelling Anglo-Saxons, Anglo- 
 Indians and Anglo-Americans. They are swanky, 
 jammy, stiff, starchy, self-conscious, baroque and 
 bizarre, all arising from conceit and a false claim to 
 be the superior people of the world ; and they are 
 always so patronizing and condescending, therefore 
 can one forbear to laugh, my friends ? All through 
 that long voyage to Sydney we talked oil, read oil, 
 and saw oil. Then a great inspiration was formed in 
 Olympus and descended on my brain, formulated in 
 this manner, " Australia holds every other metal and 
 mineral, so why not oil ? If you find oil, George, you 
 will perform two great services enrich yourself 
 enormously and make your native land the most 
 powerful of all countries. Go to it, George so I went. 
 Think of my stimuli. I had studied mining, lived 
 amongst mining men, been down hundreds of mines, 
 and had seen on the Stock Exchange men make big 
 fortunes quickly and easily out of mines gold, 
 silver, copper and tin. It did not take more geology 
 than I knew to convince me Australia, being a tertiary, 
 a sedimentary, a carbonaceous land, must and does 
 contain petroleum in some part of it. All my task 
 was to find two bucketsful of petroleum and I was 
 not only a made man, but certain to be a very rich 
 one. So I gave up all else and went to work to educate 
 a few people ready for a tremendous gamble to find 
 money to drill for oil. For two years, I wrote, spoke, 
 lectured about the existence of petroleum, taught its 
 geology, urged its necessity, pointed out the reward 
 
 128
 
 MINES, STOCK EXCHANGE, OIL 
 
 to be won if oil were found. It was a glorious concep- 
 tion, a splendid motive, and every day I stood on 
 velvet with a bet booked of two million pounds to 
 nothing. None of my contemporaries had ever laid 
 such a wager. The fabled adventurers, the mythical 
 rich men could not have been closer to their vast 
 riches than I was. Monte Criste, Croesus, Timon of 
 Athens, Aladdin, King Midas, even Rockefeller, 
 Pierpont Morgan, " Cotton " Coats of Paisley, " To- 
 bacco " Wills of Bristol never had such an opportunity 
 to amass wealth quickly. I only wanted two buckets- 
 ful of petroleum and NEVER GOT ANY. 
 
 129
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 SOME big piles of money have been derived from gold 
 mining. George Lansell of Bendigo, who started 
 life as a soap and candle maker, left .3,000,000 in 
 debentures and bonds payable to bearer. He did not 
 invest in land or city property like J. B. Watson of 
 Bendigo, who left 2,000,000 made out of one mine, 
 safely invested in Melbourne city property. Latham 
 and Watson made a million in no time and put it 
 back into mines. Sir W. J. Clarke's father, originally 
 a butcher in Hobart, bought the best land in Victoria 
 for ioj. to ji an acre, and left his family 2,000,000. 
 His grandson, Sir Rupert Clarke, cleverly handled 
 his share of his father's estate and had an income of 
 90,000 a year, which at 5 per cent represents 
 i, 800,000. Edmund Jowett, a Yorkshire wool 
 stapler, backed by trusty friends, collected sixty sheep 
 stations during droughts and is worth 3,000,000 in 
 a good season and 1,000,000 in a bad. I first knew 
 Jowett when he got five pound a week for writing 
 the " Argus " wool reports. James Tyson gathered 
 a lot of sheep and cattle stations, lived meanly, and 
 died without a will, leaving nearly 3,000,000 for 
 the Supreme Courts of the States to distribute amongst 
 his kin. Sidney Kidman, another squatter, a colossus 
 among sheep owners, a mammoth Brobdignagian 
 among cattle owners, has nearly seventy stations, and 
 until he dies will not know how much more than 
 3,000,000 he is worth. The Syme Brothers, pro- 
 prietors of the Melbourne " Age," enjoy a joint 
 income of a 100,000 a year which capitalizes at 
 
 130
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 2,000,000. The Connibere Brothers, the wisest 
 men in the Flinders Lane rag trade, sold out lock, 
 stock and barrel at the height of the post-war boom 
 in soft goods, and putting the proceeds into city 
 property a little way out are good for 2,000,000. 
 Jimmy Richardson, once a ship's steward, now the 
 Antaeus of the liquor trade of Melbourne, must pay 
 taxes on a million pounds. Sir George Tallis, whose 
 autobiography would be entitled " From Clerk to 
 Theatrical King," is drawing very close to being a 
 million-pounder. Darling Brothers, the wheat firm 
 who would be small fry in the wheat pit which I saw in 
 Chicago, command 2,000,000 and perhaps more. 
 Joshua Brothers started in Melbourne as sugar- 
 boilers and left off as whisky boilers. How much 
 more than a million they made is esoteric, concealed, 
 cryptic. Foy and Gibson, the suburban drapers who 
 became woollen manufacturers and universal providers, 
 are easily worth 3,000,000. Harry Howard Smith 
 is the richest shipowner in Australia and some day 
 will cut up for 2,000,000. Sir Edward Miller, 
 son of old " Money " Miller, has barely a million, 
 and really doesn't deserve any more because he does 
 not know what to do with the million he very nearly 
 has. Bowes Kelly made a fortune out of a one-four- 
 teenth Broken Hill Syndicate shares and lost it nearly 
 all in Zeehan and elsewhere, until he got into the 
 Mount Lyell Mine. Bowes owns eight hundred Queen 
 Anne villas besides a tin box full of scrip and is worth 
 easily a million. H. V. McKay, the Sunshine Har- 
 vester Maker, died far too soon or his 1,800,000 
 would have been doubled. William Angliss, the meat 
 king, was a " pommy " butcher from Devonshire and 
 his 2,000,000 is creeping towards 4,000,000. 
 The spectacular fortune made recently in Victoria 
 belongs to W. L. Baillieu, a hero of the ancient land 
 boom, if not the hero. Dick Garland gave him the 
 
 '3 1
 
 Dunlop Rubber Company, Herbert J. Daly put him 
 on to the Broken Hill Zinc dumps, and De Bavay 
 found a flotation process to treat them. Johnnie 
 Wharton bought the North and South Broken Hill 
 shares for him. Carl Pinschof showed him how to 
 form the Carlton United Breweries. Theodore Fink 
 told W.L. he was sure " Herald " shares were worth 
 buying. H. W. Gepp hinted that Electrolytic Zinc 
 Company was a safe gamble, and W.L. made a coup 
 and a separate fortune by amalgamating the London 
 Chartered Bank, of which he was local director, with 
 the English, Scottish and Australian Bank. If W. L. 
 Baillieu is not worth 5,000,000 it is a shame, a very 
 great shame, for he ought to be. He suffers from 
 sand in his arteries and is not over happy. Theodore 
 Fink is rapidly approaching the six figure boundary, 
 but he's a brainy little man with a kind word and a 
 smile for everybody except those he hates. Nicholas, 
 the maker of the confectionery known to headachy 
 women as " Aspro," has since the war began put 
 together more than a million pounds. Robert B. 
 McComas, the shipping and wool man, is rapidly 
 nearing the millionaire class, and of course Mac- 
 pherson Robertson has got his third degree of million- 
 arity and could realize 5,000,000 for his confectionery 
 business to-morrow. Alfred D. Hart of the British 
 Tobacco Company, will cut up for a couple of million, 
 and his American partner, Willie Cameron, for even 
 more, because he has rich relatives in the tobacco 
 trade away down in old Virginny. 
 
 The late Zeb. Lane, well known in Broken Hill 
 and Kalgoorlie, met an Indian maharajah on a P. and O. 
 boat who told him of a remote spot in the heart of 
 India where diamonds were mined by the bucketful 
 without the aid of machinery. Zeb. wanted me to 
 go with him to secure a concession over the diamond 
 field from the reigning prince, with the object of taking
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 it to London for flotation. Diamonds what a new 
 and splendid word to conjure with in a well-constructed 
 prospectus ! Telluride, bornite and carbonates were 
 getting worn out as symbols of the great wealth to 
 be won in new mines on far-distant fields, poor bait 
 now for feeding to the public, which was, as always, 
 ready to take a few shares in any new show provided 
 the bellwethers on the prospectus were successful 
 or notorious. With diamonds as the mine product 
 there was no need for either guinea-pig directors or 
 reports by an M.E. mining expert, or mining 
 engineer, as the reader pleased. What widow, 
 clergyman or retired civil servant could resist applying 
 for a few shares in the Indian De Beers Diamond 
 Fields, Limited ? So it was settled, and I found my 
 way to Madras to meet the agents of the Nawab. 
 Accompanied by a young rajah, the journey to 
 Banganapalle was easily, though tediously, accom- 
 plished. At the small railway station a cow cart was 
 waiting, and a trip of twenty miles to the capital of 
 the native state was made over bush tracks through a 
 desolate country inhabited by pariah dogs and children. 
 Before a palatial marble building, set in the centre 
 of a village composed of mud and adobe huts, the 
 Diwan or Prime Minister of the state met me and 
 offered me the hospitality of the Nawab. Certainly 
 he had no bedroom to offer me, but a shake-down 
 would be placed on the roof. A tin basin and a 
 gourd of water represented the furniture of the roof, 
 and there were no mosquito curtains, but a plentiful 
 supply of mosquitoes. Dinner was a rough affair 
 of chicken soup, chicken fricassee, chicken cutlets, 
 chicken curry, and chicken on toast. Four of us sat 
 down to it : the Diwan, the rajah, a doctor and 
 myself. They were all Madrassis, educated at college 
 and spoke English fluently. The salon had been 
 magnificently decorated, but was now tawdry and 
 
 K 133
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 filthy. The night spent with the mosquitoes on the 
 roof with only the stars winking at me was one of 
 horror. Next morning the Diwan told me only one 
 other Englishman had been in the town in twenty 
 years, as the Nawab was an independent native 
 monarch not beholden to the British raj. Further, 
 I learnt that the palace has recently been converted 
 into a temporary hospital for cholera patients, of whom 
 there were two hundred in the rooms beneath me. 
 After a one egg breakfast we went to a durbar with 
 the Nawab in a vast unfurnished apartment. The 
 Nawab sat on a throne of Austrian bent wood at the 
 end of the room and listened to his Prime Minister 
 translating my request for a concession. His Royal 
 Highness, although he spoke English, could not 
 talk with me directly, according to court etiquette. 
 He wanted twelve new nautch girls in exchange for 
 a fifty years' concession over eighteen square miles 
 of diamond mines, with a 10 per cent royalty and a 
 substantial cash payment the Nawab wanted that 
 urgently. Then the Nawab signified my requests 
 would be granted, and the deputation thanked the 
 Minister and withdrew. The Diwan drove me in 
 a dog-cart to the chief diamond mine. There was a 
 decadent Eurasian in charge, and we found him 
 engaged in the miser-like occupation of playing with 
 heaps of uncut diamonds on his office table. The 
 shaft was fifty feet deep and a windlass was the only 
 machinery. Holding on to the rope, with their 
 feet resting in holes in the side of the shaft, were 
 about ten native women who passed the blue dirt 
 in small osier baskets up the shaft to the lady just 
 above, and so to the dame on the brace. Two men 
 washed the dirt roughly and every bucket yielded 
 some diamonds. There was evidence for miles round 
 of ancient mining, for this plateau had been the main 
 source whence were supplied the diamonds to the 
 
 134
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 Orient for centuries. When Aurungzebe or Akbar, 
 kings of Delhi, wanted more diamonds, they sent an 
 army to Banganapalle, put the men to the sword and 
 carried off the females and diamonds. The field 
 had of course never been worked with machinery. 
 With the precious concession safely in my possession, 
 imagination led me to sneer at Rockefeller and 
 Carnegie. The Nawab was so pleased with me and 
 my Stock Exchange knowledge that he lent me a 
 motor car to go to the railway station to catch the 
 Madras train. The coloured chauffeur brought 
 about one mishap after another, and it took from 
 six till eleven at night to do the twenty miles. Towards 
 the end of the journey the rajah and myself started 
 to walk to the station while the chauffeur mended 
 his engine. At the first village we were chased back by 
 hundreds of dogs of every breed, reinforced by jackals 
 and what looked like cheetahs. We caught the train at 
 midnight and the chauffeur went back to be ham- 
 strung, disembowelled and crucified for ruining a 
 perfectly good Ford car. In London my first visit 
 was to a director of the De Beers Diamond Company 
 of Kimberley, who took exactly five minutes to tell 
 me the Company knew all about my diamond field, 
 and with the aid of two Governments and the Stock 
 Exchange the directors would not permit me to raise 
 capital or float a company ! He mentioned, inci- 
 dentally, that his company had locked up in Hatton 
 Gardens vaults 35,000,000 worth of cut diamonds 
 which were filtered into New York a few at a time to 
 feed a constant and growing demand. Within a 
 week it was certain he spake the truth. Nobody 
 would look at either my diamonds or my draft prospec- 
 tus, and the scheme died stillborn. These Bangana- 
 palle diamonds are sold clandestinely in India, but 
 the power of the big De Beers Corporation will keep 
 these mines unworked until such time as the Kim- 
 
 135
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 berley deposits are worked out. Then the De Beers 
 people will give the reigning Nawab thousands of 
 nautch girls and automobiles in exchange for a per- 
 petual concession over that desolate tableland of 
 eighteen square miles. The adventure was one of my 
 failures, most regrettable because with untold wealth 
 I had made up my mind to buy a second pair of braces. 
 Another time I should have made a pile of pounds, 
 shillings and pence was when I formed a syndicate 
 to send me to the Federated Malay States to secure 
 options over tin mines. I meant to follow up and make 
 use of the success of the Tongkah Harbour Tin Com- 
 pany on an island in the Mergui Archipelago belonging 
 to Siam. In Penang and Kuala Lumpur I picked up a 
 number of options over producing mines easily and 
 cheaply. And I also got a short option over a tin- 
 smelting concern in Penang owned by a German, a 
 Chinaman and a Chetty. There was only one other 
 smelting company in F.M.S., the Straits Trading 
 Company, and the one I bonded for sale in London 
 only needed more capital. So far so good, tin began 
 to fall and rubber to rise, and when I reached London, 
 tin was 90 a ton and rubber touched los. a pound 
 with one fluke sale at i is. 6d. So I waited in London 
 till my options ran out and somebody else floated the 
 tin smeltery and bagged the profit. Wasn't that bad 
 luck ? And we put in two winters in London the 
 Dreadful, when the cold, fog, rain and icy matters 
 make life an abomination of desolation. I think that 
 was the trip when I saw the clever, half-witted and 
 wholly dangerous Winston Churchill, in bell-topper, 
 spats and frock-coat, very like my own, directing 
 twenty Grenadier Guards in their rifle fire at a house 
 down in Whitechapel supposed to be inhabited by 
 an artist called Peter the Painter. Churchill was an 
 amusing sight that day. Next please ! And kindly, 
 don't worry. For forty years have been obsessed 
 
 136
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 with the belief that the Brown Coal at Altona on 
 Hobson's Bay would pay to briquet and yield gas, 
 ammonia and various by-products, so we formed a 
 syndicate and took an elaborate scheme to London 
 with a view to interesting leading people interested 
 in electricity for the production of which the dry 
 brown coal of Altona, with its high content of volatile 
 and fixed carbon, is eminently suitable. In fact, 
 Altona and not Yallourn should have been the seat of 
 Victoria's electrical industry. It would have been, 
 but for the landed interest in Yallourn of two powerful 
 Victorian politicians who thrust Morwell (Yallourn) 
 down the throats of Parliament late one hot night in 
 December ; and that's another and a sensational 
 story. With the aid of Sir Philip Dawson aud Lionel 
 Robinson, Clark and Company, the famous Australian 
 stockbrokers in London, I nearly put the Altona 
 business over, and if I had done so Yallourn would 
 not have been developed at an ultimate cost of 
 15, 000,000, and Altona would have been sending 
 electricity all through Victoria at a capital cost of 
 5,000,000 all told ! With my usual gaucherie I 
 missed the financial bus and a large entry in the Consols 
 ledger at the Bank of England no importa ! 
 
 Here is the list of shareholders in the Melton 
 Syndicate Limited, Palmerston House, Old Broad 
 Street, London, Manager : E. Habben : 
 
 Capital 3000, in 3000 i Shares. 
 
 Directors Shares 
 
 Joseph Dowling, The Minery, Rusper, Horsham, 
 
 Sussex ... ... ... ... 100 
 
 Hon. Edmund W. Parker, Brookside, Rugby ... 100 
 Hon. B. R. Wise, K.C., 12, Sloane Terrace, Sloane 
 
 Square ... ... ... ... IOO 
 
 J. Hadley, General Electric Company, 122, Charing 
 
 Cross Road, London (for Allgemeine Elecktrici- 
 
 tats Gesellschaft of Berlin) ... ... IOOO 
 
 137
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Sir E. J. Manville, M.J.E.E., 29, Great George Street, 
 
 Westminster ... ... ... ... 130 
 
 Sir Phillip Dawson, M.J.E.E., 29, Great George 
 Street, Westminster (Electrical Engineer to Lon- 
 donBrighton Railway) ... ... ... 140 
 
 Shareholders 
 
 Lionel Robinson, Clark and Company, 24, Throg- 
 
 morton Avenue ... ... ... 100 
 
 A. McHarg, 20, Bridgewater Square ... ... 50 
 
 J. O. Byrne, 12, New Court, Lincoln Inn (Mel- 
 bourne Trust Company) ... ... ... 200 
 
 J. Waller, M.J.E.E., Kineaid, Manville, Waller and 
 
 Dawson ... ... ... ... 130 
 
 W. Heaton Armstrong, M.P., Private Banker, Pal- 
 
 merston House ... ... ... ... 250 
 
 G. D. Meudell, Whitehall, Bank Place ... ... 600 
 
 Babcock and Wilcox, High Holborn, Boiler Manu- 
 facturers 100 
 
 Total 3000 
 
 Some people, Midas for instance, have asses' ears, 
 being asses and yet make pots of money. It is fear- 
 fully easy to make money, given a fair beginning, 
 provided you give up all else and devote yourself to 
 turning every pound over at a profit. Something 
 besides thrift is needed, because saving is dull plod- 
 ding and not at all clever. Anybody can save, and it 
 did not need Micawber to point out how. The man 
 who means to die rich ought not to gamble. He should 
 be always, night and day, on the watch for invest- 
 ments to yield him small profits quickly. They are 
 like thrips, those small safe chances flying about in 
 millions. Fifteen years on the Stock Exchange, a 
 life lived amongst money and monied people, taught 
 me that lesson. If you want to make money surely, 
 scorn delights and live laborious days looking out for 
 
 138
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 certainties. Then buy them and hold for a small 
 profit which grab. I missed a fortune by not acting 
 on my knowledge of the prices of fixed deposits and 
 shares in bung banks. Just after the breakdown in 
 1891 Tom Ellison, of Ellison and Evered, share- 
 brokers, drew up a form of transfer which he wrote 
 on the back of the fixed deposit receipts, all of which 
 were of course offered for sale at a discount by holders 
 who needed money badly. I began buying deposit 
 receipts early and got some cheap bargains in Com- 
 mercials, Bank of Victorias, Nationals, at IQS in the i y 
 or half their face value. These gradually went up, 
 but before the public became wise to what was going 
 on and found out how safe and sound the purchases 
 were, fixed deposit receipts were sacrificed to the 
 extent of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Then 
 some of the banks allowed their debtors to buy the 
 bank's own deposit receipts and set them off against 
 their overdrafts. For several institutions and their 
 overdrawn clients I subsequently did a big business 
 buying bank fixed deposit receipts here and in London, 
 Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow. There was money 
 to be picked up buying cheap bank shares, which 
 I did, but not to a large enough extent. As W. L. 
 Baillieu once remarked to me after the flurry was 
 over and the clouds had rolled by, " Fancy, Meudell, 
 there all these bank things were fructifying under 
 our noses and we didn't notice them." I did, but I 
 sold out too soon, and went for a trip round the 
 northern hemisphere. I missed a fortune but found 
 a lot of happiness. 
 
 Petroleum mining has always had a fatal fascination 
 for me and has cost me a competency. When C. F. 
 Lungley brought me his invention of a method of 
 squeezing more petrol out of kerosene I went into 
 the business with vim and verve. Thomas J. Green- 
 way examined the machine and found that Lungley 
 
 139
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 used a catalyst or third agent in the process of distilla- 
 tion and seemed to get more petrol at the expense of 
 the kerosene content of the crude petroleum. Lungley 
 would not disclose what the catalyst was, and Green- 
 way told me to drop it for that reason. My natural 
 cocksureness led me to ignore Greenway's good 
 advice and carried me along to my undoing. It 
 seemed all right in actual practice because Lungley 
 did get more petrol and less kerosene by his process 
 with his own machine. If the process and the machine 
 worked all right in California amongst the local refiners 
 and refineries we could sell the Lungley process readily 
 for a few million dollars, so we raised enough money to 
 transport Lungley and his machine to San Francisco 
 where it was worked before no fewer than twelve 
 chemists representing Standard Oil, Shell Oil, General 
 Petroleum, Associated Oil and Union Oil companies, 
 all of whom turned it down because Lungley would 
 not disclose the secret of his process. Another big 
 wad of money I should have made never materialised. 
 
 FORTUNES I DID NOT MAKE 
 
 Among half a dozen chances of making and keeping 
 a competency I had a chance once to settle in London 
 and join the Stock Exchange as partner of a firm 
 doing a large business with Australia. My Melbourne 
 experience would have been most valuable to the firm, 
 because I had been inside every big mine of import- 
 ance in Australia, excepting those in Queensland. 
 It was simply a question of climate and I could not 
 stick the London winter. To a sun worshipper not 
 to see the sun for months at a time is the worst of all 
 penances and punishments, so I came home. The 
 firm who wanted me to join easily and quickly rolled 
 into riches and retired from work, so I missed that 
 purse of Fortunatus. No importa ! After all a pile 
 of money is often a nuisance, and when the desire to 
 
 140
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 create wants fades out one can be very happy on a 
 little money. Another flood of wealth poured through 
 my hands when I was buying receipts for a bung 
 bank. I had accumulated about 30,000, in partner- 
 ship with a canny friend, the worth of fixed deposit 
 receipts at an average of i $s. in the 1, and we could 
 have gone on buying up to 300,000, if we had had 
 enough gumption or acumen. " Carpe diem " being 
 my family motto we sold out and I sailed up to 
 London to " enjoy the day." One ought to have 
 bought heavily certain bank shares which could be 
 got on credit and were fructifying under my eyes. 
 The late William Knox suggested I should go to 
 London and help the late D. J. Mackay to place 
 200,000 of debentures for the Mount Lyell Mining 
 and Railway Company. We joined forces and formed 
 a small limited company to handle that debenture 
 issue and to float South Lyell and North Lyell com- 
 panies on the London market. I worked very hard 
 and helped Mackay to secure the underwriting of 
 the issue. It took a long time to do, because London 
 mining people were affected by reports against the 
 Lyell district as a copperfield. One clause in our 
 prospectus which I suggested gave holders of deben- 
 tures the right to exchange one 100 debenture for 
 thirty-three Mount Lyell shares having a face value 
 of 3. Mackay exceeded the time given him to 
 float the issue. One Thursday we cabled Melbourne 
 to say the issue was sold at 90 less i\ per cent broker- 
 age. Next day the Melbourne Board cabled with- 
 drawing the issue, and on the Saturday morning 
 three share-brokers and the directors and friends 
 took the lot at 90. We had proved the money could 
 be raised in London, so they gambled on a certainty. 
 As I clearly foresaw, it was only necessary to boost 
 the price of the shares above 3 to make the deben- 
 tures more valuable. They eventually went to 405, 
 
 141
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 and Mackay and I missed making 50,000. I was 
 never paid my expenses or given a bonus or a few 
 debentures. The still small voice of gratitude was 
 stilled and never even squeaked. Wordsworth knew 
 his humanity well when he wrote : 
 
 " I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds, 
 V/ith colours still returning, 
 Alas ! the gratitude of men, 
 Hath oftener left me mourning." 
 
 Personally I do not believe gratitude exists in any 
 human being. It is a mythical legendary sentiment 
 peculiar to dogs, but to nobody else. When ill and 
 supposed to be dying, I gave my business to a bloke 
 who had come to my office in knickerbockers as an 
 office boy, and I've only seen him once since ! That 
 does not hurt or upset me, it only makes me laugh. 
 But I know I deserved a cut out of those exceptional 
 profits on that Mount Lyell debenture issue, because 
 I laid the foundations of its extraordinary success. 
 And what is more all those Mount Lyell holders, 
 save one, were in low water financially and the 
 debenture proceeds saved both them and their mine ! 
 D. J. Mackay and I had put a valuation on the Mount 
 Lyell mine and its debentures in London, and B. J. 
 Fink, Bowes Kelly, H. Karlbaum, W. Knox and 
 John Goodall, quick to see that point, withdrew the 
 issue, floated it in Melbourne in two hours and each 
 made a small fortune out of the float. Debentures 
 went to 405, and shares to 13 IOJ., and I got 
 nothing, not a penny. 
 
 Two flourishing drapery businesses were placed 
 in my hands for sale in London. After the bank 
 smash in 1892 business of every kind in Melbourne 
 went to pot. George and Georges Company had a 
 big overdraft with the National Bank and I took 
 the papers and the data with me to London, where 
 
 142
 
 FORTUNES MISSED 
 
 I placed the matter before several big wholesale 
 houses at St. Paul's Churchyard, who were shy of 
 trusting Australian firms, several of whom in the 
 soft-goods' trade were shaken and some shaky. The 
 price asked was .100,000 and my commission 
 would have been so fat as to verge on obesity. Nothing 
 came of it except a succession of dashed good luncheons 
 at Sweetings, Pirns, and at the City Carlton Club. 
 Another time I was asked to cable to London and 
 offer to sell Craig Williamson's building and business 
 when it was only one quarter its present size for 
 100,000 cash. It was placed before a syndicate of 
 Fore Street merchants who thought the price too 
 high and a reply cable ended the business. After 
 that Mr. W. E. J. Craig, a remarkably sagacious 
 business man, took control of Craigs and made it 
 one of the most profitable as it is the best conducted 
 business in Melbourne of its kind. There again 
 I lost another fat wad of cash and shares. No importa ! 
 Next please ! Tid'a-pa^ nitchevo and nothing matters, 
 does it ? For two years I tried to get the Tasmanian 
 State Government to join me in an arrangement to 
 gather funds in London to start an oil shale industry 
 in Tasmania. My plan was to form a company of 
 1,000,000 capital in London, give the Tasmanian 
 Government half the shares fully paid up, free of 
 calls, costs, expenses, and without recourse to them 
 in any shape or form. I meant to form a syndicate 
 to lay down the preliminary expenses of presenting 
 the business properly in London. With 500,000 
 shares we could easily get 250,000 cash, not to 
 experiment on the local coal and shale, but to erect 
 retorts on the spot to distil oil from the cannel coals, 
 tasmanite, pelionite, lignite and oil shales which lie 
 unused all over Tasmania. With Government backing 
 we could raise the needful cash ; without it, nothing 
 doing. So put that on the list of my alleged failures. 
 
 H3
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Next please ! In drilling for oil near Lakes Entrance, 
 Gippsland, Victoria, a flow of natural gas was struck, 
 forcing its way through a column of water 1 1 20 feet 
 high in a six-inch pipe, and blowing off under that 
 difficult condition at a rate of ten million cubic feet a 
 year. It has been going into the air for two years. 
 In Canada or the United States the lease would be 
 worth millions and I might have been a millionaire ! 
 No importa ! 
 
 Another occasion I missed a great coup was when 
 I first assumed the role of pioneer in search of oil in 
 Australia in 1903. Some years after that I formed 
 the conclusion that oil would never be found in Aus- 
 tralia until plenty of cash was available, so I began 
 the promotion of a company in London to put up 
 j 1 00,000 in cash and an attache case full of scrip 
 for myself, my heirs, executors and assignees. The 
 idea caught on and we had promises to underwrite 
 half the cash when the Mines Department of South 
 Australia sent abroad apparently to government 
 departments, petroleum institutes, and societies a 
 bulletin written by L. Keith Ward condemning the 
 prospects of ever finding oil in the Commonwealth. 
 The bulletin had not been published here, and it was 
 a shock when my London friends let the business 
 fall fut. If we had gone to flotation I feel sure we 
 would have proved oil in the basin of the Murray 
 River system, which has been the sewer for bringing 
 the carbonaceous matter of three states towards the 
 sea for thousands of years. Petroleum will be found 
 yet when the right amount of money is provided, 
 and the right men, Australians and nobody else, are 
 given the right machinery to use in the search for 
 oil in this marvellously rich mineral country with its 
 illimitable store of coal, brown coal and oil shale. 
 
 144
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 TRAVELS A TABLOID OF TRAVEL 
 
 To me travel is the supreme joy. There is nothing 
 on earth in art or science comparable with the delight 
 of seeing new sights, hearing new sounds, and talking 
 to strange people in strange lands. And the recollec- 
 tion of travel is a glorious possession. To aid that 
 remembrance I have collected several thousand 
 printed and written mementoes, theatre programmes, 
 hotel bills, menus, entree cards, tickets, maps, plans, 
 guide-books, and the rest. A piqure of morphia, a 
 whiff of opium, a nip of hashish would not have the 
 same soothing and pleasurable effect on me as ten 
 minutes with the tin box holding the gleanings of 
 forty years of world travel. Before me is a pro- 
 gramme of the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, 
 dated July loth, 1889, when Gounod's opera, Romeo 
 and Juliette, was performed in French, Madame Melba 
 and Jean and Edouard De Reszke sharing the honours. 
 During the balcony scene we three Australians played 
 leap-frog in the corridor ! The tyro of 1889 and 
 Melba of 1929 are surely not the same person. In 
 1902 prices were amphitheatre, is. 6d., amphi- 
 theatre stalls, 5^. and IQJ. 6</., balcony stalls, 15*., 
 and orchestra stalls, ^i U., do not parallel with 1926 
 prices either. On February 9th, 1898, I heard Ada 
 Crossley at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place. 
 Madame Belle Cole was the other star artiste. There 
 is only one Ada Crossley, and Clara Butt and Dolores 
 and Albani are just next in magnitude. On March 
 1 8th, 1901, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New 
 York, I heard Melba in " La Boheme " and the mad
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 scene from " Lucia," Signer Mancinelli conducting. 
 Some of the " 400 " of New York were there, and we 
 saw Jacob Astor, Perry Belmont, W. G. Rockefeller, 
 Pierpont Morgan (parterre box No. 35), and a young 
 Vanderbilt. The list of box-holders is printed on 
 the programme, but as the Yanks are an unmusical 
 nation the performance went flatly. Next day the 
 Opera House was let as a music-hall. Here is a 
 New York programme of Koster and Bial's, Decem- 
 ber, 1897, alongside a gorgeous bill of the Empire 
 Music Hall, London. They hissed Marie Lloyd at 
 Koster and Bial's the night I was there, and the 
 hissing was deserved. Anna Held, perhaps the 
 most beautiful woman at that time on the stage, also 
 appeared. Next I note a memento from the famous 
 Maple Club at Tokio, given me by a Geisha after 
 an elaborate dinner and a pleasant evening of music 
 and dancing. The greatest compliment a Geisha can 
 pay is to be curious regarding one's jewellery, or hair, 
 or clothes. They are dear little women, whose ways 
 are not like unto ours. The afternoon of Sunday, 
 March 27th, 1898, was spent at the Concours Hip- 
 pique in the Champ de Mars, Paris, when sixty-two 
 horses competed for the prix d'essai of thirty-two 
 pounds for jumping. There was a splendid lot of 
 spills. Frenchmen are safer in automobiles, an exhibi- 
 tion of which I saw the same week in the Tuileries, 
 the first show ever held in Paris. The next Sunday, 
 I find from the card, was spent at Auteuil watching 
 several steeplechases, and playing a few francs on 
 the tote or pari-mutuel. The jockeys were chiefly 
 English. Mr. Kewney of the V.R.C. should go to 
 Auteuil to learn how to provide food and drink for 
 a crowd ; it is done so badly at Flemington. On 
 July 1 4th, 1898, my wife and I had seats near the 
 President at the grand review of troops at Longchamps. 
 The final charge of six thousand cavalry was worth 
 
 146
 
 A TABLOID OF TRAVEL 
 
 untold gold as a spectacle. Speaking of races, Dor- 
 ling's list of the Epsom Races for Wednesday, May 
 25th, 1898, is interesting, because Jeddah won the 
 Derby, starting at 50 to i and I backed him. William 
 Cooper's Newhaven II, who won the Melbourne 
 Cup, was beaten in the Epsom Cup. 
 
 Here comes a programme from the Theatre Royal, 
 Hong Kong, of May yth, 1901, when the Brough 
 Company played " The Village Priest." The Broughs 
 were great favourites in the East. August i8th, 1889, 
 we two Australians attended a military concert at 
 the Schutzenfest platz, " unter den eichen," at 
 Wiesbaden. There was a mimic battle, too. Next 
 are four more opera programmes of 1889, from 
 Berlin, Frankfort, Vienna and Dresden. At the 
 latter we saw several Wagner operas, in the company 
 of Professor Petersen afterwards at Melbourne Uni- 
 versity. What a dreadful bill is this of the Gran 
 Hotel de las Cuatro Naciones, Barcelona, but that 
 of the Grand Hotel de la Paix, in the Puerta del Sol, 
 Madrid, is worse. The catalogue of the Museo at 
 Madrid, which I visited on Christmas Day, 1895, 
 has pinned to it a ticket for the bull fight. I preferred 
 the Museo, with its Velasquez and Murillos. . What 
 Australian abroad has not been to the Jardin de 
 Paris, and tried la glissade ? A reminiscence of the 
 Boule Miche, in the shape of a ticket from the Bal 
 Bullier, is here. The bill of the Hotel Hungaria, 
 Buda-Pest, has somehow got mixed with that of 
 Maiden's Hotel, at Delhi. We paid 8*. a day at 
 Maiden's, but there was no Durbar in January, 1901. 
 Here is a supper menu from the Hotel Carlton, 
 London, which cost IQJ., " Bovril soup, scalloped 
 lobster, chicken, game patty, cold beef, tongue and 
 ham, salade, iced pudding and biscuits." It costs 
 is. 6d. a breath in these big London hotels. A better 
 dinner was that to the Earl of Hopetoun, on October 
 
 H7
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 1 5th, 1889, when Sir Graham Berry, K.C.M.G., 
 presided at the St. George's Club, Hanover Square. 
 Sir Hugh Childres, Sir Andrew Clarke, Sir George 
 Tryon, Mr. Thomas Sutherland, Lord Knutsford 
 and Lord Rosebery were notable speakers that night. 
 On April ist, 1889, I heard Miss Jennie Lee in 
 ' Jo," at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, and the 
 dear little lady was then at her best. Foila, see this 
 billet d'entree for the Casino at Monte Carlo ! Of 
 course they have a cirkus variete at Copenhagen, the 
 chief feature being a good orchestra. There was 
 some pretty ballad singing by Frk. Nanny Bergstrom, 
 whom I had heard previously at Stockholm. A ticket 
 from Thomas Carlyle's house, 24, Cheyne Row, 
 Chelsea, keeps company with a bill from the New 
 Prince Charles Hotel, New Orleans. The bill with 
 " chits " from the Oriental Hotel, Yokohama, clings 
 to one from the Hotel St. Petersburg, Berlin, and 
 they resemble one another in being reasonable. On 
 the Southern Pacific dining-car from Orleans the 
 carte for dinner contains fifty-two items, while that 
 of the Cunard liner " Campania " holds thirty-seven. 
 What pretty and artistic reminders I have of Nikko, 
 the beautiful inland Japanese town ! " Nikko wo 
 minai uchi wa, kekko to iu na ! " which means, 
 " Do not use the word magnificent till you have seen 
 Nikko." We have nothing tangible to show regarding 
 the earthquake we enjoyed there. On December 9th, 
 1893, I saw a football match, Blackheath v. Cardiff, 
 at Rectory Field, Blackheath. Rugby football to an 
 Australian is merely stupid. On June yth, 1889, 
 we had rather a good dinner at the " Cri," Piccadilly 
 Circus, in honour of David Christie Murray, the late 
 Edmund Yates being in the chair. A few of my 
 neighbours were Haddon Chambers, Hume Nisbet, 
 Marriott Watson, Mannington Caffyn, Philip Mennel, 
 Justin M'Carthy ; and I remember the Veuve 
 
 148
 
 A TABLOID OF TRAVEL 
 
 Monnier, the Theophile Roederer, the Calon Segur 
 (1879), an d the speeches, were all nice and dry. Two 
 notable circus programmes, Barnum and Bailey's, 
 at Olympia, London, and Buffalo Bill's, outside Paris, 
 are appropriately folded together, and close by lies 
 one from a Geneva Hippodrome, also a book of the 
 Hamburg Zoo. The illustrated route of the Mount 
 Saleve Railway, near Geneva, nestles with an account 
 of the funicular railway up Vesuvius. One cannot 
 forget Chamounix, because of our honeymoon, an 
 hotel bill, a telescope, and Mont Blanc, all of them 
 long. It is a far cry from the Chateau of Miramar, 
 near Trieste, to the Jama Musjid of Shah Jehan, at 
 Agra, and it can be heard just as easily as the pin I 
 heard dropped in the elliptical Mormon Tabernacle 
 at the Zion of the Latter Day Saints, Salt Lake City 
 in 1884. Here is an account of that most glorious 
 of beautiful human creations, the church of St. Peter 
 at Rome. Bramante and Michael Angelo ! // fine 
 loda r opera. It is not flat blasphemy to say the Capitol 
 and the Congressional Library at Washington come 
 next after St. Peter's and the Taj Mahal in the contest 
 of magnificence. The owner of ' The Victory," 
 Lionel Robinson who won the Melbourne Cup with 
 him, and I went once to Waterloo, and a small photo- 
 graph of the Lion Mound on the battlefield is a 
 pleasing remembrancer. Next comes a bill from 
 Shepherd's Hotel, Cairo, and here I must stop. Of 
 all this I am proud, for I can say, " Vengo di Cosmo-poli" 
 I am a citizen of the world ! 
 
 AUSTRALIA, LAND OF COLOUR 
 
 A strangely false idea of the beauty of Australia 
 has been given by writers, songsters and poets, who 
 have led strangers to believe Australia is devoid of 
 colour, that it is mostly desert, brown, dry, sandy, 
 and that our glorious possession, the eucalyptus tree, 
 
 L 149
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 is scraggy, scentless and shadeless. The truth is the 
 opposite. Australia, because of its wide range of 
 territory within the temperate as well as the tropical 
 zone, is especially endowed with vivid colours and 
 tinted foliage. There is no blue atmosphere like ours 
 elsewhere, nor is there any colour in the sky like Austra- 
 lia's in any country. There is no country of all I have 
 seen can compare with Australia chromatically. So 
 far as the science of colours goes for diversity and 
 beauty our country leads and leaves the world behind 
 it. And this applies to both fauna and flora. England 
 and Scotland are drab and dreary all the year round, 
 compared with Tasmania, and in Ireland alone did 
 I see anything colourful and that was the grass. The 
 pioneers who came from cold, bleak, poverty-stricken 
 England and Scotland to open up Australia and 
 brought numerous falsities here did not understand 
 their new environment of colour and beauty. We, 
 their children, know better, There is no Northern 
 European tree oak, elm, birch, beech or poplar 
 equal to the indigenous eucalyptus, probably the most 
 useful and beneficent tree that grows. 
 
 COST OF TRAVEL 
 
 Since I started travelling I reckon it has cost me 
 20,000 for my wife and self. To-day I could not 
 have covered the same ground much under 50,000. 
 In India, China, Japan, Malay States, Dutch East 
 Indies, the hotels charged from 6s. ^d. to 12s. 6d. 
 a day inclusive. The same hotels would charge 
 three to four times those prices nowadays. And 
 everything else is proportionately higher : theatres, 
 entertainments, railways and steamships. In 1884 
 I went first class to London from Melbourne by the 
 ss. " Orient " for 63, the return fare being 100. 
 The same cabin to-day would cost me 132 single, 
 and 231 return. The Orient boats were about 
 
 150
 
 COST OF TRAVEL 
 
 4000 tons, " Potosi," " Garonne," " Lusitania," " John 
 Elder " and " Sorata." The P. and O. steamers were 
 all about 3000 to 4000 tons, and fares ranged round 
 60 single and 100 return. Not so long before that 
 era the P. and O. Company did not charge for wines 
 or liquors. The little P. and O. steamers in 1884 
 were, " Pekin," " Khedive," " Massilia," " Thames," 
 " Sutlej " and " Ballarat." The White Star Com- 
 pany, from Liverpool to New York, ran the " Celtic " 
 and " Germania," charging 12, 14 and 16 first 
 class for the trip lasting about nine or ten days. The 
 Cunard Company charged the same rates and doubled 
 them for return tickets. The " Cephalonia," " Cata- 
 lonia," " Scythia," " Servia " and " Bothnia " were 
 the crack boats then. We took ten days on the 
 " Bothnia " to cross the Atlantic. Out of hundreds 
 of hotel bills here are a few extracts. In 1884, Grand 
 Hotel, Leghorn, breakfast, 3 francs, dinner, 5 francs ; 
 Grand Hotel, Milan, 28th April, 1884, breakfast, 
 1.50, lunch 2 and dinner 5 francs ; Hotel Swan, 
 Lucerne, 8j. a day ; Hotel de la Poste, Brussels, 
 IDS. a day ; and Arundel Hotel, London, bed and 
 breakfast, 6s. a day ; Hotel Victoria, Venice, 15 
 francs a day ; Grand Hotel, Naples, 18 francs a day. 
 Finally, First Avenue Hotel, Holborn, then brand 
 new, charged an inclusive fee of 15^. a day, while 
 you could get a table d'h6te dinner at the Holborn 
 Restaurant, then the best of modern cafes, for 35. 6d. 
 The cheapest place to travel round is the Pacific Ocean, 
 and you will find Oceana and Polynesia no less amusing 
 and no less instructive than Pall Mall or Paris. 
 
 MEN 
 
 I thought I had known a large number of rich 
 men throughout Australia and during my travels in 
 Europe and the two in America, until I made my first 
 trip through the Malay States from Rangoon in Burma,
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 via Penang and Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, I did not 
 really know how many large fortunes can be rapidly 
 compiled from other things besides wool and gold. 
 At the Spotted Dog Club in Kuala Lumpur, called so 
 because white, brown and yellow are eligible shades 
 of membership, I met some rich Chinese who had 
 made big " rises " out of tin, rubber and the spirit 
 and opium licences hired from the Government and 
 farmed. One charming Chinese gentleman, who was 
 very kind to me, was Kong Lam, a member of the 
 council of the F.M.S. He had made in a few years 
 250,000 out of the three sources of wealth just 
 named. His home at Kuala Lumpur was a revelation 
 in splendour. Another Chinese at the Singapore 
 Club was then drawing 96,000 a year from tin 
 mines at Billiton and Banca and drinking too many 
 whisky stengahs with the money. My mate and I 
 went over a palace unoccupied by its Chinese owner 
 in Singapore which cost him 100,000 furnished. 
 His income was 100,000 a year ! His favourite 
 tipple was gin pahits every ten minutes all day long, 
 a pahit being only about an eye-bath full. 
 
 SHIPPING LINES 
 
 Of the hundreds of ships by which we have travelled, 
 it is hard to say which was the best all-round vessel. 
 This much one can claim without dread of denial, 
 comparing the steamers and awarding points for 
 cleanliness, comfort, safety, healthy cabins, and good 
 food, the Australian coastal shipping services have 
 no equal on the seven seas. Have travelled on dozens 
 of steamers along the coasts of Australia, Tasmania 
 and New Zealand, and have a list of six boats which 
 were wrecked after I had been on them, though I 
 never went through an accident at sea. My first 
 sea trip was by the ss. " Edina," the oldest steamship 
 on Lloyds' list, to Warrnambool, fifty years ago, and 
 
 152
 
 SHIPPING LINES 
 
 it took twenty-four hours to do the 165 miles, or 
 seven knots an hour. To the Zeehan-Dundas silver- 
 field, on the west coast of Tasmania, and afterwards 
 to the Mount Lyell copper-field I made numerous 
 voyages in craft of all sizes, but all small ones from 
 90 to 150 tons burthen. Think of it, ye armchair 
 lovers who live at home at ease, and who have only 
 travelled by big luxurious liners. The smells, the 
 dirt, the horrible sleeping shelves, the poor food and 
 the abominable motion of these tubs is nearly in- 
 describable. The Union Steamship Company of 
 New Zealand is without peers among the coastal 
 lines of the world, and Denny Brothers of Dumbarton 
 have built for the Union Company some of the best 
 steamers afloat. Have been on about forty Union 
 ships and liked them all. Mikhailovitch's steamers, 
 on the River Plate, are excellent, and so are some of 
 the ferries on the Hudson River to Albany ; have had 
 enjoyable trips on the Rhine and Danube, the Clyde, 
 the Thames (the latter the most beautiful of all rivers), 
 the River Mississipi and the Clyde, and at one time or 
 another we have travelled by all the great European 
 fleets and by every passenger line out and into Aus- 
 tralia, and know nothing superior to boats of the 
 Burns Philp, Howard Smith, Mcllwraith, Mac- 
 Eachearn or Huddart Parker lines. Have been on 
 most of the great Atlantic liners including the Inman, 
 the Anchor, the Allan, the Cunard, the White Star, 
 the Hamburg-America, the America and the Nord 
 Deutscher Lloyd. It is not fashionable to say so, 
 but with my wide experience of steamboats I plump 
 for the N.D.L. as the best equipped, best managed 
 and most comfortable vessels sailing the oceans. 
 That sounds like rank heresy, but facts are stubborn 
 things. The next best line is the Messageries Mari- 
 times Company of France, and then the Nippon 
 Yushen Kaisha of Japan. We have been literally on 
 
 '53
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 dozens of P. and O. and Orient ships and detest 
 them for their snobbery, swagger and swank. The 
 officers are allowed far too much freedom in these 
 services and on some boats are allowed to be a nuisance 
 amongst the female passengers. Especially on the 
 boats carrying Anglo-Indians, the heaven-born civil 
 servants and the haughty military officers maintain 
 their alleged superiority of caste and are intensely 
 disliked by the Australian passengers. Talk about 
 racial and national hatreds ! They are mere trans- 
 gressions of politeness compared with the bitterness 
 between these two clans of the Anglo-Saxon family. 
 A hardened voyager I have found it good policy to 
 laugh heartily at the airs and graces of these suburban 
 residents of the outer Empire. 
 
 IMMIGRATION PERIL 
 
 With forty-two different foreign languages spoken 
 in 26,239 religious organizations in the United 
 States, what hope is there for even that simple basic 
 element of cultural and spiritual union in a nation a 
 common language ? What chance for a united United 
 States is there when fourteen million foreign born 
 whites and yellows in that country, and their like- 
 minded, support 1052 foreign language publications 
 of all kinds ? By the census of 1920 more than a 
 quarter of the entire population of 105,710,620 was 
 foreign born or of foreign parentage. In 1926 there 
 were nearly 120,000,000 people in the United States, 
 and therefore over 30,000,000 are aliens racially and 
 culturally, opposed naturally to the Yankees or those 
 of British blood, and some day these aliens, applying 
 the principle of self-determination, will make the 
 United States spiritually bonded and destroy the 
 ideals of the Anglo-Saxon progenitors of these present- 
 day Americans. To call them Anglo-Saxons and to 
 
 154
 
 IMMIGRATION PERIL 
 
 address them as our cousins is to act a lie and to dis- 
 honour our own traditions. 
 
 In the South American republics, like Brazil, 
 Argentine, Bolivia, Chili and Paraguay, the Americans 
 have not gripped the foreign trade, having so far been 
 too busy and fully employed at home. They must 
 tender for part of the trade of these rich territories, 
 and the Atlantic countries once fettered, those of the 
 Pacific will offer themselves to be bound with the 
 chains of American trade. The Panama Canal 
 means the ultimate creation of a foreign mercantile 
 marine to carry American goods, and the Panama 
 Canal will be its porch to the Pacific. The effect on 
 Australia's destiny will be that the United States 
 will gradually become Australia's most dreaded 
 enemy. And why not ? The Anglo-Celtic element 
 in the North American is being washed out by the 
 Teutonic, the Latin, and the Slav blood, and the 
 feeling of the kinship has really disappeared despite 
 post-prandial orators. Our only chance of safety 
 from subjugation by the United States is the rift 
 likely to be caused by the need for trying to expel or 
 keep under the Negro Americans, and also by the 
 want of cohesion amongst the American peoples 
 themselves. One cannot place too much reliance on 
 the loyalty of Great Britain to Australia, and as a real 
 Australian I don't believe Britain cares the shadow 
 of a shade for Australasia, and will lend us no aid 
 when the Yankees want our beautiful continent for 
 the over-plus of their millions of hybrids. Australia's 
 destiny is in dire peril and the sooner we have a 
 system of conscription, a rifle for every man, our own 
 arsenals and navy, the better able shall we be to try 
 to retain our nationality, and resist the cohorts which 
 will bring hither the satraps to destroy our autonomy, 
 and make Australasia an American colony. 
 
 My mate and I had a splendid voyage, no longer 
 
 '55
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 possible, by a North Deutscher Lloyd Company 
 route from Batavia to Brisbane, calling at Sourabaya, 
 Java, Macassar in the Celebes, Banda and Amboyna 
 in the Moluccas, all through the Spice Islands, 
 stopping every day at one or two ports to pick up trade, 
 and then along the Dutch and German colonies in 
 New Guinea which they ought never to have been 
 allowed to annex. The sooner the Dutch are forced 
 to give up the East Indies the better for the British. 
 They hold all their oversea possessions with a feeble 
 hand. How can it be otherwise when the other hand 
 is always filled by a sandwich ? We called at a lot 
 of German settlements along the north coast of New 
 Guinea, and at Eitape we had a whole day ashore. 
 This place or a village near by had been blown to a 
 frazzle, as Theodore Roosevelt, the over-valued 
 Yankee President would have said, by a German 
 gunboat because the niggers had killed a priest and 
 eaten three nuns a few weeks previously. The German 
 school for the native kiddies was the Guildhall or 
 Louvre of the village. Here we saw on the walls a 
 large chromograph of the conceited German Emperor, 
 Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, the chap who ran away 
 from his army to save his neck, exalted between 
 framed pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary ! 
 The Kaiser was six inches higher up the wall. It 
 wasn't blasphemous so much as it was laughable. 
 On a back beach, while gathering shells, about a 
 dozen small black fellows joined the party. A box of 
 chocolates made them friendly. Assuming the position 
 of fugleman I formed a line and drilled them, then 
 word by word I taught them to sing the first verse 
 of the national anthem, " God Save the King." When 
 they knew the song perfectly I led them through the 
 village laughing and singing lustily. It was damned 
 funny and most edifying, though not applauded by 
 the Germans on the wharf. Naturally that was seven 
 
 156
 
 IMMIGRATION PERIL 
 
 years pre-war. Next day we went over a German 
 Government plantation at Friederickshafen growing 
 kapok, cotton and coconuts. The manager told me 
 he worked 1000 natives with the aid of one Mauser 
 automatic and two long buggy whips. At Herbertshoe 
 we saw Queen Emma, a Samoan Princess, who kept 
 a general store and made money trading and planting 
 coconuts. Her son, Coe Forsaythe, is a well-known 
 Sydney racing man. His father was a Yankee. On 
 that delightful trip one passenger was a fellow called 
 Poulteney Bigelow, a nomadic journalist who bossed 
 everything on the " Prince Waldemar," including the 
 captain's cockatoo. When they go travelling why 
 won't Americans stop talking and drop blustering. 
 Nobody cares a damn whether the United States is a 
 great country or not. If it really is, how can that fact 
 give joy to the rest of us ? The only place in the world 
 I have never been offered a cigar, a drink, a luncheon, 
 a dinner, or a club membership is New York, the earthly 
 hell of noise and incivility. We went on to Simsons- 
 haven, now Rabaul, then being built by Germany as a 
 naval base in prospect of the occupation of Australasia 
 and all the British islands in Oceana. That plot 
 failed, as every similar attempt to occupy Australia 
 effectively must fail whether made by Japanese, 
 Germans, or Americans. The coastline of the Aus- 
 tralian continent stretches for 12,000 miles, and the 
 area is 2,948,306 square miles. The mainland is 
 256 square miles larger than the mainland of the 
 United States of America which thinks and calls itself 
 a great country, or in pure blasphemy " God's Foot- 
 stool." 
 
 These are the three most wonderful sights on earth : 
 the Grand Canyon of Colorado, the Niagara Falls, and 
 the view of the Himalayas from Darjeeling. The 
 Thames is the most beautiful river, the Mississippi 
 the most impressive, and the Ganges far and away 
 
 157
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the most interesting. Of the three great limestone 
 cave systems of the world, Adelsberg Grotto near 
 Gratz in Hungary, the Kentucky Caves in U.S.A., 
 and the Jenolan Caves in New South Wales, the 
 latter is infinitely the most entrancing and the best 
 developed. Which are the three most magnificent 
 buildings one has seen ? In this order, the Taj Mahal 
 shrine at Agra in India ; St. Peter's Cathedral at 
 Rome ; and the Congressional Library at Washington 
 in the United States. Which are the three finest 
 hotels on the earth for comfort ? The Hotel Stewart 
 in San Francisco, the Kaiserhof in Berlin, and the 
 Hotel Australia in Sydney. There are of course more 
 expensive and more pretentious hotels, but out of a 
 list of five hundred I have slept in, I plump for these 
 three, because they combine luxury and comfort in 
 the highest degree. Hotel Stewart in California, and 
 Hotel Australia in Sydney are homely hotels splen- 
 didly managed. There are no quiet hotels in New 
 York or Chicago, and all of them are fit places for 
 mob-men who love noise and hustle. 
 
 MALTA 
 
 Have been to Malta, the key of the Mediterranean, 
 and wonder why the British don't make a second 
 Heligoland of it, an impregnable fortress to dominate 
 the Near East. It is in the very centre of the Mediter- 
 ranean, and with its safe harbours it could be and ought 
 to be made the strongest place in Europe. When the 
 League of Nuisances fails from lack of subscriptions 
 to carry on its funny amateurish game of keeping 
 peace, Malta, as " the Nurse of the Mediterranean " 
 and its strategic centre, will assume its true position 
 as one of the principal keys of the Empire. We have 
 spent a day at Malacca in the East Indies where there 
 are no canes for sale, and another day at Macassar in 
 the Spice Islands, where there is no hair oil made, 
 
 158
 
 SOUTH SEAS 
 
 although there are nutmegs a-plenty. In Brazil, at 
 Santos, Rio Janeiro, and Pernambuco, we tried in 
 vain to buy Brazil nuts, yet I bought an excellent 
 pair of Wellington boots, long ones for riding, at 
 Wellington, New Zealand. There are two commodi- 
 ties not mythical or legendary, because we have had 
 them up and down all round the globe, in jungle, 
 desert, or city Lea and Perrin's Worcestershire 
 Sauce and Guinness's Stout. 
 
 SOUTH SEAS 
 
 Have seen most of the chief groups of islands in 
 the South Seas and must confess their glamour is 
 fleeting. Saw Fiji first and was entranced by its 
 novel beauty. The contrast of its greenness with 
 the dryness of my homeland must have lent the charm. 
 Samoa was visited next when there was a tripartite 
 control by Germany, Britain and the United States. 
 There was more to rave about in the country behind 
 Apia, and the natives were more attractive than the 
 Fijians. Made a pilgrimage to Vailima to pay 
 homage to the memory of Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 the King of Stylists, and can understand the fascina- 
 tion the beautiful surroundings of his home had for 
 him. We had a gay time with the natives, the women 
 especially being likeable and friendly. Still, the bases 
 of a truly happy life, the food, the good bed, the hot 
 bath, the lavatory, and the wire blinds were wanting, 
 and the insect pests made life partly disagreeable, 
 and the humid heat was a constant penalty on pleasure. 
 On another trip I stopped off at Tutuila, now called 
 Pango Pango, an American colony with the prettiest 
 harbour and one of the best of earth's land-locked 
 havens. There the natives were neither so charming 
 nor so clean as their Samoan relatives. Before the 
 Hawaian or Sandwich Islands were Americanized 
 and ruined as beauty spots I spent a holiday there
 
 ever so many years ago. There were very few Japs, 
 Chinese, Portuguese, or other aliens in Hawaii in 
 those days before the United States annexed the 
 territory. Honolulu was a sleek and glossy paradise, 
 and the unspoilt natives quite as attractive as their 
 cousins the Maoris of New Zealand. Then Claus 
 Spreckels started growing sugar, pineapples were 
 planted for canning, and the glory of Hawaii departed. 
 The aborigines are decadent and will shortly vanish 
 as a race, their places being taken by the lascivious 
 Jap and his average dozen children. Japs breed 
 quicker than flies or rabbits and every child ranks as 
 an American elector. Some day the Japanese problem 
 in Hawaii will be as difficult of solution as the negro 
 problem at home to the Americans. Meanwhile 
 they keep their powder dry and their forts fully manned 
 by 5000 gunners. Pearl Harbour, near Honolulu, 
 is a naval base, becoming as strong as Gibraltar is or 
 Heligoland was, and at the first sign of insurrection 
 the Japanese will be driven over the precipice at Pali, 
 as the Hawaians were driven by King Kamehameha. 
 The best group of South Sea islands is called Society, 
 of which Tahiti is the largest and most beautiful. 
 Although that is so it does not justify the arrant 
 nonsense written about it by Yankees like O'Brien 
 and new chum Englishmen like Robert Keable. The 
 town of Papeete is a pleasant enough place, though 
 crude, raw, primitive. The truth is Tahiti has been 
 spoilt by the tourists and the Chinese. It is not an 
 Isle of Dreams, a garden of the Hesperides, or an 
 abode of the blessed. Rather is it a pretty tropical 
 island, debased by strangers, the Tahitians spoilt by 
 the missionaries and the traders, and the island itself 
 being commercialized and despoiled of its natural 
 loveliness. There is nothing to rave about in Tahiti 
 which is certain to become a travel resort for more 
 and more Americans who will some day be supplied 
 
 1 60
 
 SOUTH SEAS 
 
 with a ten-storied hotel with elevators, central heating 
 and toilets, to which will be attached a casino con- 
 trolled by the French administration. Real travellers, 
 and not mere tourists, should try hard to visit the 
 Marquesas Islands, made notable by Herman Mel- 
 ville and R. L. Stevenson, whose people are fast 
 disappearing through European diseases. The Mar- 
 quesas group, like Greece, has a series of mountain 
 ranges and valleys running parallel, and naturally divid- 
 ing the tribes and keeping them apart. The decline in 
 the population is as rapid as it is shocking. The Pau- 
 motu group, or Low Archipelago, should be seen, 
 especially during the pearling season when com- 
 munication is regular and certain. The pearling 
 is strictly controlled by the French authorities. A 
 number of the islands are mere atolls, coral reefs 
 just peeping up out of the sea. Raratonga is an 
 uninteresting island, but typically Polynesian. It is 
 a true example of all the other South Sea islets which 
 are much alike green, hot and moist. The best 
 island to see in Oceana is New Caledonia, found by 
 Captain Cook and annexed by the French to whom 
 it ought never to have belonged. Like the British, 
 the French were looking for an overseas prison for 
 their worst convicts, and like the British they hung 
 the very bad malefactors who stole bread or poached 
 pheasants or didn't stand up when " God Save the 
 King " was sung. It gave Australia some trouble to 
 get the French Government to stop sending prisoners 
 to Noumea, and now they go to Cayenne in French 
 Guiana. Noumea is a delightful centre for a holiday. 
 There are two good hotels, excellent roads for motor- 
 ing, and the scenery is right for motorists. 
 
 ADEN, BUDA PESTH 
 
 Aden is another of the unpleasant spots on the 
 globe. A long time ago we spent a day there and 
 
 161
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 visited the dry tanks and the cantonment for the 
 use of the British soldiers under a C.D. Act passed 
 for the benefit of the military and naval forces. It 
 was a curious walled area guarded by armed sentries, 
 as though it were a Royal Mint. The women, living 
 in little cottages, were of a dozen nationalities and of 
 as many shades of colour. The regimental surgeon 
 was there at the time writing out and handing certifi- 
 cates to the examinees. It seemed a sensible plan of 
 handling the social evil. Years after at Buda Pesth 
 on the Danube, an American Consul took us for a 
 night prowl around the city, one of the sights being 
 a house of pleasure tenanted by an aged patronne, 
 her assistant, and about eighteen to twenty girls, 
 aged twelve to sixteen years. They entertained us 
 with dancing, singing, music and sherbet. Here 
 again there was not more than two girls of the same 
 nationality. We were told by the Consul these girls 
 began their calling as far west as Tiflis in the Caucasus 
 and moved via Constantinople up the Danube, then 
 north to Dresden, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and 
 finally, if they lived, to Siberia. 
 
 CAIRO 
 
 Cairo is a bestial city and all Egypt an overrated 
 abomination. People only go their to cure ulcerous 
 lungs and enjoy dry heat which we Australians have 
 always in our temperate zone covering half our 
 continent. Sensible people who know always keep 
 away from sandy countries and deserts and places 
 with scarcity of rain. Insects and lack of sanitary 
 conveniences keep me away from countries like 
 Egypt and Palestine, where flies and fleas symbolize 
 the life of these outcast regions. One month in Paris 
 is worth several cycles in Cathay or in Cairo. Stayed 
 at the old Shepheard's Hotel ages ago before the 
 irruption of the Yankee waifs and strays from Cohues 
 
 162
 
 CAIRO 
 
 and Podunk. Had a good dragoman and saw the 
 sights and did the tombs and museums. Wishing 
 to learn something of the family life of the Egyptian 
 upper class I asked the dragoman to introduce me 
 to a girl from a Pasha's or Bey's harem. He said 
 that was easy and one night at the Hotel Arabe we 
 all met, the dragoman, Lady Lais, her brother and 
 myself. When she removed her yashmak and showed 
 the dirty face of a street walker I let out a yawp and 
 fled, telling the dragoman to pay them ten piastres 
 each and donkey fare home. Had a trip up the 
 Nile and left wondering what Napoleon saw to want 
 in an offensive country like Egypt. 
 
 BURMA 
 
 A long course of Rudyard Kipling, who is a replica 
 of myself so far as his face goes, caused me to make 
 up my mind to go to India and Burma, and specially 
 to follow him over his voyage in the Seven Seas to 
 the Far East. Kipling comes next to Robert Louis 
 Stevenson as the finest author of the last fifty years, 
 and that is why I despise his travel talk as poor stuff. 
 We went laboriously from Rangoon to Mandalay by 
 a beastly train with bad bedding and tucker just 
 before the monsoon broke. It was a painful journey 
 through a terrain lacking interest. The inartistic 
 pagodas built by rich Burmese to give them a lift 
 into their heaven dot the landscape without im- 
 proving it. The umbrellas and the tinkling bells are 
 trivial and not pretty. King Theebaw's palace at 
 Mandalay was a wash-out, once showy, garish, 
 gawdy, then a sorry sight, worm-eaten, mildewed, 
 crumbling and mouldy. The best part of it was the 
 old moat round the walls, in which the night before 
 his capture by the British General Fitzgerald, Theebaw 
 drowned his wives, concubines, and all their aunts 
 and mothers-in-law, tied up in bags with heavy bits 
 
 '63
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 of basalt included. That sounded funny if it were 
 true, and proved London " Punch " in its childish 
 manner is quite correct in calling a mother-in-law a 
 bother. The Burmese men are splendid fellows, 
 although idealists. They neither believe in work nor 
 do it, and even go so far as to hate people who like 
 work. So do I. Therefore the Burmese women 
 have to do all the work, having the children, keeping 
 them clean and fed, doing the cooking, minding the 
 shop, paying the rent and taxes, even unto bringing 
 home the beer. The men sleep always and babble 
 about the streets when awake. No wood to chop, 
 no boots to clean, no letters to post, no bills to pay. 
 What an idyllic life ! And Kipling wrote nothing 
 of all that. He fell in love with a Burmese girl, 
 brown, soft and luscious, on the platform of the 
 Shwe Dagon Pagoda, and seemed too pre-occupied 
 to tell us of the joy of life in a town where a fellow 
 had nothing to do. Was taken down by an Aus- 
 tralian and a Chinese storekeeper who sold me stolen 
 rubies from the Burman ruby mines, which turned 
 out to be valueless zircons, of which I have in my box- 
 room one kerosene tin full found in South Australia. 
 Major Elliott asked us to go to Moulmein where he 
 said I could commit murder or rape, or rob a bank, 
 or get tipsy, or eat hashish, or do anything violent 
 without chastisement. I asked, " What about the 
 strong arm of the British Raj ? " " Ah ! " he replied, 
 " I am the British Raj in Moulmein," and so he was. 
 
 SPAIN 
 
 In Madrid I went to a bull fight, a low-down 
 brutal performance, only fit for Spanish people, 
 50 per cent of whom can't read or write. A small 
 bull of the polled Angus breed who had been left 
 in a dark room under the grandstand to tame him 
 was driven into the arena by much prodding with 
 
 164
 
 SPAIN 
 
 sharp pitchforks. The bull trotted in and leisurely 
 started to eat an appetizing green programme he 
 found in the arena. Then an unshaven Spanish 
 brigand in gaudy clothes, mounted on a Timor pony 
 with bandaged eyes and a lame hind leg, trotted in 
 at a slow gait. The toreador began prodding the 
 bull with a small dart or banderilla while he was 
 chewing the cud and reflecting on the length of the 
 programme he had eaten. Then gaily-caparisoned 
 banditti came bounding into the arena to supply the 
 poor bull with further large quantities of prods, and 
 by the time his hide was stuck full of holes the gallant 
 matador rushed in clad in a costume made out of the 
 flags of Spain and the United States. The audience 
 shrieked with delight, and when the bull trod on the 
 toreador's toe the infuriated gladiator drove his two- 
 handed sword down the poor beast's throat. They 
 harnessed one mule to the carcass, another to the 
 disembowelled nag, the band played the Spanish 
 National Anthem and the bullfighter withdrew amidst 
 the plaudits of 10,000 spectators, to collect a fiver 
 from the man at the ticket-box. A fully-horned 
 Queensland bullock would have gored and eaten the 
 matador, the pony, and several of the bandits inside 
 five minutes. Hunting the Tantanoola tiger would 
 be soul-stirring work compared with a Spanish bull- 
 fight. A two-up school is far more genteel and 
 picturesque. In the Museo at Madrid I saw forty-two 
 paintings of Velasquez, and twenty-five Murillos 
 besides gems by Raphael, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van- 
 dyck, Guido Reni. Next to the Dresden Gallery, 
 that of Madrid has the best collection of old masters. 
 Went through Spain by myself and think the Escorial 
 and the Toledo Cathedral the best things to see. 
 What struck me most in Spain was the ruin wrought 
 by the destruction of the forests which caused the 
 reduction of the rainfall, the drying up of the rivers, 
 
 M 165
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the washing down of the alluvium from the moun- 
 tains and all the desolation and dreariness which 
 follows the cutting down of trees. It ought to be an 
 object lesson to us in Australia where planting and 
 saving trees ought to be a religious rite. Many 
 ideas about the Spaniards learnt from books were 
 washed out by inspection during my Spanish tour. 
 The Spanish peasant usually has a square bullet 
 head, small green eyes, flat features and an aldermanic 
 stomach. He is built rather on the lines of Sancho 
 Panza than of Don Quixote. The Spanish grandee 
 of one's reading is not visible and the Spaniard of 
 to-day is small, fat and ugly. What to say of the 
 women ! Ah ! that is another story. In the north 
 they are small and plain and Shades of Cervantes ! 
 Many of them are red-headed, not auburn or blonde, 
 just downright red. The Spanish dame de campagne 
 does not wear the graceful lace mantilla over head 
 and shoulders. She doesn't wear a hat, and generally 
 has a cheap Glasgow handkerchief coloured like an 
 Italian sunset, and covered with horses, windmills 
 and things. Each abode in the country districts I 
 traversed has plenty of loopholes and at least one 
 paneless window on the second floor, while bits of 
 roof are missing, and portions of the wall probably 
 taken away by American tourists as specimens for 
 cabinets in Oshkosh, Illinois, or Kalamazoo, Texas. 
 In Florence, Italy, I met an Amurikin tourist who 
 had been touring Palestine and Egypt gathering 
 antiques and relics. He came from Schenectady, 
 New York, and showed me a blue and yellow carpet- 
 bag full of nails from the cross, Crusaders' snuff- 
 boxes, a shoe nail worn by Balaam's ass, a brass nail 
 from Mahomet's coffin taken probably during its 
 state of suspension between heaven and earth, and a 
 chip off the Sphinx's nose. " Gosh," he said, " that 
 vurry rullic cost me wan hundred dollars for the 
 
 1 66
 
 SPAIN 
 
 shike who climbed up and gotten it for me." The 
 country Spanish seem poor and live poorly. The 
 food and wine in the posadas or inns was miserable. 
 Domestic animals in Spain are very sociable. Here 
 a pig will walk out through a hole in the wall of a 
 dwelling, there a donkey can be seen sleeping in the 
 salle a manger^ and again a barn-door fowl will perch 
 on the week's washing which is flaunting from the 
 window-sill of the solitary window in every home. 
 Under one's bedroom floor the sheep, the pigs, the 
 goats and the cows snore and talk in their sleep all 
 night long. Spain is a very poor country with a very 
 rich past. On the whole the people are politer, 
 lazier and happier than we are, and life is altogether 
 gentler and more domestic. 
 
 JAPAN 
 
 Japan is a poor nation of poor people dependent 
 for profits on her foreign trade. She has no accumu- 
 lated wealth made by past generations, so has nothing 
 to tax for use in making war. Japan has no borrowing 
 power on the money markets of the world, and the 
 only nation able to lend her money is the United 
 States, a potential enemy and a white nation with one 
 coloured problem within her gates and therefore 
 quite unlikely to help another coloured race with 
 funds for warlike purposes. War cannot be made 
 without iron and oil, and Japan lacks reserves of 
 both. The idea of an invasion of Australia by Japan 
 is a chimera, a fantasy, a mere frenzy fit for fools to 
 frighten boys and babies with and is not rational to 
 thinking people. 
 
 My mate had the glorious red-gold hair that Titian 
 loved so dearly, a mantle of living gold. It was 
 remarkably beautiful and strangely abundant, filled 
 with a light that never was on sea or land, a very 
 poet's dream. One afternoon in Tokio we drove in 
 
 167
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 jinrickshaws from the Imperial Hotel to present our 
 letters of introduction to the heads of the Mitsui 
 Bank. For a quarter of an hour my mate was left 
 with our Japanese guide outside the bank. At first 
 little notice was taken of her until some inquisitive 
 yellow Puritan noticed the colour of her hair, and 
 spread the news. When I came out of the bank a 
 crowd of about five hundred men, women and children 
 had gathered and were touching her clothes, laughing 
 furiously, and evidently using lots of bad Japanese 
 language. We got away safely, and Sato, the guide, 
 told me that to those people my mate's hair was an 
 evil sign and they believed her to be an extremely 
 bad woman of no importance. After that her beautiful 
 crown of hair of golden chestnut was well hidden by 
 veils. On another occasion, in India, the ignorant 
 driver of a bullock-gharry, who had never before 
 seen a white woman, on a country road behind the 
 ruins of Amber in Jaipur, scarcely took his eyes 
 from the brown gloves she was wearing. He could 
 not reconcile a white face with brown hands. When 
 she took off one glove and he saw the white hand 
 covered with rings, the doddery old Hindu waggoner 
 indulged in a paroxysm of laughter that would have 
 made the walls of Jericho reel on their bases. 
 
 No book of travel about Japan ought to be published 
 unless it described how the Japs have tried to solve 
 the social evil, or W. T. Stead's plague of Babylon. 
 To anybody who fully realizes that from the two 
 chief venereal diseases flow 90 per cent of the ill- 
 nesses that afflict modern humanity, it is blind folly 
 not to explain fully how these wise people try to 
 abolish these accursed scourges, and at the same time 
 endeavour to satisfy the ruling passion of both sexes, 
 the desire to pro-create. Notwithstanding the extend- 
 ing use of rubber contraceptives, venereal disease is 
 spreading and engulfing the human race in a filthy 
 
 168
 
 JAPAN 
 
 morass of sickness due directly or indirectly to two 
 sexual complaints. The Yoshiwara is a government 
 bawdy-house controlled like any other public health 
 resort. There is a Yoshiwara in every town in Japan, 
 and there ought to be one in very town in the British 
 Empire and dozens of them in the big cities. At 
 Tokio years ago, when an American and I visited 
 the Yoshiwara, we found two soldiers at the entrance 
 to the encampment guarding the gate with fixed 
 bayonets as was the custom when the C.D. Act was 
 first enacted for the benefit of the British army over- 
 seas. In the centre of the cantonment was a hospital 
 built like the ruins of Borobodoer in Java on a terraced 
 platform. There were four doors to the building 
 and all day and all night the hetirae were tripping gaily 
 up and down, to and fro their weekly examination 
 by the doctors. One of the doctors told us that 
 the records showed only one half of I per cent of 
 the women contracted venereal disease, and those 
 tainted were kept in hospital until cured. Fancy 
 only one half per cent of the females examined being 
 found to be on the verge of one or other of these 
 foul and loathsome complaints ! Why 90 per cent 
 of white women have one or other of the two sexual 
 diseases by heredity or by direct or indirect contact ! 
 Think of the saving of sickness and pain, O ye Puri- 
 tans and Pharisees who personally have rheumatoid 
 arthritis or tuberculosis, or cancer, all diseases due 
 to filthy sexual contact either on your own part or 
 that of your parents or grandparents. The system 
 was very simple. The women of all ages were classi- 
 fied and the poor ones exposed in the shop windows, 
 sometimes with posters announcing that " Mimosa 
 San, 1 6 years old (and looking sixty), had just arrived 
 that day from Nikko (or some country town) and 
 would be pleased to make new friends." A qualified 
 chartered accountant practised on a Government 
 
 169
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 ledger in a doorway just round the corner, took the 
 two yen or the ten, as the case may be, gave a receipt 
 and entered it to the credit of Madame Chrysan- 
 themum or Monkey Margaret, or whatever was the 
 nom de -plume of the lady student in ethics and morals 
 one had determined to dally with. There was no 
 bootlegging or drinking or bad conduct possible. 
 The unfurnished retiring rooms were very plainly 
 furnished with mats, one pillow and a kakemona on 
 the wall, having painted on velvet pretty pictures of 
 little blue wrens pecking one another's beaks pre- 
 paratory to hopping into sweet green nests. Isn't 
 this system preferable to our cruel and anti-social 
 method of building hospitals for fallen women, 
 clinics for diseased men, asylums for lunatics, retreats 
 for feeble-minded and reformatories for neglected 
 children ? Don't all these charitable institutions 
 nourish and continue the custom under which when 
 a boy reaches puberty he naturally does a natural act 
 with some young lady friend instead of being able 
 as in Japan to satisfy his naturally manly appetite 
 from is. upwards ? And hence all these tears ! 
 Men and women nowadays die like flies from cancer, 
 which is undoubtedly the final form of syphilis, of 
 gonorrhoea, or perhaps of both acquired in youth by 
 themselves or by their papas or grandpapas or possibly 
 their female ancestors near or far. All the great 
 religions of the world Buddhism, Shintoism, Con- 
 fucianism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, recognize 
 the passion to be a natural appetite, and Christianity 
 alone condemns it as a sin and makes ample provision 
 to cure and help the victims after they have obeyed 
 nature and incurred horrible pain and disease, not 
 only for their natural lives, but for the lives of all 
 their progeny to come. 
 
 170
 
 AUSTRALIA, A WONDERLAND OF TRAVEL 
 
 AUSTRALIA AS A WONDERLAND OF TRAVEL 
 
 Why Australians go away from home to find 
 better scenic beauty one never can understand, 
 because we have everything to please and charm in 
 our great big country. The most picturesque coun- 
 tries are Switzerland and India, and neither of them 
 equals either Tasmania or New Zealand. If perpetual 
 snow on high mountains is the supreme ideal, as it 
 seems to be for all those people who are, unluckily 
 for them, not Australians, then must the critic stop 
 criticizing. Of all North America, California is the 
 nearest region to Australia in the possession of natural 
 beauty and a delightful climate all the year round, 
 perpetual sunshine, eternal blue skies, and soft balmy 
 air always. Have seen Mont Blanc, Fujiyama, 
 Rainier, Vesuvius, Niagara, Nikko, Mississippi, Rhine, 
 Danube, Lake Como, the Riviera, Rio Janeiro, and 
 the Bay of Naples. The three lovely islands of the 
 seas are Ceylon, Hawaii and Java, yet none of them 
 for sheer loveliness excels Tasmania. Within ninety 
 miles of Sydney the traveller can see all that is beautiful 
 in mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers and sea-coasts, 
 and in Sydney itself he will see the Queen city of 
 Earth. There is no paradise for the wanderers like 
 New Zealand where Milford Sound and Sutherland 
 Falls are unparalleled sights, and until the sightseer 
 comes to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand he 
 cannot possibly say he has seen the most beautiful 
 countries on the globe. Earth proudly wears Aus- 
 tralia as the finest gem on her zone. 
 
 TRAVEL PLACES 
 
 My wife and I have travelled further than any 
 married couple in Australia. We made one trip 
 round the globe covering two years from home, 
 which took us to all the continents. The record was 
 29 steamers, 19 railways, and 50 hotels in eighteen 
 
 171
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 months. Before we married, my mate had made 
 three world voyages with her father and mother. 
 She was wrecked in the steamer " Korangamite " 
 off the coast of New South Wales, and in 1898 was 
 on the P. and O. ss. " China " when she ran ashore 
 at Perim Island in the Red Sea. The only observer 
 of how the " China " ran into the island was the 
 man at the wheel. The captain and all his six officers 
 were not on the bridge. Lady Willingdon, then Mrs. 
 Freeman Thomas, was giving a birthday dinner party 
 when the ship struck and all was bubble and hilarity. 
 My mate says the wreck was due not to the dinner, 
 but to lack of discipline. It is curious that although 
 we have travelled so much we have never met with an 
 accident or with any adventures. Once, at the ruined 
 city of Amber, near Jeypore, India, she was pitched 
 out of a howdah when the elephant shied at a monkey. 
 The moral is that when you travel avoid jungles, 
 deserts, mountains and stick to cities, hot baths, good 
 meals and modern lavatories. In this order the three 
 most beautiful seascapes are the Inland Sea of Japan, 
 the Barrier Reef off Queensland, and the vicinity of 
 the Thousand Islands on Lake Ontario in Canada. 
 The most picturesque of all views is Sydney Harbour 
 at night. In the day of course it is unequalled by 
 any other harbour. We didn't care for Rio Janeiro. 
 Take away Corcovada and it is nil. A prettier haven 
 is Pango Pango, on Tutuila, a Samoan island in the 
 Pacific. India is the glory land of the earth, and 
 the Taj Mahal the superb gem of architecture. The 
 Palace of Miramar, in the Adriatic seen by moonlight, 
 is another beautiful building. There is nothing to 
 see worth the journey to Japan, not even Nikko. 
 The Japs write, " Until you have seen Nikko you 
 cannot understand beauty." There is a spot on a 
 hill near Kangaroo Flat in Victoria, Australia, infinitely 
 to be preferred to Nikko. The best pleasure trip we 
 
 172
 
 AUSTRALIA, A WONDERLAND OF TRAVEL 
 
 took was all round the Dutch East Indies. There 
 you live amidst heat, colour, light and water, the four 
 joyous things of life. After you have seen the Niagara 
 Falls on the Canadian side and the Grand Canyon of 
 Colorado there is nothing left to see in the United 
 States which you cannot see better elsewhere. And 
 you will never find good manners nor good temper. 
 In the United States they are lost arts. New Zealand 
 is the true wonder land of the planet. The scenery 
 is varied and variegated. There you find lakes, 
 rivers, waterfalls, mountains, volcanoes, and forests 
 of every kind. The New Zealanders themselves are 
 an amusing people because they are so religious and 
 so conceited. Go to New Zealand if you are fond 
 of the primeval and the primitive. The people are 
 the healthiest, strongest and finest, yet puritanical 
 and worthy. Of the South Sea Islands we have 
 seen, Tahiti is truly worth while, and New Caledonia 
 undeniably delightful. Keep away from British 
 Papua and New Guinea for travel there is not rewarded. 
 Don't trouble to go ashore at Honolulu. When I 
 saw it first in 1884, Hawaii was a paradise. To-day 
 it has been commercialized and destroyed. American 
 civilization poisons wherever it enters. Its chief 
 ingredients are noise and roughness. Try and get 
 to the Marquesas and Paumotu islands, but avoid 
 Fiji and Tonga, both spoilt by the uncalled-for and 
 unwanted missionaries. Keep out of Egypt, which 
 is dirty from Alexandria to Khartoum. Cairo is a 
 repulsive city lacking the merit of being amusing. 
 Old dead tombs, mummies, mosques, and temples 
 can never be attractive to civilized twentieth-century 
 people. During seven trips have been in nearly every 
 State of America and regret the money it cost as being 
 wasted. Their cities there are mere agglomerations 
 of noise and unpleasant people of whom the chief 
 characteristic is childishness. Americans are a syn-
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 thetic race, a mosaic of all the other races. The result 
 is disappointing because refinement of body and mind 
 have been lost and the human has slipped down to a 
 lower plane. Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, 
 Baltimore, Pittsburg, St. Louis and the rest are 
 merely vulgar and businesslike. Reno, the divorce 
 centre, stands as the material symbol of American 
 mentality : lawless, intolerant and selfish. When 
 they rebuild Boston and clean up New Orleans they 
 may be pleasant places to visit. Keep away from 
 Chicago the noisy, New York the rude, and Los 
 Angeles the vulgar. San Francisco is a pleasant 
 place, but windy, noisy and over-crowded. The 
 traveller should slip over and look at it, lest another 
 earthquake, sure to arrive, spills 'Frisco into its own 
 harbour. None of these American cities has a good 
 art gallery. The New York collection is finicking, 
 full of dull indistinct rubbish by old masters, mostly 
 uneducated Dutchmen and Italians. There is no 
 American school of art. The best native artists all 
 live in Europe. In the " Ville de la Ciotat," a Mes- 
 sageries steamship, we called at Victoria, the chief 
 town of the Seychelles Islands group situated on 
 Mahe Island. This is a British coaling station taken 
 from the French in 1794 after John Bull's best 
 land-stealing manner. The biggest moneylender on 
 earth, John Bull has been easily the largest-sized 
 land-grabber. He has taken by peaceful means, 
 captured by wars, both honest and dishonest, bought, 
 sold and exchanged land ever since 1066 A.D. The 
 War gave him a great opportunity to invent a phrase 
 called " mandated territories " and John Bull added 
 immense tracts of land to his demesne. Certainly 
 the British paid for it in lives and money, the lives 
 a regrettable mis-waste, the money stupidly lent to 
 France, Italy, Belgium and others, who if they could 
 not have defended themselves should have vanished
 
 AUSTRALIA, A WONDERLAND OF TRAVEL 
 
 as nations. Very few Australians alive have been 
 to the Seychells group of ninety islands because the 
 Messageries Company does not call there on the 
 Australian route. Mahe is a drab, dreary village 
 without a hotel. You can smell the vanilla from the 
 deck of your ship, also the cheap scent used by natives. 
 Copra, cloves and tobacco are grown and exported. 
 Mahe, with 20,000 people on the island, is as drab 
 and dull as an English country village, like Waldron 
 in Sussex, and hundreds of other hamlets where men 
 and women exist half decayed. 
 
 JOURNALISTS' CONFERENCE 
 
 One of the most delightful episodes of our lives 
 was the entire Annual Conference of the Institute 
 of Journalists in September, 1910, in London. It 
 was a tidal wave of good things to see, to hear, to eat, 
 and to drink. Being an overseas Fellow of the In- 
 stitute, I seemed to be specially honoured. We went 
 everywhere, were introduced to everybody, and ate 
 and drank everything offered, moderately or in excess. 
 Lord Burnham, then only the Hon. Harry Lawson, 
 was President that year, and he made an ideal Chair- 
 man of the Conference, which was composed of the 
 real brainy men of Britain, the journalists. The 
 Conference Dinner at the Hotel Cecil was everything 
 that was good. I sat between Sir Herbert Tree and 
 Mr. Stanley Makower, who did not know me from 
 a bar of soap, and never even asked me where Aus- 
 tralia was. There was a function at the Guildhall, 
 and the Corporation of London strained itself cor- 
 poreally to treat us well. Towards midnight I was 
 sorry I had not worn rubber waders over my trousers 
 because the refreshment room was nine inches deep 
 in champagne at low water-mark. Gog and Magog 
 and I got soused together. There was a number 
 one luncheon in the King's Hall at the House of 
 
 '75
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Lords, Earl Beauchamp in the Chair, and among 
 those present, reading from left to right, were, Messrs. 
 Amontillado, Liebfraumilch, Pommery Greno, Chateau 
 Lafite, 1896, and Hennessey Liqueur brandy twenty- 
 five years old and still very strong. The menu 
 translated was chicken soup, soles, partridge, grouse, 
 mutton, chicken in jelly, York ham, ox tongue, 
 compote of pears and eaux miner ales ^ all of which 
 proves that a little French is a dangerous thing to 
 learn. I sat next to S. J. Sewell, one of the most 
 charming fellows I have ever bored in my life, and 
 opposite Mr. Frank Newnes, who simply revelled 
 in the tit-bits from soup to nuts. We were hon. 
 members of seven clubs : Press, Constitutional, 
 Royal Societies, Savage, Lyceum, National, Liberal 
 and British Empire, and I regretted my non-election 
 to a really good ambulance club for service towards 
 dawn. Herbert Cornish, F.J.I., the Secretary, couldn't 
 have been kinder to us during our nine days in 
 Wonderland and Joyville. If the Journalists' Confer- 
 ence were made a monthly affair my mate and I 
 would go and settle down in London. There was a 
 journalists' function at the Garden Club in the Japan- 
 British Exhibition at White City managed by that 
 King of Entrepreneurs, Imre Kiralfy. The best 
 speaker in London was Rev. R. J. Campbell of City 
 Temple who reminded me of the first great preacher 
 I heard in 1884 at the Tabernacle, C. H. Spurgeon, 
 with whom I chatted about Australia. The most 
 striking figures at the Journalists' Conference were 
 Robert Donald, Waldorf Astor, Sir Douglas Straight, 
 Sir Edward Clarke, Sir George Reid of Sydney, 
 Sir Edward Russell, H. B. Irving and the Countess 
 of Warwick. Four Members of the House of Com- 
 mons were produced as specimens of homo sapiens, 
 A. C. Morton, Henniker Heaton (of Sydney " Even- 
 ing News "), Colonel Seely and L. G. Amery, the 
 
 176
 
 JOURNALISTS' CONFERENCE 
 
 latter being fully entitled to be President of the 
 Federation of Ugly Men's Associations of the United 
 Kingdom. And here is the right place to append the 
 menu of the choicest dinner I have ever eaten during 
 forty years of wandering up and down the world : 
 Caviare, oysters on ice, lobster soup, schnapper with 
 mussel sauce, filets of sole, sweetbreads conti, supreme 
 of chicken, Parisienne, saddle of mutton, English 
 fashion, quail, omelette souffle, chartreuse of straw- 
 berries, parmesan cheese straws, coffee ice, with 
 wines en suite. That dinner was ordered carte blanche 
 to be entirely made of Australian materials, bar the 
 Russian caviare supplied by a general, and it was 
 served at Scott's Hotel, Melbourne. Neither Escoffier 
 nor Rector, nor Krasnopolsky, nor Delmonico, could 
 cook or serve better a better dinner. This is said by 
 the owner of a thousand menus gathered from a thou- 
 sand hotel, ship and railway dining tables throughout 
 the world. " And J. P. Robinson, he, said they didn't 
 know everything down in Judee," nor do they 
 concerning dining and wining. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 Landing in London on Saturday, 22nd March, 
 1884, I hurried up the Strand by bus and had my 
 dinner at Romanes for is. 3^. It was then a narrow 
 corridor of a shop with red steaks and chops in the 
 window, flanked by a platter of spaghetti and a basin 
 of French salad made of borage, lettuce, endive, 
 cress, and shallots with nasturtium leaves and flowers 
 on top, and lots of garlic on the bottom. Ecrevisses 
 and escargots were not on Romano's menu forty-four 
 years ago, and bisque homard quite unknown. A 
 fiasco of chianti, costing u. 3^., irrigated a sumptuous 
 meal of three courses and gruyere Eheu fugaces 
 annos ! Next day I called on Cashel Hoey at the 
 Victorian Agent General's office and got a card 
 
 177
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 signed by George Errington, M.P., for admission 
 to the House of Commons. The first afternoon 
 I spent there I saw and heard W. E. Gladstone, the 
 Marquis of Hartington, H. W. E. Childers, an ex- 
 Victorian minister, Henry Fawcett, Parnell, and of 
 course T. P. O'Connor. In those days there was no 
 orator equal to John Bright whose style and diction 
 were as purely Anglo-Saxon and simple as the prose 
 of John Ruskin or R. L. Stevenson. There is no 
 pure Anglo-Saxon spoken anywhere nowadays. The 
 films and the dreadful Niagara of American books by 
 American slang writers have entirely destroyed the 
 purity and harmed the genius of the English language. 
 It's a pity Geordie Washington, Benny Franklin, and 
 Sandy Hamilton did not, out of spite, originate a 
 language for the use of the American colonists who 
 fought England to grab the fee simple of the land of 
 the United States, because they got it for nothing. 
 
 In 1884 I went to London, starting out with ^250 
 from Melbourne and landing back home, after cross- 
 ing Canada and the United States, with exactly ten 
 shillings in hand. That was the cheapest eight 
 months of foreign travel out of my 400,000 miles. 
 Travelling under Thos. Cook and Sons I saw thirty- 
 six cities in Europe, and went all over the United 
 Kingdom and Ireland. Everybody was very kind 
 to me and nobody could make out how I spoke 
 English with the Oxford accent. I was easily better 
 educated and better read than any of the men of my 
 own age I met, because our high school training for 
 the Melbourne University was superior to any English 
 curriculum. Australian universities are quite efficient 
 and will be more so when the authorities stop importing 
 professors and employ only Australian teachers. 
 Took ten days to get to New York on the old Cunarder 
 " Bothnia," and disliked that city intensely. Hurried 
 off to Niagara and by the Thousand Islands to Mon- 
 
 178
 
 LONDON 
 
 treal, then a half-baked, backward and primitive 
 town. Caught glimpses of Chicago, Detroit, Salt 
 Lake City, and found the San Francisco of those 
 days an overrated city with only one really bright 
 spot, the Palace Hotel, the first hotel of its class in 
 the United States. Thence home via Honolulu then 
 an unspoilt Elysium, and across the Pacific, the best 
 oceanic trip on the planet. 
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 Having seen most of the great cities on earth, 
 London to me is repulsive, hideous, unattractive. 
 London lacks the grace of Paris, the dignity of Berlin, 
 the beauty of Vienna, the cleanliness of Copenhagen, 
 the quaintness of Stockholm, the majesty of St. 
 Petersburg. London possesses the narrowness of 
 Canton, the noise of Chicago, the vulgarity of New 
 York, the crowding of Calcutta, and the filthiness of 
 Buenos Ayres. London is a queen city wanting in 
 brilliance and steeped in gloom. Most Australians 
 are overwhelmed by London's vastness and its press 
 of people, and stop to adore without thinking. In a 
 gold-topped temple at Benares I saw a sacred cow 
 standing in a byre on the filth of months, and crowds 
 of worshippers kneeling in the muck and prostrating 
 soul and body before the beast. London is an apt 
 parallel to that cow. The love of Londoners for 
 London passeth my Australian understanding. Those 
 Australians who have not seen London have only to 
 read the descriptions of Charles Dickens the prophet 
 and high priest of dirt and poverty to get an idea of 
 its awfulness. There is something cryptic and 
 mystic about London, this city of dreadful day and 
 night which one accustomed to our bright sky, clean 
 cities and lively people cannot fathom. Above all 
 other characteristics London is noisy. The seven 
 and a half millions of humans contrive to make one 
 
 179
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 everlasting din and clatter. Even as the sense of 
 smell in man has been dulled through the ages, so is 
 the sense of hearing of the Londoner becoming 
 enfeebled, if indeed it be not purely rudimentary. 
 The Londoner loves noise for its own sake. He 
 continually creates loud sounds and revels in them. 
 It is impossible to rest or be quiet in London because 
 of the eternal roar. And next to this evil feature of 
 London comes its odious climate. From November 
 to May, the climate consists of fog, damp and gloom 
 in equal parts. The Icelander's lungs are white, the 
 Londoner's purple. The fog is palpable, material, 
 a very pall to body and mind. No drug in the pharma- 
 coposia is so depressing. The sun cannot penetrate 
 the London fog, a canopy of smut, a shroud of soot. 
 Then the fog's handmaiden, those furies zero, 
 cold, ice, rain, snow, biting winds and mud ! The 
 third horror of London makes an uncomfortable 
 Trinity to wit, the crowd of people. Noise, climate 
 and crush. Daily did I thank old Hoddle for giving 
 Melbourne ninety-nine feet streets so we might have 
 twelve feet footpaths. A hand laid on my shoulder 
 even by a friend feels to me an infringement of my 
 liberty. And one's sense of personal freedom is 
 hurt every minute in London's swarming streets. 
 As you walk down Fleet Street, or Old Broad Street, 
 or Lombard Street you are elbowed, pushed, touched 
 and harried by fellow-passengers who are mostly 
 unwashed. And it is a species of indignity from which 
 there is no escape. In our spacious Australian towns 
 one's body is free from defilement ; in cramped 
 London the insult is perpetual and unavoidable. 
 London is too full to be pleasant. Outdoor existence 
 in London being disagreeable it might be thought 
 the inhabitants would build comfortable homes. 
 On the contrary, the houses are as uncomfortable 
 inside as they are forbidding and ugly outside. The 
 
 180
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 streets are built with two stout buildings at each end 
 and the houses in between just lean up against them. 
 
 Dark, airless, chilly and stuffy, a London house 
 from the underground area, where the sun never 
 enters, to the attic is the acme of all that signifies 
 discomfort. Londoners hate fresh air, and windows 
 are seldom opened. There are no special ventilators 
 in the walls, and the ceilings of most houses are low, 
 while the rooms, except in the mansions of the rich, 
 are small and narrow. The area where the servants 
 live and the food is kept and cooked are merely 
 dungeons unfit for human habitation. 
 
 The absence of baths in the older houses is amply 
 compensated by the presence of lavabos, part of a 
 fine sewage system. The retirata in London houses 
 are not secluded, but placed alongside the chief 
 rooms or off the main hall. After seeing Berlin, 
 Vienna, Paris, Brussels, even Washington, the traveller 
 has nought but contempt for London's public build- 
 ings. The British architect is an imperfectly developed 
 person wedded to tradition and soaked with stale 
 ideas. Take the new War Office and the new Board 
 of Trade building as typical of modern architecture, 
 and one's artistic sense is offended by the common 
 design, the trivial appearance in each instance. Of 
 course there are the Abbey and the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment, and besides them nothing. The Bank, the 
 Mansion House, the Royal Exchange, and the Stock 
 Exchange are worm-eaten microbe-stricken structures. 
 
 Truly the Londoners are plain people and love 
 plain things round them. And they are essentially 
 shopkeepers, and inartistic shopkeepers at that. They 
 conduct shopping under cramped conditions in tiny 
 shops. The big shops, like Whiteley's, Barker's, 
 Robinson's, and all that species, deal in everything ; 
 mostly rubbish exposed in tiny rooms in untidy 
 heaps. There is one notable exception Harrod's 
 
 N 181
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Stores which are modelled on German or French 
 lines, where dainty goods are shown in spacious 
 rooms prettily decorated and filled with light and 
 fresh air. 
 
 The most pitiable feature of London life is the 
 habit of eating stale food forced on the Londoner 
 because, thanks to her idiotic policy of free trade, 
 Britain has squelched her agricultural industry and 
 cannot raise enough food to feed her people. Every 
 other great nation except Britain raises its own food. 
 This inability to grow its own breakfast will some day 
 lead to the subjugation of Britain and the dissolution 
 of the Empire. Just think of it ! Except in the 
 houses of the rich, the big hotels, clubs and restau- 
 rants, one cannot get fresh food. The food of the 
 middle classes, probably originally of good quality, 
 comes to the table thawed, and from several to many 
 days old. Meat, fish, flour, eggs, butter, fruit, 
 vegetables are all imported from other countries, 
 chiefly in ice. Eighty per cent of the meat comes 
 frozen from North America, and 60 per cent of the 
 wheat. All the fish is frozen, and so is most of the 
 game. Siberia sends eggs fourteen days old ; Den- 
 mark and Holland supply butter, cheese and milk of 
 older growth ; and the fruit and vegetables make 
 voyages of from six days to six weeks duration. Much 
 of this stuff starts stale and arrives tasteless, insipid 
 and innutritious. No wonder the Londoner is thin, 
 ansemic and dyspeptic. One shudders to think what 
 the very poor live on. In the lower middle class 
 homes, the cheapest and poorest fish always smoked 
 or salted, forms the staple diet. Such common stuff 
 as smelts, bloaters, herrings, haddocks, sprats, all 
 poor in proteids and inferior in quality, has to nourish 
 the Londoner's protoplasm and supply him with fat, 
 brains and muscle. This salty diet is responsible 
 for the Britisher's tremendous drinking habits.
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 In my opinion the breakfast bloater and the dinner 
 herring compel the Londoner to be thirsty and need 
 beer. To achieve temperance reform I would put 
 on a heavy land tax ; force land into cultivation, 
 take the Chow slaves out of the Johannesburg mines, 
 and set them to planting cabbages and lettuce in 
 Devon and Sussex, and forbid by law any able-bodied 
 man of soldier's age between twenty and forty to 
 eat salt fish or salt meat. Never more will I scoff 
 at the Kyneton sandwich, or a Junee chop. At any 
 rate they are not frozen and then thawed. 
 
 I missed the sun and the blue sky in London dread- 
 fully, and nearly as intensely did I crave for fresh 
 food. My pity is for the Londoner and my pride is 
 terrific, because I'm an Australian, and can get a 
 good egg and sweet milk, both only six hours of age 
 and less. And its food has affected the British type. 
 The race in the parent country is undergoing a 
 metamorphosis through its food. Frozen food is 
 only a factor of, say, twenty years existence, and 
 already it has wrought modifications of function and 
 structure in the Londoner. His acquired char- 
 acteristics due to the change in the nature of his food 
 and drink in one generation will be transmitted, and 
 his offspring will show the variation markedly, because 
 changed habits produce an inherited effect, and 
 alteration in the Londoner's food is nearly a total 
 one since 1884 when I first visited Noiseville. The 
 effect of this stale food on the Londoner, and that he 
 is decadent is proved by the loss of supremacy in 
 home-grown arts and sports. In tennis, boxing, 
 billiards, cricket, rowing, running, shooting, football, 
 most of the championships are held by Australians, 
 and in Melba and Mackennal, Australia has produced 
 the leading British-born artists at the very top of their 
 respective professions. These are a few of the results 
 of pure food. And by the way, while the Englishman 
 
 183
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 wrangles about the Disestablishment of the Church, 
 reform of the House of Lords and Home Rule, he 
 omits to stop adulteration of food and drink, which 
 goes on merrily, to the evident detriment of the race. 
 
 A disgusting symptom of degeneracy is the custom 
 of the London women in fondling and kissing and 
 petting dogs of all sorts and sizes. They carry the 
 beasts everywhere, and take them to bed with them 
 at night. 
 
 The travelling Australian generally sees London 
 life as presented in the hotels, clubs and restaurants. 
 Owing to the monstrous value of land excessive 
 ground rents, every London hotel is expensive from 
 and Australian view-point, whether it be a temperance 
 caravanserai in Bloomsbury, or the Ritz, Carlton, 
 Cecil, or Savoy. Notwithstanding these extravagant 
 charges few of them pay the owners. Three, four and 
 five per cent are the usual dividends on hotel shares, 
 and a great many London hotels remain open by 
 grace of their creditors or liquidators. Competition 
 of late years of course is a factor in the failure of the 
 London hotel. Too many pretentious hotels have 
 been built in recent years, and bankruptcy ends the 
 vista the day the front door is open for business. 
 So too very few London clubs pay their way. Except- 
 ing the big political clubs kept alive by donations 
 from teamen and brewers seeking baronetcies, the 
 ordinary social clubs are submerged in debt, chiefly 
 as debentures. Of the hundred ladies' clubs, about 
 three or four flourish, while the rest decay. Most 
 London clubs are housed in dull, poky, tiny houses 
 free from air and light, and therefore described by the 
 draught-hating Londoner as "So cosy, you know." 
 Like the London church, the clubs are used as dormi- 
 tories, being soporific and unsociable. The restau- 
 rants do very well, and Monico, Frascati, Holborn 
 and Gatti, even return good profits. The stranger 
 
 184
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 should stick to the table d'h6te plan of feeding. Let 
 him not gambol in the pleasant meadow of a la carte, 
 or his browsing will cost him dear. There are at 
 least a hundred good table d'h6te cafes from the 
 Cavour to the Pagani, where imported food is made 
 up by imported cooks and served by imported waiters. 
 And what of the people who live and move in the 
 milieu thus described ? The Londoner is a greater 
 slave of caste then the Hindu. He stands in dread 
 of the man in the castes above him, and glares con- 
 temptuously on the worm in the castes below. There 
 is no personal freedom, and from birth to death a 
 Londoner lives strictly by the rules and laws of his 
 set. He doesn't make friends easily and his outlook 
 on life is narrow and limited. Did his grandma 
 know Brown's grandma ? Then perforce he must 
 cultivate Brown and cherish him. Was his father 
 in a bank ? Well, he cannot talk to Jones in the train 
 from Croydon because Jones serves in Hope Brothers' 
 shop. If his dad was a lawyer, then he must become 
 one, join dad's club, and in peril of his social position 
 he must not know James the stockbroker (stock- 
 brokers being common persons), though he is entitled 
 to address Howard, a do-nothing mollusc, who sleeps 
 at Boodle's Club all his time, and does not work. 
 This system cramps the Londoner's activities and 
 warps his brain. 
 
 The Londoner is a polite person, politeness being 
 a peculiarity of all people who have to live in an over- 
 crowded area. But he takes care not to be civil to 
 people under him. It would never do to unbend to 
 an employee or servant, for are they not unmistakably 
 inferior ? The Londoner is only half educated, and 
 rarely accomplished in the trivial artistic pursuits. 
 The public schools teach Latin and " footer," both 
 imperfectly ; the middle class schools pay much 
 attention to deportment and the correct crease in the 
 
 185
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 trousers, while the Board Schools, run by untrained 
 and sweated teachers, teach the children the rudiments 
 of simple knowledge, after having given them their 
 free breakfast. Technical education is a luxury to 
 be sought in Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham. 
 The Londoner detests reading, avoids his great 
 museums, keeps away from lectures, and anything 
 scientific, while he crowds the music-halls and theatres 
 which abound in the metropolis. There are nearly 
 nine hundred places of entertainment, with few 
 exceptions supplying piffle in vast quantity to their 
 frequenters. To use a generic term the stage is at 
 very low ebb in London just now. There is no 
 really great actor or actress, and the way for others is 
 blocked by elderly men and women, who linger 
 superfluously on the stage, because they were once 
 public favourites. To the visitor it is lamentable 
 that decrepit mummers should be retained to play, 
 years after the joy of life has fled from them. The 
 visitor does not care whether Ellen Terry or Marie 
 Tempest or George Alexander or Charles Wyndham 
 were good actors in the 'seventies, for he sees they 
 are not now. And so it is in opera bouffe. The leading 
 players are mediocre, with poor voices and inferior 
 knowledge of stage-craft. Tell that to a Londoner 
 and he will laugh at your ignorance. You, as an 
 Australian, accustomed to good singers, a well- 
 trained chorus and pretty girls, know better. You 
 have been spoilt at home, and cannot appreciate the 
 rubbishy theatrical work the Londoner adores by 
 tradition. I have seen theatres in every quarter of 
 the globe, and assert that in the last twenty-five years 
 London has never seen an actress in opera bouffe the 
 equal of Nellie Stewart or Florrie Young. The English 
 are unmusical people, the proof being that London 
 has not yet produced a great singer or player. The 
 leading concert and opera singers are either foreigners 
 
 186
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 or Australians. In bygone days London possessed 
 Reeves and Santley, good British-born singers. To- 
 day there is not one above mediocrity. Climate, 
 food and environment in London do not make for 
 the production of either musicians or a musical public. 
 And the Londoner can't paint. If it was not for a 
 Scotch element, a few Yankees, like Sargent and 
 Abbey, and fortuitous foreigners like Alma Tadema 
 or Herkomer, the Royal Academy would be a jejeune 
 body of artists. Who is the great British painter 
 to-day ? Is there one ? The exhibition of the two 
 salons of Paris is infinitely finer than the show at the 
 Royal Academy in imagination, variation and tech- 
 nique. The collection of the Luxembourg Gallery 
 in Paris, and the Prada at Madrid far transcend the 
 National Gallery and Tate's Gallery in London. 
 Having stripped the Londoner of most of the things 
 he is supposed to own in excehis, one would like to 
 say he's a good sport. Here one chances on cold 
 comfort. The Londoner is distinctly not good at 
 sports and he doesn't practise them. Here's a list 
 of things he can't do, for I've seen him trying for 
 many years past. He can't swim, skate, ride, box, 
 shoot, run or play cricket, tennis or football. All 
 these sports are played by professionals, and the 
 Londoner pays to look on and yell. It's a wonder 
 he hasn't taken to bull-fighting, because that's a nice 
 dangerous game to look at. One virtue remains 
 to our cousins in the world's greatest city. They are 
 all politicians, and talk politics incessantly and vote 
 for " safe " men of the calico-jimmy variety. For 
 this reason I have some hope for the regeneration 
 of the Londoner. Some day the scales will fall from 
 his eyes, and he'll vote protection, and go in for 
 developing his old, old country which is destitute of 
 home industries, small trades and intense culture. 
 Wait till the poor chap fully realizes that his country 
 
 187
 
 can't feed itself, and he'll pull down every Bright 
 and Cobden statue, and delete the Asquiths, Georges, 
 Churchills, and other chatterers, who tell him to 
 trust the foreigner for his bread and meat. To me 
 two things are appalling in London the inrush of 
 aliens and alien goods, and the terrible poverty every- 
 where. The poverty is unspeakable, and nearly 
 indescribable. The poor, who exist on offal, live in 
 rags, and never inhabit a room, walk the dingy London 
 streets in thousands. You don't see them (dear 
 reader who is annoyed with my criticism) in the 
 Burlington Arcade or Bond Street. Go east and south- 
 east, observe keenly, and make quiet enquiries. 
 You'll be astounded by the ragged, filthy depravity. 
 It is starvation and slow death for tens of thousands 
 particularly of children. The causes ? Locked-up 
 land and the open door ! Too few landlords and too 
 many foreign competitors. The remedies are far 
 away because for the present the British have no 
 leaders, neither in statesmen nor newspapers. The 
 epoch of the ha'penny paper coincides with the death 
 of big men. The London newspapers wield no power 
 nowadays. They are poor, badly-written sheets 
 anyhow. Except the Tory " Morning Post," no 
 daily tries to teach or lead through vigorous writing. 
 The " Mail," " Chronicle," " News," and " Mirror " 
 are mere travesties of journalism. They abound in 
 scrappy paragraphs of news, badly selected and want- 
 ing variety. The leading articles are trite and trivial, 
 sloppily written, and without objective. Outside 
 the ponderous " Times " and lubberly " Telegraph " 
 the rest of the London papers are commonplace ; 
 the Sunday papers, bar two, being smutty and vulgar. 
 The present House of Commons is a collection 
 of second-rate politicians, having neither capacity 
 nor cleverness, and whose constant attitude towards 
 great affairs is expressed by the Arabic " Malaish," 
 
 188
 
 A VIEW OF LONDON 
 
 or the Spanish, " No importa," meaning " No matter." 
 In business the Londoner is provokingly slow. He 
 can't hurry, and he thinks and acts sans haste. He is, 
 generally speaking, too well off to bother. The 
 other nations use his banks and his money, while the 
 Germans absorb his commerce. Tell him his trade 
 and commerce are declining, and he'll point to the 
 yearly growing figures of imports and laugh at you. 
 Those imports are iced foods ! And his increasing 
 export consists of coal, Britain's life-blood sold to 
 her rival manufacturers abroad ! Strip London of 
 its parks and its river, and you have an ugly, detest- 
 able city whose gigantic size squelches all that is 
 naturally good out of its inhabitants. As the Arab 
 sheik's horse stamps the life out of the prone wor- 
 shippers newly returned from Mecca, so does London 
 tread to death the virtues and the lives of tens of 
 thousands of devotees who adore its immensity 
 Personally I made a present of London to the cabman 
 who drove me to catch my train down home to the 
 best of all good countries, Australia. 
 
 189
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 PEOPLE I HAVE KNOCKED ABOUT WITH 
 
 THE GAIETY COMPANY 
 
 THE tour of the first Gaiety Company from London, 
 headed by Nelly Farrem and Fred Leslie, was the 
 greatest theatrical event in the annals of Australian 
 play-going up to that time. The land boom in Victoria 
 had reached its perimeter just prior to the debacle 
 which broke twelve banks and wiped out 200,000,000 
 worth of assets. The Gaiety Company was inimitable, 
 containing as it did the creme de la creme of the leading 
 revue artists of London : Sylvia Gray, Letty Lind, 
 Florence Levey, Maud Hobson and Marian Hood, 
 with Teddy Lonnen and Fred Storey, the eccentric 
 dance, to support them. One night at the Princess 
 Theatre bar Fred Leslie's party was bored by a 
 commercial traveller who was worrying one of the 
 girls and would insist on shouting " bubbly " for all 
 hands. Fred Leslie finally suggested to the bore to 
 go to Menzie's Hotel to get sober. The soused one 
 was put in a hansom cab and some wag poured a 
 glass of brandy down his coat and lit it. The driver 
 was paid a pound to drive the likeness to a Christmas 
 pudding to his own hotel and deposit him. That 
 same night, Fred Leslie put Nelly Farren in a hansom, 
 mounted the box and drove the cab himself to Men- 
 zie's. That was against the law and it cost Fred a 
 fiver to close the scrape. During that hectic boom 
 period, the art of good eating was first expounded in 
 Melbourne by two French chefs, Lacaton and Denat. 
 It is a strange thing that the fine art of good dining 
 has to-day not even a -pied a terre in Melbourne. 
 
 190
 
 THE GAIETY COMPANY 
 
 At the age of ninety years the magnificent city of 
 Melbourne does not possess a high-class caf where 
 recherche food can be enjoyed. 
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 Have been present at some interesting dinners in 
 London. The best was one given on varnishing day 
 to a bunch of Royal Academicians by George 
 McCulloch, the Broken Hill millionaire and art 
 patron. McCulloch had bought a freehold from the 
 authorities of the Imperial Institute and built a 
 house to his own design. The dining-room was 
 octagonal with eight arches leading into other rooms, 
 the walls of which were covered with modern paintings. 
 There were present some notable painters, E. J. 
 Poynter, Alfred East, Alfred Gilbert, David Murray, 
 Bougereau, the famous French artist, Vicat Cole and 
 B. W. Leader. The only Philistines present were 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir) R. W. Jeans, general manager 
 of the Bank of Australasia, and myself. The dinner 
 was excellent, well cooked and well balanced by 
 wines en suite. 
 
 Another amusing dinner was a regular one of the 
 Whitefriars' Club at Alderton's Hotel on Ludgate 
 Hill. Herbert Cornish, the genial and able secretary 
 of the Institute of Journalists took me along. Alfred 
 Sutro was in the Chair and the discourse by Arthur 
 Bourchier was called, ' What should influence a 
 playwright in writing his plays ? " Bourchier pleaded 
 for the uplifting and improvement of the mental 
 condition of the masses of playgoers and took a high 
 ethical view of the question. There were a number 
 of producers of " best sellers " and dramas, and 
 society comedies present, including a handful of minor 
 poets and poetasters. It was so long ago that the 
 names of the speakers have faded, though one can 
 recall Hichens, Jerome, Weyman, Pinero, Hope, 
 
 191
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Barrie, Philpott, and several other notables who were 
 pointed out to me by Cornish. As " our visitor from 
 the Antipodes " I was asked for my opinion as to how 
 a dramatist should shape his plays, and I suggested 
 he should keep his eyes firmly fixed on the box- 
 office takings and write what was likely to pay most. 
 In June, 1889, I was at a dinner given in the Criterion, 
 Piccadilly, to David Christie Murray on the eve of 
 his departure for Australia. Edmund Yates, than a 
 noteworthy London journalist, was Chairman. Some 
 of my neighbours were the Australian dramatist, 
 Haddon Chambers, Hume Nisbet, Marriott Watson, 
 Dr. Mannington Caffyn, Phillip Mennell, Justin 
 McCarthy, M.P., Thomas Archer, Agent-General 
 for Queensland, Sir George Elliott, M.P., David 
 Anderson and Edmund Yates were the chief speakers, 
 and I remember the Veuve Monnier vintage 1880 
 and the Theophile Roederer like the speeches, were all 
 nice and dry. A more pretentious feast at St. George's 
 Club, where I was living, was a farewell to the Earl of 
 Hopetoun, Governor-Elect of Victoria, with Sir 
 Graham Berry, then Agent-General for Victoria, in 
 the Chair. The menu was exceptional and the wines 
 so-so. There I hobnobbed in my small snobbish 
 manner with some very eminent people and ruffled 
 it with the best of them. Particularly is my memory 
 cloyed in remembering the canetons au Salpicon, the 
 pluviers dore"s, and the Chambertin and Romance 
 Conti burgundy. That night I was the fattest hog 
 in Epicurus' sty. Sir E. J. Reid, the naval architect, 
 proposed the Army and Navy, and Sir Andrew Clarke, 
 Admiral George Tryon and Mr. (afterwards Sir) 
 Thomas Sutherland, M.P., responded. Lord Knuts- 
 ford proposed Hopetoun 's health, and Lord Rosebery 
 responded for " Our Colonial Empire." Those 
 speeches were good, but I did not appraise too highly 
 others by Hugh C. E. Childers, an ex-Victorian 
 
 192
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 Cabinet Minister, who drew 1000 a year pension 
 in London for donkey's years, or that of Sir Charles 
 Tupper, then Commissioner for Canada. Sir William 
 Robinson, afterwards Governor of West Australia, 
 spoke a piece, and the music directed by Chevalier 
 Wilhelm Ganz, then a celebrity, was comforting. 
 It is useless to pile Pelion on Ossa by detailing several 
 guild banquets in the City of London where one 
 ate venison and boars' head off gold plates and picked 
 plovers' eggs worth half a crown each, just as one 
 eats grapes at sixpence per pound. The only other 
 of thousands of notable meals worth recording was 
 my own wedding breakfast at the Princes Restaurant 
 in Piccadilly. There were only the four of us, the 
 dramatis -person* present, and it was the pinnacle of 
 epicurism, a true symposium of gourmets, unforget- 
 table, and the correct effect of that barbarous function, 
 a wedding. 
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 Long ago I collected the equivalent in sixteen 
 languages of " Nothing matters," such expressions 
 as " N'importe," " No importa," " Nitchevo," and 
 so forth. They make the most valuable of all 
 philosophies. Does anything really matter in life 
 that we should worry, fret and weep over it ? One 
 doesn't know why one is on earth or where one goes 
 to after death. Is it worth bothering about, anyhow ? 
 Very few people reason in this way, and so live in the 
 shadows of worry, care and anxiety, enjoying a hell 
 upon earth through fear of a baseless and imaginary, 
 because impossible, hell after death. Who knows ? 
 Enjoy the day, it is not always Christmas. The rich 
 men I know amuse me. Usually they lack resources 
 of mind. They cannot play, sing, or dance, or enjoy 
 a good play or a fine picture, and as for reading, the 
 rich man who can read for pleasure is a rarity, a strange 
 
 193
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 prodigy, an unusual event ! Jimmy Tyson was said 
 to eat grass to save food. When the waiter at Menzies' 
 Hotel said in reproof, " Mustard with mutton, Mr. 
 Tyson." ' Yes, you damn fool, we eat mustard with 
 everything in the bush," was his reply." " Money " 
 Miller before his death amused himself jingling 
 sovereigns on a green card table. What fun has 
 Sidney Kidman got from his money ? Edward 
 Jowett dances a little and badly. When he was poor 
 he wrote and read. J.B. Watson and George Lansell, 
 both millionaires, knew nothing and learnt nothing, 
 not even joy. W. L. Baillieu is a money spinner of 
 much capacity. He cannot do a single thing to give 
 him pleasure, not even through the medium of the 
 pedal of a piano player. Rupert Clarke with .100,000 
 a year, less income tax, used to growl his way through 
 life. Harry Howard Smith with 80,000 a year is 
 an invalid. Not one on the list can or could laugh or 
 tell a funny story. What value or reward does great 
 wealth bring ? 
 
 L. ROBINSON, CLARK AND COMPANY 
 
 Let me tell briefly the story of the romance of 
 L. Robinson, Clark and Company, a firm of Aus- 
 tralian stock-brokers on the London Stock Exchange. 
 Over thirty years ago Lionel Robinson and William 
 Clark failed on the Stock Exchange of Melbourne, 
 and failed badly. The gold rush to Coolgardie in 
 West Australia was just starting and most of the 
 share business was being done in Adelaide instead 
 of Melbourne. Leaving their families in Melbourne 
 and armed with two guarantees from their fathers 
 for ioo each with the Commercial Bank, Adelaide, 
 the two adventurers went to Adelaide and hung round 
 the Stock Exchange, gradually worming themselves 
 into the thick of a tremendous boom which ensued 
 upon the flotation of numerous good and bad and 
 
 194
 
 L. ROBINSON, CLARK AND COMPANY 
 
 medium West Australian mines in London. Robinson 
 and Clark had good friends among the share-brokers 
 in Melbourne, Sydney and London, and business 
 increased so much that they were able to join the 
 Adelaide Stock Exchange as members. Then they 
 threw away their gloves figuratively and with bare 
 knuckles went into the game of buying scrip cheap 
 in Adelaide and selling it dear in London. Soon their 
 transactions became extensive, and at one time they 
 had ,200,000 of drafts going and coming on the sea 
 at the same time. If they had failed, the Commercial 
 Bank might have closed for the second time perhaps 
 for ever. Fortunately nothing went amiss with the 
 market or with prices, the boom being kept alive by 
 fresh discoveries of gold-fields and new flotations of 
 London companies. Robinson and Clark soon became 
 leaders on the Exchange and worked night and day 
 and always for a profit. When they had amassed 
 50,000 clear and landed it high and dry, the late 
 Lionel Robinson came to London to spy out the land. 
 I was with him every day introducing him to all the 
 worth-while people I knew. l< Robby " did not like 
 his chances of success in the wider arena of the 
 London Stock Exchange and got stage-fright. One 
 night at dinner at Kettner's Cafe in Soho he told me 
 he had cabled Bill Clark to say he was returning 
 home to Adelaide. Clark's reply was, " Stay there ; 
 am catching steamer ' Arcadia.' ' When Bill arrived 
 in London he became a clerk of the Stock Exchange 
 to qualify for membership, and they opened an office 
 in Old Broad Street, and subsequently in Palmerston 
 House. They never looked back and made one 
 coup after another. They were both fine operators 
 and quicker than lightning or wireless. One deal 
 " Robby " made with Sir Christopher Furness, the 
 shipping king, will illustrate my point. For the sake 
 of advertisement the firm kept a string of racehorses, 
 
 195
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 which gave them entree to the exclusive racing circle 
 of England. Robby met Sir Christopher at Good- 
 wood and the chat turned to mining and then to 
 Great Boulder Perseverance Shares. Then and there 
 Robinson agreed to give Furness ,10,000 cash for 
 the privilege " to put " 20,000 Perseverance shares 
 into him within three months. These wily and daring 
 experts got to work and made Perseverance rise 
 and fall, jump and drop, do everything except gyrate 
 sideways. At the clean-up, three months later, the 
 firm had bagged 96,000. Within ten years of 
 joining the London Exchange, Robinson, Clark and 
 Company were reputed to be worth a million solid. 
 Their joint career has been a romance. When they 
 left Melbourne stone-broke they owed roughly twenty- 
 five pound each to the grocer, butcher and milkman. 
 To-day the firm is easily the most powerful Australian 
 house in the London Stock market. 
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 Though mixed up all my life with people who 
 owned racehorses and bet on races, I have never 
 been tempted to lose money to enable bookmakers 
 to have caviare for breakfast, plovers' eggs for lun- 
 cheon and braised caneton, sauce Portugaise, for 
 dinner. I made one sensational wager and renounced 
 betting for life. A party of Australian racing men 
 went by drag from the old St. George's Club, Hanover 
 Square, to Epsom on Derby Day, 1898. We had a 
 sprinkling of the fair sex and a dozen bottles of " The 
 Boy " aboard with assorted pates filling seven baskets 
 full. Merson Cooper, Harry Simms, of Adelaide, 
 " Prince " McGill, with Lionel Robinson, and Billy 
 Jones, both of whom had won the Melbourne Cup, 
 were in the party. About three weeks previously 
 I had been suppering with some of the lads of the village 
 at Rule's Supper House, in Maiden Lane, in those days 
 
 196
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 under Mrs. O'Brien, the most delightful estaminet 
 in London. There were half a dozen well-known 
 jockeys at the next table with Tod Sloan as host. 
 All of them drank G. H. Mumm excepting one chap 
 who took a spot or two of water unmixed. He had 
 hands and arms like a surgeon's and they told me 
 his name was Otto Madden. In Tattersall's enclosure 
 at Epsom our party laid some heavy wagers on 
 every horse except J. W. Larnach's Jeddah who was 
 nominally 100 to i. Remembering the strong, 
 steady water drinker who was riding Jeddah I took 
 50 to i on him. He romped home and I collected 
 fifty pounds. Ten pounds of the win I put on Sir 
 William Cooper's Newhaven, a Melbourne Cup 
 winner, for the Epsom Cup, and lost it. I have 
 never bet since. 
 
 BOB SIEVIER AND LORD DEERHURST 
 
 When in a small way I was a man about town in 
 Melbourne, and I got to know a large number of 
 interesting identities. Had known Tommy Corrigan, 
 Australia's famous steeplechase rider, at Warrnambool, 
 where he was working for Hughie Gallagher, a publican 
 whose four daughters were renowned beauties in a 
 Bourke Street Hotel. One night a crowd of us 
 called in to see the pretty Gallagher girls after the 
 theatre and were just in time to see Bob Sievier, 
 who founded the " Winning Post " as a rival to the 
 " Pink Un," knock down young Viscount Deerhurst, 
 eldest son of the then Earl of Coventry. The episode 
 headed town talk for months and is still remembered 
 by the old " bloods " of the city. Sievier started cash 
 betting on the world's finest racecourse at Flemington. 
 My father-in-law, John George Dougharty, M.L.C., 
 and his brother-in-law, Major Purcell, were instru- 
 mental in securing and surveying the Flemington 
 Course for the Victorian Racing Club. Lord Deer- 
 
 o 197
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 hurst was second cousin to J. G. Dougharty, who 
 for some reason not disclosed refused to receive young 
 Deerhurst at his home, Elwood House, Elwood. The 
 Earl of Coventry had given a letter to a Duke of 
 Manchester some time previously introducing him 
 to J. G. Dougharty. His Grace dined at Elwood 
 House and during the walnuts and wine tried to 
 " tap " his host for a considerable sum. J.G.D. 
 refused laughingly, and naturally the Duke never 
 revisited Elwood. The Duke of Manchester was 
 wrecked on the Orient Company's, or rather the 
 Pacific S.N. Company's, steamer " Sorata " off the 
 South Australian coast, but all on board were saved. 
 
 HARRY LAUDER 
 
 Once my wife and I were taken to dinner at the 
 Cafe Royal, then next to Krasnopolsky's Restaurant 
 at Amsterdam, the best dining place in Europe, by 
 a London cousin and an Anglo-Australian banker, 
 prim, proper and conventional, like all Club English- 
 men. We went to the Pavilion Music Hall, " The 
 Pav." on some sort of a gala night. There was one 
 extra turn by a twisted Scot with a twisted face and 
 voice and a twisted walking stick. He sang a Scotch 
 lyric, through his throat, apparently coated with rust, 
 called " The Girls of Tobermory." Lacking savoir 
 faire y and despising convention for the nonce, we two 
 Australians laughed consumedly at the cheeky little 
 unnamed Scotch singer. Our hosts protested at our 
 ribaldry, " You must not laugh loudly like that, it's 
 never done." Not only did we laugh like a tornado, 
 but we applauded with all the aplomb of a machine 
 gun and the wee tangled up Scot sang an encore. 
 We found out from the manager of "The Pav." 
 that the unknown singer was called Harry Lauder. 
 Two years later, on another trip, my cousin met us 
 at Waterloo Station and promised us a treat at the old 
 
 198
 
 HARRY LAUDER 
 
 Royal Music Hall, in Oxford Street. He took us 
 to hear Harry Lauder. Years afterwards at a dinner 
 in the Penang Club on St. Andrew's night when 
 somebody sang Lauder's masterpieces, three of us 
 agreed to go and hear him the first time we met in 
 London. A year later we three dined at the Great 
 Eastern, Liverpool Street, and engaged a box at the 
 Cambridge Music Hall. We went behind at Harry 
 Lauder's invitation, and he rang for four Scotch and 
 pollys, disposing of the mythical yarn that " he hained 
 his bawbees," or bred moths in his purse. 
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD SOME GREAT MEN 
 
 When I first went to London in 1884, Mr. Deakin 
 gave me a letter to Sir John Fender, the head of the 
 Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, who im- 
 pressed me as being head and shoulders above the 
 business men I have met in the City of London. In 
 those days business was conducted on loose lines. 
 If you called on a man on Monday he usually fixed 
 Thursday at 1 2-45 p.m. for an appointment, and took 
 one to luncheon at his city club. After luncheon and 
 a brace of green chartreuse or fine cognac, 1 842, no 
 business was discussed, and your newly-made friend 
 left for his week-end in the country that afternoon. 
 Sir John Fender was not a man of that type, being 
 most business-like and attentive. He invited me to 
 his home at Sidcup in Kent and showed me his fine 
 collection of pictures in his town house. His per- 
 sistent development of the cable and telegraph facili- 
 ties throughout the Empire placed Great Britain 
 under an obligation to Sir John Fender that can 
 never be liquidated. 
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 Most interesting men were three cousins of mine, 
 James, Robert and George Inglis. The Hon. James 
 
 199
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 IngliSj known in Sydney as " Tiger " Inglis, was 
 Minister of Public Instruction in one of Sir Henry 
 Parkes' Ministries. He had an adventurous life 
 chock full of colour and episodes. He began as an 
 indigo planter in Assam before Sir William Preece 
 found the secret of making aniline dyes from tar, 
 which the conservative English dyemakers refused 
 to purchase. Preece sold the secret to German 
 manufacturers, and the first thing to be swamped by 
 the new process of producing blue dyes cheaply was 
 the indigo industry in India and Ceylon. Jimmy Inglis 
 then became a tea planter and indulged in big game 
 hunting of which he was a zealous practitioner. 
 Malaria from jungle life forced him to travel to New 
 Zealand to die. An open-air life midst the scenery 
 of the most perfect country on the planet renewed 
 his vitality and he came to Sydney to become a states- 
 man and tea merchant. He was a clever and volumin- 
 ous author best known by " Oor Ain Folk," a book 
 describing life in a Presbyterian manse in a Scotch 
 glen. James Inglis also wrote, " Tent Life in Tiger 
 Land." Robert Inglis, his eldest brother, went to 
 London and became a member of the London Stock 
 Exchange, of which he was Chairman for many years. 
 As broker for several Scottish assurance companies 
 Robert became wealthy. He was colonel in the 
 citizen forces and knighted in his official capacity as 
 the judicial president of the 5000 adherents of the 
 Stock Exchange. Sir Robert ought to have been a 
 Judge of the High Court of Justice of England, so 
 perfectly judicial was his mind and mental outlook 
 on life. He was like his native Caledonia, stern and 
 wild very frequently with delinquents of the Stock 
 Exchange. Inglis once fined " Prince " Baillieu, our 
 Australian member, for asking a leading Hebrew 
 stock-broker over the telephone whether he thought 
 himself the Blondin of the Stock Exchange, the man 
 
 200
 
 INTERESTING PEOPLE 
 
 who never made a mistake, " Because you know damn 
 well, Ikey, if you had only made one slip it would 
 have been fatal." George Inglis, another cousin of 
 Robert and James, was a partner of Colonel North 
 in his nitrate mines in Chili. Remember one luncheon 
 party at the Woolpack Restaurant, somewhere behind 
 Cornhill, as a guest of Colonel North's, when Zebina 
 Lane told more funny stories in two hours than 
 George Inglis and I could have remembered in two 
 years. George Inglis gave us some top-notch dinners 
 at Cafe Royal and Oddenino's in Regent Street, 
 when those two restaurants were very nearly the best 
 in London, although that excludes Verrey's and 
 Romano's. Another cousin was William Inglis, a 
 member of the Viceroy's Council of India. Consider- 
 ing they were only parson's sons they were all extremely 
 brainy. Oatmeal and buttermilk makes a fine quality 
 of grey brain matter. Another extraordinary sagacious 
 stockbroker was Faithfull Begg whom I first met in 
 1889. One night he took his partner, Johnston, 
 and myself to Romano's to dinner, and during the 
 pousse-caf e period, a journalist named Russell joined 
 us. He had just returned from Constantinople 
 where he represented a big London daily paper, 
 and told us the full story of how the late John Norton, 
 founder of the Australian weekly, ' Truth," had 
 been caught in a harem by the Pasha owner. Norton 
 was given his choice to leave by the outgoing Khedivial 
 mail steamer that night for Port Said, or to be bagged 
 and drowned in the Bosphorus. Norton chose the 
 steamship ticket and duly reached Sydney, where he 
 founded " Truth " on the lines of London " News 
 of the World," and finally left a fortune. Norris, 
 Oakley Brothers were once my London agents on 
 the Stock Exchange when I was at my zenith and 
 when they cultivated the Australian market out of 
 which they made a fortune. With my intimate, 
 
 201
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 personal knowledge of the big Australian mines, 
 like Broken Hill Proprietary, Mount Lyell, Mount 
 Morgan, Mount Bischoff, Great Boulder, Ivanhoe, 
 etc., I could have made a fortune in London easily. 
 The damp foggy climate was too bad for my catarrhic 
 Australian chest and I had to return home to the blue 
 sky and the daily sunshine. 
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD 
 
 The best Englishman who came to Australia was 
 Captain Cook, because he found the best country on 
 the planet. The most delightful Englishman who 
 ever dwelt here was Phil May, who like Lycidas died 
 ere his prime. Often met Phil May when he was on 
 the Sydney " Bulletin " developing his own talent and 
 laying a sure foundation for the modern practice of 
 the black and white art which so many Australians, 
 like my friends Alf. Vincent, Norman Lindsay, Lionel 
 Lindsay, Will Dyson, Frank Nankivell of New York, 
 and George Rossi Ashton of London, have raised to 
 its highest technical pinnacle. One morning George 
 Ashton and I called on Phil May at his house in 
 St. John's Wood to pay him a visit of ceremony. 
 Mrs. May opened the door and said Phil was busy 
 on his cartoon for " Punch " next day. Hearing 
 our voices, Phil came out to settle the disturbance, 
 and in reply to George's request that he should come 
 out for ten minutes he said fervently and vigorously, 
 " Boys, I'll come out and stay two days with you." 
 And what a day it was. The morning we spent in 
 the strangers' rooms of a dozen London clubs, 
 beginning at the Cavalry Club in Piccadilly and 
 finishing up at the Savage Club in the Adelphi, of 
 which Phil May was a beloved member. How he 
 got away with the hall officers of all these clubs I don't 
 know. He may have been known and his tips may 
 have been familiar. We lunched at Romano's with 
 
 202
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD 
 
 Romano himself and Pitcher Binstead of the " Pink 
 Un " and two more of the merry staff joined us for 
 pousse-cafes. Next we did three Press clubs and 
 looked in at more matinees than a befuddled reveller 
 could register on the phylactery on his left wrist. 
 About five o'clock we called for George Edwards 
 at the Gaiety Theatre and toddled along to Short's 
 in the Strand for just one aperitif of sherry. And so to 
 the Hole in the Wall, the Bodega in Glasshouse 
 Street, and for a final to Teddy Bailey's Queen's 
 Hotel in Leicester Square. The afternoon fizzed 
 and bubbled with merriment and assorted liquors. 
 It was far finer than a cycle of Cathay, or being 
 buried in Westminster Abbey. Joseph Lyons acted 
 as our dinner host at the Trocadero, just then opened, 
 and we lurched round to the Empire for a glimpse at 
 Adeline Gene*e, worth a gross of Pavlovas as a danseuse. 
 Next we called on Charlie Morton, manager of the 
 Palace Theatre, and met Alfred Plumpton, once a 
 Melbourne music teacher. Maude Allan was doing 
 Salome half-stripped to the buff and dancing quite 
 as gracefully as could Hackenschmidt, the huge 
 German wrestler. At that time, on dit that Maude 
 was the little pet of a big, because powerful, Prime 
 Minister. Naturally we strolled unevenly to the 
 Alhambra music-hall and palace of varieties, now a 
 beastly American movie-picture show, to call upon 
 Alfred Moul the manager, who once taught the 
 piano in Melbourne. Then from the pit we cooe-ed 
 to Fred Storey, the eccentric dancer, whom I had met 
 in Melbourne when he was with the Gaiety Company, 
 headed by the inimitable Fred Leslie and Nellie 
 Farren. Storey joined us and we glided into Cafe 
 Cavour and called upon Philippe to produce his very 
 finest cru of bubbly attended by a bisque homard, 
 spatchcock Escoffier, golden plover sur croustade, 
 a Russian cheese from the Volga and four goose- 
 
 203
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 quill toothpicks. Philippe accompanied us to the 
 bar to have a whisky sour and a spoonful of caviare 
 to stop hiccups, when lo ! and behold Mrs. May 
 entered from the street, smiled blandly and men- 
 tioned, " Phil, time to go home." Phil muttered, 
 " Good night, boys ; fancy four Australians like us 
 meeting all of a sudden," and off he went. Mrs. 
 May told me later that he finished his " Punch " 
 cartoon before going to bed. One story of her, 
 because about Phil May one could tell a hundred. 
 Mrs. May, my mate and I were guests of Mr. Lawrence 
 Bradbury, proprietor of London " Punch " two or 
 three years later, at Pagani's Restaurant in Great 
 Portland Street. Phil had not been dead very long. 
 " I suppose you have been busy, Mrs. May ? " said 
 Bradbury. ' Yes," she replied quietly, " this morn- 
 ing I've been tearing up a lot of old sketches and 
 paper rubbish of Phil's I found in a big wooden 
 box." Bradbury was horrified and I fancy he must 
 have bought the surviving waste paper before we 
 dispersed. But what a delight in those days it was 
 to be chaperoned by such a cicerone as Phil May ! 
 Here is a fair tour in those different days, amongst 
 the haunts of the free and easy and the delightful 
 people. On Saturday morning to go early to True- 
 fitt's in Bond Street, have a hair cut, a shampoo, a 
 shave, a manicure, a pedicure, and a hair dye (if 
 advisable). Next to get your tall hat groomed at 
 Scott's, buy a pair of gloves in the Burlington Arcade, 
 hail your favourite hansom cab and drive to Scott's 
 in Haymarket for a dozen Royal Whitstable oysters 
 and a small mutchkin of porter, before getting a 
 gardenia from the flower-girl beneath Eros' statue, 
 Piccadilly Circus, the true centre of the earth. And 
 so perforce to your banker in Clements Lane, E.C., 
 for more " brass," then by a short cut into Birch's 
 Green House for a tiny glass of port and an even 
 
 204
 
 LONDON 
 
 tinier tartletina. Thence down to Coates' Wine 
 House in Old Broad Street for a dock glass of amon- 
 tillado, such as Heliogabalus would have given a 
 Roman colony for. Next along to the " Financial 
 Times " to pick up Arthur Murray, the editor, that 
 most brilliant and lovable journalist of his day, and 
 to drag him round to Pirn's in Cheapside for a tiny 
 sandwich of pate de foie gras and a taste of Pedro 
 Ximenes, that Circean wine not known by the present 
 generation of Londoners, who wear shocking hats, 
 shabby clothes, made-up bow ties and bad boots, 
 use limited English, drink whisky and think it nectar, 
 and smoke the vilest cigars and cigarettes money can 
 buy. The next visit would naturally be to Philip 
 Mennell, best of good fellows, editor of the " British 
 Australasian " and author of several books. Mennell 
 knew everybody of value in London and personally 
 introduced me to bankers, pressmen, authors, actors 
 and all that genus of men who do most of the best 
 work of the world and are therefore the best to know. 
 To continue the ramble, we go to Sweeting's near 
 St. Martin's-le-Grand, G.P.O., just for a few sand- 
 wiches and a glass of adorable Liebfraumilch 1889. 
 Continuing the route march past St. Paul's (where 
 with five other clans of Scotchmen I once spent an 
 hilarious New Year's Eve outside the Cathedral) 
 down Ludgate Hill into the Alderton Hotel, across 
 to the Bodega under the railway bridge and with a 
 skilful chassee croisee through the thick traffic past 
 Tom Cook and his sons' office bang into the " Cheshire 
 Cheese," the most over-valued eating house in London. 
 Here we stop to take breath and a glass each of 
 black Edinburgh ale, strong enough to turn a 100 h.-p. 
 turbine. A gentle stroll en plein air and we enter 
 Wine Office Court and leave cards at the Press Club. 
 Along Fleet Street, dodging alcoholic pitfalls, we 
 zig-zag to the Cock Tavern just beyond where 
 
 205
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Temple Bar used to be. Fine beer at the Cock, 
 which is not so far from the Victorian Agent-General's 
 office, alongside the Law Courts, so we annex Sir 
 John Taverner, easily the best Agent-General of all 
 I have met, from Murray Smith, Sir Andrew Clarke, 
 Graham Berry, Duncan Gillies, to Peter McBride. 
 Taverner was always ready to help a Victorian to 
 float a mining company, get bail for him, take him 
 to a tailor, or interest him in a two-hour luncheon 
 at Gatti's Adelaide Gallery Restaurant. The next 
 choice was between Hotel Savoy bar and that of 
 the Hotel Cecil. Armed with a box of Teofani or 
 Abdulla Egyptian cigarettes, then the vogue for 
 smokers, we were ready to sit down in the American 
 bar and sample alluring American cocktails built 
 by an English barman. Time now for midday 
 lunch and the choice lay between Simpson's glorified 
 chop house in the Strand or the buffet of the Grand 
 Hotel. At that time Simpson's was the only dining- 
 room where one could get genuine roast beef of Old 
 England, or real Southdown or Scotch mutton. 
 The latter was excellent because the Scotch lodge 
 their sheep in barns better than their own houses 
 and cram them like fowls with swede turnips to give 
 them the true flavour of Scottish heather. Nowadays 
 the Londoners get only the roast beef of Old America 
 frozen, or the boiled lamb of the Young Argentine 
 chilled. After luncheon occurs an embarrassment 
 of riches. In every direction from Nelson's monument 
 streets run in all directions filled with places where 
 good drink may be purchased, but not borrowed. 
 And on a bright, blue, sunshiny afternoon, which 
 happens only a dozen times a year in London, there 
 was nothing more health-giving and amusing than to 
 walk leisurely along to Piccadilly, call in at the Blue 
 Posts, drop in at Verrey's in Regent Street North, 
 find one's way to Cafe Royal or Gambrinus Cafe and 
 
 206
 
 LONDON 
 
 from there to the Monico and look continually upon 
 fair women and brave men all becomingly attired and 
 behaving decorously. Grandma did not shave her 
 hair or lop the lower half of her dress to use her legs 
 as a lewd magnet, but she got there just the same. 
 Other times, other tricks. And also how fast and 
 far the years have fled ! On consulting my notes 
 I find much of the above " gin crawl " was spread 
 over several days and the tale is not half finished. 
 After all human nature has not changed one jot, dot, 
 tittle or iota since man began. Man is an untiring 
 pleasure-seeker. This golden rule has held through 
 the aeons of time, men and women are fifty-fifty, 
 half of them honest, half dishonest, half clever, half 
 silly, half good-looking, half ugly, half truthful, 
 half of them not, half strong, and half of them weak. 
 It is the only certain mathematical law about mankind 
 which is divided rigidly in two classes, good and 
 bad. All which is preaching and harmful to a best 
 seller. My companion of the " gin crawl " was a 
 diminutive Cockney accountant who had been a 
 clerk in Mombassa in East Africa and who had 
 drifted across to Melbourne where he joined another 
 accountant from Gloucestershire. They both fared 
 badly in the land boom wash-out and from their 
 " compotes " saved enough money to buy deposit 
 receipts in bung banks and make competencies. 
 He finished his part of the inspection of West End 
 saloons when a fair Hebe poured out a wineglass of 
 absinthe instead of gin at the " Rose and Thistle " 
 in Air Street. The subsequent proceedings interested 
 him no more. One belief do I cling to firmly from 
 among a multitude of lost illusions. To be well 
 dressed is better than to have the consolation of one 
 of the many religions. For years I had my clothes 
 sent home to Melbourne from Meyer and Mortimer 
 of Conduit Street, hats from Scott's, boots from 
 
 207
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Lobb's in St. James Street, and everything else from 
 Whitelock's in Pall Mall. To be one of the best- 
 dressed men in Melbourne was of higher attainment 
 than to become an Immortal of the French Academy, 
 or a member of New York's 400. There are no 
 well-dressed men in Melbourne now, for the cut and 
 material of male clothing belong to the time when 
 dinosaur's eggs were soft and eatable. At the end 
 of the so-called nineteenth century the Sunday 
 morning parade in Hyde Park was a pure joy. Both 
 men and women were exquisitely and morally dressed, 
 and moved and behaved gracefully. To-day the 
 sexes have the manners and morals of negroes with 
 a similitude to the dreadful black fellows of the 
 United States. Her hair ought to be a woman's 
 chief glory and at the behest and for the behoof of 
 the United Master Hairdressers' Association of the 
 World, woman has shorn off her chief attribute of 
 beauty and reduced herself to the level of the hags 
 and wantons. A pity 'tis, 'tis true. With bizarre 
 dresses go baroque manners, and the complement 
 of the bad manners so prevalent in these modern 
 days is weak morals. And good temper seems to 
 have gone with good manners down the declivity to 
 hell following the Gadarene swine. 
 
 AN EMINENT AUSTRALIAN I ARTHUR LYNCH 
 
 Quite easily the most talented and brilliant Aus- 
 tralian who lived abroad away from home is Dr. 
 Arthur Lynch, born on the old Smythesdale gold- 
 field near Ballarat. Lynch's accomplishments pro- 
 claim him a genius. He holds numerous University 
 degrees, is an incomparable linguist, speaking six 
 languages, and above all is a poet of the very first 
 rank. Arthur Lynch is the author of " Modern 
 Authors " and " The Poor Scholar's Quest of a 
 Mecca." His " Koran of Love " and " The Caliph," 
 
 208
 
 AN EMINENT AUSTRALIAN, ARTHUR LYNCH 
 
 dedicated to John Keats of whom he is an intense 
 admirer, are really beautiful poems of rare distinction. 
 In a book of his works given me by Arthur Lynch he 
 has written on the fly-leaf an Ode to Australia in a 
 sad tone, complaining that his native land " stood aside 
 with folded hands and smiled when strangers lying 
 had his name reviled." This allusion is made to 
 Lynch's leadership of the Irish Brigade when he 
 fought on the Boer side in the South African War. 
 He believed, as many thousands of other Australians 
 believed, that the war to take away their countries 
 and possessions from the two Boer Republics was an 
 act of tyranny and injustice perpetrated by Great 
 Britain at the behest of two grasping free-booters, 
 Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jamieson. It was 
 a bar sinister across Britain's escutcheon and merely 
 resembled the deed of an immensely strong bully 
 who knocked down a small peaceful person and stole 
 his money and his clothes while he lay prone, friend- 
 less and helpless. Colonel Lynch was captured and 
 sentenced to death for treason, though he was let off 
 and soon after became a Member of the House of 
 Commons for an Irish constituency. Lynch thought 
 the forcible annexation of the two little Dutch re- 
 publics an unjustifiable act of brigandage : cruel, 
 unjust and dishonest. Cecil Rhodes tried to make 
 atonement for his crime against national ideals by 
 devoting his Stock Exchange winnings to a childish 
 scheme of English University scholarships, to try 
 and make a few scholars from a few countries love 
 one another so as to live in amity. A preposterous 
 and impossible object, for since the ape became a 
 man he has always hated apes from other countries 
 and always will. 
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 Another Governor I met was Sir John Fuller in 
 
 209
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 London at some Guildhall function when he was 
 Governor-Elect of Victoria. Next day he asked me 
 to call at his house in Knightsbridge to pump me for 
 information about Melbourne. I found out what he 
 wanted and advised him to apply to the Government 
 for another suite of nurseries and maid's rooms, and 
 to ask for more money for incidentals at the two 
 Government Houses. I believe he got both, and I 
 was agreeably surprised to find he never asked me 
 either to luncheon or dinner at Government House, 
 not even to a garden party. Such base ingratitude 
 too ! To be invited to a Saturday night dinner along 
 with the racing crowd, the wool-growers, the high- 
 born civil servants, and the climbers of Melbourne 
 society gives one the proper social cachet in the eyes 
 of the Victorian public. 
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD 
 
 During my first visit to London I met Philip 
 Mennell, the author of a book of biographies of 
 leading Australasians, who at that time was owner and 
 editor of the " British Australasian," still being pub- 
 lished in London. Through Mennell I met a number 
 of leading journalists like Sydney and Arthur Murray 
 of the " Financial Times," Dr. Ellis Powell of the 
 " Financial News," Robert Ross a leader-writer of 
 the " Times," and A. J. Wilson of the " Investors' 
 Review." A. J. Wilson continually attacked the 
 borrowing proclivities of the Australian Colonies, 
 and for years predicted they would collapse financially. 
 Thanks to Mennell I made a friend of the late Sir 
 R. W. Jeans, the extremely able London manager 
 of the Bank of Australasia. He and I have often 
 heard Melba from the top gallery of Covent Garden 
 for half a crown. 
 
 Lord Sydenham, formerly Sir George Sydenham 
 Clarke, an ex-Governor of Victoria, was another 
 
 210
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD 
 
 notable man who was extremely good to me when 
 I had a highly important negotiation with the War 
 Office when offering them the Alcock electric range- 
 finder, an Australian's invention. 
 
 Have had to do with many company lawyers in 
 London and was more impressed by the superior 
 sagacity of Sir Frank Crisp, although Fred Button 
 of Blyth, Hartley and Button, a South Australian 
 native, was a shrewd solicitor all his life connected 
 with important Australian companies and their direc- 
 tors. Sir Richard White was another accomplished 
 lawyer with whom I had business when he was 
 connected with the London County Council thirty 
 years ago. A man of infinite tact of high repute in 
 the City of London was Sir James Martin, then 
 secretary to the Society of Accountants, who was 
 exceedingly kind to me throughout a series of my 
 business visits. Another leading accountant who 
 showered kindness on me was Robertson Lawson 
 who came from Edinburgh and established a fine 
 practice in London. Another accountant closely 
 associated with Australia through the Mount Lyell 
 Mining and Railway Company was Edwin Habben. 
 Through my connection with William Knox, Habben 
 got his first Australian mining company, and he 
 has had many of them to manage. Have always 
 found London lawyers and accountants slow, but 
 thorough. 
 
 CELEBRITIES I HAVE COME ACROSS 
 
 Far and away the most interesting personage of 
 renown I have met in my wanderings was J. H. 
 Curie, the mine valuator, who was quite easily the 
 prince of mining reporters. Curie spent some years 
 in Australia as a youth seeking health, and he became 
 a very paragon as an examiner and reporter of mines 
 of every sort. J. H. Curie stands alongside Sir 
 
 211
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Boverton Redwood and E. H. Cunningham Craig, 
 the two British experts on petroleum mining to make 
 a trinity of mighty mining authorities. J. H. Curie's 
 reports on the Broken Hill silver mines were classics, 
 and as books of travel, " The Shadow Show " and 
 ' This World of Ours " are peerless in modern times. 
 Another hero in my eyes was a Scotchman named 
 Macarthur who with his partner, Forrest, invented 
 and patented the cyanide process of recovering fine 
 gold from tailings. I met Macarthur in Menzies' 
 Hotel, Melbourne, where sooner or later most of 
 the great ones of the earth sojourn. The Macarthur- 
 Forrest cyanide process has saved countless millions of 
 gold to the mining community and there ought to be a 
 storied urn, an animated bust, a granite monument, or 
 something imperishable erected in every gold-mining 
 town on earth in honour of these two Scotchmen 
 who did more for Australia than Bruce, Wallace and 
 Burns did for Scotland. Amongst all the women 
 of all the countries I have visited, from white to black, 
 coloured brown, sepia, bay, chocolate, fawn, snuff and 
 liver coloured, yellow, citrine, ecru, saffron, lemon, 
 sulphur, straw and amber coloured, the most interest- 
 ing was easily my own cousin, Margaret Jane Brand. 
 Margaret's father was a ship captain owning a fleet 
 of schooners and ketches in the Baltic timber trade. 
 For thirty years he and his relatives sailed from 
 Montrose to St. Petersburg and made money out 
 of timber. When steamers came into the trade my 
 uncle obstinately refused to change from sail to steam, 
 so he lost every stiver of his cash, and all his mer- 
 chandise and fleet of ships. Fortunately he had given 
 his two daughters an extensive and expensive educa- 
 tion on the European continent. Both were admirable 
 linguists, supplied with all the family brains and savoir- 
 faire, and amply endowed with both health and 
 beauty. Margaret spoke six languages and English, 
 
 212
 
 CELEBRITIES I HAVE COME ACROSS 
 
 so she went to St. Petersburg and became a superior 
 governess in aristocratic families, all of whom were 
 rich. She was two years in the family of M. de Witte, 
 Chancellor of Russia, and gained an intimate, close-up 
 knowledge of Russian morals, manners and politics. 
 She had a wide acquaintance among the great person- 
 ages of several European countries, travelled widely 
 in the best style, and incidentally saved all her salary 
 and emoluments. It is difficult to imagine a more 
 charming personality, albeit passionless and puritanical 
 in conduct and character. A firm of rascally Russian 
 bankers gambled her fortune on the St. Petersburg 
 Bourse and lost every copek and rouble. Shortly 
 after I saw her in London my cousin died in penury 
 in St. Petersburg. 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Rudyard Kipling once made a flying visit to Mel- 
 bourne. He left a New Zealand steamer at Hobart and 
 came across from Tasmania to Melbourne for I think 
 about three days. The Speaker of the Legislative 
 Assembly was Sir Matthew Henry Davies a reputedly 
 wealthy land boomer then at his zenith. Davies and 
 I were living at the Athenaeum Club and about 
 aperitif time he asked me to dinner that evening to 
 meet Rudyard Kipling who had presented a letter of 
 introduction to him. There were two other old 
 inhabitants of the club at the party and Kipling's 
 conversation was one long ripple of delight. Being 
 a conceited ass I was extremely upset because I could 
 not get a word into the conversation. After dinner 
 we went to a small card room to finish our cigars, 
 and Sir Matthew asked Kipling to what he ascribed 
 his remarkable skill as a writer of stories concerning 
 so many diverse occupations and followings. Kipling 
 replied that he thought his power of rapid observation 
 was the chief support of his ready pen. ' Will give 
 
 P 213
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 you an example if you like," he said. We all left the 
 room and he remained by himself for about two 
 minutes. He joined us in the corridor outside and 
 detailed exactly every article in the room and where 
 it stood, described the colours and pattern of the 
 wall-paper, named many of the books on the shelves, 
 told us the subjects of the pictures, recalled the 
 various ornaments, and graphically named nearly 
 every object on the tables and floor. It was a revela- 
 tion in the exercise of the receptive power of all the 
 human senses and a sixth. I took an opening to tell 
 Kipling how I had made a worthless journey to 
 Rangoon to see his vaunted and over-praised Shwe 
 Dagon Pagoda. He laughed pleasantly and said he 
 really did not think very highly of that gilded monu- 
 ment himself. As a whole-hearted admirer of Rudyard 
 Kipling I feel impelled to say no other writer about 
 India and its purlieus has ever been able to portray 
 India, its people and its life, so clearly and completely 
 as he has done. Kipling renders material the inward 
 spirit of that mystic land and its mysterious people. 
 All which I have verified during two trips to the 
 overwhelmingly interesting and beautiful Asiatic 
 wonderland. 
 
 TWO AMERICANS 
 
 An Australian friend introduced me in the vesti- 
 bule of the Hotel St. Francis, San Francisco, to one, 
 John Drew, said to be a leading actor. Hearing 
 that I came from Australia, Drew forgot to act and 
 rudely said, " Oh, I know, from a place called Sydney 
 where life is one long Sunday, like a day in the New 
 York Bowery. You don't raise anything but kangaroos 
 out there, do you ? " Have seen quite a number of 
 American actors since ; I appreciate Drew's place 
 in the category. Why are American actors and 
 vaudeville people so lacking in courtesy and sweet- 
 
 214
 
 TWO AMERICANS 
 
 ness ? It must be due to their environment. Met a 
 Kansas lawyer in the Flying Angel express from 
 Los Angeles to San Francisco, and over a bottle of 
 Big Tree Brand Californian Claret one night in the 
 smoking parlour he told me a lot of stories about 
 his buddy, Woodrow Wilson, which chiefly con- 
 cerned the fair sex and might therefore easily come 
 under the heading " Ben trovato sed non e vero." 
 He said Wilson would ultimately fail through that 
 personal weakness. One story about Chief Justice 
 Brandeis of the High Court of the United States 
 and how he helped Woodrow Wilson out of a tangle 
 about a lady cannot be proved and must be left out. 
 
 PEOPLE ABROAD 
 
 William Fabian Meudell of Belleville, Canada, 
 collector of customs, was a great uncle of mine. In 
 his early youth he had been a soldier and fought in 
 the Peninsula under the Duke of Wellington, as an 
 ensign in the Black Watch, the famous 42nd Regi- 
 ment. He was a despatch rider or galloper on head- 
 quarters' staff. I went to Belleville to call on the old 
 gentleman who received me warmly because we 
 Meudells are a rarity and there are not many of us. 
 So anxious was I to trace the family tree that I visited 
 several Huguenot churches in England, Belgium 
 and France to peruse their registers in search of the 
 family name. My belief after all is that my ancestors 
 were not quick enough on their feet and none of 
 them got away from the St. Bartholomew scrap. 
 Uncle Fabian was a strictly Puritanical Scotchman, 
 truly pious, and shackled by tradition and ritual. The 
 first morning at his home a bell rang for prayers at 
 seven o'clock ; there were more prayers at breakfast, 
 a snack of family worship at one, a sleigh ride in the 
 snow at two, no afternoon tea at four, but a couple of 
 chapters from the Old Testament concerning battling
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 and begetting, a Psalm was read after tea and at ten 
 o'clock the household assembled for family worship. 
 I left for Chicago next day and gave up searching 
 for Huguenots, being fearful lest I found any 
 more. 
 
 What an interesting man was A. J. Wilson, founder 
 and editor of the " Investors' Review," when I first 
 called upon him in London. He was the mildest- 
 mannered man that ever scuttled a colonial loan or 
 cut a company prospectus into sausage meat. In 
 those far-off days Wilson's harsh criticism of Australian 
 Government borrowing was not just, because the 
 proceeds were used to build developmental railways, 
 and though they only paid interest they were quite 
 safe as a security for trustees' investment. Of late 
 years we have changed all that. Far too many political 
 railways have been built which not only do not pay 
 interest, but are unpayable lines, and in many instances 
 hundreds of miles of railway h?ve been closed and 
 uprooted. No Australian Government railway de- 
 partment ever writes off for depreciation or renewals, 
 and not a single railway balance sheet is honest and 
 truthful. In Victoria especially the construction of 
 railways is a scandalous waste of money. It has had 
 the evil effect of putting up the price of country lands 
 so high as to make it impossible for a new farmer- 
 owner to make either a profit or a living. Mr. A. J. 
 Wilson was only a generation before his time as a 
 true prophet. 
 
 GREAT MEN 
 
 Outstanding amongst the really great men I have 
 met abroad is Sir Philip Dawson, M.P., of the firm 
 of Kincaid, Manville, Waller and Dawson, the leading 
 firm of electrical engineers in London, and therefore 
 in the British Empire. When I went out to London 
 to try and arrange to get the big brown coal body 
 
 216
 
 GREAT MEN 
 
 exploited on Mr. George Chirnside's property, Wer- 
 ribee Park, ten miles from Melbourne G.P.O., I was 
 introduced by a powerful London friend to Kincaid's 
 as the best informed and most talented firm of electrical 
 engineers in the city. Then I met Mr. Philip Dawson 
 who stood six feet seven inches high and weighed 
 eighteen stone. He was not big, but merely massive, 
 and splendidly proportioned. His brain must have 
 been immense, and his intellect super-excellent. 
 When I introduced W. L. Baillieu, Australia's finest 
 financier, to Philip Dawson, " W.L." said, " Mr. 
 Dawson, you are the first man I have ever had to look 
 up to in my life." Sir Philip speaks six languages 
 perfectly, and to listen to him entertaining a dinner 
 party composed of men of six nationalities was an 
 astounding lesson in linguistics. His bonhomie and 
 courtesy are rare and natural. At the famous dinners 
 of the Savage Club, Philip Dawson as Chairman was 
 a revelation in courtliness and savoir-faire. An 
 extremely temperate man in character and conduct, 
 Philip Dawson has to eat and drink largely for the 
 sake of nourishment. When we went to Berlin 
 together to interest the puissant General Electric 
 Company of Germany, known the world over as the 
 A. E.G., in the electrification of the Melbourne 
 suburban railway system, Dawson asked me whether 
 I could " stand my oats." In good conceit of myself 
 I said, " Yes, certainly." On the Channel steamer 
 for Ostend he asked me to have an aperitif before 
 luncheon. I had sherry and bitters and Dawson 
 easily disposed of a quart of Johannisberger. And 
 so it was all through the trip. He ate like a gourmand 
 because his body needed plenty of food and drink. 
 As he had carried through the first conversion to 
 electrification in London successfully of the railway 
 from Victoria Station to London Bridge he was 
 persona grata with the great A. E.G. and its incom- 
 
 217
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 parable executive. That of course was in 1911. 
 These leading German electrical engineers worshipped 
 Dawson as a superman. 
 
 TITLES 
 
 One thing the travelling Australian is forced 
 to admire in the Americans they have abolished 
 and will not permit titles in their country. We 
 Australians cling to the amusing English custom of 
 making pinchbeck noblemen of all sorts of public 
 mediocrities. In ancient times a man won his spurs 
 and his knighthood by his prowess on the field of 
 battle. In modern days titles are given too freely for 
 almost any reason to the most ordinary and unworthy 
 people. Sham knights in Melbourne and Sydney are 
 as thick as flies. Can anybody say what meritorious 
 action, what gallant deed any of these people per- 
 formed, entitling them to be singled out and placed 
 on an imaginary plane above their fellows ? Why 
 should plain and democratic Australians be forced 
 to call these men Sir and own that they are in some 
 way superior to all the rest of us ? They are a very 
 ordinary lot of chaps and it is hard to see why they 
 should be singled out from all other men who are 
 scrambling for money or for jobs and billets, and be 
 labelled with a meaningless placard of nobility. 
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 Alfred Harmsworth was not then Lord Northcliffe 
 when I called upon him once at Carmelite House to 
 place before him a project for a newspaper like the 
 " Daily Mail " to be printed simultaneously in 
 Melbourne and Sydney. This was about the time 
 the " Argus " was feeble and falling away below the 
 " Age " in circulation, advertisements and influence, 
 and the " Herald " was wallowing in the mire of 
 mere incompetence. It was a splendid chance to 
 
 218
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 create a really national newspaper with a policy like 
 that of the Sydney " Bulletin " to attract the natural- 
 born Australians in a solid phalanx under the Aus- 
 tralian banner. Foreign and alien influence has 
 always been too powerful to permit of the growth 
 of an Australian national spirit which is even yet 
 unborn. Australia is still in swaddling clothes and 
 always sucking an English-made dummy. Lord 
 Northcliffe liked my proposal and approved of the 
 scheme. The money end of it did not seem to bother 
 him at all. He asked me to nominate a capable 
 business manager and gave me a week to do so. I 
 put forward three names of Australians, whom upon 
 cabled enquiry he rejected. He told me a good 
 editor, and chiefs of staff and departments were 
 plentiful, but a good general manager, the pivot of 
 every successful newspaper, was a rare bird and hard 
 to snare. Lord Northcliffe named (Sir) Robert 
 Donald as a good general manager, if he could get 
 him. I think Northcliffe was lukewarm as there 
 was no obvious money in the venture. The Melbourne 
 ' Herald " was obscure then and the handicap of 
 being the first with late European news, which isn't 
 worth a damn to Australians, was not an attraction. 
 
 When I first met Lord Glendyne he was Robert 
 Nivison, then not a very old member of the London 
 Stock Exchange, and had been a bill clerk in the 
 London and Westminster Bank. Nivison was called 
 ' The Canary " because his hair was once yellow, 
 and therefore quite unlike his heart and character. 
 My letter of introduction to Robert Nivison was 
 from an old friend of my father, Mr. W. G. Devon 
 Astle, then joint London manager of the London 
 and Westminster Bank. I think Mr. Astle was a 
 relative of William Westgarth, an early colonist in 
 Melbourne, who wrote a book about Victoria upon 
 his return to London. Mr. Nivison was the first 
 
 219
 
 stock-broker to organize the issue of what were called 
 Colonial loans, most of which were really the infantile 
 borrowings of the Australian colonies and New 
 Zealand who had sent Japhet into the promised land 
 of Canaan, meaning London, with power to exchange 
 bonds for cash. These first loans carried 7 per cent 
 interest, i\ per cent brokerage, i\ per cent under- 
 writing, 2 \ per cent overriding commission, one 
 half per cent for paying the half-yearly interest 
 coupons, with another one half of one per cent for 
 keeping the Colonial Government account. Reading 
 from left to right, it will be readily seen what a really 
 profitable industry it was for the bankers and the 
 brokers. Like the young tiger who likes plenty of 
 mint sauce with his lamb, these early Victorian loans 
 were as spacious as the inflated crinolines worn by 
 the women of those far-off days, when Australian 
 loans were comparatively safe and well spent in 
 Australia. Nowadays too many Australian loans are 
 floated to pay interest due by Australia and not kept 
 handy in a suspense account, and the rest of them 
 are wasted on unproductive public works, such as 
 railways and city buildings. Nivison gradually 
 acquired personal control of the business of issuing 
 in London loans for Australia, New Zealand, Canada 
 and India. Australia owes over 1,200,000,000, 
 so it is not hard to believe that Lord Glendyne is 
 the most powerful financier in the British Empire, 
 and the word recalls that I have seen him in the 
 British Empire Theatre, in the Gaiety Theatre, and 
 even at the Palace Theatre having a laugh after 
 having probably underwritten a ten million loan 
 before dinner. Well, and why not ! It is easy work 
 this underwriting, conducive of heaviness of heart 
 and vexation of spirit, yet withal completely profitable. 
 Last time I saw Lord Glendyne was in Dalgety and 
 Company's office handing Mr. E. T. Doxat, that 
 
 220
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 paragon of financiers, a cheque for 500 for under- 
 writing a loan of which he had never seen the pros- 
 pectus. Lord Glendyne once left the broad road 
 leading to successful bond issues for the narrow path 
 of lending money to a mining company. He once 
 advanced 20,000 to the North Mount Lyell Copper 
 Company of Tasmania and didn't sleep well till it 
 was repaid. He told me so himself. 
 
 I was an early member of the Royal Colonial 
 Institute in London and used to attend their dinners 
 and lectures. The dinners were capital and usually 
 held in the Whitehall rooms of the Hotel Metropole. 
 Once J. F. Hogan, an ex-Australian journalist, and 
 Irish Member of the House of Commons, read a 
 paper on the Irish in Australia, and somewhat causti- 
 cally rubbed it into native-born Australians for being 
 so perky, cocky and intolerant. Being that kind of a 
 perfervid Australian who believes we Australians are 
 a people utterly superior to the rest of mankind, 
 I begged permission of Lord Rosebery, the Chairman, 
 to reply to Mr. Hogan's scathing criticism. In 
 most inflammatory language, in fine histrionic style, 
 with plenty of action, I explained Australia's imaginary 
 superiority to all other Britons, at the expense of Mr. 
 Hogan. When I had finished with him his address 
 and himself looked as tattered and torn as a pillow 
 full of feathers in a baby whirlwind. Lord Rosebery 
 seemed to be convulsed with laughter internally and 
 when summing up remarked that if politics at the 
 antipodes were conducted in the lively manner of 
 his young friend from down under, it must be highly 
 interesting and exhilarating to be a politician. Faith- 
 full Begg, M.P. for St. Rollox, Glasgow, was my 
 host that night and he was highly delighted with my 
 oratorical fireworks. 
 
 Another lord who had the pleasure of meeting me 
 was Inchcape, then Sir James Mackay, the Napoleon 
 
 221
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 of British shipping. My mate and I were travelling 
 by the P. and O. " Egypt " from Bombay to Mar- 
 seilles, and Sir James occasionally condescended to 
 play rope quoits with us and listen to our stories in 
 the smoking room without telling any himself, a 
 habit of the pseudo-great. Often I wonder whether 
 the really great know any good yarns. If they do, 
 I could easily become popular with them. Our one 
 well-founded objection to Lord Inchcape was that 
 he indulged to excess in cheap scent Lang-y-Lang, 
 musk and sandalwood and as we were in the next 
 cabin we were frequently and freely gassed with it. 
 Had nearly forgotten another great satrap who often 
 listened to my wisdom when going to Egypt, not 
 together, but on the same ss. " Derbyshire," Lord 
 Cromer, formerly Sir Evelyn Baring. In that aged 
 boat there were only three first-class bathrooms and 
 the artful High Commissioner of Egypt made his 
 valet lock himself in one of them from six to eight 
 daily so Cromer should not miss his tub ! What a 
 wily old diplomat ! For years I have sat in the seats 
 of the mighty in all the seven seas, after they had 
 left the ship's dining saloon. Once I was fellow- 
 passenger with a son of Chululongkorn, King of 
 Siam. He was a genial little brownish bloke who 
 carried in two hip pockets, two gold flasks of whisky, 
 one for himself as shouter and the other for the shoutee. 
 He had inveigled a pretty Parisienne midinette to 
 accompany him to Bangkok and she made an excellent 
 travelling companion for all of us. The Prince 
 invited me to go to the ruined temples of Angkor 
 Thorn and to Nom Penh with him and promised me 
 the loan of a white elephant and an introduction to 
 one of his twenty-five sisters. On the same ship, 
 Mustapha Pasha and Hassan Bey had a few " spots " 
 of Johnny Walker with us. Another Eastern poten- 
 tate I knew was the Sultan of Johore, a native state 
 
 222
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 under the protection of Great Britain, across the Strait 
 from Singapore. Met him in Melbourne at Menzies' 
 Hotel, where he was stopping with a Sultana, formerly 
 a coryphe'e at the Gaiety Theatre, London. Johore 
 gave her carte blanche at a leading jewellers, Gaunt 
 and Company, and while he was trying to select 
 winners at the daily races round about Melbourne, 
 she was picking pearls of great price and a few dia- 
 monds for good weight. One noonday while the 
 Sultan was mixing with the collective devilry of 
 Melbourne at the Moonee Valley Races, Tottie 
 Fewclothes caught the P. and O. boat for London, 
 and like Marco Polo her place knew her no more. 
 The Sultan had six sets of false teeth for fixture in 
 his lower jaw, one with two platinum bicuspids, and 
 others with gold, silver, emeralds, agates and enamel. 
 My wife and I went from Singapore to Johore with 
 an order from the British Resident to visit the Zenana, 
 where our guide told us there were twenty-eight 
 Sultanas (enough to fill a carton) and forty-five khaki- 
 coloured children from two months to twenty years 
 old. Also there was a Casino modelled on the gaming 
 house at Monte Carlo. While we were in the Malay 
 States two girls who had been in a Melbourne bar 
 arrived under engagement as stenographers and 
 typists to the household of the Sultan of Johore. To 
 preserve the dignity and prestige of the British Raj 
 they were not allowed to land and were given a thou- 
 sand dollars each to go back home. 
 
 Sir George Sydenham Clarke, made Lord Sydenham 
 for his services on the Esher War Office Committee, 
 which partially reformed the British War Office, was 
 once Governor of Victoria, and unlike every other 
 Governor or Governor-General, he really did what 
 he could for this country when he went back to 
 London. Ever since I have been going up to Europe, 
 not one single man who has represented the British 
 
 223
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Raj in Australia has been worth a pinch of mustard 
 seed to Australasia after he left it. From Hopetoun 
 to Stonehaven, from Loch to Stradbroke, not one of 
 them has done a tap for this country. Why ? Because 
 there is nothing they can do to do us any good. To 
 use a homely simile, if any of them had wished 'to be 
 helpful to show gratitude for the good time and 
 plentiful flattery he got here, it would be like the 
 vain effort of a flea to get under Mount Kosciusko 
 and raise it one foot. So when I took the Alcock 
 Electric Range Finder to the War Office to offer it 
 to the British Government, the only ex-Australian 
 official who was helpful and had any weight whatever 
 was Sir George Sydenham Clarke. And after my 
 first half-hour with him at Whitehall I knew I would 
 fail to sell that wonderful invention to the War 
 Office. Lord Sydenham's description of the inertness, 
 and fossilization, the vacancy of mind of the heads of 
 that over-much venerated War Office simply flooded 
 me with contempt for that paleozoic and pre-glacial 
 British institution, the Palladium of our Liberty ! 
 No wonder Great Britain after the Mons lesson had 
 to reconstruct and recondition her Army in the face 
 of the foe ! Years previously I had heard the great 
 Earl Roberts by public speech warn the authorities 
 and the people they should get ready to fight the 
 Germans. The War Office woke in its sleep, rubbed 
 its eyes, blew its nose, and turned over to resume 
 its placid rest. A. U. Alcock, an Australian electrical 
 engineer and genius, invented a range finder that 
 gave the exact range and bearing of a passing ship 
 to a land fortress and to every gun in that fortress 
 or near by. The instrument would go inside a No. 7 
 bell-topper and the operator's telescope, as he followed 
 the course of the vessel, operated by wire dials in the 
 gun-pits of all the guns that were ready to be fired. 
 Angle and distance were recorded nearly accurately. 
 
 224
 
 LORDS WHO HAVE MET ME 
 
 There was then only one range finder, the Watkins, 
 in use in British forts and not one elsewhere in the 
 world. The War Office took the model and we got 
 nothing for it. The Melbourne syndicate included 
 many of the leading business men of the city, like 
 David Syme, Malcolm MacEacharn, William Knox, 
 Bowes Kelly, Colin Templeton, F. M. Dickenson, 
 Henry Butler, H. U. Alcock, William Mountain 
 and Byron Moore. I spent seven months calling at 
 the War Office and arranging for the testing of the 
 instrument. General Markham was irritated and 
 incensed every time I got past his bodyguard into 
 his presence and refused to consider my proposals. 
 Lord Roberts, then Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, 
 was married to a sister of Mrs. F. P. Stevens of 
 Warrnambool, an old friend of our family. Mrs. 
 Stevens had given me a letter of introduction to 
 Lord and Lady Roberts, and in desperation I wrote 
 Lord Roberts at Dublin Castle and asked for his 
 assistance. Next day I got a telegram from the War 
 Office asking me to call. No sitting on the cold stone 
 steps at the Pall Mall door that day. A brace of 
 British grenadiers in busbies escorted me to General 
 Markham's room, and I was actually (and I am 
 ready to make an affidavit conscientiously believing 
 that anybody who swears falsely always gets off) 
 offered a chair ! What Lord Roberts wrote to the 
 authorities I do not know, but Meudell stock 5 per 
 cent irredeemable and interminable, previously stand- 
 ing at 50, jumped to a premium of 150. Old Mark- 
 ham recoiled to jump better, and his volte-face stunt 
 was highly amusing. Major Ardagh, chief of ord- 
 nance, came and saw our model that day and three 
 days later it was set up at Shoeburyness and tried 
 out. Three more days later we never heard of it 
 from that day to this, but part of it is being used 
 extensively on British battleships. Taken individually 
 
 225
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the British officer may be inclined to practise the 
 virtues inherent in a gentleman, though collectively 
 as a war department he behaves like a cut-purse. 
 Coming home by North America I called at Phila- 
 delphia and saw Lieutenant Greig, then head of the 
 ordnance department of the Bethlehem Steel Works, 
 now part of the United Steel Trust, and explained 
 the instrument to him. Then he offered me not 
 only the full use of his staff and factories to test and 
 develop the Alcock range finder, but offered to sell 
 it to the United States Government for a million of 
 money in pounds and split that upon the fifty-fifty 
 basis. A prophet has no honour in his own country, 
 yet he cannot, it seems to me, get either profits or 
 honour when he goes abroad. The only good result 
 of that costly mission was that I married my wife in 
 London which was worth the 500,000 I didn't get. 
 
 226
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE 
 
 WHY the business men of Sydney have created, out 
 of nothing, in less than a century, the strongest 
 private bank and the most successful mutual life 
 assurance office in the world ! They have made 
 Sydney, in fifty years, the sixth shipping port for 
 tonnage in the greatest empire the world has ever 
 known. They have made of Sydney the most beautiful 
 city on earth, not excepting Edinburgh. You get 
 the same answer to the same question in one hour in 
 Sydney as you can get in London in one week, perhaps. 
 The business immigrant who goes to Australia to 
 set the pace to keep the Australian business man up 
 to the scratch must take care he is not run over and 
 killed during his first spurt. To the end of 1925 
 Australia had produced 1, 129, 000,000 of minerals, 
 and has per head the soundest public debt, the most 
 bank deposits, the most savings bank deposits, the 
 best birth rate, the lowest death rate, the finest land 
 laws, the best wool output, the most sheep in the world. 
 Australia also produces the best horses, sheep, cattle, 
 meat, butter, rabbits, champagne, sugar and fruit 
 known to merchants. Australia has the greatest 
 silver mine, the best copper mine, the richest gold 
 mine, and the largest tin mine, as well as the biggest 
 coalfield in one spot on earth. Our trees are the 
 highest, our coke the purest, our zinc the cleanest, 
 and our oil shale beds and brown coal seams the 
 most extensive on the globe. Our import and export 
 trade is the largest per head, and so is our local 
 shipping. Taxation is the lowest, epidemic disease 
 
 227
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the smallest, crime statistics the lowest, milk supply 
 and food the purest, and old age pensions at one pound 
 a week the highest known to humanity. Finally 
 we get more sun, warmth and good weather than any 
 place outside Southern Europe, and our population 
 weighs more and measures more than any other 
 people. 
 
 SOME GREAT AUSTRALIAN BANKS AND COMPANIES 
 
 You will never hear Australians blowing and 
 boasting about their country or its institutions. 
 Misguided men like Donald Mackinnon, Mark 
 Sheldon, J. A. M. Elder, Dr. E. C. Page, G. A. 
 Pearce, who have been on Government jaunts to 
 New York come home and cackle about America's 
 progress as being due to hustle and advertisement, 
 and therefore worthy of being copied by Australia. 
 That kind of talk is all fudge. Only weak men and 
 weak people and nations gas about their doings. 
 Nobody here ever writes about the extraordinary 
 success of many Australian-made institutions. How 
 many Australians know that the bank of New South 
 Wales, established in Sydney in 1 8 1 7, is the strongest 
 and safest bank in the world ? How few Australians 
 know that there is no other life assurance company 
 in business so safe and so successful as the Australian 
 Mutual Provident Society. The Mutual and Citizens' 
 Life Assurance Company is an amalgamation of the 
 Citizens' Life Company and two small, feeble mutual 
 assurance companies. It is so prosperous that the 
 shareholders of the Citizens' Life Company drew 
 1 60,000 in dividends last year on their paid-up 
 capital of 200,000, or 80 per cent per annum. 
 What assurance company on earth can pay 80 per cent ? 
 and the Citizens' Life will some day pay 400 per cent 
 in yearly dividends and probably be dissolved by a 
 law of the Commonwealth Parliament. There is no 
 
 228
 
 AUSTRALIAN BANKS AND COMPANIES 
 
 executors or trustees' company so strong as the 
 Trustees, Executors and Agency Company of Mel- 
 bourne, the first of the kind established anywhere. 
 The Temperance and General Assurance Company 
 is steadily forging ahead and some day Australia 
 will be extremely proud of it. Three great pastoral 
 companies handling wool and sheep stations are 
 Dalgety and Company, Goldsbrough, Mort and 
 Company, and Younghusband and Company. One 
 has to work in London amongst banks and stock- 
 brokers to learn what a tower of strength to Australia 
 is Dalgety's, and in a lesser degree what a fine status 
 in the financial world is held by Goldsbroughs. There 
 are some great merchants, firms of pure Australian 
 birth, like James Henty and Company, James Service 
 and Company, John Connell and Company, Henry 
 Berry and Company that would be a credit to any 
 community because of their high integrity. " Flin- 
 ders Lane," a generic name for the soft-goods ware- 
 house businesses of Melbourne, has fallen from its 
 high estate just as mighty Babylon fell. Bad manage- 
 ment, bad payment of employees, and general meanness 
 have brought " Flinders Lane " to earth. There are 
 no wise leaders in the soft-goods trade to-day like 
 F. T. Sargood, J. M. Bruce, Henry Butler, Robert 
 Reid, David Beath, Neil McGlashan, or George 
 Webster. The good retail shops have vanished and 
 their places filled by emporia holding rag fairs, jumble 
 sales and bargain bazaars aided by crazy and untrue 
 advertisements. 
 
 SIR JOHN MONASH 
 
 Sir John Monash, the most brilliant of Australian 
 generals, emerged from the war with a splendid 
 reputation as a military commander. So few of the 
 professional soldiers who led the British army at the 
 outset of the war proved capable in the field, that 
 
 Q 229
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Monash's success stands out in high relief. He was 
 an amateur soldier, an artillery officer without previous 
 battle experience, a fact making his success the more 
 meritorious. Monash's father was a storekeeper in 
 a bush town in New South Wales, and when his son 
 left his primary school the father told a friend of mine 
 he was selling out to reside in Melbourne, so that he 
 could give John a University education. Monash, 
 senior, was a highly respected citizen and his foresight 
 was justified because Monash, junior, went through 
 the University of Melbourne with great distinction. 
 He is now Vice-Chancellor of his Alma Mater and 
 deserves every honour as a great Australian his 
 native land can bestow. Yet he was not called before 
 Parliament and properly thanked for his magnificent 
 services to his fellow-countrymen. Possibly because 
 he was not a professional or high-caste soldier, or a 
 carpet knight owing his rank and preferment to 
 family relations and to society women. 
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 One of the finest women in Melbourne is Miss 
 Edith Onians, Hon. Secretary of the City Newsboys' 
 Society, who has devoted her life to doing good to 
 others in a splendid manner. She has been the means 
 of saving hundreds of poor orphaned boys from 
 drifting into blind alley occupations, which tend to 
 lower the conduct and character of the waifs and 
 strays of a modern city. Three prominent citizens 
 who have amassed great fortunes in Melbourne by 
 sheer merit through sticking to business and not 
 missing any points, are Montague Cohen, Solicitor, 
 who has mixed law and beer with excellent financial 
 results. J. H. Riley, an accountant, has piled up a 
 heap of money by having as many irons in the fire 
 as the grate would hold. He has contrived to acquire 
 at least a dozen big city businesses and make profits 
 
 230
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 out of every one. The romance of business surround- 
 ing James Richardson, the ex-ship's steward and now 
 the richest publican and wine and spirit merchant in 
 Melbourne, ought to be written to show ambitious 
 youths how easy it is to make money in vast quantity 
 by denying oneself any pleasure and attaching an 
 atom of seccotine to every shilling in sight. 
 
 Colonel Charles Umphelly, D. B. Lazarus, M.L.A. 
 for Bendigo, and I went to Windsor Castle to see 
 Queen Victoria and were graciously shown over the 
 Royal stables ! Splendid, wasn't it ? We saw the 
 Old Lady out driving with Princess Beatrice, and 
 really she didn't look like a queen. She was a very 
 ordinary, dowdy, little woman, neither regal nor 
 dignified, fat and pallid. At King Edward's funeral 
 we saw about twenty kings and princes and the only 
 person in the procession who really looked royal was 
 Emperor Bill of Germany, the chap who ran away 
 from his army. Another quaint little person I saw 
 once was W. M. Hughes when Prime Minister 
 of Australia. There should be a general law for- 
 bidding any man not born in Australia being made 
 Prime Minister. Hughes was motored to the 
 Liverpool camp in New South Wales, by a cousin 
 of my wife's, who was then a private in the A.I.F. 
 " Brab " was a first-class chauffeur whose skill pro- 
 voked Hughes' admiration so much that he gave 
 the young squatter thrippence at the end of the day. 
 It is now a family heirloom. 
 
 In 1915 in Los Angeles I met Edmund Mitchell, 
 a Scotch journalist of high intellectual power. He 
 was trained on the " Glasgow Herald," and in 1893 
 arrived in Melbourne in time to take part in the 
 Shearers and Maritime Strikes on behalf of the 
 squatters. Mitchell saw an opening for a pastoralists' 
 journal and established the " Pastoralists' Review," 
 which was successful from the outset. Wanting more 
 
 231
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 capital Mitchell negotiated with R. E. N. Twopeny 
 and A. Pearse, who were then in New Zealand, 
 Mitchell was a rover by nature and soon after found 
 his way to California, where he wrote several books of 
 the highest order. 
 
 
 
 JACK DOUGHARTY 
 
 My brother-in-law was a well-known man about 
 town thirty years ago. He loved to pose as a leader 
 of sports and sporting, and amongst other methods 
 of keeping his place he helped boxing men and 
 pugilists financially. Frank P. Slavin, better known 
 as " Paddy," was a friend of Jack's who lent him 
 money. Slavin was a fighter of the first order, and 
 in England beat Jem Smith, the champion at Bruges 
 in Belgium where he had to fight a gang of roughs. 
 Then Paddy went to U.S.A. and hammered Joe 
 McAuliffe, Jack Ellis and Jake Kilrain. In May, 
 1892, just before I reached London, Paddy Slavin 
 fought Peter Jackson, a coloured man once the 
 idol of the Sydney prize ring, at the National 
 Sporting Club, London. From all accounts this was 
 the greatest of all modern prize fights between two 
 undoubted Australian champions, ten rounds of a 
 titanic battle, made up of every kind of punch and 
 wallop known in the art of fisticuffs. In the tenth 
 round, Peter Jackson feinted with his left and quick 
 as wireless hit Paddy on the point with his right. 
 Paddy fell forward into Peter's arms and this epic 
 contest ended. 
 
 s. M. BRUCE 
 
 The last generation of Australian politicians was 
 superior in intellect to this, and the generation before 
 was better still. The first Administration of the Com- 
 monwealth, on ist January, 1901, comprised all the 
 
 232
 
 S. M. BRUCE 
 
 strong men in Parliamentary life headed by Sir 
 Edmund Barton, whose lieutenant was Mr. Alfred 
 Deakin. The other Ministers were, Sir William 
 Lyne, Sir John Forrest, Sir George Turner, C. C. 
 Kingston, Sir J. R. Dickson, Sir P. O. Fysh, R. E. 
 O'Connor and N. E. Lewis. The Government was 
 a true phalanx of ability and intellect. From that 
 date the calibre of Cabinets has been slowly withering 
 and weakening, till now we have a mediocre collection 
 of nonentities wielding Federal power. At the 
 Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, 
 Stanley Melbourne Bruce was prefect and captain of 
 the school, first among equals, because he was suave, 
 bland and tactful. That is why he is Prime Minister 
 of Australia to-day. His father, J. M. Bruce, worked 
 his way up from the ranks of the working drapers to be 
 head of a wholesale soft-goods firm in Melbourne, 
 known as Paterson, Laing and Bruce. J. M. Bruce 
 was suave, bland and tactful and passed these quali- 
 ties on to his son Stanley who is a splendid representa- 
 tive of the soft-goods business, being all things to 
 all men. Success has made him too talkative, and by 
 no means profound in knowledge or intellect. Bruce 
 is what people call a " nice " man, one who is more 
 celebrated than cerebrated with grey matter in his 
 brain. 
 
 NORMAN LINDSAY 
 
 The greatest black and white artist of modern times 
 was Phil May, and next to him Aubrey Beardsley. 
 Then Norman Lindsay of Sydney came along and 
 surpassed both of them and everybody else. Went 
 to London on the same ship as Norman Lindsay and 
 had the pleasure of introducing him to Laurence 
 Bradbury, one of the proprietors of London " Punch," 
 who naturally knew about Norman and his work. 
 He introduced Lindsay to his art editor, Townsend, 
 
 233
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 who asked him to illustrate three small jokelets or 
 japelets to show his mettle and style. Norman 
 Lindsay did his best and the jokes shone like a phos- 
 phorescent watch among a lot of grandfather's clocks. 
 On pay-day Norman was given a cheque for three 
 guineas at which he laughed all the way from Bouverie 
 Street to my office in the city. ' This microscopic 
 thanksoffering must be spent quickly," said Norman, 
 " lest it goes bad." So we summoned to a feast, 
 Will Dyson, the now famous caricaturist, and E. T. 
 Buley, an Australian, then editor of the Northcliffe 
 Sunday newspaper, " The Weekly Dispatch," which 
 chiefly contains the very latest divorce news and 
 other anti-social crimes of the British aristocracy. 
 We went to Pinoli's Restaurant in Wardour Street 
 and knocked down the cheque amidst loud and 
 prolonged applause. From the festa of spaghetti 
 and chianti, Norman Lindsay went to Reuter's Tele- 
 gram office in the Strand and sent a cable to the 
 Sydney " Bulletin " saying he was going home very 
 shortly, and he went and stayed there. Fancy the 
 meanness of offering twenty-one shillings each for 
 three inimitable drawings by the world's greatest 
 black-and-white artist ! It takes an Englishman 
 born within the sound of Bow bells to understand 
 London " Punch's " heavyweight humour. Since 
 then Norman Lindsay has won the approval of the 
 leading European art critics for his uncanny power 
 with pen and pencil, and his fame is assured, while 
 his work is improving and gathering force and subtlety 
 day by day. Lindsay has " arrived " though he has 
 not stopped going. He is already a great etcher. 
 
 FLORENCE YOUNG 
 
 The most remarkable of all the attractive and clever 
 women I have known was Florence Young, so long 
 
 234
 
 FLORENCE YOUNG 
 
 the beloved idol of the theatre-goers of Australasia. 
 Florrie was one of the sweetest and kindest of all 
 friends, always charming, always cheerful, and never 
 a nagger. Every Christian home has one nagger, 
 male or female, who is hateful and as hideous as a 
 beastly motor-cycle. Florence Young had a rare 
 distinction of person, with a fine mind and a strong 
 brain and body. Look at the hard work she did 
 through twenty-five years of acting and singing in 
 comic opera ! She had neither match nor equal on 
 the London stage, nor any rival here at home. Why 
 then did she not win a diadem as queen of comic 
 opera in London ? Because custom and convention 
 allow half a dozen male and female veteran actors and 
 entrepreneurs to rule the theatrical world of London 
 with a rod of iron. The theatrical mandarins who have 
 a monopoly of English playhouses will never permit 
 their pets, either singers or actors, to be displaced by 
 strangers. Melba fought her way to the top and 
 trampled over the puny people who have always 
 bossed Covent Garden and all the byways leading 
 to it. Ada Crossley, similarly being an Australian, 
 had to engage in combat with the concert monopolists 
 of Modern Babylon. Yet Ada Crossley ended by 
 being the finest contralto singer of her era. Nelly 
 Stewart, a peerless Australian actress in her special 
 art, could not get an engagement in London, because 
 theatrical managers and owners prefer fantoccini 
 puppets who will obey. The dearth of new plays, 
 the death of the drama in England is due to a ring of 
 old dodderers who will not engage a new player or 
 read a play by a young playwright. Some of them 
 have most improperly been ennobled as knights. To 
 name the men and women who have destroyed 
 dramaturgy and the histrionic art in the " old country " 
 would be to invite myself to be burnt at the stake 
 as an ancient auto da ft. Here is a typical programme, 
 
 235
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 dated 28th February, 1903, of " The Geisha," pro- 
 duced at Her Majesty's Theatre by J. C. Williamson 
 himself. Florence Young played O Mimosa San ; 
 Carrie Moore was ultra-delightful as Molly Seamore ; 
 Maud Chetwynd played Juliette ; Celia Ghiloni, 
 another fascinating Australian, was Lady Constance 
 Wynne. These capable Australian women were 
 supported by Harold Thorley, Pat Bathurst, Hugh J. 
 Ward and George Lauri. There was a galaxy of 
 talent ! Nowadays the Australian stage is occupied 
 by inferior American players who mimic like apes, 
 jazz like blackfellows and spoil our language by the 
 slang of the ghetto. 
 
 J. F. ARCHIBALD 
 
 Next to David Syme of the " Age " the greatest 
 publicist in Australia was John F. Archibald of the 
 Sydney " Bulletin." His real name was Jules Francois, 
 son of an Irish father and a French mother. We went 
 to the same school in Warrnambool, Victoria, though 
 Jack was leaving as I joined. He went to the Mel- 
 bourne University for his B.A. degree and drifted 
 into journalism in which fine art he became a master, 
 a chieftain of men, a public leader of much might. 
 Archibald alone created an Australian public opinion 
 without being able to call into being an Australian 
 spirit. There is no national spirit. There is no 
 national spirit to-day because of the accursed teaching 
 of the schools and universities that we Australians 
 are firstly British and secondly Australians. No 
 Australian child is ever taught to love his own country 
 first. The poor urchin with his pap is taught that 
 a faraway little country with a battling past, a crumb- 
 ling present and a desolate future, should be called 
 "home," and adored accordingly. Home to 90 per 
 cent of Australians is a Sydney or Melbourne slum, or 
 a decayed mining town, or the wide and dreary bush, 
 
 236
 
 J. F. ARCHIBALD 
 
 yet they talk glibly of England as " Home." Archi- 
 bald, perceived the pressing need of turning the 
 thoughts of the Australians inwards, and of moulding 
 new ideals for a new race. The British live and 
 move by ritual, by convention, by what grandpapa or 
 grandmamma did, and there is no freedom, no liberty 
 and plenty of fear of their " betters," the ridiculous 
 and conceited Whigs and Tories. At my suggestion 
 Archibald used as the " Bulletin " motto, " Australia 
 for the Australians," and when a "White Australia" 
 became a living question he changed it to the meaning- 
 less phrase, *' Australia for the White Man." Im- 
 migration is a needless curse to Australia and some 
 day we may have to give battle to stop it. 
 
 GREAT MEN 
 
 Newspapers, not Nature, make men great by 
 writing them up. Here are a few exceptions to that 
 canon. Sticht, Mellor, Schlapp and Dickenson. 
 Because of William Knox's friendship I used to meet 
 all the leading men connected with the Broken Hill 
 Proprietary and Mount Lyell Mines, two Australian 
 giants of what economists call " the robber industry," 
 the industry that takes wealth from the soil and does 
 not replace or renew it. Knox asked me to dinner 
 at " Ranfurly " one Sunday many years ago to meet 
 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Sticht, who had just arrived 
 from America the previous day. Robert Sticht was 
 easily pre-eminent amongst many eminent mining 
 engineers we have had in Australia during my life- 
 time. The essence of making mining profits is to 
 stop waste and reduce costs. Sticht had no equal in 
 working out such a policy. He was a highly educated 
 and an extremely intellectual man of the very highest 
 character for justness and integrity. Working together 
 amicably and with mutual understanding, Alfred 
 Mellor, the secretary of the Mount Lyell Company,
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 and Robert Sticht, the mining superintendent, make 
 an ideal dual executive. Mellor was an especially 
 fine man who died too soon. Towards the end of 
 his life Robert Sticht suffered from worry over a 
 bad investment in a copper mine at Mount Balfour 
 in Tasmania, and this hurried him to his grave. As 
 he himself expressed it, Sticht lived and died as a 
 scientific agnostic. Another of the very great mining 
 men of my day was H. H. Schlapp, who came from 
 the United States as metallurgist to the Broken Hill 
 Proprietary. As a technologist, Schlapp stands high, 
 but his common sense and business acumen make his 
 great strength. It was Schlapp who inspected the 
 Mount Lyell massif and detected its value, not as a 
 gold mine but as a huge pyritic deposit of copper and 
 gold. Schlapp recommended Bowes Kelly, William 
 Knox and William Orr to buy the lease from Grotty, 
 Dixon and Company, and his advice to send for 
 Sticht really founded that great concern. Knox was 
 an unerring judge of men and his work for the Broken 
 Hill Proprietary and Mount Lyell Companies is 
 imperishable. Knox went to Spain with William 
 Orr to the Rio Tinto Copper Mine to interview 
 G. D. Delprat, a Dutch engineer then in charge of 
 Rio Tinto. That was one of the best of Knox's 
 many good appointments. He could not possibly 
 have secured a better superintendent than Delprat, 
 to whom belongs the credit of establishing the New- 
 castle Steel Works, some day to be the leading 
 industry of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. 
 Associated with G. D. Delprat was my old partner, 
 F. M. Dickenson, a wise, acute business man, who 
 took Knox's chair as secretary of the Broken Hill 
 Proprietary Company. If " Dick " had not been 
 tempted by the Broken Hill Proprietary board to 
 leave me to become their secretary, it is certain our 
 firm would have been the leaders of the Stock Exchange 
 
 238
 
 GREAT MEN 
 
 of Melbourne. The most sagacious of the original 
 Broken Hill Proprietary directors was W. P. Mac- 
 Gregor, the most popular Willie Jamieson, the most 
 thoughtful Bowes Kelly, the shrewdest was Harvey 
 Patterson, while the strongest headed was George 
 MacCulloch. Yet, without William Knox as controller 
 these directors would have made a lot more mistakes, 
 and goodness knows they made plenty while learning 
 at the expense of the wonderful Broken Hill Pro- 
 prietary Mine all about silver mining. 
 
 DR. RINDER 
 
 Dr. " Coolie " Kinder was one of the most interest- 
 ing of my contemporaries, clever, but slow, witty 
 and humorous. " Coolie " was an old member of 
 the Yorick Club of Melbourne, in those days belonging 
 to a coterie of extremely clever professional and literary 
 men. He had a habit of going home to his suburb 
 at midnight, when an old four-wheeled cab called for 
 him at the Yorick every night. " Coolie's " delight 
 was to fill his cab with doctors living in the far 
 suburbs and talk them to sleep on the way home. 
 One such ramble I remember took us to Williams- 
 town, nine miles, to Brunswick, four miles, to Kew, 
 five miles, and we finally landed at St. Kilda, six miles 
 from there, at 5 a.m. It was at least a novel way of 
 killing time. Once " Coolie " took me to the Yorick 
 Club about 1 1 p.m., and we found Julian Thomas, 
 "The Vagabond," an "Argus" writer like Fred 
 Greenwood who described the doss houses of London 
 as " The Casual," fishing for rats down the lift well, 
 with a strong line, a sharp hook and a beefsteak. 
 He caught one rat in one hour. We adjourned to 
 supper and four of us ate a huge leg of mutton, vast 
 quantities of pickles and beer, and were fined a guinea 
 each by the house committee for keeping the steward 
 
 239
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 out of bed after 5 a.m. One needed a stenographer 
 to catch all the good things said. 
 
 CHARLIE UMPHELBY 
 
 Two of the finest friends I ever had were Charlie 
 Umphelby and Hans Irvine. Charlie drifted into 
 the Royal Australian Artillery and was a colonel 
 when killed in the Boer War at Driefontein. He 
 was attached to Lord Roberts' staff and was killed 
 by a stray shot fired by a Boer who was galloping 
 home from the battle. The bullet struck the riding 
 cane Umphelby had hanging to his wrist and was 
 deflected through his liver. My wife and I saw him 
 off from Port Melbourne to South Africa on the 
 ss. " Euryalus," and he told us in his cabin he had 
 a premonition he would be killed. He was a kindly, 
 cheery soul, knew his job, was popular with his men, 
 and a born leader. Hans Irvine, the wine grower, 
 was another notable man, almost a replica of Umphelby 
 and, like him, well-bred. Irvine's father was a cousin 
 of one of the Irish Dukes of Leinster and his uncle 
 was an admiral in the British Navy. He himself was 
 a typical Australian and will be known in the history 
 of local viticulture as the first vigneron to manufacture 
 sparkling wines. He imported several French Cham- 
 pagne makers and besides made what were probably 
 the best still wines in Australia. Irvine tried to 
 establish his Great Western brand in London, and I 
 met him there on three trips. Once he gave me 
 fourteen days to sell his vineyards and stocks for 
 j 1 00,000 cash. The time was too short and I missed 
 making a " punch " by brokerage. Another of my 
 numerous chances missed ! 
 
 JOE WOOLF 
 
 In my early business days when I nursed illusions, 
 since supplanted by delusions, Joseph Woolf, the 
 
 240
 
 JOE WOOLF 
 
 wisest and most subtle Melbourne solicitor, and I 
 collaborated to get a concession from the Bendigo 
 City Council to build cable tramways in the city and 
 suburbs. The poor little parochial councillors fiddled 
 with us and finally refused to grant the franchise to 
 use the streets. Interested in the scheme were James 
 and George Duncan, the two superior tramway engin- 
 eers to whom all the success of the Melbourne cable 
 tramway system is due. That was in 1885. The 
 market was ripe for a tramway float and we would 
 have made a nice " dry bit " out of the transaction. 
 Joseph Woolf is a replica of the late Hugo Stinnes, 
 the German arch-millionaire. Joe made me secretary 
 of another big enterprise which his far-sighted 
 intelligence approved as sure to yield us a lot of 
 money. It was to use the Evelyn Tunnel on the 
 Yarra at Warrandyte, twenty miles from Melbourne, 
 for the production of electricity. The tunnel was 
 driven by the early miners through a bend of the river 
 to divert the water and enable them to recover the 
 gold in the river bed. Part of our scheme aimed at 
 damming back the Yarra and creating a great lake 
 which would have doubled Melbourne's water supply 
 at that time. We could not get the rights from the 
 Government and the project fell down. All through 
 my career I have been too early and too soon with 
 most of my best money-making ideas. Another of 
 my bright ideas was formulated many years before it 
 was appreciated. When going to America on a 
 business trip I was given the plans and proposals of 
 the Kiewa scheme of hydro-electricity, to dam back 
 and use the waters of the Kiewa and Mitta Mitta 
 Rivers in North-East Victoria. A leading firm of 
 hydro-electrical engineers in San Francisco drafted 
 the plans and got a New York group of capitalists 
 to agree to provide 1,000,000 sterling to do the 
 work and send the electric juice to Melbourne. We 
 
 241
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 went about the business quietly and few people knew 
 that all we wanted was a thirty years' lease or con- 
 cession, and the work would be started at once. The 
 Minister of Public Works was Mr. John McWhae, who 
 was so shortsighted or pig-headed or both as to refuse 
 to grant more than a fifteen-year tenure, which gave 
 the concessionaires not enough time to do more than 
 get their money back. That was another case where 
 I lost a " punch of cash " because I was too soon with 
 a bright idea. Again I lost a lot of boodle when the 
 Tasmanian State Government and the Commonwealth 
 Post Office declined to support my project for a daily 
 mail by air to Tasmania. That was in 1919 and a 
 Tasmanian Air Company is being formed by others 
 in 1929. There again I was before my time with a 
 payable proposition. 
 
 ADA CROSSLEY AND J. MOORE HICKSON 
 
 I have numbered as friends Ada Crossley, the 
 leading contralto singer, and James Moore Hickson, 
 the faith healer. Ada Crossley along with a fine 
 mezzo-soprano voice had a rare, charming personality. 
 She was adored by her fellow-Australians. Born in 
 Gippsland, a farming and grazing province in Victoria, 
 Ada Crossley had a strenuous struggle to get to the 
 top as a singer, and unlike Nellie Melba she did not 
 have an over-rich father behind her to thrust her 
 forward. With James Moore Hickson we made 
 several trips in Victoria, and I was associated with 
 him all through his mission. His extraordinary 
 power of healing the sick is occult and esoteric. 
 That he makes marvellous cures I had abundant 
 proof and evidence. In my own case he cured an 
 attack of shingles in a day, which my doctor said 
 would lay me up for three weeks. 
 
 242
 
 JAMES TYSON 
 
 JAMES TYSON 
 
 One day in 1853 my father was acting as accountant 
 in the Bank of Victoria, Castlemaine, a gold-field that 
 yielded fifteen million pounds' worth of gold inside 
 ten years. As the doors were opened, a tall, weather- 
 beaten young man, dressed in a red shirt and riding 
 breeches, strode in, unbuckled a leather belt from 
 his waist and tersely ordered my father to " Count 
 that, young man." There were 6000 in notes of 
 all banks and denominations in the belt. The big 
 stranger said he wanted to open an account. In 
 answer to the usual inquiries he said his name was 
 James Tyson and that he was a drover without a 
 fixed abode. Under my father's genial influence 
 Tyson told the story of his first profit. He had gone 
 to Warrnambool amongst the stations deserted by 
 their owners during the great trek to the gold-fields to 
 buy sheep and a few horses, the sheep round about 
 a shilling and the horses up to ten shillings. He 
 drove his mixed mob to Castlemaine and sold them at 
 extraordinary prices for a total of 6000. James 
 Tyson became friendly with my Dad and remained 
 a friend all his life. Many years afterwards Tyson 
 laughingly suggested that he would engage three of 
 his nieces to the three Meudell boys with a view to 
 matrimony, so he evidently believed in the advantage 
 of heredity in producing good stock in humans as 
 in sheep. James Tyson left nearly 4,000,000 behind 
 him without making a will. 
 
 SIR JOHN FORREST 
 
 Sir John Forrest was one of many good Australians 
 of a bygone era. His three expeditions through the 
 unknown territory of Central and Southern-Western 
 Australia were epical. Every journey was made 
 under the threat of death by thirst. From day to day 
 
 243
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 John Forrest never knew where his next drink would 
 be secured. The torments of Tantalus standing in 
 water up to the chin and not drinking a drop were 
 as naught alongside the ever-present fear that water 
 might not be found that day or the next. Once I 
 complimented Sir John Forrest at a public meeting 
 upon his explorations, and his concept of carrying 
 water by pipes 300 miles to Coolgardie and Kal- 
 goorlie. Mr. Deakin told me next day that Sir 
 John Forrest said that no public tribute of praise had 
 ever so greatly pleased him. Beside his hazardous 
 exploring trips, his renowned political career was 
 nothing in his own sight. C. C. Kingston, the brilliant 
 South Australian statesman, was another big native- 
 born Australian, who died in his prime. Once I 
 wrote a series of six articles dealing with the over- 
 borrowing and over-legislation of the six States, 
 a deadly evil to-day, as it was then. South Australia 
 as a culprit borrower and extravagant spender was 
 wide open for stern criticism. The day after my 
 article appeared, C. C. Kingston came past my office 
 at 54, Queen Street, Melbourne, and with a heavy, 
 nullah walking stick thrashed my brass name-plate, 
 making two dents in it. It was the highest compliment 
 every paid to me by a really great man. 
 
 THREE FIRST-CLASS JOURNALISTS 
 
 Three first-class journalists I knew were John H. Y. 
 Nish of the Melbourne " Argus," John E. Scantlebury, 
 originator of the Wild Cat Column in the Sydney 
 " Bulletin," and Davison, called Peter, Symmons of 
 Melbourne " Age." Jack Nish divides with Jack 
 Stephens of the " Age " the honour of being the best 
 sub-editor who ever worked on the Melbourne press. 
 He was a born editor, one who could smell a libel 
 through an envelope, was tactful, knew his paper's 
 policy and spirit and by striking out or adding a 
 
 244
 
 THREE FIRST-CLASS JOURNALISTS 
 
 word could change the tenor of a paragraph. Jack 
 Scantlebury had worked as a miner in Bendigo and 
 knew the uncertainty and the chicanery inseparable 
 from gold mining. His paragraphs were models 
 of clarity and hit the spot every time. Scantlebury 
 went to London to try his luck, and got hold of a poor 
 instrument for his purpose in the " British Aus- 
 tralasian," then owned by an Australian firm of 
 stockbrokers, starved for money and badly managed. 
 He came back to West Australia, discovered that gold 
 stealing was universal on a gigantic scale and cabled 
 back a long article costing jiio, which earned him 
 the sack from his Stock Exchange bosses who disliked 
 sensations. Peter Symmons has never had a successor 
 on the Melbourne newspapers, because he was too 
 brilliant and too crafty, a real Machiavelli of the press. 
 Journalism in Melbourne nowadays is wishy-washy, 
 tame and spiritless. There are no fighting journalists 
 because there is no demand for them. Symmons 
 could write fine topical verse, invent good stories, 
 and comment on politics and sport at short notice. 
 Among Australian journalists of the day there is one 
 facile princeps, Donald MacDonald, and another, a 
 professor emeritus of journalism in "Bung" Wilmot, 
 men of exceptional attainments, both on the "Argus" 
 staff. As a sports editor R. W. E. Wilmot is un- 
 rivalled in the Commonwealth. George Bell, the 
 engineer of the " Argus," is an Atlas who has carried 
 that paper on his head and back for forty years. 
 
 ROMANCE OF BIG BUSINESS 
 
 The career of the late Sir Henry Jones is a remark- 
 able instance of a great success in spite of heavy 
 handicaps. He was the head of the well-known jam 
 works which were established in Hobart more than 
 seventy years ago by Mr. George Peacock, and in 
 which he first worked as a factory hand and afterwards.
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 as foreman. He learned every phase of the great 
 business which he afterwards directed from actual 
 experience. He was entirely without educational 
 advantages in his youth. He nevertheless made a 
 keen study of business affairs, and his almost uncanny 
 business sense enabled him to exercise a foresight and 
 insight that were the envy of men who had every 
 advantage of education and training. When the late 
 Mr. George Peacock decided to retire from business, 
 about thirty-six years ago, he offered Sir Henry 
 Jones, of whose business ability he had formed a very 
 high opinion, an opportunity for buying the business 
 if he could arrange finance, on extended terms if 
 necessary. The offer was accepted and Sir Henry 
 Jones carried it on for a number of years in conjunc- 
 tion with Mr. A. W. Palfreyman, another " big " man, 
 and Mr. E. Peacock as partners. Later Sir Alfred 
 Ashbolt, afterwards Agent-General for Tasmania, who 
 had joined the firm as a clerk, became the fourth partner. 
 From the time Sir Henry Jones assumed the control of 
 the business rapid and continued progress was made. 
 From the first factory in Hobart the business extended 
 to Sydney, Melbourne, South Australia, London, 
 South Africa, San Francisco, and New Zealand. 
 Factories have been established in all these places 
 for the canning of fruit and the manufacture of jam. 
 In Hobart the concern has other interests and acts as 
 agents for several steamship lines. Sir Henry Jones 
 was considered to be one of the greatest men in 
 Australia. He was capable of holding his own in the 
 highest business circles in any part of the world. He 
 had a creative mind and a quick brain, with an ability 
 to get down to basic truths and not to be confused 
 by side issues. 
 
 246
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 Two eminent judges of the Supreme Court Bench, 
 Hodges and Irvine, worked their way upwards without 
 much influence or many puissant friends. My 
 father-in-law, John G. Dougharty, was asked by 
 Harry Ricketson, an old client of his, to engage a 
 tutor for his sons on a Riverina Station at a salary of 
 90 a year and the " run of his dover," meaning 
 his board and lodging. Young W. H. Irvine, just 
 then a new chum from Ireland, applied and at a per- 
 sonal interview Dougharty gave him the billet and 
 told him he would give him ^120 a year and risk 
 refusal by Ricketson. Irvine was the best Premier 
 Victoria ever had and is now Chief Justice, and ought 
 to be Governor of the State. Hodges was tutor 
 to the sons of Sir William Stawell, also a Premier 
 and Chief Justice. Remember being in Melbourne 
 on my first holiday after getting through the matricula- 
 tion examination at the age of fourteen, and witnessed 
 a practical joke played on Hodges by his fellow- 
 boarders in Mrs. Garlick's guest house in Mackenzie 
 Street. Hodges was in the lavabos when the con- 
 spirators barred the door outside with huge baulks 
 and propped up the hose so that it poured a cooling 
 stream through the fanlight of the place foreigners 
 label with a double zero. The future great judge 
 looked very bedraggled when he emerged and went 
 upstairs to dry. We travelled to Colombo with 
 Judge Hodges once and he told me a good story of 
 how Sir Simon Fraser, a wealthy railway contractor 
 and squatter, wore a leather belt round his waist 
 day and night containing 100 sovereigns on which 
 he wished to save exchange by not buying a bank 
 draft. The belt became so heavy and so hot that 
 Fraser took it ashore at Colombo and got a draft 
 instead. Another old squatter, John Moffatt of 
 
 247
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Hopkins Hill, Chatsworth, Victoria, was specially 
 keen on saving bawbees by similar excursions in 
 finance. In 1867 Moffatt invited the Duke of Edin- 
 burgh to visit him at his new house at Chatsworth 
 in Victoria and ordered from Mullen's Melbourne 
 book shop half a ton of books, and from MacEwan's 
 a double bedstead, twelve feet by twelve feet. It 
 stood four feet above the floor, and there was a 
 mahogany ladder of four steps by which to go to bed 
 and get up. The Duke and John spent a merry 
 summer evening with a verandah temperature of 
 ninety degrees, discussing hot whisky toddy with the 
 aid of real toddy ladles and plenty of lemons. Next 
 morning His Royal Highness confessed that he was 
 pressed to get up during the night and couldn't 
 climb back, so he slept on the floor, the night being 
 warm. This is not a ben trovato yarn because my father 
 later on did the toddy stunt with Moffatt and missed 
 his ladder and his bed in the middle of the winter. 
 
 Edward (Teddy) El burn was one of the most 
 interesting men I met because he was adventurous. 
 He had lived a wonderful life in various countries 
 and has always done things, and left his footprints on the 
 sands of time as it were. Teddy was a midshipman, 
 but did not stop long enough in the Navy to rise any 
 higher. First knew him at Broken Hill in the " roar- 
 ing eighties " where he was share-broking with 
 Charlie Von Arnheim. There was a slump in the boom 
 and scrip prices did a nose dive. Colin Templeton, 
 now on the Melbourne Tramway Board, was then 
 manager of the Bank of Australasia at Broken Hill 
 and engaged keeping a neat overdraft for the firm 
 of Elburn and Von Arnheim advanced against scrip. 
 Head Office began to growl about the fading margin 
 of the security and Elburn said he would go to Mel- 
 bourne and see the superintendent. When he was 
 away a fire broke out in Argent Street, Broken Hill, 
 
 248
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 and played havoc with the wooden, tin and hessian 
 shanties used as offices. Horace Destre'e, then 
 Elburn's clerk, wired him, " Fire coming closer ; 
 what shall I do ? " Teddy sent a characteristic reply : 
 " Burn the bally books and take a holiday." Every- 
 thing had been settled previously with the bank 
 which did not lose any money. Teddy Elburn was 
 a regular visitor to mining rushes and booms all over 
 Australia and was popular everywhere. He was at 
 Zeehan, Tasmania, with Gordon Lyon, Reggie Pell, 
 and Everard Brown, went to Coolgardie early, on to 
 Hannans, now Kalgoorlie gold-field, down to Norse- 
 man, up to Cue and to most of the outer West Aus- 
 tralian gold-fields. Then he wandered north to 
 Chillagoe and Mount Garnet when those sadly over- 
 rated duffer fields were at their zenith. Next, Teddy 
 met my mate and myself at Mikhailovitch's Dock in 
 Buenos Aires early one morning after a night trip 
 from Monte Video. We went with him to the 
 Phoenix Hotel and met his wife, formerly Miss 
 Shadforth of Queensland, and his small daughter. 
 Teddy had made money out of a gold and diamond 
 mine at Matto Grosso in Brazil, and was then sitting 
 behind a pile and looking at the world over the top 
 of the pile's head. He was lending money at risky 
 rates on the Buenos Aires Bourse against bundles 
 of scrip. One firm collapsed and because he did not 
 know the law regarding such loans made by aliens 
 Teddy dropped his bundle and went away to Burmah. 
 The war called him and he drove motor trucks full 
 of high explosives for three years without accident. 
 He thrashed a bullying corporal thrice his size and 
 earned a week in clink, a Croix de la Boxe, and loud 
 and prolonged applause from a large portion of the 
 British army. 
 
 Two incidents of early Broken Hill impressed me. 
 One night at John de Baun's hotel at Silvertown, 
 
 249
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the town that preceded Broken Hill as a silver mining 
 centre, there had been a gathering of the first owners 
 of the Broken Hill leases which were just beginning 
 to be valuable and saleable. W. R. Wilson, the well- 
 known racing man, Willie Jamieson, George Mac- 
 Culloch and Bowes Kelly had been dining and cele- 
 brating their good luck. After dinner the dining- 
 room filled with silver miners from all the little mines 
 round about Silverton. There were cascades of 
 " bubbly," and rivers of Scotch to be drunk, and 
 everybody got full of drink, including the grand piano, 
 a Schwechten, just imported by John de Baun. With 
 tumblers as missiles, every mirror and picture on the 
 walls was smashed to molecules and de Baun collected 
 .200 for damages. Another riotous day was the 
 opening of the Tarrawingee Flux Company's tramway 
 by a grand banquet attended by many leading Adelaide 
 and Melbourne mining men. An American named 
 Bill Adams, who confessed when in his cups that he 
 really did win the Battle of Waterloo, walked up 
 the middle of the dining-table from the vice-chair- 
 man's end to the chairman's, kicking aside the furnish- 
 ings of the feast, also the food, drink and flowers. 
 It was an awesome sight. A few years later very many 
 of the same guests went by the ss. " Grafton " to a 
 banquet at Strahan on Macquarie Harbour, Tas- 
 mania, to celebrate the opening of the Mount Lyell 
 railway. Every leading mining man in Melbourne 
 was aboard, all those most closely connected with 
 the history of the Broken Hill Proprietary and the 
 Mount Lyell Companies. A terrific gale raged all 
 night and finally the shaft jammed and the " Grafton " 
 was drifting on to a lee shore. All the mighty mining 
 magnates were below, mostly badly sick, Captain 
 Morrisby, Willie Jamieson and I being on the bridge 
 awaiting the ship to strike. The engineer patched 
 up the shaft and when he came up to tell the Captain 
 
 250
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 to go ahead we were exactly fifty yards from the 
 breakers. 
 
 Travelled once with a New Zealand delegation 
 going to an Imperial Conference. A fine old gentle- 
 man was Timi Kara, the Hon Jas. Carroll, whose 
 mother was a Maori, beloved by everybody and 
 especially by the Maoris. A newspaper reporter 
 whom we met was beastly insulting to Timi Kara 
 by imitating exactly a description of Maori religion, 
 habits and customs given as a lecture by him in the 
 saloon. He copied the voice, language and motions 
 of the old gentleman in a ludicrous manner, and 
 those in the smoke room who heard it left the room 
 one by one as a protest. Went once with Colonel 
 Charlie Umphelby who was killed at Driefontein, 
 South Africa, in the Boer War to call on Arabi 
 Pasha the famous Mahdi and leader of the insur- 
 gents against the British in Egypt in 1882. Arabi. 
 was a prisoner on parole in a house in the Cinnamon 
 Gardens, Colombo, Ceylon. He asked us to tea and 
 chatted about nothing at all. He looked the very 
 antithesis of a fuzzy-wuzzy or a dancing dervish 
 and did not seem at all dangerous. He and King 
 Theebaw of Burma were the two hardest nuts the 
 British had to crack in the nineteenth century. 
 
 GREAT MEN I HAVE GROVELLED BEFORE 
 
 Chief Justice George Higinbotham was easily the 
 greatest man Victoria ever honoured in politics or 
 law. In my busy buzzing days when I was sort of 
 a public blow-fly, always getting up meetings, or 
 starting reforms, or fomenting agitations, I frequently 
 had to see Judge Higinbotham ; a more courteous 
 gentleman never held a high public position. John 
 Madden, C.J., was one of a notable family of public 
 men, who used now and again to attend our public 
 meetings, chiefly those of the Australian Natives 
 
 251
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Association, and lend us his aid to amuse the audience. 
 Sir William Irvine, C.J., is one of the most extra- 
 ordinary figures in Victorian history. I had a good 
 deal to do with the Kyabram reform movement, and 
 on one occasion the reformers swept the polls, and 
 sent in 65 members out of 95 to follow Mr. Irvine, 
 who reduced the Legislative Assembly to 65, the 
 present number of members. Like a fool I worked 
 very hard, neglecting my business and ruining my 
 health through politics from which I got nothing, 
 not even thanks from Premier Irvine or any of his 
 Ministers. However, like Tarn O'Shanter, I was 
 glorious, o'er all the ills of life, Victorious, and so 
 far as I can see and think nothing matters ! 
 
 s. MYER 
 
 The most amazing business romance of Australia 
 is the rise to affluence of a young Polish Jew from 
 Warsaw Sidney Myer of Myer's Emporium, Bourke 
 Street, Melbourne. He came to Victoria cashless, 
 but not friendless, as relatives had firmly entrenched 
 themselves in the ready-made toggery trade, without the 
 second pair of trousers free. Myer was grub-staked 
 with a pedlar's pack of haberdashery, and travelled to the 
 thinly peopled Mallee District of Victoria selling pins, 
 buttons, needles and threads at profit ranging from 
 one to two thousand per cent. He used to replenish 
 his canvas holdall at Ballarat where he was financed 
 by another Polish nobleman called Flegeltaub, who 
 had two buxom daughters, Julia and Nancy. Their 
 father financed Sid. Myer who married Nancy and 
 opened a fluff" shop in Bendigo in the building once 
 called the Lyceum Theatre, Pall Mall, where in 
 1855 m y father heard Lola Montez, the international 
 courtesan, sing to the diggers at the nightly concerts. 
 Mrs. Myer is a capital business woman with an 
 abundance of brains. Through her, Myer's business 
 
 252
 
 GREAT MEN I HAVE GROVELLED BEFORE 
 
 steadily expanded and bumped Craig, Williamson 
 and Company's Bendigo branch so heavily that it 
 began to roll and it was finally sold out to him. Next 
 he came to town and picked a foothold in Bourke 
 Street between Robertson and Moffat's and the most 
 exclusive Buckley and Nunn's. On his left flank 
 was old Westmore Stephens' old-fashioned draper's 
 shop which like Oliver Goldsmith's traveller was a 
 remote, unfriended, melancholy slow store for shop- 
 pers. Sid. Myer is a human octopus with as many 
 tentacles as a centipede has legs. Rapidly he has 
 created a departmental store bigger than the Magasin 
 de Louvre, or the Bon Marche* in Paris, greater than 
 Wanamaker in Philadelphia or Gimball's in New 
 York, very nearly as extensive as Marshall Field's 
 in Chicago, or Selfridge's in London, and on the 
 same scale as the White House and the Emporium 
 in San Francisco, all of which I have inspected inter- 
 nally. Myer has created this vast enterprise just as 
 the world was made, out of nothing. He has crippled 
 all his big rivals in the city and smothered dozens of 
 small shops in the suburbs. What will be the end of 
 this gigantic wen nobody can foresee, and as a trained 
 financier I am dubious about it. In 1925 Myer sold 
 100,000 contributing shares in his company for 25J.cash 
 a-piece, or a premium of 5^., and it is said he contem- 
 plates opening a shop in New York. If he does, 
 the city of Much Noise and More Dirt will be able 
 to see this profoundly crafty Jew pile up a billion 
 dollars and land it high and dry. He knows more 
 than Edward Bok, Isaac Marcosson, Dr. Frank 
 Crane, Pierpont Morgan, Babe Ruth, Stephen Lea- 
 cock and W. T. Tilden compounded, smelted and 
 moulded into one man. 
 
 The romance of an Australian industry is well 
 exemplified by an extraordinary growth of the con- 
 fectionery manufacture of McPherson, Robertson in 
 
 253
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne. Mr. Robertson is 
 barely fifty years old, but with extraordinary ability, 
 energy and foresight he has built up one of the greatest 
 businesses of its kind on earth. The MacRobertson 
 works cover thirty acres of space peopled by nearly 
 3000 employees with a wages bill of 500,000 a 
 year. MacRobertson turns out over one thousand 
 kinds of confectionery, and the factory is quite self- 
 contained, because machinery and woodwork of all 
 kinds are made on the premises. The motor fleet 
 for transporting the productions of the firm includes 
 150 motor vehicles all coloured in old gold, labelled 
 with the identifying sign of MacRobertson's " Old 
 Gold." This business is one of the most colossal in 
 Australia and is valued by the proprietor at 
 3,000,000. 
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 Theodore Fink is easily the most intellectual man 
 in Melbourne, and through the " Herald " newspaper 
 group wields much power. Though he does not 
 speak French he claims he was born in the Channel 
 Islands. Theodore right through the last land boom 
 and the present loan boom has been the Fidus 
 Achates of W. L. Baillieu, the uncrowned ruler of 
 Victoria. It has been a good co-partnership for both 
 of these two preternaturally able and astute men. 
 In the last boom they both took great risks, plunged 
 into the vortex of the mad gamble and failed totally, 
 completely and extensively, and made compositions 
 with their creditors. The clean-up and burial of 
 the land boom was the quickest and smartest 
 thing ever done in Victoria. Two hundred and 
 forty-eight compositions were made by boomers 
 and borrowers with their creditors, and literally 
 thousands of minor operations were performed be- 
 tween banks and mortgagees with small borrowers 
 
 254
 
 PEOPLE I HAVE MET 
 
 who were toppled over by the fierce financial gale 
 that ranged with extraordinary velocity. The financial 
 fabric of Victoria was built on false valuations, just as 
 it is to-day. It is hard for anyone who did not go 
 through the downfall of 1891-3 to understand how 
 complete was the annihilation of values. Every piece of 
 land, goods, food, securities, houses tumbled down and 
 every value crumbled, broke up and fell in dust. The 
 present generation do not know what havoc can be 
 wrought by the collapse of a boom. The portents 
 and omens are that all Australia within the next 
 few years will go through another financial break- 
 down, another extirpation of values, another wiping 
 out of credit, of money and of prices. We are right 
 back to a repetition of the universal over-borrowing, 
 over-lending, and over-spending which ended in the 
 ruin of thousands of innocent people. And now as 
 then the creators of untrue values and prices will 
 feather their nests and go scot free. No dishonesty 
 will be visited by punishment. All booms collapse 
 so soon as this acid test is applied, " Does this farm, 
 or factory, or shop earn a reasonable, not a high, rate 
 of interest on its capital value ? " 
 
 William Lawrence Baillieu was the High Priest of 
 the Victorian land boom, an extraordinary astute 
 money-maker, profoundly subtle where a profit is 
 concerned, a remarkable financier, and a past-master 
 in the art of handling clever men. 
 
 Among the romances of big business in Australia 
 in my time the career of William Lawrence Baillieu 
 stands on a pinnacle over them all. Born of humble 
 parents and only moderately educated like most 
 successful money-getters, W.L. went to a state school 
 at Queenscliff, Victoria. He was a clerk in the Bank 
 of Victoria for several years, where he learnt to write 
 a good fist and keep bank books neatly. By ancestry 
 W.L. is descended from French, perhaps from the 
 
 255
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 Channel Islands, which have belonged to England 
 since 1066 when the poor miserable English were 
 overwhelmed by a French conquistador, much as 
 Pizzaro treated the Incas of Peru. W.L. came to 
 town as the land boom was burgeoning and joined 
 Donald Munro, son of James Munro, a pious teetotal 
 Premier of Victoria, and a wowser high in the counsels 
 of that dull race. It was a gay era for real estate agents, 
 who wore purple and fine linen and ate and drank 
 heavily and well. Duncan Gillies, an ex-digger of 
 the gold-mining days, had begun to borrow money in 
 London to develop Victoria. James Munro was 
 secretary of a building society and used his son's 
 firm, Munro and Baillieu, to buy and sell city and 
 suburban land on a big scale. Munro, senior, was 
 Chairman of the Federal Bank formed by J. B. Watson, 
 a Bendigo quartz millionaire and John Robb, a railway 
 contractor. Watson got out of the bank early because 
 he died, but Robb had to step in. The bank was 
 always badly managed, and the directors and their 
 pals soon borrowed its whole capital of 400,000 
 and about 800,000 of its deposits besides. Munro 
 and Baillieu had numerous overdrafts at the Federal 
 Bank and discounted land sale bills at any bank that 
 would take them, which meant most of the banks. 
 For three or four years the land gamble was a riot, 
 subdivisional sales every Saturday, city property sales 
 every day, the creation of building societies, land banks, 
 and land syndicates were the chief factors of the 
 madness. All rotten and based on false valuations 
 by silly asses of auctioneers. Revenue or rents were 
 never used to test values. The cry of the land leech 
 was, " How much will you give ? " Merchants, 
 lawyers, doctors, accountants gave up their lawful 
 occupations to job in land blocks, large and small. 
 Matthew Henry Davies, Tom Bent, Frank Stuart, 
 Jimmy Mirams, all the five Finks, all the six Kitchens, 
 
 256
 
 W. L. BAILLIEU 
 
 five Davies brothers, G. W. Taylor, J. G. Turner, 
 ' The Flying Pieman," Joe Woolf, the solicitor, 
 Mark Moss, the moneylender, three Derhams, P. H. 
 Engel, W. Greenlaw, J. W. Hunt, W. G. Sprigg, 
 two Kings, and the whole of the Baillieu family 
 of nearly one dozen joined in the merry play. All 
 through the smash of the Commercial Bank, which 
 told the knell of the dying boom, W. L. Baillieu was 
 the outstanding figure of the cranky march of the 
 citizens to nearly universal insolvency. Strong, able, 
 self-controlled, a born money spinner, a natural 
 gambler in land lots and scrip certificates, W. L. 
 Baillieu is incomparably the cleverest financier in 
 Australia. He burst for a million pounds and he 
 will die leaving double that. His money chiefly since 
 his smash has come from the zinc dumps and mines 
 of Broken Hill and from the Carlton Brewery, a 
 union of all the breweries of Melbourne. Profound 
 and penetrating he has trained his brothers and his 
 sons in his own methods. His is a really notable 
 family physically and intellectually big. 
 
 THE " BULLETIN " 
 
 No paper in the Empire has done more to mould 
 the thought and guide the policy and politics of a 
 great continent destined to house a great nation, than 
 the Sydney " Bulletin " founded by Jack F. Archibald, 
 an Australian to the backbone and spinal marrow. 
 Convention, ritual, tradition are the three curses of 
 the British people, especially those of them living 
 in that funny little group of islets in the North Sea, 
 all cold, wet, dank and damp. These three char- 
 acteristics make the British a placid, long-suffering, 
 contented people, accepting without complaint just 
 whatever their betters, meaning those in the rich and 
 ruling classes and castes, choose to give or allow them. 
 The Briton is a servile wormy sort of person who wor- 
 
 257
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 ships the squire and bows the knee to the titled 
 jackanapes, who claim ancestors or wealth or both. 
 Archibald denied the value of convention and scoffed 
 at ritual. He possessed a brilliant intellect and power- 
 ful will, and clamped his views and opinions on the 
 life and thought of Australia, so that to-day it is a 
 freer country than any other and follows the true 
 and proper policy for any country desiring to be great, 
 of being intensely selfish and self-protective. More 
 than six thousand stories and poems, and over five 
 thousand drawings reach the " Bulletin " annually. 
 They come from every corner of the Commonwealth, 
 Maoriland, New Guinea, Fiji and the other islands 
 that dot the Pacific. Every overseas mail brings 
 contributions from a diplomatic office in Spain ; 
 from a farmer in Paraguay ; from an artist in Paris ; 
 from a journalist at Toronto, Canada ; from a musical 
 critic at Manchester ; from an Inland Mission 
 station in China ; from a bank in Constantinople. 
 The list of Australian contributors runs far into four 
 figures, and embraces almost every walk of life, 
 from judges up or down to fruit hawkers. I am 
 proud to be the oldest living contributor of the 
 " Bulletin." 
 
 THE " MELBOURNE REVIEW " 
 
 The " Melbourne Review " was founded by Henry 
 Gyles Turner, Arthur Patchett Martin, Alexander 
 Sutherland, A. M. Topp and H. K. Rusden, all 
 friends of mine. H. G. Turner asked me to con- 
 tribute to the " Review " and I wrote several slashing 
 articles on " Australia for the Australians " and 
 " Imperial Federation " from a purely Australian 
 angle, which did not increase my popularity, because 
 my contention was that the Australian is an improved 
 edition of the British from up in Europe. It is a 
 pity the " Melbourne Review " closed down in 1885, 
 
 258
 
 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW 
 
 for a magazine of its high standard was and is badly 
 wanted in Australia to present the Australian view 
 of every public problem in politics, in economics and 
 in sociology. What our grandparents thought right 
 and true in Great Britain, a cold, small, over-crowded 
 country, is frequently grotesque and unsuitable in a 
 young, immense, and intensely progressive country 
 like Australia. I have contributed articles on a 
 myriad of subjects to most of the leading journals 
 and newspapers and have always found the best 
 channel for any patriotic thoughts and views to be the 
 Sydney " Bulletin," the only journal that does not 
 mix Imperialism with Australianism. I believe in a 
 Monroe doctrine for Australia " Hands off and 
 Keep out." 
 
 NEWSPAPERS 
 
 On 1 6th March, 1887, forty years ago, I was 
 elected a Fellow of the Statistical Society, London, 
 for work done for the defunct Melbourne " Daily 
 Telegraph," a morning daily newspaper of Conserva- 
 tive principles mixed with religious tenets and narrow 
 wowserish views about drink and sport. It was 
 extremely chauvinistic in its support of good little 
 Queen Victoria. The ' Telegraph's " editor, the 
 Rev. W. Fitchett, a military historian of high repute, 
 was a good leader writer, but not worldly enough to 
 thrust his paper forward as David Syme was at that 
 time pressing the Melbourne " Age " upward past 
 the Melbourne ** Argus." Alexander McKinley 
 and his brother, James, managed the paper and George 
 Wamsley made a most competent financial and com- 
 mercial editor. It was always supposed the Davies 
 group of land speculators supplied the capital, of 
 which there was not enough, and the paper laid down 
 and died. As I had done a lot of journalism by this 
 time, Angus Mackay, the owner of the Bendigo 
 
 259
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 " Advertiser " asked me to go to Sydney on the 
 office staff of the Sydney " Daily Telegraph," then 
 being founded by J. B. Watson, the Bendigo million- 
 aire, Sir (then Mr.) Malcolm MacEacharn, his son- 
 in-law, the shipping potentate, Angus Mackay and 
 Sir John Mclntyre, with other Bendigo investors. 
 As I was that rare bird in those days, a certified Pitman 
 shorthander, Mackay offered me six pounds a week. 
 The salary being puny I declined the offer. 
 
 MELBOURNE NEWSPAPERS 
 
 One of the greatest chances of my life was lost 
 when it looked so easy to grasp. 
 
 In 1907 I conceived the idea of raising 200,000 
 cash in London to start a morning daily paper in 
 Melbourne, preferably one to be published simul- 
 taneously in Sydney. The success of the Melbourne 
 " Herald " and steady growth of population were the 
 basis of my conviction that a newspaper would pay 
 well. In 1907 the population of Melbourne was 
 525,000 and of Victoria 1,000,000. The circulations 
 of the daily papers were roughly, " Age," 100,000 to 
 105,000 ; " Argus," 55,000 to 60,000 ; and 
 " Herald," 50,000, while their profits were " Age," 
 70,000 a year ; " Argus," and " Australasian " 
 40,000 ; and " Herald," 40,000 a year, taken 
 from its published balance sheet. One could see 
 the population of Melbourne growing faster propor- 
 tionately than that of Victoria. Outside Melbourne 
 there was no country newspaper worth a pinch of 
 mustard seed, nor is there now, and it looked an easy 
 task to smother them to extinction. There was only 
 one great business journalist in Melbourne in those 
 days, David Syme of the " Age," and his intellectual 
 successor has not so far popped his head up over 
 the journalistic horizon. David Syme had a long 
 struggle to establish the " Age " on a firm foundation, 
 
 260
 
 MELBOURNE NEWSPAPERS 
 
 His was a strong despotic personality, eager to enforce 
 his views and will on politicians. He had an almost 
 fierce spirit of independence combined with great 
 assertiveness. David Syme knew the value of a good 
 editor and he took Arthur Lloyd Windsor away 
 from the " Argus," and as editor of the " Age " he 
 reigned nearly forty years and carried the paper 
 fast and well ahead of the " Argus " in power and 
 popularity. The " Age " has always been char- 
 acterized by a spirit of progressiveness, and its leader 
 writing is always strongly affirmative and positive. 
 The " Age " has always warmly advocated the broad 
 interests of the community at large, and by its steady 
 and energetic championship of protection to Aus- 
 tralian industry has done more to build up Australia 
 solidly as a nation and as a manufacturing country 
 than any other paper in the Commonwealth except 
 the Sydney " Bulletin." David Syme was a great 
 Australian and the influence of his life's labour will 
 be felt by this country for a hundred years, because 
 it is embedded in the spirit of the people of Australia. 
 David Syme bought out his nephew, Joseph Cowen 
 Syme, paying 140,000 for his one-fourth interest, 
 and so valuing the " Age " at 576,000. To-day it 
 is worth 1,000,000. The real founder of the 
 " Argus " was Edward Wilson, a glowing enthusiast 
 about the foundations of British Colonies like Edward 
 Wakefield of South Australia. When directed by 
 Wilson the " Argus " was not only an ultra-Radical 
 paper, but was distinguished by the use of violent 
 and insulting language towards representatives of the 
 British Crown, as well as for its strong advocacy of 
 purely Victorian interests. Wilson was not a business 
 man and drifted into financial low water when the 
 gold yield of the colony fell off. He had to get help 
 from Lauchlan Mackinnon, a second- or third-rate 
 Victorian sheep-farmer. When Mackinnon joined 
 
 s 261
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the " Argus " office the atmosphere underwent a 
 complete change. The paper no longer existed to 
 serve the community, but to return profits on the capital 
 engaged, so anything likely to interfere with proceeds 
 was suppressed and the editorial staff was reduced to 
 a status similar to that of serfs and extreme parsimony 
 was the order of the day. While the " Argus " watched 
 its profits and curtailed its policy, the " Age " ex- 
 panded its efforts for the service of the country and 
 rapidly forged ahead of the " Argus," which paper 
 was unable to retain the services of able men. The 
 proprietorship was constituted of Edward Wilson, 
 77 shares ; Lauchlan Mackinnon, 55 shares ; Ross 
 and Spowers, 12 shares ; total, 144 shares. When 
 Mackinnon died he left 43 snares to his adopted 
 daughter and 12 shares to her son. He left his nep- 
 hew, L. C. Mackinnon, nothing ; but L.C. displaced 
 Hugh George as General Manager of the " Argus," 
 and Hugh George found a better position as manager 
 of the Sydney " Morning Herald." The late L.C. 
 Mackinnon was discovered by Lauchlan Mackinnon 
 during a trip to Isle of Skye, near Scotland, and taking 
 a fancy to him said he would make him his heir. 
 So L.C. was placed in the " Scotsman " office in 
 Edinburgh to learn the newspaper trade. It is said 
 when L. C. Mackinnon reached Melbourne, the old 
 man wanted him to marry his adopted daughter, 
 and L.C. refused, being rebellious enough to marry 
 a widow who died within three years. Then his 
 uncle gave L.C. the choice of marrying his daughter 
 or leaving the " Argus." He yielded and married, 
 yet the old chap left him nothing in his will. G. F. H. 
 Schuler succeeded A. L. Windsor as editor of the 
 " Age," and for forty years has been an admirable 
 and sagacious editor. He has had the able support 
 of the best sub-editor this country ever saw in John 
 Stephens. F. W. Haddon, editor of the " Argus," 
 
 262
 
 MELBOURNE NEWSPAPERS 
 
 was distinguished by conscientious proof-reading 
 and by dull common sense unrelieved by a spark of 
 genius. His successor, E. S. Cunningham, is much 
 the same sort of man, not highly educated, has a keen 
 nose for news and is addicted to rather childish forms 
 of sensationalism ; still he suits the dull, conservative 
 octogenarian policy of the " Argus." The council 
 of management has David Watterson as representative 
 of the Wilson Trustees at 2000 a year, while young 
 " Lauchie " Mackinnon and W. J. Spowers represent 
 the Mackinnon interest of shares. David Watterson, 
 like Howard Willoughby who took the editorship 
 till he had a paralytic stroke, is neither well educated 
 nor well read, but on F. W. Haddon's death he 
 slipped into his seat on the Council of Advice. 
 
 Next I propounded a scheme to my cousin, Sir 
 Robert Inglis, Chairman of the London Stock Ex- 
 change, to buy the business of James MacEwan and 
 Company, the leading ironmongery and hardware 
 business in Melbourne. " Bob " Inglis held 20,000 
 of " B " debentures and wanted to realize. He sent 
 me on to Mr. Bruty, his solicitor, but we could not 
 arrange with the London liquidator of the company, 
 Mr. R. J. Jeffrey, so another good money-maker 
 went wrong from my standpoint. Thomas Luxton, 
 an ex-sharebroker who bought MacEwan's business 
 from the liquidator, funked the responsibility and 
 died, but his sons have pulled it through and placed 
 it on its former pedestal as a paying business. In 
 some former state of transmigration of my soul I 
 feel sure I must have either been a black cat or a 
 Bolshevik, my luck has been so bad and despicable. 
 Well, what does it matter ! I have had a happy 
 and merry life, full of delightful experiences around 
 and over all the Seven Seas. 
 
 Three popular Australian fetishes are Marcus 
 Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Eureka Stockade, 
 
 263
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 an author, a poet, and a riot, all purely English and 
 not at all Australian. Marcus Clarke's book about 
 the brutal treatment of English convicts by English 
 military officers and English warders is called, " For 
 the Term of his Natural Life," was a newspaper 
 serial story written in gruesome English, and possess- 
 ing nothing human nor edifying. It was a bestial 
 story bestially told, and has no literary merits nor 
 any right to live. Marcus Clarke won a spurious 
 fame because the book was accepted in England as 
 a faithful picture of home life in Australia. Adam 
 Lindsay Gordon is a versifier, a mere poetaster, more 
 of a jockey than a literary man, and he had not a 
 single Australian characteristic. He was born an 
 Englishman, lived an Englishman, and preferred to 
 die an Englishman. A small and unimportant 
 cult of English-born Australians profess to adore 
 Gordon's verse, written as though all Australians 
 admired the horse and horse racing and could under- 
 stand the loose thoughts and ideas of Gordon's 
 second-rate poetry. Bobby Burns may appeal to all 
 lovers of humanity throughout the Empire, but 
 Adam Lindsay Gordon only catered for the sport- 
 loving, unlearned and unintellectual people who 
 like to see and read about other men riding horses 
 though they themselves have never been upon one. 
 The Eureka Stockade riot was a comic opera rebellion 
 staged by a lot of alien agitators who were " Agin the 
 Government," and were too mean to pay taxes or 
 licences to dig for gold. There were no Australians 
 amongst them and it is a blemish on Australian history 
 to elevate a mere police court event to a pinnacle 
 suitable for an historical epic. The Eureka Stockade 
 ought to be banned and forgotten. 
 
 264
 
 NAMES OF STATES 
 
 NAMES OF STATES 
 
 This is the right place to have a hearty laugh at 
 the funny names of the seven Australian provinces. 
 They are all misnomers and quite incongruous. 
 Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South 
 Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and New 
 Zealand. What poverty of imagination labelled 
 Queensland, a most magnificent sub-tropical country 
 of amazing fertility and great natural beauty with a 
 name so utterly commonplace ! Having seen South 
 Wales, a foggy, black, forbidding stretch of bleak 
 land, it was a base libel on the truly magnificent 
 foundation colony of Australia to call it after a dreary 
 patch of barren waste. It is not New, it is not South, 
 and it does not resemble Wales in any particular. 
 The sooner the name is changed the happier every 
 true Australian will be. Why does not some patriotic 
 rich Australian native offer a price of 5000 for the 
 best substitute name for New South Wales, the 
 competition to be confined to men and women born 
 here. Victoria, so called after a little German lady, 
 has a ridiculous name for one of the most beautiful 
 and diversified tracts of land on earth. South and 
 West and North Australia, how bizarre and baroque 
 and banal these names sound and appear. Surely 
 we could find better. When the Commonwealth 
 comes to be cut up into twelve states, as it surely 
 must, these three titles ought to be the first to 
 go. Tasmania, the counterpart of the best half of 
 England, the south, a country of rare beauty, should 
 not labour along under a Dutch name, that of a 
 stupid, uncouth Dutch sailor. And it is a crime 
 against nomenclature, against patriotism, against 
 common sense, and above all against aesthetics, the 
 science or theory of the beautiful, to call Maoriland 
 New Zealand. Where is Old Zealand ? Is there 
 
 265
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 any Zealand anywhere ? And why has such a fantastic, 
 odd, funny, grotesque nickname been fastened on 
 the wonderland of the world ? Have you seen 
 Maoriland ? Do you know it has no equal as a 
 country on this planet ? Do you know it is the most 
 splendid gem of the British Empire, fertile, superb, 
 enchanting ? And, above all, its men, women and 
 children are the healthiest and finest of human beings ! 
 And yet this extraordinarily well-favoured region is 
 called New Zealand ! Bah ! 
 
 J. G. DOUGHARTY 
 
 My father-in-law, John George Dougharty, M.L.C., 
 was the doyen of Stock and Station auctioneers, and 
 was a king among equals in his day at Flemington 
 sale yards. He was partly trained as a doctor in 
 Scotland, but before he finished his course he was 
 asked by a close friend to go to Australia, then far 
 away, like Ultima Thule. Dougharty's father was a 
 lawyer in the town of Hamilton, who won and married 
 the daughter of Rebecca, Duchess of Lindsay and 
 Balcarres, sister of the then Duke of Hamilton. 
 J. G. Dougharty was a cousin of the loth Duke of 
 Hamilton, and through him related to the Earl of 
 Coventry, and the present Duchess of Montrose, who 
 was born Lady Mary Hamilton and married the Duke 
 when he was Marquis of Grahame. Dougharty was 
 manager in New South Wales for the Scottish Aus- 
 tralian Pastoral Company when the gold rush in 1 849 
 attracted him to California, whither he sailed with 
 Dr. Macintosh. They invested all their money in a 
 cargo of medicine and reached San Francisco safely. 
 In the harbour their schooner was rammed and went 
 to Davy Jones' locker with all the medicine. The 
 adventurers did not care for the digger's life and as 
 they were not too successful they returned to Aus- 
 tralia. Dougharty became a stock auctioneer and 
 
 266
 
 J. G. DOUGHARTY 
 
 made so much money that at one time or another 
 he owned Omeo, Bindi and Tongio stations in 
 Victoria, Yarronvale in Queensland, and Barham in 
 New South Wales. Sir Rupert Clarke was ajackeroo 
 on the Omeo station, along with Jack Dougharty, 
 afterwards known to fame as the generous backer 
 of Paddy Slavin who fought Charlie Mitchell for 
 the championship of England, and was beaten. 
 Years after I went with a London cousin to call on 
 Slavin, who kept an hotel in Air Street, Piccadilly, 
 and as we got near the front door, sailors came hustling 
 through it on to the footpath in a slightly soiled and 
 disorderly condition. Paddy explained that they 
 were the crew of a Sydney ship who had been drinking 
 their cheques all day and it was closing time, anyhow. 
 Alongside J. G. Dougharty, as an auctioneer of live 
 stock and almost his equal, was J. C. Stanford, of 
 Poers, Rutherford and Company, a very prince of 
 salesmen, whose gift of language, backed by a vast 
 reservoir of good stories, made him the best auctioneer 
 of his day. Dougharty was judge to the Victoria 
 Racing Club for the first nine years of its existence. 
 Another popular Victorian auctioneer was Joe Archi- 
 bald of Warrnambool, a schoolmate of mine who had 
 no equal in his era, although Arthur Tuckett of 
 Melbourne, in his prime, and George B. Appleton, as 
 wool salesman for Goldsbrough, Mort and Company 
 were close runners-up to Archibald in deftness and skill. 
 
 RANDOLPH BEDFORD 
 
 Shortly after the first Broken Hill silver boom I 
 had the good luck to meet Randolph Bedford, a 
 brilliant and versatile genius, a true Australian whose 
 thoughts are ever turned inward towards his native 
 land and his own fellow-countrymen and their welfare. 
 Like myself, Bedford does not believe in convention 
 as a rule of life, nor in tradition as a guide to conduct 
 
 267
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 The daily ritual so strictly observed by the English in 
 England does not appeal to us. Only Chinese respect 
 their ancestors and most Australians, like us, think 
 we confer an honour on our great grandparents by 
 being born, and have nothing to thank them for. 
 Randolph Bedford, without the doubtful advantage 
 of a university training, is an extraordinarily well- 
 read man with a highly cultivated intellect. He 
 agrees with Voltaire and myself that solemnity is a 
 disease used as a means of profit by those afflicted 
 with it, such as bank managers, doctors, judges, 
 lawyers and owners of funeral parlours. We say, 
 woe unto the philosophers who cannot laugh away 
 their learned wrinkles. Randolph is utterly indifferent 
 to the praise or blame of his fellows, and does not 
 care a pinch of sand, as Virgil wrote, for either Trojan 
 or Tyrian. He does care for the welfare of his native 
 land and its people, and agrees with me that for an 
 Australian to think Imperially is mere impertinence. 
 Let the chaps up on top of the world do all that, 
 and let us Australians alone to follow out our destiny 
 of finally winning the hegemony of the world, in a 
 natural leadership of all the other nations. Bedford's 
 chief virtue is to be everything by turns and nothing 
 long miner, journalist, art and dramatic critic, 
 poet, author, dramatist and legislator. In the course 
 of nearly six hundred revolving moons (for he is nearly 
 fifty years old) he has been a statesman and a violinist, 
 but he has never tried to be the other thing. He is 
 too liberal to make a lot of money, and has the softest 
 and biggest heart possible for a human body to hold. 
 Generosity that is Randolph Bedford. He began 
 life resolved to play Hamlet in the biggest building 
 in London, but had to quit that vaulting ambition 
 because he never could train down to have a thin, 
 lugubrious face and a flat tummy like Hamlet ought 
 to have to succeed. 
 
 268
 
 ALBERT EDWARD LANGFORD 
 
 ALBERT EDWARD LANGFORD 
 
 One of the by-products of the Mount Lyell boom 
 was the late Albert Edward Langford, an extra- 
 ordinary youngster who made a lot of money quickly 
 and spent it freely. He was a got-too-rich quick lad, 
 who fluked a fortune before learning the value of 
 money. Langford began as liftboy in the Mutual 
 Store, Melbourne, served as office boy to M. H. 
 Davies, the solicitor, who became Speaker of the 
 Legislative Assembly, and finally became clerk to 
 Bowes Kelly, about the time Kelly quarrelled with 
 James Crotty over the sale of the Mount Lyell Mine. 
 Crotty took Langford, with all his confidential 
 information, over as his private secretary, and put 
 him into all " the good things," " the dogs and 
 monkeys," on the outskirts of Mount Lyell, such as 
 North Lyells, South Lyells, Lyell Comstocks, Lyell 
 Consols, with all their litters of North and South and 
 Extendeds, all in no liability companies. Crotty and 
 Langford got volumes of scrip for infinitely less than 
 nothing. 
 
 When bornite, a valuable ore of copper, was 
 exposed in the cutting of a road on the North Mount 
 Lyell Company's lease, all the surrounding dogs and 
 monkeys in the Crotty menagerie began to chatter 
 and climb up on the Stock Exchange. Albert Edward 
 thought it was time to make what Tommy Luxton of 
 the Stock Exchange used to call a " dry bit " of 
 solid cash, so he went into a private hospital in East 
 Melbourne for a minor operation, like an ingrowing 
 toe-nail or a wart on his ear, or something not fatal, 
 and stopped there six weeks. Nobody was allowed to 
 see Bertie, who sold every share he owned and banked 
 ^40,000. Then he got better and came out of 
 hospital. There had been coolness between Bertie 
 and Bowes Kelly, but Bowes relented when Bertie 
 
 269
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 took him the option over the Briseis tin mine, Tas- 
 mania, and finally they joined forces. Langford 
 took the float to London and was rebuffed everywhere, 
 tin being 90 a ton and unfashionable. The story 
 of how Langford met a lord's son in a house of pleasure 
 is ben trovato whether true or not, and gave him a 
 wad of shares to help Langford to get a board of 
 directors for the proposed Briseis Tin Mines, Limited. 
 They met outside the door of the bathroom and 
 Bertie invited the young scion of nobility to take his 
 bath first and join him in a " small of bubbly " in 
 his bedroom. The coup came off", for Bertie and his 
 lordling went east to the city, after a light breakfast 
 of Pommery and Greno, and bagged two directors 
 before luncheon. The float went ofF flying, and the 
 moral is that it is wise to be kind to titled persons 
 you meet in cathedrals or the other places. 
 
 SPORT 
 
 I had the good fortune to see Briseis win the 
 Melbourne Cup in 1876, and at the same meeting 
 she won the Derby and the Oaks. Saw Carbine win 
 the Cup in 1890, and having seen about thirty Cup 
 races run I am entitled to say that Carbine and 
 Briseis were the two best gentleman and lady race- 
 horses Australia ever possessed. It amuses me nowa- 
 days to hear greenhorns and new arrivals on the turf 
 talk about animals like Manfred and Heroic, who win 
 a race smartly and then " go into smoke," as the 
 burglars say, for a month or two. The finest steeple- 
 chase course in the world is the Warrnambool, for 
 a cross-country steeplechase, and I have seen the 
 Liverpool Grand National run over four and a half 
 miles. Saw Tommy Corrigan win the Warrambool 
 Steeplechase one year. He was then riding for Frank 
 Tozer before joining Hughie Gallagher, the racing 
 publican with the four pretty daughters. I knew 
 
 270
 
 SPORT 
 
 Wig Enderson, another rider over the sticks, Tom 
 Hales and Bill Yeomans and think them better, 
 because brainier riders than the jockeys of to-day. 
 The soundest and handsomest sire we ever had here 
 was Panic, standing at Henry Phillips', Bryan O'Lynn, 
 stud, near Warrnambool, away back in the times of 
 the Barmecides. 
 
 MELBOURNE ARGUS AND ORIEL COLUMN 
 
 Not many people know how the amusing " Oriel " 
 column was started in "The Melbourne Argus" 
 in 1890 or thereabouts. At that time newspaper 
 men were underpaid, reporters especially. There 
 were half a dozen brilliant young men on the " Argus " 
 and " Age " who met in Matooreko's fish cafe in 
 Elizabeth Street, near Hosie's Hotel. One Saturday 
 evening, and over " one doushaine of the besht " 
 oysters, they decided to add to their 4 IQJ. a week 
 by publishing a paper of their own. Donald Mac- 
 Donald, the best of all Australian journalists was 
 elected editor. The most of the copy was written by 
 John Sandes, B.A., and Davison Symmons, known 
 to our coterie as " Peter," two capable journalists, 
 as versatile as they were brilliant. The two clever 
 Blair sisters, daughters of a famous literary man of 
 the Early Victorian period, David Blair, were co-opted 
 on the staff. The rest of us wrote pars, for honour's 
 sake. " Bohemia " was a brilliant journal of wit, 
 satire and humour, which had no right or need to 
 perish. General Manager L. C. Mackinnon of the 
 " Argus " consulted General Manager Joe Syme of 
 the " Age," over the telephone about the excellent 
 stuff their reporters were manufacturing in their 
 own time. The upshot was that Mackinnon called 
 his men in and said he would pay them each 2 a 
 week more to open a column in the " Argus " on 
 
 271
 
 Saturday for verse and persiflage and stifle " Bohemia." 
 Unluckily this was done, and a journal of distinction, 
 that ought to have become " The Literary Digest " 
 of Australia, was quietly chloroformed, or had its 
 throat cut, I forget which. Johnnie Sandes named 
 the column " Oriel," after his Oxford College. 
 " Peter " Symmons has never had an equal on the 
 Melbourne press as a writer of light verse, and he 
 had an uncanny power of ridicule. There were some 
 good chaps on the " Herald " when Sam Winter was 
 editor. It is a pity the " Evening Standard " had not 
 enough capital to turn the corner. ' Jimmy " 
 Thompson, its creator, deserved better luck than to 
 be gobbled up by the " Herald," a shockingly inferior 
 yellow paper. Rea and O'Toole, two Irishmen, and 
 Jack Blackham, a Bendigo journalist, were on the 
 staff for years, and the only tip-top journalist the 
 paper ever had before Theodore Fink breathed his 
 divine afflatus into the " Herald," was Jack Nish, 
 the ideal great sub-editor, for many years on the 
 " Argus." 
 
 272
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 HOTELS, CAFES, DINNERS, ENTERTAIN- 
 MENTS 
 
 Six Bendigo bank clerks and I came to Melbourne 
 to see Briseis win the Melbourne Cup, and we spent 
 the night before sight-seeing. Melbourne was a 
 roughish sort of a town in those days, wide open 
 and frankly immoral. Hotel bars did not close till 
 11.30, and as "wowsers" had not been invented 
 then, and the police force was below strength, there 
 was no repression of drink or of gaiety. During 
 our evening stroll we country greenhorns called in 
 wherever there was an open house. The Exchange 
 Hotel in Swanston Street, with bars upstairs and 
 down, was filled with well-dressed hetirae, gay, 
 laughing and chatty. All were drinking " bubbly " 
 and nobody was tipsy. Diagonally across the road at 
 the Blue Posts Hotel, now the Temperance and 
 General Life Building, not like its confrere behind 
 the Burlington Arcade, London, there were about 
 six bars, filled with files de joie to the number of one 
 hundred. The kerosene lamps shone brightly, the 
 barmen (because then barmaids had not been dis- 
 covered) were busy opening Moet and Chandon, 
 Pommery and Greno and Krug, by the dozen bottles, 
 and everybody was jolly. The next port of call was 
 the Earl of Zetland, where more Cyprians, descendants 
 of Thais, Lais and Phryne, were gathered in a crowd 
 of fifty. Then we sallied up to deal's and found the
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 u pub " packed with the frail sisterhood, pleasant 
 and charming, and not a vulgar trull nor trollop 
 amongst them. It was an easy tack to the " Saddling 
 Paddock " of the Theatre Royal, then a vast vestibule 
 with a quarter of a mile of bars enclosing a coulisse 
 crowded with well-dressed men and a few diggers 
 in red shirts and cabbage tree hats, bookmakers, 
 jockeys, club men and the ommium gatherum of a 
 superior village, with more and more women. Here 
 there were literally hundreds more ladies of pleasant 
 manners and easy virtue, who had never even heard 
 of a cocotte or a wanton. Right up Bourke Street to 
 the top we called at all the places where fermented 
 and spirituous liquors were retailed ; also at Ned 
 Bitton's for oysters and Jack Heard's for a dressed 
 crab. The demi-monde were everywhere in crowds. 
 Where did they live, and how, and where have they 
 gone ? The city only mustered 250,000 people, 
 and here were loose women of no importance in 
 hundreds. They mostly lived in the near-by suburbs, 
 Carlton, Fitzroy and East Melbourne. Lonsdale 
 Street East was the centre of the better class of 
 prostitutes, living in the famous houses kept by 
 Scotch Maude, Madame Brussels (said to have been 
 a sweetheart of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867), and 
 Biddy O'Connor, while round the corner was Mother 
 Eraser's, a favourite pleasure house of the clubmen 
 and merry lads of the village. They were all well- 
 conducted bagnios, healthy and not expensive. In 
 the suburbs were more pretentious maisons de joie y 
 supported by city merchants and professional men 
 full of carnal sin. What has become of these love 
 places and their habitues ? Where are they to-day ? 
 Gradually the Puritans annexed the money and the 
 power of the community, and the Scots church began 
 to head the list of collections on Hospital Sunday. 
 Like the bells of St. Marguerite in Paris, which tolled 
 
 274
 
 EARLY EXPERIENCES 
 
 the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the 
 police, under a pillar of the church, Chief Commis- 
 sioner of Police, H. M. Chomley, began and carried 
 out a social clean-up. One by one the street walkers 
 were locked up, one after another the gay houses 
 were closed, and the inmates of dozens of suburban 
 joints were frightened by Presbyterian policemen, 
 while the joyousness of Melbourne's night-life was 
 silently squelched. That class of useful and necessary 
 handmaidens has vanished from the public gaze, 
 although still alive in increased numbers. One fears 
 that the motor car has become a perambulating 
 brothel and the hip-pocket flask does tide rest. 
 
 Australia being a working man's country, in the 
 sense that most men and women have to work for 
 living, and there are very few idle rich, there is not 
 much money spent upon mistresses or the maintenance 
 of imitation harems. Of course there are plenty of 
 rich men who have a second home in a distant suburb, 
 but no class or caste exists of well-born, well-educated 
 ladies who are well paid to make the rich men happy. 
 In London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and, to a lesser 
 degree, in many new working-men's cities, like San 
 Francisco and Los Angeles, there are hundreds of 
 well-kept women. In Australia there are very few 
 such Messalinas, because the rich Australian is not 
 a sybarite, but a home-keeping youth who is kept 
 under surveillance, and cannot sport even a femme de 
 menage. The poor beggar doesn't know how, and 
 most of his equals are so bucolic and primitive they 
 don't even know how to order a proper dinner. That 
 is a faculty inbred and instinctive, and nearly all the 
 rich Australians had labourers for grandpapas and 
 shop-girls for grandmammas. We are, in fact, we 
 Australians, a nation of crude raw people, the very 
 antithesis of sybarites.
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 CAFES AND RESTAURANTS 
 
 To my soul of a boulevardier a good cafe is a great 
 and soothing delight, while my travelling spirit 
 yearns for a first-class hotel. One trip my mate and 
 I listed no dining places in London, and ticked 
 them all off. The best dinner of that lot we had 
 specially ordered from George Krehl, at the Cafe 
 Verrey, Regent Street. We had reached London, 
 across America, and had sampled the cuisine at Del- 
 monisco's and Rector's, the famous New York restau- 
 rants. Those two dinners were carte blanche to the 
 chef, and Verrey 's excelled them both. Then we 
 gave a farewell dinner to my travelling companion 
 at Romano's, and the Roman whom I had known 
 since 1884 produced a refection with wines en suite 
 which could not be excelled, even though it had been 
 ordered by Heliogabalus. One of the guests, acting 
 as treasurer, collected the sum of five pound each, 
 four raddition, from those present, and played poker 
 after dinner with the Roman and two friends. He 
 lost the whole 100 and never paid Romano's bill ! 
 Simpson's in the Strand was a useful place in those 
 days for a solid English dinner, a meal that always 
 gives me varicose veins on my liver. Pagani's Cafe 
 Royal, Oddenino's and Gambrinus were the best 
 restaurants at that time. Many a roystering we had 
 at supper in the Hotel Continental, the St. James' 
 Restaurant, nee "Jimmy's," and the Globe. We 
 tried them all and liked 'em all, including the dozens 
 of fair and frail ladies we met in all those 1 10 taverns, 
 hotels, night clubs, buffets, estaminets and posadas. 
 Life then was one delirious plaisaunce, supported, by 
 rude health and lots of money. 
 
 Because the country contains people belonging 
 to over one hundred races, the United States revels 
 in international cookery. In the big cities there are 
 restaurants which cater for the nationals of every 
 
 276
 
 CAFES AND RESTAURANTS 
 
 European nation, and if you care to search for them 
 you can vary your diet and change your environment 
 thrice daily. Mother Gum and I mapped out San 
 Francisco once, and went to a different eating house 
 for every meal. In my youth I've done a bit of 
 kangaroo hunting, pig-sticking, going down mines, 
 and climbing high mountains, but for pure placid 
 enjoyment give me as a pastime the sport of searching 
 for fresh foreign restaurants. And look where we've 
 eaten good dinners. At Henry's, Paillard's, Voisin, 
 Joseph's, Foyot, Marguerey, Cafe* Americain, Cafe" 
 de la Paix in Paris, and in many estaminets in Boule 
 Miche at Montmartre. How sweet their memory 
 still ! Vienna at her pinnacle of prosperity was the 
 most alluring city in Europe, and the food and 
 cooking in the best cafes was a revelation even to me 
 a citizen of the world. In Dresden, in Frankfort, 
 in Hamburg, in Berlin one dined and wined in the 
 very best style. And in Copenhagen, the Hague, 
 and Amsterdam and Brussels (think of the gorgeous 
 Cafe Riche there) every meal was a bit of bliss. At 
 Tokio, Shanghai, Batavia, Singapore, Colombo (do 
 you remember the G.O.H. in Gus Loosen's days ?), 
 Rio Janeiro, Buenos Aires, yes, and at Capetown, 
 one has had meals whose remembrance will last for 
 eternity. 
 
 PARIS 
 
 Was taken to a supper at the Cafe Americain once, 
 perfectly decorous and quiet, at which the gentlemen 
 were dressed in evening clothes of the finest make 
 and the four lady guests wore nothing. The can-can, 
 or high kicking quadrille, was then a feature at the 
 Moulin Rouge and at the Bal Bullier danced by 
 professionals. Restaurant Harcourt was a lively 
 rendezvous for the students, and there were a dozen 
 brasseries near by where the patrons were artists,
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 students and midinettes, lively, jolly and not vulgar. 
 Cheap education in the United States and England 
 for cheap people has wiped out artistry and refine- 
 ment. The world now belongs to the lowbrows and 
 the mobsmen and their females. Once went with a 
 Melbourne Member of Parliament, who played the 
 violin, to Maxim's when it first opened. For a 
 louis the conductor lent him his baton to conduct the 
 orchestra for once round the course. It cost him 
 another louis to have Braga's divine serenata played 
 by violin and harp, and for another three louis we 
 two backwoodsmen thought we owned Maxim's. 
 If one tried to do that now, it would, as an infraction 
 of the ridiculous Treaty of Versailles, lead to forty- 
 eight hours in the calaboose of the thirteenth arron- 
 dissement ! 
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 Cr. Alfred Josephs of Bendigo was one of the best- 
 known bookmakers in Australia in the era to which 
 belonged H. Oxenham, " Count Abrahams," Nat 
 Sloman, Robert Sievier (who owned Sceptre and the 
 "(..Winning Post " afterwards), and other well-known 
 betting merchants. Dan Lazarus, M.P. for Bendigo, 
 joined me in a trip round the earth via the United 
 States. We called at Apia in Samoa and went up to 
 Vailima to see R. L. Stevenson's house and tomb, 
 both in a state of decay. Incidentally we made 
 friends with two Samoan Princesses who looked like 
 Vestal Virgins and were not. We bathed with the 
 natives and coupled with girls slid down a smooth 
 rock into a cold deep pool time after time till we 
 didn't know whether we were frozen or on fire. Then 
 we slept in an open compound clad in plantain and 
 pandanus leaves, and were treated hospitably by the 
 chief and his female relatives. Everybody got tipsy 
 on kava that night, and the records of the carousal 
 
 278
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 cannot be remembered for publication, for which 
 they were probably unfit. At San Francisco, never 
 called " 'Frisco " by a resident, who never heard of 
 any earthquake there, but vaguely knows there was 
 a big fire once upon a time, we called on " Mo." 
 Gunst with a letter from Alf. Joseph. Gunst was a 
 leading tobacconist who was Chief Commissioner of 
 Police by election. We asked him for the loan of 
 two detectives to escort us through China Town, 
 the Barbary Coast, and the underworld of 'Frisco 
 generally. Gunst was sorry he could not spare two 
 policemen that night because he wanted them all at 
 the prize fight between Joe Goddard, the Barrier 
 Pet from Sydney, and Tom Sharkey, an American 
 heavyweight. " Mo." told us he was stake-holder, 
 referee, and interested in the gate money, besides 
 being head of the police. While we were enjoying 
 ourselves on the outskirts of China Town, the crowd 
 rushed the ring, the police rushed the crowd, and the 
 box keepers rushed home with the money ! Truly 
 is America the self-styled land of hustle. They're 
 great and busy hustlers after money all the time. One 
 thing is embedded in my memory. At that time the 
 Palace Hotel was the best eating place in the United 
 States, because the cooking was international and the 
 food was infinitely varied. Then, too, it was cheap, 
 now it is dear and not so diversified. The best hotel 
 on earth of its class is the Hotel Stewart at 'Frisco, 
 conducted by two charming Scotch people, Charlie 
 and Margaret Stewart. And Mother Gum and I 
 have lived in five hundred hotels together in all the 
 four corners of the world, so we ought to know a 
 good hotel when we live in it. 
 
 CAFES, NEW YORK 
 
 Delmonico, Sherry, Rector, in that order, were 
 
 279
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 the best restaurants in New York when I spent a 
 holiday, making gastronomic excursions, in that 
 savage and impolite city. American cookery has the 
 advantage that it is cosmopolitan and international. 
 The population is made up of nearly one hundred 
 nationalities and races, all trained to eat some special 
 foods cooked in special ways. Australia, having 
 only one people, 96 per cent British, has only one 
 diet, steak, chops, beef, mutton, potatoes and gravy 
 (don't forget the gravy), with suet puddings and 
 slabs of cheese. Every Australian home dinner is so 
 amusing and so very English. Our women can't 
 cook and our men do not know the art of good eating. 
 There is no epicurism in Australia, no fine sense of 
 gastronomy as the prop of happiness. There is not 
 one first-class restaurant in the Commonwealth so 
 far. How few Australians know anything about 
 wines, and how very few drink anything regularly 
 but vile, filthy whisky and gaseous, unwholesome 
 beer ? Four-fifths of our wines, thanks to climate 
 and soil, equal to the best of foreign wines, are sent 
 out of the country, and the Australians drink tea 
 all through the day, to the extent of eighty-five pounds 
 of tea per annum per head. One morning early, my 
 mate and I called at Delmonico's and consulted the 
 maitre d'hotel about a special dinner carte blanche 
 with wines en suite for every course. Then we went 
 back to the Waldorf Astor Hotel to bed and slept 
 till that elegant dinner was nearly ready. Even 
 Apicius, the Epicure, who lived in Rome and spent 
 j8 00,000 upon delicacies for his table, would have 
 liked that meal. I hope to eat another like it on 
 Tib's Eve or during the feast of the Greek Kalends. 
 It was no Barmecide feast made of dreams raw and 
 cooked. The Palace Hotel in San Francisco was 
 the first modern hotel built in America, just as the 
 Waldorf-Astoria was the first of the present-day 
 
 280
 
 CAFES, NEW YORK 
 
 hotels of luxury built in New York. I was among 
 the earliest guests at both places. The Palace Hotel 
 was supreme in excellence and led the way to the 
 hotel world of the universe. For an inclusive charge 
 in those days one could have six meals a day with 
 free snacks in between, and the cuisine covered the 
 gamut from Chinese dishes, through all European 
 cookery, to Mexican tortillas, frijoles and chile con 
 carne. Rector's was a perfect restaurant, a very 
 Koh-i-noor, and it was the only place out of 
 Paris where I have eaten fillet sole a la Marguerey, 
 probably the most famous sauce in the history of 
 gastronomy. 
 
 CAFES 
 
 The London of 1880 to 1910 was a charming, 
 lovable city. Life was quiet, refined, enjoyable. 
 Nous avons change tout cela the horrible, internal 
 combustion engine invented by Otto, the gas person, 
 has destroyed the dear ancient city. Motor cars, 
 yahoos and motor-cycle houhynyms have made London 
 repulsive, vulgar and abominable. It is not so much 
 the new rich, half-educated, and wholly boorish, 
 who are responsible for the radical change in London's 
 character, as the rising tide of universal bad manners 
 peculiar to all Londoners of every class. Incivility, 
 disrespect for women and old people, and selfish 
 behaviour are observable everywhere. To blame 
 the war for this anti-social decadence is absurd. 
 The chief agency for defiling London life is the 
 American moving-picture business which has eaten 
 like a cancer into the heart of the people. The cinema 
 is controlled by those Asiatics, the international 
 Jews, people of a lower type than the Anglo-Saxons, 
 Orientals whose mentality and intellect are on a 
 much lower plane below ours. These American 
 Jews ought to inspire dread, because they are gradually 
 
 281
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 eating away the basis of London's former friendliness 
 and kindliness and the Londoner of the present day 
 inspires fear in a visitor, especially a British visitor. 
 He is a bounder and his wife and girls imitate him. 
 The best dining place in the former gay and desirable 
 London was Verrey's in Regent Street, because of 
 two factors, the chef and the wine cellar, established 
 by George Krehl. The Cafe Royal, when Nichol 
 and his wife managed it, came very close to the 
 highest order of excellence. The Globe for a riotous 
 time, and Rule's Supper House in Maiden Lane for 
 its picturesqueness and its odd inhabitants, together 
 with the bygone St. James' Restaurant, old " St. 
 Jimmy's," made a trinity of joyous, gay, merry 
 resorts where the residents of Bohemia and Alsatia 
 mingled in order to be happy. Oddenino's came 
 later, and Gambrinus offered a grateful change of 
 diet, because its menu was cosmopolitan. Monico 
 and Gatti's always seemed to be stodgy, so English 
 you know, and Suburbia revelled in a meal at either. 
 How can one describe the fleeting joys of the Bristol 
 or old Kettner's in Soho, or the ancient Pagani's in 
 Great Portland Street ! Before the Trocadero, we 
 had as pleasure resorts at meal time, the Gaiety and 
 the Criterion, and one could always depend on a 
 delicious repast at the Holborn or the Frascati, at 
 the latter of which I happened to be a first diner the 
 day it was opened. In matters gastronomic, " Fallen, 
 Fallen is London that Great City," and in manners 
 she has descended to the lowest of the seven hells of 
 Dante. 
 
 HOTELS, CAFES 
 
 Here is a useful list of wines en suite to be served 
 with the various courses of a properly ordered dinner, 
 which, by the way, is an art in itself. It is taken 
 
 282
 
 HOTELS, CAFES 
 
 from the menu of a dinner given in a leading London 
 hotel the Cecil : 
 
 Hors d'oeuvres. Sherry. 
 
 Oysters. Hock. 
 
 Soup. Madeira. 
 
 Fish. Chablis and Sauterne. 
 
 Entree. Burgundy. 
 
 Roast. Claret. 
 
 Poultry. Sparkling Burgundy. 
 
 Dessert. Champagne. 
 
 Cheese and Savoury. Port. 
 
 Coffee. Maraschino and Vieux Cognac. 
 
 I have a rare collection of menus, bills of fare, and 
 wine lists from all over the earth, collected in hotels, 
 clubs, private houses, trains and steamships. The 
 daily literature of travel, that is the ephemeral stuff, 
 such as hotel bills, maps, plans, tickets, concert and 
 theatre programmes, etc., the ommium gatherum of 
 fifty years' collection, amounts to nearly five thousand 
 pieces, and makes amusing reading when I want to 
 refer to the past and reflect upon the joys, the glories, 
 the menus p/aisirs and the gorgeous beauties of art 
 and nature I have had the good fortune to experience. 
 
 THREE NOTABLE DINNERS I ATE 
 
 At Penang once I was invited to a Chinese wedding, 
 which chiefly consisted of a dinner of lengthened 
 sweetness long drawn out. Our party was made up of 
 three white men and two white women. The dinner 
 began at seven o'clock and ended at eleven. The 
 salon was the ground-floor room of a shop with brick 
 walls and unfurnished. In one corner was a shallow 
 well where the dishes and plates were washed and 
 used again. The menu extended to about thirty 
 dishes, and European wines were served en suite 
 without any disgusting American cocktails, the 
 
 283
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 assassins of a good dinner. The cooking was excellent, 
 the service ideal, and the table appointments of 
 la premiere ordre. Of the thirty guests, about fifteen 
 were Chinese ladies, most of whom spoke English 
 that was not pidgin. All were beautifully dressed, 
 and every one wore a perfect cascade of jewels, from 
 the top of the head to the tip of the fingers, pearls, 
 diamonds, emeralds predominating, and not a single 
 piece of jade, catseye, moonstone or zircon being 
 visible. The value of the jewels and gold adorn- 
 ments represented a vast fortune. In brilliance 
 the show excelled a Melba night at the Covent Garden 
 opera. The bridegroom, a young Chinese clerk 
 born in Singapore, spoke and wrote five languages, 
 and played the typewriter and adding machine like 
 a Paderewski. He was magnificently dressed in costly 
 silk and wore expensive gold bijouterie. After a few 
 songs, sung to the samisen, we all adjourned across 
 the road to the house of the bride's parents, where 
 we met more Moet and Mumm and fine champagne 
 liqueur. In an upstairs room, gorgeously furnished, 
 we sat round to witness the bride meet the bridegroom 
 for the first time in their lives ! She presented him 
 with a cup of tea and he kissed her hand. A black 
 rooster was tied to the leg of the bed with a bit of 
 twine, so the marriage god would bless the union 
 with a boy, not a girl. Then the party broke up, 
 and the brocaded counterpane, the embroidered 
 pillows, the cabinets of silk costumes, the cupboards 
 of underclothing, the glass boxes full of rich and 
 dear clothing were taken away on a motor van by 
 the firm that lends all the accessories of a wedding 
 at a flat rate of five pounds for the evening. Even 
 the bed was taken away along with the luck-bringing 
 rooster, and I learnt that the newly-weds would 
 sleep on the floor between two rugs ! Nevertheless, 
 the dinner remains a joyous memory. The next best 
 
 284
 
 THREE NOTABLE DINNERS I ATE 
 
 dinner we went through at the Hotel Des Indes in 
 Batavia, Java, and it was really bonzer. Seventeen 
 little Javanese house-boys, called spadas, brought in 
 thirty-eight dishes in slow succession, and upon a 
 foundation of boiled rice, one raised a pyramid of 
 things good to eat, such as shark fins, biche de mer, 
 birds' nests, guinea fowl, lychees, pork, jams, edible 
 puppy, turtle, ginger, lobster, turkey, and salted 
 almonds, etc. They called it " riz-tafel," and it 
 was both funny and filling. One perfectly splendid 
 dinner was given at the Royal Automobile Club in 
 London by Sir Philip Dawson to my wife and myself 
 as a family farewell. Our host, like Bismarck, com- 
 posed his own menu with exquisite taste and cos- 
 mopolitan understanding. Without telling any club 
 secrets we antipodean barbarians rejoiced most over 
 the plovers' eggs and the ortolans ! 
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 The Vienna Cafe was an active centre of life in 
 former days, when it was called Gunsler's Caff by 
 one of the first of Melbourne's caterers, after Spiers 
 and Pond had pioneered the city's catering trade and 
 retired with a fortune to London. J. F. Gunsler 
 wanted to move his cafe to the centre of the Melbourne 
 Block, the recognised promenade for the haul ton 
 and the elite, similar to the " Board Walk " at Atlantic 
 City. He advertised for a partner with 5000, and 
 a gold buyer named H. G. lies, in the Bank of Victoria, 
 Bendigo, who had made a " rise " suddenly out of 
 some gold mine shares joined Gunsler. They moved 
 into a real European cafe-restaurant, well furnished 
 and well conducted on Parisian lines. Gunsler and 
 lies invited me to join them at their first dinner in 
 the new place and meet their chef, who excelled 
 himself and justified his European reputation. After 
 that I was a regular habitue of the Vienna Cafe, 
 
 285
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 now the Australian Cafe, which became a club for 
 clever men and men near-clever. One night Harry 
 Brush, the most popular of Melbourne's younger set, 
 holding a status like William Gillette in New York's 
 fashionable 400, " Dangles " Holroyd, son of a 
 Supreme Court Judge, and Dick MacDermott, son 
 of Townsend MacDermott, K.C., a Dublin barrister 
 of high repute, dined in the basement salon of the 
 Vienna Cafe. After treating themselves splendidly 
 well they made numerous visits to the street where a 
 waggonette awaited them. By-and-by it dawned 
 upon the waiters that the three well-known diners 
 were removing the furnishings of their table to the 
 cab, piece by piece. They had taken everything 
 out except the small oval table, and while busy pushing 
 it through the door, the manageress, Miss Shepherd, 
 angrily demanded they should return the goods. 
 The purloiners explained they had a supper engage- 
 ment up at Scotch Maude's in Lonsdale Street, 
 and would return the things in the morning ! Another 
 time Harry Brush and another lad of the village 
 hired an ice cart from its tipsy driver late one night, 
 and starting from the Vienna Cafe called at various 
 hotels and sold blocks of ice at cost price. When 
 they had cleared out the stock, they climbed into 
 the cart, closed the doors and went to sleep. About 
 dawn they took the ice cart to the nearest watch- 
 house and explained to the sergeant they had kind 
 of picked it up in the street. In the present days of 
 strict law and order these two pranks would have 
 earned for the boys heavy fines and possibly imprison- 
 ment. The Vienna Cafe, in its latter days, had for 
 hire a number of shabby cabinets particuliers^ familiar 
 to anybody who knows the boulevards of Paris and 
 their purlieus, where ladies and gentlemen may 
 meet for all kinds of lawful and unlawful occasions. 
 A Puritanical police force has wiped out that semi- 
 
 286
 
 ENTERTAINMENTS 
 
 innocent traffic, and philanderers now philander in 
 motor cars in side streets in Melbourne suburbs. 
 
 A programme of a fancy dress ball at the Royal 
 Opera House, Covent Garden, lies open before me. 
 What pleasant memories it recalls ! We went with 
 Jennie Lee, then still wearing her halo as the creator 
 of " Jo " in the " Bleak House " play. The ball was 
 held on ist March, 1901, and the dances were polka, 
 valse, lancers, barn dance, and galop, the orchestra 
 being conducted by Dan Godfrey. Frank Rendel 
 and Neil Forsyth directed the affair, and little Willie 
 Clarkson the perruquier, ably helped them, while 
 Gunter and Company served a supper in the grand 
 saloon and boxes which cannot be supplied in these 
 days. St. Jazz, St. Bobbed, St. Shingled, St. Hole- 
 proof were still living obscurely near the hobs of 
 Dante's seventh hell, and the high priests and priest- 
 esses of vulgarity had not then procreated to pro- 
 duce their indecent spawn of unsexed men, women 
 and half-wits. And what happy nights out and joyous 
 supper resorts there were in the London of twenty- 
 five years ago, before the rich and uncultured Ameri- 
 cans invaded Europe to destroy politeness, while the 
 horde of international Jews headed by wealthy Attilas, 
 the modern Huns, Goths and Vandals, had not then 
 secured the status which gave them the power to tear 
 down culture from its pedestal and erect a golden calf 
 as a fetish for the people to worship. 
 
 FINALE 
 
 I have committed the immorality of being too far 
 in front of my own age, and in other times gone by 
 I might probably have been tortured and hung. 
 
 It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth 
 through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard. 
 My excuse for acrid criticism must be love of my own 
 native land. Having seen most of these others my 
 
 287
 
 PLEASANT CAREER OF A SPENDTHRIFT 
 
 own country seems the best. This book has been 
 written because the buttons tore from the pants of 
 my patience. Australia is a good country badly 
 managed. Howard Houlder, the English shipping 
 director, told us that development has been overdone 
 and that it was a tragedy to see a young country headed 
 for ruin. For twenty-five years since Federation, 
 which has been a pronounced financial failure, Aus- 
 tralia has been living on borrowed money. Federa- 
 tion was a mistake. All Australia wanted was domestic 
 free trade amongst the six colonies and prohibitive 
 protection against the world. If there had been no 
 Commonwealth, we would not have gone into that 
 war and would not have been plunged into an abyss 
 of dreadful debt. If there had been no Commonwealth 
 there would not have been this needless craze for 
 immigration. Why this insane loud cry to fill this 
 good country with a horde of strangers ? Is not the 
 shocking example of the United States and its hybrid 
 race of people enough to warn us not to open widely 
 our doors to inferior, ignorant humans and implore 
 them to come in and help themselves to our land, 
 our wealth, our peace, our work and wages. What 
 folly ! What stupidity ! Cut bono fuerit ! For 
 whose good is this being done ? Not for the benefit 
 of ourselves or our happiness ! Are we such craven 
 cowards as to listen to those who say, " If you don't 
 fill your empty spaces with immigrants you will be 
 attacked by other nations and perhaps lose your 
 country." What nonsense ! What puerility! Who 
 can take this country from us ? Only the United States 
 and it is doubtful whether the other white nations 
 of the world would allow them to try and take Australia 
 from us. Australia is not as weak as the two little 
 Boer republics whose land was stolen. Australia has 
 plenty of good food, enough shelter and clothing, and 
 barring the incapable and unemployable, proper 
 
 288
 
 FINALE 
 
 salaries and wages, and it is suicidal to admit even 
 one more stranger. It is our first duty to provide 
 happiness and comfort for our own Australians before 
 we concern ourselves about any Europeans, British 
 or otherwise. Until we partially abolish poverty at 
 home we have no right to burden ourselves with 
 millions of paupers from abroad. What we have, we 
 hold. AUSTRALIA FOR THE AUSTRALIANS! 
 
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