THE TRUE OBJECT OF FUTURE AUSTRALIAN EMIGRATION.

New Zealander, Volume 9, Issue 788, 2 November 1853, Page 4

THE TRUE OBJECT OF FUTURE AUSTRALIAN EMIGRATION.

|From »he “Australian and New Zealand Gazelle,” Jnnc 2.i.j The discovery of !he gold fields themselves is not more remarkable lhan is the heterogeneous mass of persons which (hat discovery has brought together in Australia, The views of the persons loaning this mass vary with their success or the want of it; and were we to credit the assertions of individuals. Victoria would be the most coni radio- j tory place under the sun. The same hatch of adv ices which tell us of a hard-handed mechanic staggering under the weigh! of gold which he can scarcely carry, tell us of a gentleman reduced to (he necessity of hogging, to keep him from absolute starvation. Within fifty yards of each other at the same moment, we read of a ruffianly convict from Van Diemen's Land placing the 0 1. notes of a local bank between slices of bread and butter, and eating them ; and of a downhearted, hut in all probability a well educated man, dying of destitution under a shed. Before the door of a publican w ho has made his 20,000/. within the year, stands a Master of Arts of the University of Oxford, selling pies for his subsistence. All these, and many o.Ugp instances equally strange, have been duly Chronicled in our pages; and in all probability, every one of of the individuals described has written home to his friends in England that Victoria is really what he himself found it; i. c., that it is at the same time the richest and (he poorest country under the sun; that is a country in which every body must necessarily become rich, and at the same lime one in which everybody must necessarily become poor. It is not a week since we were perusing in our office a letter of the latter lugubrious character, when, in the midst of the operation, there came in a lad not two years since in our employ-and not yet out of his teens—with a bag of gold to show us, which he had himself brought home for the purpose of taking out his relatives ton country in which, as he said, “ there was plenty more of if.” There is only one inference from all this, viz., that the country is a rich or a poor one, according to the capabilities of its describers; for their accounts are uo doubt strictly true ; further lhan this, the land would he yet a terra incognita, hut tor the millions of gold which if is pouring into the port of London. There are grades, too. in this estimation of riches or poverty. One man comes home with nuggets to the amount of 7.000/. or 8,000/. acquired in a week or two ; another informs his friends in England that he has been at work on the roads, but as the Government will not give more than ten shillings a day for breaking stones, he is seriously thinking of looking out for something better; the lowest grade is that of a gentleman, who cannot stoop to breaking stones on a road at ten shillings a day and in the true spirit of genteel martyrdom, lie lays himself down by the roadside and dies of exhaustion.

There is, however, a practical inference; and that is, that to those inured to labour, and who care nothing for fatigue or temporary disappointment, Victoria is a perfect mine of wealth; to those of opposite physical or mental capabilities it is a perfect mine of poverty and disappointment. The beggar is literally raised from the dunghill to si! among princes; and the prince in education and thought at least, is compelled to take the dunghill seal which the beggar has just quitted. Hence Australia is the beggar's paradise, and the gentleman’s purgatory, io say nothing of a hotter climate. The gentleman has no business there; for it is ten to one but that bis only consolation in suffering, will be that the friends he has left at home —probably dreaming of Urn enormous wealth he has accumulated—are not witnesses of his degradation. Hundreds of gentlemanly men are as surely in this condition as that hundreds of an opposite character are within hail, who are striving hard lo dissipate the wealth they can scarcely gel rid of, by resorting to the lowest sensualities, above which their vulgar appreciation of the uses of wealth is not able to rise.

Intending emigrants at home do not know what to make of these contradictory statements and emigration consequently flags. Yet the thing is clear enough. The scores of thousands who have gone, have emigrated to join in the rush for gold. They who were physically adapted to their object have got gold in abundance ; whilst those who were not so adapted to it have got nothing but a worse poverty than they left for their pains. The result is only a natural one, and presents nothing whatever of an extraordinary character, it would have been more extraordinary bad the result been different to what il is. But Australia stands more in need than ever she did of emigrants of a different kind, viz., men who go out with a fixed determination not to go near the gold mines, but with an equally firm determination to gel their full share of the gold notwithstanding by the* steady pursuit of social industry. These are the men who will become the sinews of the nascent empire; the gold diggers as they wear out, will he its exuviae merely. There is nothing lasting in their pursuit, as the history of all gold-producing counHes shows. There are already too many gold hunters, and too few absorbents of the gold which is disinterred.

Hence Ihe spectacle which the colony presents as a whole is as singular as are the elements of its gold-hunting society. Capital is everywhere overabundant, but there is no one to scatter it «) that it may fructify. Melbourne presents (he strange anomaly of a population larger than the •whole city contained two years ago, living in the barest apologies for tents, which neither shelter from the sun by day or the dews by night ; because none can be found to build houses for that population, though could the builders be found, capital would overflow for the purpose. Nearly a quarter of a million persons have to be fed, but as there are few to cany on a systematic and highly profitable mode of agriculture, the population is necessarily dependent on other countries or colonies for its daily bread. Wool, the great industrial staple of the country, which, with the additional capital supplied by the gold fields, might soon be raised to an unheard of extent, is comparatively neglected, because the shepherds are gone to the diggings, and new emigrants will not settle down to the shecpfold ; preferring to follow the Will-o'-lhe Wisp which leads them to the mines, and often to poverty, This stale of things will find its level in lime; but the intending emigrant may be assured that if he he on the spot so as to get a firm footing first, he will in the end reap a larger profit than ever he will get whilst in search of nuggets. So far then from emigration flagging because contradictory or unsatisfactory accounts come home from gold seekers—such accounts varying with their success or want of it—if intending emigrants saw their own interests, they would see that no more favourable lime could arise than the present for embarking in industrial pursuits to which the money of the diggers must largely contribute. But to secure their share of (he gold, they must leave nining to those to whom it is congenial, and stick to their own adopted industrial calling. This is the secret of success in such a state of society as that of Victoria. The Melbourne papers have recorded instances of a shoe-black in the city who made 500 L a year by his calling; a washerwoman who realized 1,000/. in the same time; and a lemonade seller at the diggings who took 50/. a day, which was all profit except the tartaric acid, soda, and essence of lemon, of which his beverage was composed. These persons were practical philosophers: the shoe-black would not go to the diggings, though he had abundant means so to do; the washerwoman would as goon have dreamed of swallowing her own ends as to have gone near the diggings; whilst the

lemonade seller, ■who was at the diggings, would as soon have thought of grasping a red hot iron as a pickaxe in search of gold it came to him almost without an effort, as it will to all who steadily pursue some industrial occupation which is essential to the goldminer; and the former will in the end prolit more by gathering spare nuggets from an aggregate number of the latter, than by any individual effort to become suddenly rich by gold mining, however sternuously that effort may he made. Notwithstanding the vast numbers who have emigrated to Australia, steady industrial emigration has not yet begun. The vast produce fields of the country are comparatively barren as yet, though the materials for developing their fertility are already inexhaustible, but useless for want of opportunity for employment; which opportunity cannot arise but from steady industrial labour’ A future day, and that not far distant, will show that the gold mines of Australia bear only the same relation to the cahabililies of the country generally as the compost heap in (he yard of an English farmer does for the produce of his farm. I hey will form the fertilizing material, and be thus far of primary importance; hut, to the value of the produce which they will bo the means of developing, they will stand in a secondary ratio only, it is rather, therefore, to the interest of thinking emigrants, to look to the produce rather than to the gold which will develop it, A farmer at home, who was bent only on looking after the accumulation of his manure heap, would hardly succeed like one who looked after the crops which it may be made to produce.