Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/368

 sexes. The eager ethnological reader will naturally require my conclusive opinion—a prosaic, possibly a disappointing one. Australian-born persons, with trifling exceptions, are very like everybody else, born of British blood, anywhere. So far from all being run into one mould, as it pleases strangers to believe, they present as many instances of individual divergence from the ordinary Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic types—mentally and physically—as are to be found in Europe or elsewhere. Then the heat, the constant eating of meat, the locomotive, speculative habit of the land—do these not produce a variation of type? How can they be like people born in the green Motherland? is eagerly asked. My answer is—that 'race is everything.' A little heat more or less, a little extra wayfaring, the prevalence of the orange and banana, of abundant food—these things do not suffice to relax the fibre and lower the stamina of the bold sea-roving breed which has never counted the cost of the deadliest climate or the wildest sea where honour was to be satisfied, thirst for adventure to be slaked, or even that lower but essential desideratum, a full purse to be secured. If the air be hot, there sighs the ocean breeze to temper it withal. On the great interior plateaux, the pure, dry atmosphere, which invigorates the invalid, rears up uninjured the hardy broods of the farmer, the stock-rider, and the shepherd. Stalwart men and wholesome, stirring lasses do they make. The profusely-used beef and mutton diet, due to our countless flocks and herds, though it does not tend to produce grossness of habit, is a muscle-producing food, best fitted for those who are compelled to travel far and fast. The ordinary bush-labourer, reared on a farm or a station, is generally a tall, rather graceful personage. He may be comparatively slight-looking, but if you test or measure him, you will find that the spareness is more apparent than real. His limbs are muscular and sinewy; his chest is broad; his shoulders well spread; he is extremely active, and, either on foot or horseback, can hold his own with any nationality. Wiry and athletic, he is much stronger than he looks. He will generally do manual labour after a fashion and at a pace that would astonish a Kent or Sussex yokel. If he have not the abnormally broad frame of the English navvy or farm-labourer, neither has he the bowed frame, the bent back, the shorter limbs of the European hind. With all his faults he is much more as Nature made him, unwarped by