In an Unknown Prison Land: An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and homeGriffith, George Chetwynd
History
In an Unknown Prison Land: An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home
Griffith, George Chetwynd
Crime; Criminals; New Caledonia -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Penal colonies -- New Caledonia
I have seen French colonists in French colonies, Germans in German
colonies, and colonists of many nationalities under the alien flags of
the South American Republics, where, as a rule, they do a great deal
better than in their own colonies, if they have any, but never have I
seen such a perfect realisation of the ideal of cosmopolitan colonisation
as I saw during my stay at Seppeltsfield.
Day after day we drove out along broad roads through the pleasant
vineyards and farmlands which lay under the ranges that shielded them
from the hot north winds, and every hour or so we pulled up in a village
which might have been picked up by superhuman hands out of Germany, or
France, or Holland, Ireland, Scotland, or England, and just put down
there in the midst of what forty years ago was the South Australian
Wilderness.
My host was a German and the son of a German, and he has nine sons, all
good Australians, true sons of the soil, worthy citizens of the empire
who have found all that men seek to find within the wide confines of the
Pax Britannica.
I have a certain reason for using that phrase. I had just come from a
French colony which, in the national sense, could only be described as
a house divided against itself. There was the conflict between bond and
free, between French and English, Australians, Germans, Jews, naturalised
foreigners, and those who were still wondering which side of the
international fence it would pay them best to sit on, but in the pleasant
country about Seppeltsfield I found all the elements of international
unity and none of discord.
Within that eight-mile radius there was an epitome of Europe. In one
township you might have closed your eyes for a moment of forgetfulness,
opened them again and seen yourself in a German town not very far from
the banks of the Rhine. Having a little German at my disposal, I accepted
the illusion and found myself drinking good lager beer out of the same
old glasses that I had drunk it ten years before in the Fatherland,
and listening to just the same quaintly turned conversation that I had
listened to and joined in during a walking tour down the Valley of
the Weser and over the Hartz Mountains. The houses were built in the
same way, the same beer was drunk to the same toasts and with the same
old-world choruses, and I and the Accidental American played a game for
the championship of England and America on just such a kegel-bahn as you
could find behind any country hotel in Germany. I won because I didn’t
laugh quite as much as my opponent did.
At the end of another drive I found myself in France listening to the
soft speech of the Côte d’Or and drinking the wine of the country which
might have been sent that day by telegraph. A few miles farther on we
were in Ireland. I am not prepared to say that the mountain dew was
actually distilled on Irish hillsides, but it was very like the original
brew, and the brogue was as rich and pure as any that you would hear
between Dublin and Dingle Bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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