The Chinaman is the most careful and thrifty, the most loving, gardener in the world. It seems as if his little plot of land grows to be to him as his child—no matter how small it is. I remember once watching from my bedroom window, in one of the Melbourne Coffee Palaces of which the back overlooks Little Burke Street, a Chinaman in a blue linen coat, busied during the dinner hour, day after day, with some narcissus in blue bowls on a neighbouring roof, and marvelled at the infinite loving care with which he was tending them. As in the smaller so in the greater, though perhaps, on the whole, he is the truest artist in the minute. The Australian does not like the Chinaman; he resents his frugal ways—in a country that is certainly not frugal—his colour—his strangeness, his untiring, unswerving industry. You see a lot of white men working in the market gardens round Oakleigh and Garden Vale. They stop to talk with each other, to look round at the sky and distant landscape, to enjoy a few quiet puffs at their pipes; above all, to spit on their hands. The Chinaman never looks up, never stops from dawn to dark. He divides his ground into little oblong patches, with channels between to conserve every drop of moisture; he pampers the young weak plants, shading them from wind and sun with bits of sacking, boards, or slates; he loosens the ground unceasingly round them, and waters untiringly. I do not for a moment advocate Australians working in this manner; a man must sometimes straighten his back and look around him, must have something of a soul beyond early tomatoes and green peas; but still there is very much that he could be taught from the alien in his midst; and it is a schoolboy’s poorest excuse not to learn from a master because he is personally distasteful to him. Australia, particularly in its up-country places, needs more vegetables most terribly, if it is to escape at all from the scourge of cancer which already lays such a heavy toll on its inhabitants; and if it needs more vegetable gardens to satisfy its human needs, it certainly needs more flower gardens for its spiritual needs, as a humanizing, home-making influence, nothing striking the new chum more forcibly than the utter lack of any attempt at beautifying the outside of up-country cottages, save with empty condensed milk and jam tins. For many years squatters in the drought-stricken districts have employed Chinese gardeners, to whom they often owe the fact that their families grow up healthy, and their wives find some solace, some reminder of their girlhood’s home in the lonely wind-swept plains, where the poor despised John Chinaman has—with unceasing toil, with infinite manceuvring, by means of prehistoric wind-wheels and pumps old as Egypt in design—made a little oasis to blossom for them.