CHAPTER XV
AUSTRALASIA
After my visit to the United States on lecturing business, I gladly embraced the opportunity to go to Australasia on a similar errand, although, in the latter case, the venture was entirely my own. I mean that I was not engaged by anyone. More than that. I had an agent whose agreement with me was that he should have a free hand in spending money on my behalf, but that of the net proceeds he should take two-fifths, leaving the remaining three-fifths to me. My only safeguard was that we should have weekly settlements, but as that was treated as non-existent, it didn’t make any difference, and I had the pleasant knowledge that all through my tour I was working to maintain three people. That, however, is a mere detail.
As was to be expected, my audiences in Australasia were very much smaller than they had been in America, but I gladly note that what they lacked in numbers they made up in appreciation. Perhaps this was to be expected, as I found that I was well and favourably known by repute in the Antipodes, which was certainly not the case in America. And besides the handicap of my being an Englishman was absent. This, however, is not the pleasantest of my recollections of that tour. At the time of my visit the total contributions of the whole of Australasia towards the expense of the British Navy was only £240,000 a year, or much less than the cost of a scout. One of my lectures (“The Way they have in the Navy”) was an attempt to show my hearers what the British Navy really was, and in it I spared no pains to convince my Southern hearers that their attitude towards the Navy was not only ridiculously penurious, but fraught with the greatest danger to themselves. I very well remember impressing upon them, whenever I got the opportunity, that the amount contributed by the British people for the Navy was about £1 per head, and that if the Australasian people would only tax themselves to the same extent they would in five years have such a Navy as would afford them the protection of which they were now destitute. Nor could they reasonably expect the British Navy, if the mother-country was in danger, to spare a single modern warship for the protection of the Antipodes, all of whose cities lay near the coast, and liable to destruction by a single foreign war vessel of modern design and armament.
What the Australasian Dominions have done since then is a matter of common knowledge; if not quite as much as I recommended, still gigantic strides have been made, and I am grateful to feel that what I had the opportunity of saying by tongue and pen aided local effort sufficiently to bring about such a desirable result. At the time of my visit the obsolete cruiser Powerful was the most up-to-date vessel in Australasian waters, and the flagship of the Admiral, Sir Wilmot Hawkes. Then there came into Sydney the Japanese training squadron, three small gunboats, each of which mounted a twelve-inch gun, and though about one-quarter of the size of the Powerful, with armament sufficient to have sunk a whole fleet of Powerfuls at her leisure.
The object-lesson could not have been better timed, and I hope I used it for all it was worth. I know, at any rate, that I was severely censured for plain speaking, but I felt and said that the welfare of such cities as Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide was far before any personal considerations. But I proved then that both Press and people only wanted the facts pointed out to them for them to act. They were not content simply to turn over in their sleep and mutter, “Oh, it will last our time.” Not they. And the recent naval activity of the Southern Dominions is the result.
Apart from this patriotic matter, the reception that I met with everywhere was most encouraging. It is true that I often had the misfortune in the smaller towns of coming immediately after or before a theatrical company, which had either swept up all the “joy-money,” or it, the cash, was awaiting the advent of the fun-makers. Also I had to compete with the cinematograph in the large cities, which had just arrived, and was scooping up all the money in sight. And beyond that I was surely unfortunate in my time. Just after my arrival in Auckland from Sydney, and on the very day that I was to give the first of four lectures in Her Majesty’s Theatre, came the upheaving news of Mr. R. J. Seddons’ death, which affected the whole community more than an earthquake would have done. But not in the same way that it affected me.
For when the news arrived the city went immediately into mourning, and I was perforce compelled to refrain from giving my lecture that night. This was a very serious matter for me, for the expenses of each day, heavier in Auckland than in any town I visited, were about £80. And I was faced with that loss, because it was certain that I could not regain that lost day, as the theatre was let again immediately. I did try to get the company owning the theatre to meet me by cutting the enormous rental of the theatre for that unused night in half, but they would not hear of it, the loss was mine, and I must bear it, they said cynically. But that was not the worst. So great was the shock to the community that all businesses like mine felt it for a long time, and the three lectures I was able to give in Auckland did little more than cover expenses. The late Prime Minister of New Zealand had many sincere mourners, but none who showed their sorrow in a more practical manner than I did, even if the exhibition was quite involuntary.
Now the North Island of New Zealand is quite an earthly Paradise, and although it was mid-winter at the time of my visit, arum lilies were growing rankly in the ditches about Auckland. Yet at Gisborne, only about 100 miles south of Auckland, I felt bitterly cold on the platform, a thing that has never happened to me before nor since. So cold was it that the speculator who had engaged me for those two lectures, at a fee of £40, made a very severe loss, because hardly anybody came the second night. They would not sit in an unlined galvanized-iron building to be half frozen, no, not to hear the most eloquent speaker living, much less myself, and truly I could not blame them. It has, however, always been a mystery to me how it could be so cold in that genial part of the world.
Considerable mystery attaches to my visit to Nelson. As a trip it was delightful, giving me as it did the opportunity of verifying the existence of Pelorus Jack, the celebrated grey grampus which for some inscrutable cetacean reason meets and for a short time accompanies every steamer that enters or leaves Tasman Bay by the French Pass. Upon such a well-worn subject I am not going to expend space, but I must just notice one matter that is not touched upon usually by any of those who have written about this sociable whale. The Pateena was going a full sixteen knots, so her captain told me, yet “Jack” played round her bows without any apparent effort, and occasionally would put on a spurt that carried him a ship’s length ahead, when he would slow down, and allow the ship to overtake him again, and resume his favourite pastime of wallowing in the turbulent water just abaft her stern. And when he left her finally, which he did after about twenty minutes, he shot off at right angles from her, and almost immediately disappeared. I therefore cannot put his top speed at any less than thirty knots an hour.
But from a financial point of view Nelson was a dismal failure, and I do not see how from its population it could well have been otherwise. It may have been bad management, however; of that I know nothing. Still as my object was not a pleasant holiday, I was glad to get back to Wellington again, where I had an excellent reception, which partly consoled me. This was the more noticeable, because here again I lectured in the theatre, where I followed an excellent opera company, under the management of Henry Bracy, who were giving all Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas. Yet, despite this, I was very well patronised.
My hopes were now centred upon Dunedin, for I knew that practically everybody there knew me, and I felt very hopeful that my reception would go far to make up for what could only be classed as failure hitherto. I was to appear in the Garrison Hall, the largest auditorium in the city, and although it was not crowded it was well filled. One of my old Dunedin friends, a very prominent man of business and an expert accountant, at whose house I was a guest, congratulated me upon the audience, but when I told him the amount of the takings he was dumbfounded. Presently he said:
“My dear Bullen, you are being robbed. At the prices of the seats there should be fifty or sixty per cent more money in the house than that. Who have you attending to the front of the house?”
I replied that I did not know. My agent was in Wellington, and the very reliable and honest fellow who was acting for me could only be in one place at a time. My friend explained to me how easy it would be for dishonest people to keep a great deal of money from the takings at the doors, and then offered to come the following night and count the house, a thing he had often done before. Afterwards we would compare one another’s figures. We did so. I had £74, his count made £135! And now I could see how this thing must have been going on all the time, and I powerless to help it in any way. The best proof of the correctness of his counting was in the fact that on a return visit which I paid to Dunedin before leaving for home I gave a complimentary lecture for the benefit of a fund for helping stranded seamen. The house was about the same, but, after all expenses were paid, there was £110 net available for the fund.
These are details, however, which only show the difficulties under which a lecturer labours who has to put up with an inefficient agent or an inequitable agreement. The people were splendid. I enjoyed everything else in the country most thoroughly—the charming scenery, the delightful audiences, the home-like hotels, the thoroughly good newspapers. And the kindly hospitality of Messrs. Huddart Parker and the Union Steamship Co. and the N. Z. Government railways, which relieved me of all expenses of travel except for my agent and the advance man, was very welcome indeed. But for this and the kindness of the Steamship Company that gave me a free passage out and home, I am afraid that I should have had very little to show for my tour in cash, notwithstanding the fact that in Melbourne, in a hall which cost £4 a night, I grossed between five and six hundred pounds in six days. But I had no control over the expenditure, nor was any account ever shown me, and as for the weekly settlement, that was from the first a dead letter.
Afterwards I learned that I was supposed to come back over my tracks and revisit the cities I had given lectures in, supposed that is by those who knew me, wanted to hear me, and had been prevented. There were also many large places in Australia such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Brisbane to which I did not go, why I do not know. And so, as I began to feel very disheartened at the poor personal results from such great sums as were taken, I looked forward eagerly to my winter lecture tour at home, where, if the financial returns were modest, they were sure, and I never had the slightest reason to suspect that anybody wished to wrong me of a penny. So just when, as I afterwards learned, I ought to have been beginning the most successful half of my tour, I caught my ship at Melbourne, and started for home, where I arrived after an absence of seven months.
Looking backward over that period of my lecture career, I can see how good it was, and how well I should have been rewarded but for my ignorance in making the agreement I did. I might, it is true, have had bigger audiences in many places, but I could not have been better received than I was. And that not merely by the rank and file, but by all those in power of whatever political cast they happened to be. This was all the more delightful to me because I did not make the slightest attempt to push myself forward, and the kindly reception I got from governors and ministers was spontaneously tendered. One day in Wellington, when I was taking a walk, I thought I would leave my card at Government House, and write my name in the visitors’ book, which I had been led to believe was the correct thing to do. I had done so, and was strolling away down the carriage drive again, when a messenger came after me, and told me that the aide-de-camp wished I would return. Of course I complied, and was immediately taken into the aide’s room, who said that Lord Plunkett had seen me going away, and wished to have a chat with me.
I was then taken into his Lordship’s room, and had a very pleasant interview with him for about half an hour, during which he expressed surprise that I had not been to see him before. He laughed heartily when I told him that my native modesty forbade me to take any advantage which calling on the great ones might give me, but though I knew I was often a loser from this diffidence, I could not alter it. But I have never been able to push myself forward in this way, and there’s an end of it.
There is another thing which causes me to look back upon my Australasian tour with complacency. The experience which I then gained came too late to be of any financial benefit to me, but I fondly believe that it has been of some use to others. I have been very glad to put my knowledge at the service of anyone asking for it to whom it was likely to be of use, and I do not think that any lecturer of standing has since been caught in such toils as I was. And that is well worth remembering, I think. But here, if it will be of any use, I would wish to add, for the benefit of any brother-lecturer going to the Antipodes, never allow your agent a free hand in spending, and insist upon a daily settlement. This can easily be done if the agreed terms are half the gross takings, the agent to pay all outgoings, except the lecturer’s personal expenses, out of his half. In my case I only had three-fifths of what was left, after all expenses were paid—I paid my own—and in too many cases there was nothing left for me at all. And I never had a settlement, that is with vouchers, duly presented and signed. So that I did not, nor do I now know what all those huge expenses were for.
Still, I cannot too emphatically repeat that this was nothing to do with the audiences, which were of the very best I ever lectured to, or with the welcome I received everywhere, which was the warmest conceivable.