[Illustration: Grape-crushing by machinery at Seppeltsfield. The Grapes from which Australian Wine is made are never touched by hand (or foot) after the process of Wine-making has begun.]
Happily there was no speculation about the wine industry in Australia. If this were also true of her gold-mines and her wool-crops she would be a good deal richer and more honestly wealthy than she is.
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.