Now, all this is greatly to be deplored, and has a disastrous influence over the whole of Australian family life, because it must happen that many of these girls eventually marry, and commence their new existence under the most unfavourable conditions.  In the first place, they are totally ignorant of everything connected with household management, and what is far worse, they have almost a contempt for it.  What the result is, in too many cases, I have already dwelt upon,—­ either the husband and the family suffer from the effects of bad Cookery, and unhappiness and ill-health follow, or else the bread-winner flies to alcohol in order to forget his troubles.

It must not be imagined however, that this condition of affairs is altogether beyond remedy, and that our Australian girls are hopeless in this respect.  No, on the contrary, those of whom I have just spoken are as attractive and fascinating—­as Australian girls always are; but it is a thousand pities that they do not possess a greater appreciation of the importance of home life.  Still, after all, may it not be that our educational system is defective in that it does not implant—­all through a girl’s school life—­a love of Cookery, and of domestic management?  It is during this impressionable age that all these truths can be so well indoctrinated.  Indeed, I am thoroughly convinced that one of the greatest defects in the superlatively scientific education of to-day, as far as the girls are concerned, is the neglect which these matters receive; for it stands to reason that if they are passed by during school life, they are never learnt at all.

And, further, it should not be forgotten that a cook is always able to command high wages.  That is a fact which should not be lost sight of, although perhaps it is some what mercenary.  A cook need never fear but that she will always be in constant employment.  Ah, yes!  Max O’Rell got in a home thrust when he declared that “the average woman who finds herself alone in the world could earn her living if she could cook—­ but she can’t.”

CHAPTER IX.

AUSTRALIAN FOOD HABITS AND THEIR FAULTS.—­A PLEA FOR THEIR IMPROVEMENT.

It is somewhat curious that, among the many questions which pertain to the national life of Australia, little, if any, attention has been directed to the influences which the daily food and habitual dietary exercise upon the present, and in what way they will affect the future population.  And yet it must be apparent that the life of a nation is moulded in no small degree by its daily fare, by its general food habits, and still more by the fact of its living in conformity with, or in direct opposition to, its climatic requirements.  It is evident that the natural dietary of the earth’s inhabitants is controlled largely by the particular region in which they dwell.  Thus the Hindoos, and contiguous Eastern nations, subsist mainly upon