On the diggings up to twenty odd years ago--and as far back as I can
remember--on Lambing Flat, the Pipe Clays, Gulgong, Home Rule, and so
through the roaring list; in bark huts, tents, public-houses, sly grog
shanties, and--well, the most glorious voice of all belonged to a bad
girl. We were only children and didn't know why she was bad, but we
weren't allowed to play near or go near the hut she lived in, and we
were trained to believe firmly that something awful would happen to us
if we stayed to answer a word, and didn't run away as fast as our legs
could carry us, if she attempted to speak to us. We had before us the
dread example of one urchin, who got an awful hiding and went on bread
and water for twenty-four hours for allowing her to kiss him and give
him lollies. She didn't look bad--she looked to us like a grand and
beautiful lady-girl--but we got instilled into us the idea that she was
an awful bad woman, something more terrible even than a drunken man, and
one whose presence was to be feared and fled from. There were two other
girls in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her
“Auntie”, and with whom we were not allowed to play--for they were all
bad; which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled. We couldn't
make out how everybody in one house could be bad. We used to wonder why
these bad people weren't hunted away or put in gaol if they were so
bad. And another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark, when the bad
girls happened to be singing in their house, we'd sometimes run against
men hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening. They
seemed mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded they were
listening and watching the bad women's house to see that they didn't
kill anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys--ourselves,
for instance--who ran out after dark; which, as we were informed, those
bad people were always on the lookout for a chance to do.
We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable,
married, hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad
door in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper, and
listen round until the bad girl had sung the “Bonnie Hills of Scotland”
two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk two or
three days at a time. And his wife caught him throwing the money in one
night, and there was a terrible row, and she left him; and people always
said it was all a mistake. But we couldn't see the mistake then.
But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:
Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell,
In my bonnet then I wore;
And memory knows no brighter theme
Than those happy days of yore.
Scotland! Land of chief and song!
Oh, what charms to thee belong!
And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie--who was
married to a Saxon, and a Tartar--went and got drunk when the bad girl
sang “The Bonnie Hills of Scotland.”
His anxious eye might look in vain
For some loved form it knew!
. . . . .
And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time. Next door to the
bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family--a family of good
girls with whom we were allowed to play, and from whom we got lollies
(those hard old red-and-white “fish lollies” that grocers sent home with
parcels of groceries and receipted bills). Now one washing day, they
being as glad to get rid of us at home as we were to get out, we went
over to the good house and found no one at home except the grown-up
daughter, who used to sing for us, and read “Robinson Crusoe” of nights,
“out loud”, and give us more lollies than any of the rest--and with
whom we were passionately in love, notwithstanding the fact that she was
engaged to a “grown-up man”--(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the
way by the time we were old enough to marry her). She was washing.
She had carried the stool and tub over against the stick fence which
separated her house from the bad house; and, to our astonishment and
dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over against her side of the
fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders to the fence between
them, and heads bent down close to it. The bad girl would sing a few
words, and the good girl after her, over and over again. They sang very
low, we thought. Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and
caught sight of us. She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid
hold of the stool and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in
a hurry. And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house. The
good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw--that she'd
been talking to a bad girl--else she would never, never marry us.
She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing “Madeline”
that day.
I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself
one night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a
frightfully bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and
thereafter we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice,
lest we should go and do what the digger did.
. . . . .
I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being from
another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:
Out in the cold world--out in the street--
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!
That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened by
women sobbing (and one or two great grown-up diggers also) that night in
that circus.
“Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now”, was a sacred song then,
not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar “business” for fourth-rate
clowns and corner-men. Then there was “The Prairie Flower”. “Out on the
Prairie, in an Early Day”--I can hear the digger's wife yet: she was the
prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly and crept into
camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up with
gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good tinkettling in
the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start housekeeping on.
She had a very sweet voice.
Fair as a lily, joyous and free,
Light of the prairie home was she.
She's a “granny” now, no doubt--or dead.
And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife, wearing a black
eye mostly, and singing “Love Amongst the Roses” at her work. And they
sang the “Blue Tail Fly”, and all the first and best coon songs--in the
days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.
. . . . .
The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews' “Redclay Inn”. A fresh
back-log thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully. Company
settled down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.
Flash Jack--red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing
in it, glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack
volunteers, without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his
nose:
Hoh!--
There was a wild kerlonial youth,
John Dowlin was his name!
He bountied on his parients,
Who lived in Castlemaine!
and so on to--
He took a pistol from his breast
And waved that lit--tle toy--
“Little toy” with an enthusiastic flourish and great unction on Flash
Jack's part--
“I'll fight, but I won't surrender!” said
The wild Kerlonial Boy.
Even this fails to rouse the company's enthusiasm. “Give us a song, Abe!
Give us the 'Lowlands'!” Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying
on the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his
head--his favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing.
He had a strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and
through, from hair to toenails, as a child.
They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it
behind his head on the end of the stool:
The ship was built in Glasgow;
'Twas the “Golden Vanitee”--
Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone
between--
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen, as all
do within hearing, when Abe sings.
“Now then, boys:
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
“Now, all together!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!”
Toe and heel and flat of foot begin to stamp the clay floor, and horny
hands to slap patched knees in accompaniment.
“Oh! save me, lads!” he cried,
“I'm drifting with the current,
And I'm drifting with the tide!
And I'm sinking in the Low Lands, Low!