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* * * * *
THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA
* * * * *
THIRTY YEARS IN
AUSTRALIA
BY
ADA CAMBRIDGE
AUTHOR OF "PATH AND GOAL" AND "THE DEVASTATORS"
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1903
TO
MY TWO LIVING CHILDREN
AND THE DEAR MEMORY OF ONE
WHO WAS LIVING WHEN I WROTE IT
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. "ISLE OF BEAUTY, FARE THEE WELL!" 1
II. AUSTRALIA FELIX 11
III. THE BUSH 23
IV. THE FIRST HOME 35
V. DIK 48
VI. THE SECOND HOME 64
VII. THE THIRD HOME 79
VIII. THE MURRAY JOURNEY 93
IX. LOCAL COLOUR 111
X. THE FOURTH HOME 126
XI. THE FIFTH HOME 143
XII. THE SIXTH HOME 161
XIII. THE BOOM 177
XIV. THE SEVENTH HOME 189
XV. TOBY 203
XVI. THE GREAT STRIKE 214
XVII. OVER THE BORDER 236
XVIII. THE END OF BUSH LIFE 253
XIX. THE EIGHTH HOME 272
XX. CONCLUSION 295
THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER I
"ISLE OF BEAUTY, FARE THEE WELL!"
I knew nothing whatever of Australia when I rashly consented to marry
a young man who had irrevocably bound himself to go and live there,
and, moreover, to go within three months of the day on which the wild
idea occurred to me. During the seven weeks or thereabouts of a
bewildering engagement, the while I got together my modest trousseau,
we hunted for information in local libraries, and from more or less
instructed friends. The books were mostly old ones, the tales the
same. _Geoffrey Hamlyn_ was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be
supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable; we could not
verify those charming homes and social customs. On the other hand,
cannibal blacks and convict bushrangers appeared to be grim facts. As
for the physical characteristics of the country, there were but the
scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones
outside (none of which, actually, is the rule, and I have found
nothing to resemble the description of the latter), and the kangaroo
that carries its family in a breast-pocket, which we felt able to take
for granted. These things we did believe in, because all our
authorities mentioned them. G. had a letter from a college friend who
had preceded him to Australia, reporting the place not wild at all,
but quite like home. He instanced an episcopal dinner-party that he
had attended, and a church dignitary's "three sweetly pretty
daughters," who had come in the evening, and with whom he had sung
duets. But at time of writing he had got no further than
Melbourne--knew no more than we of the mysterious Bush, which I
thought of as a vast shrubbery, with occasional spears hurtling
through it. When we had assimilated all the information available, our
theory of the life before us was still shapeless. However, we were
young and trusting, and prepared to take things as they came.
G. was an English curate for a few weeks, and an English rector for a
few more. It was just enough to give us an everlasting regret that the
conditions could not have remained permanent. Doubtless, if we had
settled in an English parish, we should have bewailed our narrow lot,
should have had everlasting regrets for missing the chance of breaking
away into the wide world; but since we did exile ourselves, and could
not help it, we have been homesick practically all the time--good as
Australia has been to us. At any moment of these thirty odd years we
would have made for our native land like homing pigeons, could we have
found the means; it was only the lack of the necessary "sinews" that
prevented us. Such a severe form of nostalgia is, however, uncommon
here, and would be cured, I am told, by a twelve months' trip.
Certainly, in nine cases out of ten, where I have known the remedy
tried, it has seemed infallible. The home-goers come back perfectly
satisfied to come back. It is when they stay at home for more than
twelve months that they want to stay altogether.
G.'s brief curacy synchronised with our brief engagement. I was a
district visitor in the parish which he served, and in which he was
born. He became a rector on the wedding day. The charming rectory was
placed at our disposal for the honeymoon by the real incumbent, our
mutual friend, he and his good wife taking the opportunity to pay
visits until we had done with it. We drove thither in the afternoon,
and heard the bells ringing as we entered the village, and found the
rectory-gate set wide and the white-satin-ribboned maids awaiting us
on the doorstep of the beflowered house. We had two maids and a man
servant; we had a brougham; we had a tiny hamlet of a parish in which
(compared with what we have known of parishes) there was nothing to
do--two services on Sunday, and a little business of coal and clothing
clubs during the week--and where our parishioners dropped curtseys to
us on the road, and felt honoured beyond measure when we went to see
them. No wonder that, under the too totally opposite circumstances of
clerical life as we have lived it here, we have looked back to that
haven of dignified peace and ease with the wish--the stupid wish--that
we could have had it always.
Nothing could have suited us better while we did have it. We were but
four miles from our homes, and could see our people, who were to lose
us in a month, while still ostensibly in bridal seclusion. A sister
from whom I was separated for the whole of the thirty years, but who
is with me now, to gossip, as we are always doing, of those old days,
used to walk out before breakfast. We would have a quiet sewing
morning, getting forward with the preparations still so far from
completed; then we would perhaps drive her home in the afternoon, and
get an hour with my mother, who surpassed all the mothers I ever knew
in her unselfish passion for her children, and for whom my heart
bleeds to this day when I think of what my going cost her--for I know
more of mothers' sufferings in that way than I did then. She would be
working her dear fingers to the bone over something to add to the
array of zinc-lined boxes which were being fed by instalments in my
deserted room, and I see now the flash of tearful joy that lit her
fair, fine-featured face when I came with my poor crumb of comfort for
her hungry heart. Intimate girl companions walked over to lunch or to
play a game of croquet, or to make better use of the little time
remaining to us; and we walked half-way back with them on the lonely
road and through the leafy lanes. It was April and May, and, as far as
I can remember, all fine weather--a last impression of English
springtime that has lived with me like a beautiful portrait, an
idealised portrait, of a dead and longed-for friend. "Oh to be in
England now that April's there!" has been the yearly aspiration of my
homesick soul, which takes no account of east winds and leaden skies,
but only of chaffinches and apple boughs, just as Browning's did. My
birds are the skylarks above those fen-meadows, and the flower I think
of first my favourite lily-of-the-valley, of which I carried a great
bunch, with the dew still on it, to the cathedral on my
wedding-morning. And those golden May evenings, when we wandered back
along the empty road, after setting our friends on their homeward
way--I see them in some of Leader's pictures, which, if I were rich,
I would buy to live with me, for that reason only. The friends could
dine with us at the then usual hour, and still get home before the
slow twilight passed into night--a thing impossible in this country.
They were the last hours that we spent together--all young things
then, but now grey and elderly, though I cannot realise it; three of
them widows, most of them grandmothers, but never old to me, nor I to
them. For more than thirty years we have not met, and there have been
long gaps in our correspondence; but friendship has survived all,
unchanged. They still write to ask when they are to see me, and I
still write back to make provisional appointments which I can by no
effort contrive to keep.
I was married on the 25th of April 1870. On the same date of the
following month I left them all, never--as now seems only too
probable--to return. We buoyed ourselves up through the anguish of the
last farewells with a promise, made in all good faith, that I should
come back in five years. My husband promised to bring me. "We must
save up," we said to each other, "and have a holiday then." It was an
easy thing to plan, but proved too difficult to carry out. After we
became a family, going anywhere meant going as a family, and taking
all the roots of its support and livelihood with it. Theoretically, I
could have run home alone, if not in five years, in eight or ten--we
could have afforded that--but practically it was as impossible as that
we should all go, which we could never afford. So here we are still,
and my poor mother, who lived to the last on the hope that we had
given her, has long been in her grave. There is no trace of an English
home to go back to now.
We went alone to London for two or three busy days. Friends of G.'s,
whom I had never seen before, adopted us for the time, and fathers and
mothers could not have done more for us. They furnished our cabin in
the docks, and attended to our luggage--we saw neither until we went
on board at Plymouth--and pressed help and comfort of every kind upon
us. The ship's regulation against private liquors was set at naught by
a great box that stood in our cabin throughout the voyage, placed
there by the order of one of these friends. The box was a complete
wine-cellar, containing, in addition to wines of the best and dozens
of soda water, an assortment of choice cordials and liqueurs, the like
of some of which we have not tasted since. There was a particular
ginger-brandy--administered to me in the cold, wild weather of which
we had so much--that we have tried to get at various times in vain.
What we get is as moonlight unto sunlight compared with that
ginger-brandy of the ship. I may say that the donor was a London wine
merchant in extensive business. Not we only, but many a sick and
shivering fellow-passenger had cause to bless his generous heart and
hand.
Our last sight of this gentleman and his family was on Paddington
platform, whither they had driven us after a festive farewell dinner,
at which our healths were drunk and good fortune invoked upon our
journey. We sat in the train, and they piled their parting presents on
our laps. One of them brought me a fine pair of field-glasses to look
at flying-fish and porpoises with--I use them now, daily, to watch the
approach of family and visitors coming across Hobson's Bay; another
rushed to the bookstall that had already supplied us with all its
papers, bought a complete set of Dickens' novels, and tumbled them in
armfuls upon the carriage seat beside us, just as the train was moving
off. Australian hospitality cannot surpass that of those kind people,
to whom I had been a perfect stranger two days before.
Most of the night, as we travelled down to Plymouth, I talked with paper
and pencil to my beloved ones at home. For change of position, and to
get better light, I knelt on the carriage seat for a time, spreading my
sheet on the leather of the back. Our one fellow-traveller, a stout
clergyman, dozing since we started in his distant corner, woke up to see
what I was doing, and remonstrated with me. "Don't you think," said he,
"that you had better try to sleep a little now, and write your letters
in the morning?" In the fulness of my heart, I told him that I did not
know how much of the morning might be left me, and the pressing reasons
that there were for making the most of my time. Then he informed us that
he too was to sail for Australia to-morrow, and by the same ship; and it
immediately transpired that he was the person for whose sake that ship
had been chosen for us. We had arranged a later start by one of Green's
line, when a venerable archdeacon, visiting us at our rectory, urged us
to change to one of Money Wigrams', because he knew of a Melbourne
clergyman who was going in her. The clergyman had his wife with him,
which our archdeacon thought would be so nice for me. With great
difficulty we transferred ourselves, anticipating advantages that we did
not get. The Melbourne clergyman--here revealed--was a good man, but an
uncongenial companion at close quarters; his wife--she was his second,
and had been the servant of his first--was more so, and a terrible
stirrer-up of strife amongst the other lady passengers. She had embarked
in London.
I remember the look of Devonshire in the early May dawn. My
grandmother had died at Ottery St. Mary, and I loved the pleasant
county and for years had wanted to explore it. But this was all I ever
saw of its beautiful face--Ivy Bridge (was that the name?), one scene
that has not faded, and the place where the railway ran close beside
the sea. We reached Plymouth at a ghastly hour before anybody was up.
At the hotel recommended to us by our latest friend we were shown into
a room where the dirty glasses and tobacco ashes of the night before
still defiled the air and the tablecloth. Here we sat until a bedroom
was ready for us, when we went to bed--which seemed a most useless
proceeding--until there was a fair chance of getting breakfast. A bath
and a good meal pulled us together, and then we went out for our last
walk on English ground. A charming walk it was, exploring that old
town--I would give something to be able to repeat it--and a sweet
conclusion to our home life. We returned to our hotel for a bite of
lunch, hired an old man and a barrow to trundle our few things (the
heavy baggage having been put on board in London) to the waterside,
and after him a waterman and a boat, and got out to our ship lying in
the Sound--the first we saw of her--at a little before noon, which was
her advertised sailing hour. The newspapers called her a "fine
powerful clipper ship of 1150 tons," and boasted that her saloon,
which was "a very spacious apartment," could "accommodate forty
passengers with ease." We were thirty-two and a baby, which seemed
just to fill it comfortably. Such were the mammoth liners of those
days. As we were rowed up to her gangway, bashful under the eyes of a
number of keenly-interested spectators, whose heads hung over the
bulwark, we thought her wonderful.
The wife of our latest acquaintance received us on deck, but all she
wanted of us was information as to where her husband was and what he
was doing. We could not tell her; we had not seen him since our
arrival in the town. She could do nothing but watch for him, fuming;
and we went to our quarters and our discoveries of the comforts there
provided for us by the thoughtfulness of our London friends. We had
one of the only two large cabins on the ship; the other was the
captain's; the rudder clanked between us and him, behind the bulkhead
at the end of our wide curved sofa, where the pillow, tucked into a
bright rug, was a full-sized feather bed, a wedding present that at
first we did not know what to do with, but which soon proved the most
valuable of them all, as it still is, in the form of plenty of soft,
fat cushions all over the house. I spent a large part of my days at
sea reclining upon this downy mass, which began below my
shoulder-blades and sloped upward nearly to the ceiling; as I lay I
could look out of and down from the row of stern windows that made one
side of my couch, and watch the following birds and fishes--sometimes
a shark beguiled with a piece of pork--without lifting my head. It was
an envied place in the tropics, when the air swept free to the main
deck through open doors; but in rough weather--and it was nearly all
rough weather--the swing of the sea-saw was killing. It used to fling
me out of bed over a high bunk board until I was black and blue with
my falls, and it kept me sea-sick the whole voyage.
We "settled up" our room according to our inexperienced notions, and
at four o'clock we sat down to dinner in the "cuddy," still in port.
Excellent dinners we had at that odd hour for dining, which was the
regular hour, and really a very suitable one under the circumstances
of sea life, breaking up the long day of which most of us were tired
by the time the first dressing-bell rang at half-past three. The
function practically occupied the afternoon, and, as I said, was
carried out to the satisfaction of all save those who would never have
been satisfied with anything. That the company could feed us so well,
and lodge and carry us, for less than ten shillings a day argued good
management, but I think they must have relied on the dead cargo for
their profits. We were in Plymouth Sound on Sunday morning. On Sunday
evening a party of passengers went ashore to attend church. "Mind,"
said the captain, "if a wind gets up while you are away, I shall not
wait for you." But no wind stirred that night, nor all the next day,
nor the next. Our clergyman friend (without his wife) darted to and
fro, for he was confident that no ship would venture to leave a person
of his importance behind, but we dared not risk it. We spent our time
leaning over the poop-rail, gazing at the dear land, so near and yet
so far, and thinking of our mourning relatives, with whom we might
have been if we had known. When I was not doing that, I was writing to
them. On Wednesday morning, the 1st of June--we had embarked on
Saturday--the post-bag was closed for the pilot, and I looked my last
on England through a grey sheet of rain.