OVER THE BORDER
My experiences of life in Australia, long in time, have been narrow in
space. Of the thirty years of this chronicle, not six months were
spent outside Victoria.
In earlier times I paid little visits to Albury, just over the border.
We drove from Y---- in our first buggy, which was bought there, taking
the babies to a house that was full of playmates for them, and where a
couple more or less added nothing to the family cares. Looking out of
my window one morning I realised why this was so. In a back-yard
below, on a kitchen chair, sat the hostess's young widowed
sister-in-law, who lived with her and was the mother of two; these
two, my two, and the dozen or thereabouts of the family proper, sat or
stood round her like a class in school, and from a huge basin on her
lap she fed the lot, each in turn, a spoonful at a time, round and
round, until the supplies were exhausted. The serious faces of the
little ones as they opened their mouths wide one after the other
showed they were not at games, but performing a duty they were
accustomed to. When I went down to breakfast I was quietly informed
that the children had had theirs and gone out to play. But I think my
clearest memory of Albury is of the splendid Fallon vineyards and
cellars, in which one morning a hospitable proprietor offered us
tastes of his famous brands in innumerable little glasses, which
politeness constrained me to "sample" at all costs. Taking but a sip
of each, I reckoned that I must have swallowed a quantity fully equal
to my daily allowance for a fortnight; and we drove home in the sun
directly afterwards. I am proud to say that, although not a seasoned
vessel, I passed the ordeal undisgraced even by a headache--my late
host had confidently predicted it--otherwise I should not tell this
tale.
Then I once went to Tasmania--for four hours. This was not very long
ago, and I have ever since been awaiting opportunities to extend my
acquaintance with that charming place--so green, so cool, so rich in
the quality of its earth and all that springs from it, rightly
entitled to its name of the "garden island" as far as my skimming eye
could judge. Being out of health, I had taken one of those sudden
longings for the sea which come over me at such times, an instinctive
animal craving after the natural remedy for my complaint; and I had a
friend in the captain of a smart steamer plying to Tasmanian ports. An
invitation to a trip, as a privileged passenger, was too tempting to
be refused. Thus I found myself one morning, tucked up in pillows and
a 'possum rug in a long chair on the bridge, eating my breakfast of
fried fish and coffee while I gazed at the Tasmanian shore, which we
skirted between ports for several hours. We were near enough to
discern the little farmhouses in the nooks of the hills, the little
figures of milkers and carters, and housewives hanging the wash on the
clothes line; and there was a beautiful coach-road running up and
down and round the corners amongst the trees that I shall never be
satisfied until I have driven over. I have spoken of it to those who
have, and they tell me that imagination cannot conceive of it as more
beautiful than it really is, given the right season and weather.
By-and-by we turned a corner ourselves and steered into a channel that
presently opened out into a little inland bay, a little port,
connected by a toy railway with Launceston. Its little town and
wharves, where other ships were loading and unloading, occupied a
section of the wooded hills enclosing it; elsewhere the green
basin-rim was dotted with nestling homes, and their orchards and
gardens. It was towards noon, and I was called to an early lunch,
after which the captain appeared in mufti to take me for a walk. We
were through the streets in a few minutes, and on a quiet road lined
with great holly-hedges, a mighty tree of which, one blaze of scarlet,
stood in a garden where the earliest spring flowers were sprouting
from rich brown earth such as I had never seen on this side of the
world. We followed the course of the bay as it narrowed in amongst the
hills until it became a mere woodland brook burrowing under the
bushes. The grass was lush and dewy, and the colour of the soil, where
the path revealed it, as delightful to English eyes as the colour of
flowers. It was too early for more than a sprinkling of these, but I
filled my hands with ferns and other vernal treasures that told me
what a Paradise the land would be in a few weeks if that was a fair
sample of it. We "hustlers" of the mainland think it a fine place to
visit in the hot weather, but far too dull and behind-the-times to
live in; but to those who love Nature and a quiet home, and find
their intellectual resources in themselves, what an ideal environment!
"Here," said I to the captain, as we strolled back to the ship, "is
where I should like to spend my last days--to rest when work is done."
The idea obscured for a time the settled plan of my life, which is to
get "Home" somehow before the final event. We sailed in the afternoon,
and from the bridge I watched the fading of the green land as I had
watched its unfolding, but feeling now that it was my friend for life.
Now and then you look into a face which gives you the masonic sign of
a natural affinity, absent in fifty faces that ought to be more dear;
thus it was with Tasmania, which captured my heart at the first
glance.
The furthest and the chiefest of my few jaunts abroad was to the
mother-city of the mother-state--Sydney. And there is no place like
Sydney. I am firm on that point, although I am a Victorian, in whom
such an admission is rank heresy; and a son of mine who has spent
several Long Vacs. there--in summer, when I would not go near it--is
even more decidedly of the same mind. It was in the year following
that of my illness in hospital, and while I was enjoying my fresh
lease of life, that I took the journey after several false starts.
The captain--an intimate friend in private life--of an Orient liner
telegraphed to me his arrival in port, the hour of his departure for
Sydney, and the information that cabins had been reserved for me. Two
of them, I found when I got on board. As I did not travel with a maid
I took but one, which afforded twice the accommodation that I had paid
for; even that I only occupied for a night. It was a stormy night, and
at daybreak the captain and stewardess surveyed from the doorway a
wretched object in the lower bunk, and it was ordered that I be
brought upstairs to the commander's quarters. His cabin on deck had
been my drawing-room the evening before; it now became my lodging
altogether until we reached port. In the fresh air blowing through it,
and after a light meal of champagne and biscuits, I recovered my
equilibrium, and was able to thoroughly enjoy myself all day. Then the
captain betook himself to the chart-room, where he had a bed that the
weather did not allow him to use, and his servant wedged me in with
pillows as I lay, still wearing the becoming and comfortable
dressing-gown of semi-public life. I had promised not to undress, in
view of his intention to fetch me up to the bridge when the little
world below had done with us, that I might be gratified by the sight
of a storm at sea under circumstances quite outside the common
experience and never likely to occur again in mine. It was officially
a "full" gale, and the newspapers of the next morning reported the
velocity of the wind to have been up to eighty miles an hour. It was,
moreover, the depth of winter and the dead of night. The turmoil of
the sea was tremendous, but it did not upset me now; I was quite well
and happy, swinging to the heavy roll and pitch of the ship in the
soft but tight clasp of my wedging pillows, thankful that no feeling
of sleepiness came to waste the time that was storing such romantic
impressions. Presently the skipper called at the half-open door. He
had oilskins and a woollen scarf, into which I was buttoned and tied;
he dragged me out into the storm, and somehow we staggered and
struggled over the swimming deck and up the stairs to the bridge and
the chart-room, where I spent half of the most wonderful night of my
life, with him and the helmsman and the spirits of the Deep. The
picture of that midnight sea could not fade from my memory in a
thousand years. Looking down from our high platform in the air at the
bulk of the vessel under us, big mail steamer that she was, the
thought of her as man's work, effectually defying, as it seemed, the
whole weight of the Universe, was more inspiring than words can say.
Still more wonderful was the fortitude and vitality of two ships that
passed us, fighting against the furious wind and not being hurtled
along before it as we were. I was sure they were foundering, but not a
bit of it--they were only going to be late at their destination.
We were early at ours, passing through Sydney Heads at daybreak before
pilots expected us. When I went down to my cabin to dress I found my
belongings stowed on the upper bunk and the rest of the room wet from
the deluging seas that had swept us through the night. It was raw and
grey now, but calm within the harbour, the loveliness of which did not
reveal itself to me immediately. I was too rushed to get my hair done
and my shore clothes on to have time to look for it. Here we have
three hours of smooth water on which to make landing toilets; Sydney
has but a few minutes. When I returned, cloaked and bonneted, to my
late host, his successor was with him, awaiting me; and I was soon at
breakfast on shore, making the acquaintance of what I believed to be
the most charming city in the southern hemisphere. Well, at anyrate,
it is incomparably charming to me. Of course, if I had gone there as a
friendless woman, to struggle for a living in cheap lodgings, I might
have pronounced it ordinary--even horrid, a term that I once actually
heard applied to it by a mole-eyed person to whom it had never given a
good time. Or if I had gone again, to get second impressions. Or if
the weather--that arbitrary dispenser of joy and beauty--had not been
as heavenly-sweet as it was for all the three weeks of my sojourn
there. My letters from home reported rain, snow, dull skies, bad
colds, a thorough winter of discontent; I was out every day in
sunshine tempered with cool sea winds, an exhilarating freshness that
made a bit of fur and an evening fire comfortable; and the wild
flowers of spring were beginning to speckle the hills--cascades of
something like white foam surrounded a rocky lunching camp on a
memorable occasion--although it was only July.
I cannot recall one hour that does not bring pleasant thoughts to
mind. Even at night I lay with the gleaming harbour under my eyes
whenever I liked to open them to look, and I loved the strange
experience of having my room flooded as with a search-light by the
revolving beam of the great South Head Light. As an early riser I
habitually wake at dawn, and then I watched the moving ships--a
pastime I could never weary of--until called to my bath. They curved
in and right up to the thresholds of our doors--that is one of the
features of this harbour which few others can match. The masts seem to
grow out of the streets, and you can step from the deck of a great
liner to your cab as easily as from one room to the next.
At breakfast the programme for the day was submitted, and always it
had been carefully compiled so as to comprise as much variety of
pleasure as possible. I was taken on a cursory tour over the city the
first day--round the Domain and through the main streets and
beauty-places, to get that first good impression which has so much to
do with the after ones. I was enchanted with Sydney--even with the
narrow and twisted thoroughfares that are the mock of all good
Melbournites; they give "bits" of architectural composition delightful
to the uncommercial eye. In the evening we went to the theatre, and
afterwards to Parliament House, where the debaters came between whiles
to speak to us, and where I enjoyed a quite new and intensely
interesting experience up to one o'clock in the morning. Next day I
was at the Prorogation, and members entertained us with champagne in
private rooms, and I was shown parliamentary life behind the scenes. I
remember Lord Brassey was there, a visiting yachts-man, whom we did
not then anticipate would be anything more to us. As the hero of _The
Voyage of the Sunbeam_--then lying in Farm Cove, open to sightseers--I
looked at him a great deal, and also at the author of that book, who
at the ceremony sat just before me with her little daughters. She was
having her last taste of travel and of life.
The afternoon of the same day brought quite a change of scene. That
very nice man, the current American Consul, came to fetch us to a
function that was after my own heart--the "send-off" of a popular
American actress by the San Francisco mail. I cared nothing who the
honoured person was; to assist at the departure of a ship was enough
for me. In a carriage piled with flowers we drove to the quay, and
there took tender for the _Zealandia_, lying in Lavender Bay. Before
the arrival of the heroine of the occasion I investigated the ship
that was to carry her--wondering if the day would ever come when such
an one would carry me. Then the crowd gathered until all one's wits
were needed to avoid being crushed in alley-ways and corners. The
distinguished traveller did not impair the effect by arriving too
early; her company preceded her, also her humble husband, hugging her
jewel-box to his breast as he hunted for the purser to take it from
him and deposit it in the strong-room, and while still unrelieved of
his responsibility naming to us and the general public the enormous
sum that it was worth. When at last she came--such a small and
ordinary-looking, every-day woman compared with the glittering stage
vision of the previous night--she was nursing and guarding a strange
bundle of her own, which, when opened in her cabin, disclosed a little
native bear that she was taking home to make a pet of. The wallet that
was to be its travelling house was lined with fur and had been
carefully constructed for the purpose, and a consignment of the
animal's natural foods was amongst her luggage. We crowded into her
room, where more champagne flowed, not always into the right
receptacles; bouquets were presented--they heaped her bed--and
speeches made. Then visitors were rung off the ship, and sat round in
their various small boats to cheer and wave handkerchiefs while the
_Zealandia_ got under way, and then chased the stately liner as long
as they could keep up with her. Our golden-haired friend was kind
enough to stand where we could see her, and was still hugging the fur
bag with the little bear in it as we looked our last. When we regained
the Consul's carriage he took us a drive round the Domain for the
balance of the afternoon, that loveliest hour when Sydney glows pink
in the setting sun and the whole scene is steeped in a dream-like haze
that I never saw in any other place. I suppose the smoke and other
breathings of the city, blending perhaps with exhalations of the sea,
weave that wonderful veil. It is certain that the paintings of a
sinking sun upon distant ranges in the country are never so beautiful
as when there is a Bush fire about.
Next morning to Lane Cove--the first of the unforgetable series of
excursions about that harbour which indeed the wildest boasts of its
shore-dwellers could never do justice to. In the bright winter
weather, which to all intents and purposes was spring--the mean
temperature of Sydney, by the way, is two degrees above that of Nice,
and roses are never out of flower the whole year round--I suppose I
saw it at its best. We landed from the steamer on a bosky and solitary
shore, and basked awhile on beach boulders encrusted with oysters,
before climbing the steep paths to look at views. My son tells me that
when he goes on these excursions with his young parties they take
bread and butter and their pocket-knives with them, so that they can
sit down to a meal of oysters at any place or time. There was another
charming drive in the afternoon; in the evening theatre again, and a
midnight visit to a great newspaper office, where I was initiated into
the mysteries of newspaper production by all the modern processes,
including that of photographing by electric light.
Next day to Coogee--an ocean shore, with great breakers thundering on
it. Here lived a literary wife and painter husband in a little wooden
house perched high upon the cliffs, where I think we lunched. A
Saturday night party of authors, artists, and press-men--my host was a
distinguished member of the latter clan--completed another day in the
most brilliant manner. Talk of good company! I smile when I compare
that party with any Society party that I ever attended. But no
comparison is possible.
It is one of my delightful memories of Sydney, that it had this
intellectual kernel at its heart. I might not have found it in a
lifetime had I entered the social life of the place by any other door,
and so I hardly like to say that we have nothing of the kind in
Melbourne, where my opportunities of search are limited. But friends of
my own profession, who know the resources of both capitals, agree in
the opinion that there really is nothing like it here. The number of
representatives of letters and the arts, to whom mind and not money is
the essential thing, may be as great, but there is no cohesion amongst
them. They are lost in the general crowd. The little guild in Sydney
was a compact and living body, and carried out its objects in uniting
together with a sincerity rarely to be met with in the history of
clubs. Subscriptions were not the first consideration--nor the second,
nor the third; the question of its outward appearance was of the least
importance. No gilding, no formality, no aesthetics--liberty and ease,
any sort of a chair, a pipe and the right companionship--that was the
idea; and it was good indeed to see the traditions of the intellectual
life respected in that way.
I was its guest at a conversazione on the Wednesday following the
Saturday supper-party. The intervening time was filled with fresh and
bright sensations--more harbour trips, alternating with rambles about
the old quarters of the town, the "Rocks," Argyle Cut, the
Observatory, those blind streets and steep stairs from one tier to
another, which struck me as so romantic and un-Australian; and the
Arts Club's entertainment made the best possible contrast and relief
to these. We did not dress too much. I was advised that my skirt must
clear the ground, and for the rest a modest fichu and elbow sleeves
seemed the most that good taste permitted. We set forth on foot in the
cool darkness, comfortably untrammelled, and on arrival were received
by our friends of the previous Saturday and many more, who piloted us
through a series of little rooms, which were soon packed to the point
where a dress-train would have rendered its wearer altogether
immovable. We squeezed from place to place, a step at a time, ever
meeting somebody or something to make us positively enjoy the heat and
crush. Chairs and necessary tables, a piano, a blackboard, a raised
platform or two, comprised the furniture of the homely suite; its
ornaments were sketches pinned all over the walls, and the scientific
and artistic things that covered the tables, outspread for the ladies'
amusement. The mural decorations were fine. Phil May was a leading
light of the society, and the grimy and bedaubed plaster laughed with
his conceits at every turn. Amongst them was a portrait of the then
Governor of New South Wales, Lord Carington, as an utterly
disreputable vagabond. With no name to it, it was such a speaking
likeness of him, as he would have been if he could have metamorphosed
himself into such a character, that no one mistook the subject for an
instant. It was a focus of mirth the evening through. I wonder what
became of it? It might have been disrespectful, but it was a work of
art, and I think he who had inspired it would have valued it as much
as anybody. When, amongst other entertainments, this gifted
artist--and his equally (I used to think more) gifted colleague, "Hop"
of the _Bulletin_, who, still remaining with us, has not shared his
comrade's fame--drew "lightning sketches" on the blackboard with a
lump of chalk, we saw pictures that it was indeed a wicked waste to
destroy for ever a few seconds after they were made. Consummate
artfulness as well as art was employed, for the strokes were so put in
that we could not make head or tail of them until only the crowning
one or two were needed; then suddenly the multitude roared as with one
throat, and someone in the audience sat up in confused astonishment,
while everybody else turned to look and laugh at him. The last touch
of the chalk had given us his portrait to the life, with a shade of
caricature more or less, but unmistakable. I have always looked back
to those lightning sketches, so witty, so good-natured, so extremely
clever, as the most refined form of entertainment that I ever enjoyed,
and certainly the most generous. In other rooms were music,
recitations, microscopes, and such things; and everywhere kindred
spirits were intermingling and intercommuning. The ungarnished supper
was carried on trays over our heads--coffee and sandwiches, and cakes
and tarts from the pastry-cook's--and distributed to hands and mouths
with much difficulty and various mishaps; and at last we broke up and
broke away, and trotted home through the beautiful fresh night, still
exhilarated with all the mental champagne we had imbibed, leaving our
hosts, as we were secretly informed, to make a night of it on their
own account over pipes and whisky.
There was yet another Saturday party--the party of them all. We
started out to it in the sweetest weather to be found on earth, sunny
and fresh, the living light of the sky the colour of nemophilas and
the sea like liquid diamonds under it--poor similes both for the glory
of that spring-like winter morning. On foot from Pott's Point to the
Quay, by boat to Mosman's, up the ferny sandstone hills to breezy
heights where I stood enraptured to look upon the Sound and the Heads
and the Pacific outspread below, and down a crooked woodland path to a
sequestered beach, we took our way: and if there had been nothing to
get to at the end, the walk alone would have been a joy for ever. But
on that lonely bit of shore, backed by the steep hills, fronted by the
open gateway of the Heads, stood "the Camp"--the camp, if I may be
allowed to remind the reader (with apologies, owed twice over, to the
camp's proprietors), which I sketched in my novel, _A Marked Man_,
written while the impressions of the place were fresh in my mind. The
proprietors were two members of the Arts Club--men with homes and
families in the city--who made this their private resting-place and
holiday resort. They had gathered a choice assortment of their
fellow-members on this occasion; they were "giving a party." But no
woman had been allowed to take any hand in the affair; their wives
were as much guests as I was; their cook was their old sailor
caretaker, whose huge blocks of cold roast and boiled, hot potatoes
and plum duff, bread and cake from his own camp oven, required no
kickshaws to supplement them. It was a banquet for the gods, with that
sauce of sea air to it. The permanent tent, combined sitting- and
bedroom, was the drawing-room of groups of us in turn; we crowded on
the covered-up truckle beds and the floor (of pine boards, well raised
from the sand) for afternoon tea; at lunch we sat on planks under an
awning, at long plank tables, like children at a school feast. It was
a perfect "spree," but at the back of the merry trifling was that deep
intellectual enjoyment of cultivated minds rubbing together which is
so rare in social gatherings. We strolled in twos and threes along the
lovely little beach, and sprawled under the bushes, and talked,
talked; a few games had been provided, but there were no blanks to
fill with them after lunch had crystallised us. The walk back to the
boat was the best of all. The sun was setting as we climbed out of the
glen of the camp, and, looking back from points of vantage as we rose,
we saw the moon swim up over the North Head--black as ebony above the
pale glitter of the water, while all other visible land was wrapped in
that beautiful rosy haze which so glorified every feature of it. Then
the great South Head Light began its revolutions, pouring over us and
the darkening path at intervals of a minute. I do not know how far
that long ray reaches, but I know that it is brilliant in the eyes of
the homing traveller for hours before his steamer makes the Heads.
It was on the following morning that we took boat for Watson's Bay,
and stood near the lighthouse to look down the sheer wall at the foot
of which the _Dunbar_ was wrecked, one only of her living freight
surviving to tell the tale. It was awful to think of that event with
the scene under one's eyes--the jagged cliff face going down and down,
the thundering whirlpool raging at the bottom of it; and this was a
sunny Sunday morning, and that was pitch-black night, so thick with
rain and storm that a careful navigator accustomed to the port could
not see the beacon lit for him. But it was not, I think, the present
light; it could not have been.
Those out-door excursions and intellectual entertainments--and I have
not named the half of them--come first in my memories of this time;
they are the pictures "on the line"; but around them were packed many
social incidents of a less special but still interesting kind. We went
to men-o'-war parties, which are always charming--the German
_Bismarck_ in particular was splendidly hospitable--and the American
Consul took pleasure in giving us dinner-theatre evenings. Between
whiles we gave parties at home, and filled the interstices with
drives. And so every day was a full holiday, and I was always well,
and the sky was always blue and the sun shining. And so, when people
ask me what I think of Sydney, I tell them that it is an earthly
Paradise. Nothing will shake that conviction--until I go again.
I returned home overland, rather than descend to the status of an
ordinary passenger on a steamboat to whose captain I was unknown, and
I left my glass slipper on the Redfern platform. "Would you," implored
a strange lady at my carriage window, as the express was about to
start, "oh, would you mind taking charge of this little girl, who is
travelling to Melbourne alone?" She handed up a child, and what could
I do? I said I was not accustomed to taking charge of myself, that I
had never made the journey before, and was not going as far as
Melbourne; but she was sure it would be all right. What a night I had,
with no sleeping berth available! And in the dark of the raw morning,
when we were bundled out at Albury and into the hands of the Customs'
officers, while looking after the child's luggage I lost my own, and
did not recover it for months afterwards. And then I landed at W----,
chilled to the bone and exhausted with my fatigues, and had to wait
many hours for the B---- branch train; and finally reached home to
find winter again and all kinds of arrears of work awaiting me. I sat
down to mend the stockings, and two days later there was snow upon the
ground.
After all, that was the best part of it.