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Title: A Fragment of Autobiography
Author: Henry Lawson
eBook No.: 2200461h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: 2022
Most recent update: 2022
This eBook was produced by:
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A Fragment of Autobiography
by
Henry Lawson
Published in A Camp-Fire Yarn, The Complete Works of Henry
Lawson, Volume 1,
complied and edited by Leonard Cronin, Lansdowne Press, 1984.
Contents
1. The Tent and the
Tree
2. The Old Bark School
3. The Selection and a Sketch of Grandfather
4. Loneliness and a Trade
5. Father
6. Sydney
7. Untitled
8. Untitled
9. "The Republican"
10. Father's Death
1. The Tent and the Tree
I had a dreamy recollection of the place as a hut; some of my
people said it was a tent, on a good frame—for Father was a
carpenter, but Mother tells me that he built a little bark room in
front, lined with "scrim" papered with newspapers, with a
white-washed floor with mats, a fireplace in front, by the side of
the door, and a glass door!—relic of the rush, I suppose. The
tent was the same that I was born in, on the Grenfell goldfield,
some three years before, and had been brought back to Pipeclay.
There was a tree in front of the tent—or hut—a blue-gum
I think, and I know it had a forked trunk; and on the ground
between the tree and the hut had stood a big bark public house, one
of seven in the gully in the palmy days of Pipeclay. Some of the
post holes were there yet, and I used to fall into them, until
Father filled them up. Pipeclay had petered out before my people
went with the rush to Grenfell. Pipeclay was a stony barren ridge,
two little gullies full of diggers' holes caving in, a little brown
flat, a few tumble-down haunted huts, an old farm or two on the
outskirts, blue-grey scrub, Scotch thistles, prickly pears,
Bathurst burrs, rank weeds, goats, and utter dreariness and
desolation. But the hills were still blue in the distance. I took
screaming fits, they said, and would lie down and roll out of the
tent, through the room and across the flat till I was tired; then
I'd sleep. But this was before I became conscious of the World.
That tree haunted my early childhood. I had a childish dread
that it would fall on the tent, I felt sure it would fall some day.
Perhaps I looked up, and the white clouds flying over made the top
of the tree seem to move. The tent and the tree are the first
things I remember. They stood there back at the beginning of the
World, and it was long before I could conceive of either having
been removed.
There was Father and Mother and a baby brother, but I
seemed to come into the world alone—they came into my
life later on. Father said that I suggested throwing the baby down
a digger's hole, or drowning him, like a surplus kitten. They say I
got a tin of jam one day and obstinately denied it, though my
mouth, hands, and pinny were covered with jam; which was strange,
for I was painfully and unhappily conscientious and truthful for
many long years.
When I was about three, or three and a half, I read the paper,
they tell me—or at least I thought I did. I'd get it and
stare at it hard, and rustle it as I'd heard it rustle when Father
turned it. About this time I was butted by a billy-goat—and I
carry the scar, and several others, on my head to this
day—but I don't remember the goat. It belonged to Granny.
Grandfather had bullock teams and a sawpit. Granny lived in an old
weatherboard place, that had been a public house, about a hundred
yards further along in the World. I used to go to Granny's and get
coffee. I liked coffee. One day she told me that the blacks had
come and drank up all the coffee and I didn't like the blacks after
that. I don't remember that the old lady had any special points
about her, except her nose and chin, but I was extremely fond of
her until the day she died. When I was about four and my brother
two we had a song about Aunty—Aunty to come. Sometimes Mother
would tell us that if we sang that song Aunty would come, and we'd
sing it, and sure enough she'd come while we were singing it, and
rush in and kiss us. We thought it very wonderful.
Then a tremendous thing happened. Father built a two-roomed slab
and bark hut over on the flat on the other side of the
gully—and on the other side of the World as it was then; and
Grandfather came with a load of stringy-bark slabs, and
stringy-bark poles for a kitchen. And Granny and the rest were
going to Mudgee (about five miles away) or to some other place away
out of the World. The dining-room had a good pine floor, and there
were two dogs, and a church with a double tower, and a sentry on
the mantel-shelf, and the sofa tick had a holland cover—I
remember this because we weren't allowed to get onto it. About this
time I was put into knicker-bockers, and "come a man", and began to
take an interest in lady visitors. I had two pair of pants, one of
tweed and the other of holland I think, and one morning I tore the
dark pair on a stump. Then a young lady came—a jolly, stylish
girl whom I greatly admired. I was called but didn't show up for
some time. I'd washed my face and damped my hair and combed it, but
it was too wet and all in furrows. I'd dragged the holland pants on
over the tweed ones. I shook hands with the young lady and hoped
she'd excuse me for keeping her waiting, but the fact of the matter
was, I said, that my trousers were broke in a rather awkward place.
I told Mother later in confidence that I didn't think she was very
ladylike or she wouldn't have laughed so. I was very hurt about
it.
But we didn't seem to live in the new house any time before a
more tremendous thing happened. We were in a cart with bedding and
a goat and a cat in a basket and fowls in a box, and there were
great trees all along, and teams with loads of bark and rafters,
and tables upside down with bedding and things between the legs,
and buckets and pots hanging round, and gold cradles, gold dishes,
windlass boles and picks and shovels; and there were more drays and
carts and children and women and goats—some tied behind the
carts; and men on horses and men walking. All the world was
shifting as fast as ever it could.
Gulgong, the last of the great alluvial or "poor man's" rushes,
had broken out. And it seemed no time, but it must have been
months, and may have been a year or so, before a still greater
thing than ever happened. Father's party had bottomed on payable
gold, and we went with Mother and some aunts on a trip to Sydney.
We saw Grandfather at Mudgee—he was up with one of his teams,
I suppose: it was in a public house and Grandfather was singing
songs; and we saw Granny at Wallerawang, where the railway was, and
where she'd gone to live. I remember little of the coach journey
down, except that I felt smothered and squeezed once or twice, and
it was jolly. I must have slept a lot. We went to sleep on chairs
in the waiting room at the railway station, and when I woke up
somebody said it was Sydney, and there was a lot of smoke, and it
was raining.
I remember little of Sydney, except that we stayed at a place in
Castlereagh Street and the woman's name was Mrs Kelly. We must have
picnicked at Manly Beach or somewhere, for we had a picture at home
of a Newfoundland dog with the sea behind him, and that picture
meant Sydney to me for a long time afterwards. Mrs Kelly had a
swing in her back yard, and one day I was swinging high and told
Mrs Kelly's little girl that I was going right up to Heaven, and
she said I was a very wicked little boy to say such a thing. I
couldn't understand why. Mrs Kelly's little boy taught us to say:
"Ally-looyer! I hardly knew yer!"
I must have seen and remembered Pinchgut, or else Mrs Kelly's
little boy told me about it, for when I returned to Gulgong I
informed a lady that I'd found out where babies came from—I
was quite sure they came from Pinchgut. I had a new suit of
velveteen knicker-bockers, but I don't remember what Charlie had.
One day we got out in the street and the door shut behind us, and
we got frightened, and lost, and knocked and hammered at the wrong
door, and it opened and we went into the wrong house. It was awful,
but they didn't hurt us. The girls took us up in their arms and
kissed us and gave us cake, and one of them took us home. I
remember that Mrs Kelly was very angry about it, because, she said,
it was a bad house; but we couldn't see anything bad about
it—they might have kept us there, or killed us, or given us
to a policeman; we thought it was a good house.
But a more terrible thing happened. There was a hole in the
fence, where some palings had fallen out, at the bottom of Mrs
Kelly's yard, and through there there was a coach-builder's or
wheelwright's shop—I worked there afterwards—with a big
heap of chips and shavings at the bottom of their yard, against our
fence. One day Charlie and I got through the hole and started to
put shavings and chips back through into Mrs Kelly's yard for her
to light her fire with. We thought it would be a pleasant surprise,
I suppose. But all of a sudden a man came running down the yard
with a saw in his hand, while another man shouted to him from the
shop: "Cut their heads off, Bill! Cut both their heads off!" I
don't know whether I got through the hole first, or Charlie, but
there wasn't much time between us. When they soothed us and got us
a little calmer we were both determined that we wanted to go
straight back home to Gulgong at once.
I remembered even less of the journey home than I did of the
journey down. There was an inn where we stayed for a night, so we
must have taken the coach journey by van and not by Cobb &
Co's. The landlady knocked at the door and asked if we'd take in
another little boy to sleep there for the night, so the place must
have been full. There was trouble in the morning about a bottle of
smelling salts I broke and something I spilt on my
knicker-bockers.
Then the hut on Gulgong, and Father had killed a pig. Mother
asked us if we knew him again, and I said to him,
"Ally-looyer—I—hardly-knew-yer, Father!" And Father
seemed surprised.
He was always working, or going somewhere with an axe or a pick
and shovel on his shoulder, and coming home late. I remember
watching for the glint of his white moles in the dusk, and
sometimes following him out again after tea, when it was moonlight,
and he went a little way with the axe on his shoulder to split
firewood from a log. He worked in a claim in the Happy Valley, and
again on the Canadian Lead. I had childish fancies of Happy Valley,
because of the name, but I saw it in after years, and a more dismal
hole of a gully I'd seldom set eyes on.
Sometimes we'd go for a drive round the fields in a cart with
Mother and one or two other diggers' wives and stop at a claim
where one of their husbands worked. And if it was his shift below
his mate would sing out,﹃Below there! Peter! (or Tom!) Here's
someone wants to see you!﹄and he'd be drawn up all covered with
yellow mullock. I have an idea that those diggers didn't want to be
bothered by their families while they were digging for gold.
Strange to say, there were periods during my childhood when I
seemed to live alone: when Mother and brothers, but not so often
Father, seemed to go completely out of my life. Maybe I dreamed a
lot, or perhaps they were away on visits. But I remember a cubby
house and a boy they wouldn't let us play with afterwards because
they said he was a bad boy. As I grew the feeling of loneliness and
the desire to be alone increased. I had a fondness for dolls,
especially wooden Judy dolls, and later on developed a weakness for
cats—which last has clung to me to this day. My Aunts always
said I should have been a girl.
Aunt Phoebe was living at Gulgong and she had a sewing machine
and a parrot; and there were honeysuckles in front of her house (we
called huts houses—or "places" when they had more than one
room). I believed the parrot understood people and I used to talk
to him a good deal. I used to be there often, and when I was about
six I fell in love with an elderly married lady who kept a lolly
shop next door to Aunt Phoebe's. Her husband was away and she
seemed lonely. She was forty or fifty and she had moles and a
moustache. I remember I went into her shop one day, to buy lollies;
she was busy sewing, and she was worried, and she said "Oh bother!"
and it hurt me so much that I cried. I'd come in the back way and
so I went into the kitchen and dried my eyes on a tea towel. She
seemed greatly affected and comforted me, and gave me a lot of
lollies—and she wouldn't take the penny. I didn't go in to
Aunt Phoebe's until I felt quite sure my eyes were all right. I
kept big things like that locked up tight in my heart; but the lady
told Aunt. I was a very sensitive child.
And there were the diggers, grand fellows—Harry Brentnal
and Jack Ratcliffe and the rest of them, and we had money boxes.
And there were circuses—and one day we were walking with Aunt
and she sad, "Look quick! There's Maggie Oliver." And I locked and
saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was fixing up a
vine round a verandah.
And one night, in a place they called a theatre, I heard another
most beautiful woman sing:
Out in the wide world, out in the street;
Asking a penny from each one I meet.
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Casting my young life in sorrow away!
That infernal song haunted me for years, especially the last
line. There was a pretty woman, living in a hut near us, who used
to sing "Love Amongst the Roses" and have a black eye. I said I
wanted to go and fight her husband—but perhaps she loved him.
About this time I used to tell people that I was going on for
seven. I seemed to stay going on for seven for a long time, but I
began to feel old.
They said that Gulgong was done, and one day Mother and Father
packed up all the things. Next morning we were waked early; there
was a dray at the door and we heard a great scraping overhead.
Suddenly we saw the sky and next moment were nearly blinded by a
shower of pungent stringy-bark dust. Father was taking off the roof
of the hut—for we carried the house with us in those
days.
We were back at Pipeclay again. There was someone living in the
new house on the flat, so we camped for a night or so with the
Spencers. They had also shifted onto the flat and built a slab
house. They used to live in a hut near the tent by the tree, but I
didn't remember them then. I wanted to go across the gully with
some of the Spencers' children and see the tent we used to live in,
but they told me it was gone. Anyway I wanted to see for myself, or
see the place, and whether the tree was still standing, but it was
getting dusk, and the gully was full of dangerous digger holes, so
we weren't let go. We'd brought the lining of the Gulgong hut with
us—"scrim" or bagging with the newspapers still pasted on
it—and our table stood outside, where the dray had dumped it
with the rest of the load; so we children pulled a big piece of the
lining over the table, and let it hang down all round, to make a
cubby house, and we all got under—Spencer had a big family
and it was a tight squeeze. And we compared notes and got chummy
and told stories. They were the first playmates we had, and we
theirs, and we were chums until we were scattered.
The tent and the tree were gone, and Spencer was making a garden
there. But the tent and the tree still stand, in a sort of strange,
unearthly half light—sadder than any twilight I know
of—ever so far away back there at the other end of the
past.
The Old Bark School
Notwithstanding our old trip to Sydney, which we had almost
forgotten—and it's strange how boys forget things of their
childhood which come back to them as men—notwithstanding our
trip to Sydney, the World was encircled by the Mudgee Hills, with
Pipeclay as a centre. Mudgee, the town, five miles away was inside
the World: Sydney was somewhere on the edge of the World, or just
behind. I used to describe Sydney as a place 170 miles from
Pipeclay.
The World could not be flat because of the hills—we
children settled that amongst ourselves. Later on we decided that
it couldn't be round, for the same reason. But we took it for
granted, what we saw of it. The sky was part of the World, of
course, and a dome, just as we saw it, and it ended all round where
it touched the hills or flats. The sun—this was my
idea—went down behind the ridge across the Cudgegong River,
and then all round, behind the Mudgee Mountains, and behind old
Mount Buckaroo in the west and then rose again. It took him all
night to go round. These conclusions of ours gave our first
schoolmaster a lot of trouble later on. Heaven was up above, where
the stars were; God was everywhere; and Satan and the other place
were "down there". It was wicked to point at the moon or swear, or
tell lies; it was also wicked to say "devil".
There was the ghost of old Robertson in his deserted slab hut:
young Fred Spencer saw him one night through the cracks in the
slabs. And there was the ghost of old Joe Swallow in an old stone
hut at the foot of Sapling Gully; and the Chinaman's ghost at the
Chinaman's grave in Golden Gully; and the Hairy Man in Long Gully.
We wouldn't go through any of those gullies after dark. We children
used to go out on the flat in the moonlight and sit in a circle,
and talk about these spooks till we frightened each other, then one
would start to run home and the rest would follow screaming.
Father worked at building and carpentering, round about the
district and in the farming town: Spencer at fencing, clearing,
etc. on surrounding runs, and, sometimes for wages in a claim. I
have described such homes as ours many times in other books; some
were better and some were worse. There was a period of tin plates
and pint pots and brown ration-sugar, bread-and-treacle and bread
and dripping. Cows, pigs, and fowls came later, and there was milk,
butter, eggs and bacon. There were times when the Spencers lived on
bread and tea and "punkin pie". Perhaps I couldn't realise the
sordid hardship and poverty of it now. We couldn't then because we
knew nothing better, and so we didn't feel it.
I hope, in another book, to go deeper into the lives of Bush
people—there is no room here. There was hardship and poverty,
squalor and misery, hatred and uncharitableness, and ignorance;
there were many mistakes, but no one was t? blame: it was
fate—it was fate. The misery and unhappiness that had to be
and couldn't be helped. There were lonely foreign fathers, speaking
broken English, and strangers to their wives and families till the
day of their death. A friend, who knows me, writes:﹃Treated
ruthlessly, Rousseau-like, without regard to your own or others'
feelings, what a notable book yours would be!﹄Yes. But what good
purpose would it serve, even if I could find a publisher? Looking
back, from these, the dark days of my life, to my boyhood and
childhood, I can find many things that were bright and happy and
good and kind and beautiful and heroic—and sad and beautiful
too.
I don't want to write a bitter line, if I can help it, except it
be against my later self. I want to gather all the best things I
can remember and put them in this book; and it will be none the
less true. Perhaps it will be the truest I ever wrote. The dead of
our family have rested for many long years, the living will rest in
good time—and I have grown old in three years.
Shortly after we returned to Pipeclay my brother Peter was born.
I spoke of my money box on Gulgong—I had two pounds ten and I
was given to understand that it went to buy Peter. He was bought
from a Chinaman—not the vegetable variety, but the sort that
used to come round with boxes of drapery and fancy goods slung on
their poles. I still stuck to the Pinchgut idea, but a Chinese
hawker did call at the house on the morning of the day on which the
new baby was sprung on us, and that settled it as far as we
children were concerned. I didn't think that Peter was worth two
pounds ten as a baby, and couldn't see why I should be called upon
to pay for him. I thought it very unjust and brooded over it a bit.
My sense of justice was always very keen. The Spencer children had
been found in wombat holes and they said that was better than being
bought off Chinamen, anyway. But we retorted to the effect that
they hadn't been paid for.
There was an old camp for bullock teams on the flat.﹃Jimmy
Nowlett﹄and "Billy Grimshaw" and others of my earlier characters
used to camp there for quite a spell, sometimes in bad weather, or
to spell their bullocks, which they'd put in a paddock or back in
the ridges. And they'd patch up their wagons and make new yokes,
etc. I've seen the great wool teams, with bales packed high,
rolling along the rough road like ships in a gale; or bogged to the
axle trees with two or three teams of bullocks yoked to one load
and trying in vain to shift. It was cruel for the bullocks. I've
seen them go down on their knees and bellow under the blows from
the heavy handles of the bullock whips. When Jimmy or his mates
were in trouble with their teams we'd be called in and shut up out
of hearing. Great flocks of sheep went by in sections, and mobs of
bullocks. "Wild cow! Wild cow! Keep yer bloody dogs inside!"﹃Dave
Regan﹄and others of my drovers used to call with their dusty pack
horses. I remember Jimmy Nowlett ground up some charcoal and mixed
it with axle grease and rubbed it on my brother Charlie's face: he
rubbed it well into his chin and cheeks with an extra layer under
his nose and assured him that it was the very best
whisker-seed—the only genuine article, and told him to be
careful not to rub it off till the whiskers sprouted. Charlie was a
sight, but he screamed and kicked and wouldn't be washed, and had
to be put to bed with the whisker-seed still on.
Log Paddock had broken out, opposite the old Pipeclay rush, on
the old, level, creek and river frontage land grant that had shoved
the selections back into the barren stony ridges. I remember the
claims being bid for. Down at the far corner of the other end of
Log Paddock the old farmers had built a little slab and bark
chapel. (See "Shall We Gather at the River?": Children of the
Bush.) They got a schoolteacher to camp there and paid him
sixpence or a shilling a head for the children. We went there
first, in charge of some elder children. I told him that my name
was Henery Lawson, and they say he spelled it that way. His was
Hanks. I remember little or nothing of that school, except great
spitting and hard rubbing on slates.
Hanks, they say, used to talk about "improving our moral minds".
There was a hedge of roses—a most uncommon thing—round
a lucerne paddock on the bank of the creek on a farm near the
school, and one day, in lunch hour, some of us went to the farm and
asked permission to pick some roses and were told to take as many
as we liked. We came late back to school, each child with a big
bunch of the flowers. Hanks was waiting for us, and as we came up,
he took the roses, bunch by bunch, tore them to pieces, and
scattered them on the ground, then he marshalled us in:﹃Mary
Cooper, Elizabeth Cooper, Bertha Lambert, Henery Lawson, William
Harvey, etc. etc. Stand up! You are guilty of the crime of
stealing—stealing flowers from a neighbour.﹄Then it occurred
to little Bertha Lambert to say, in a meek voice, "Please Sir, Mrs
Southwick said we could take them."
"Serve out slates," said Hanks, and he turned to the blackboard
and started to set [the lesson].
About this time there was an incident which left a very painful
impression on my mind for years. We had a quince tree at our place
and were strictly forbidden to touch the fruit, which was not ripe
at the time. One day my brother Charlie pulled a quince, and
persuaded me to have a bite. I was always very fond of quinces. I
believe that he gave me the bite out of pure good nature, but the
theft was detected—there were few quinces on that
tree—and Charlie blurted out in terror that I had taken a
bite anyhow. I was stung by a sense of injustice and my indignation
was roused, for I reckoned that he had only persuaded me to have a
bite for fear I might tell on him—or that he wanted me to
share the punishment in case of detection. Bursting with
indignation, and a perverted sense of injustice, I denied that I
had touched the quince at all. Charlie stuck to it, I was believed
because I had always been truthful, and he was severely thrashed.
He begged me to confess and save him ("Henry, you know you did it!
You know you did it!"), but—I don't know what devil possessed
me, save that I was horrified as a liar—but I stuck to the
lie and he to the truth and he got a second dose and was sent
supperless to bed. It was a miserable night and a miserable week
for me. I don't think a boy was ever so conscience-stricken or a
little soul so self-tortured. He forgave me next morning after
breakfast, and might have forgotten all about it in a day or two,
had I let him. I tried every way to "make it up to him"—he
told me not to bother; I said I'd confess—he told me I'd be a
fool if I did, and tried his best to persuade me out of it. But,
months after I confessed. They didn't thrash me; better if they had
and had done with it.
About this time—or I may have been a little
younger—I began to be haunted by the dread of "growing up to
be a man". Also I had an idea that I had lived before, and had
grown up to be a man and grown old and died. I confided in Father
and these ideas seemed to trouble him a lot. I slept in a cot
beside the bed and I used to hold his horny hand until I went to
sleep. And often I'd say to him:﹃Father! It'll be a long time
before I grow up to be a man, won't it?﹄and he'd say,﹃Yes, Sonny.
Now try and go to sleep.﹄But I grew up to be a man in spite of
lying awake worrying about it.
Father and a few others petitioned for a "provisional school" at
Pipeclay—it was Eurunderee now, the black name had been
restored. Father built the school. It was of bark. I remembered the
dimensions for a long time, but have forgotten them now; anyway it
was a mere hut. It was furnished with odds and ends thrown out of
the public school in Mudgee, when the public school got new desks,
stools, and things. Father made blackboards and easels and mended
the rickety furniture. The books, slates, and things were all
secondhand and old.
I believe the population of Pipeclay to have been obstinately,
mulishly honest, whatever else they might have been; but Pipeclay,
in common with many worse and some better places, disliked mounted
troopers. The men and women were uneasy when one was around, the
children were frightened and they hid, and every dog on Pipeclay
hated a mounted trooper and would bark himself into convulsions
when one appeared on the scene. Perhaps the people disliked the
sight of the trooper and were embarrassed by his presence because
they were honest and poor. Bush children are generally shy
of strangers, but I can't account for the dogs—unless it was
the uniform. Young Fred Spencer once told my brother and me, in
strict confidence, that when he was about ten years old he caught a
trooper, tied him to a tree, cut stringy-bark saplings and thrashed
him. And when he was tired his father thrashed him. And when his
father was tired his uncle thrashed him. And then they let him go.
I doubted Fred, but Charlie believed every word. Fred's ambition
was to become a jockey; he is now one of the best riders in the
west and has ridden many races. Charlie was undecided as to whether
he'd join the bushrangers or the mounted troopers—a state of
indecision not uncommon amongst boys before our time, for both
troopers and bushrangers came from the same class.
A selector, an Irishman named John Tierney, was selected as
schoolmaster. He had served in some capacity in the Army in Africa,
a paymaster or something. His strong points were penmanship,
arithmetic, geography and the brogue; his weak ones were spelling,
English grammar and singing. He was six feet something and very
gaunt. He spent some months "training" in the public school in
Mudgee, and had a skillion built onto the school, where he camped.
I don't know whether he made his own bed, but his sister-in-law
used to send his meals up to the school—one or other of us
children used to carry them. I remember carrying a dinner of
curried stew and rice in a cloth between two plates, and a lot of
the gravy leaked out. I suppose the dignity of Pipeclay wouldn't
have stood his cooking for himself.
The Spencers went a couple of miles over the ridges at the back
of Pipeclay to a slab and shingle public school on Old Pipeclay.
Maybe their father thought they would get a better education. We
went there later on—on account of a difference, I suppose,
between our people and Tierney. There were a good many Germans
round; the majority of the farmers were Germans—all the
successful ones were. There were a good many Irish and the yellow
and green had not faded yet. So there was fierce sectarian and
international bitterness on top of the usual narrow-minded,
senseless and purposeless little local feuds and quarrels; but
there is no room for these things in this book.
The first day, one day in the first week at the Bark School, was
a great day in my life, for I was given a copy book and pen and ink
for the first time. The master believed in children leaving slate
and pencil and commencing with pen and paper as early as possible.
While setting me my first copy he told me not to go back and try to
"paint" the letters. I am following that rule in this book, with
reference to sentences. Better to strike out than paint. We had
learned our A B C—and about a Cat, a Bat, and a Fat
Rat—somewhere in the dim past.
It was Robinson Crusoe, by the way, who taught us to
read. Mother got a Robinson Crusoe and used to read to us of
evenings, and when she'd get tired and leave off at a thrilling
place, we'd get the book and try to spell our way ahead. By the
time Robinson Crusoe was finished we could go back and read
the book through from beginning to end. I wonder if Defoe had any
influence on my style? Speaking of books, I was presented, at
school break up, with a copy of a book called Self-taught
Men, for "general proficiency". My people, for some reason,
considered it a very appropriate present. But I wasn't a
self-taught man; the world taught me—I wish it had taught me
common sense and the business side of my trade.
Then the bother commenced. The master explained the hemispheres
to us on the map, and doubled it back as far as he could to show us
how they were intended to come together. We hadn't a globe. I
thought the hemispheres should come round the other way; my idea
was that the dome of the sky was part of the world and the whole
world was shaped like half an orange with the base for the earth,
but I couldn't account for the other half. The master explained
that the world was round. I thought it must have something to rest
on, but I was willing to let that stand over for a while, and
wanted the hill question cleared up. The master got an india-rubber
ball and stuck a pin in it up to the head and told us that the
highest mountain in the world would not have the ten thousandth (or
somethingth) effect on the roundness of the earth that the head of
that pin would on the roundness of the ball. That seemed
satisfactory. He it was, I think, who tied a string to the neck of
a stone ink bottle, and swung it round to illustrate the power of
gravitation and the course of the earth round the sun. And the
string broke and the bottle went through a window pane. But there
was no string from the earth to the sun that we could see. Later on
I got some vague ideas of astronomy, but could never realise
boundless space or infinity. I can't now. That's the main thing
that makes me believe in a supreme being. But infinity goes further
than the supreme.
A favourite fad of the master's was that the school, being built
of old material and standing on an exposed siding, might be blown
down at any moment, and he trained the children to dive under the
desks at a given signal so that they might have a chance of
escaping the falling beams and rafters when the crash came. Most of
us, I believe, were privately resolved to dive for the door at the
first crack. These things pleased Father when he heard them, for he
didn't build things to come down. When the new school was built,
the old bark school was used by the master as a stable and may be
standing still for all I know.
Our school books were published for use in the National Schools
of Ireland, and the reading books dealt with Athlone and
surrounding places, and little pauper boys and the lady at the
great house. The geography said,﹃The inhabitants of New Holland
are amongst the lowest and most degraded to be found on the surface
of the earth.﹄Also:﹃When you go out to play at one o'clock the
sun will be in the south part of the sky.﹄The master explained
this and we had to take his word for it—but then it was in
the book. The geography also stated that in bad seasons the
"inhabitants" of Norway made flour from the inner bark of a kind of
tree—which used to make Father wild, for he was a Norwegian.
Our name, of course, is Larsen by rights.
There was a M'liss in the school, and a reckless tomboy—a
she-devil who chaffed the master and made his life a misery to
him—and a bright boy, and a galoot—a hopeless
dunce—a joker, and a sneak, and a sweet, gentle, affectionate
girl, a couple of show scholars—model pupils the master
called 'em—and one who was always in trouble and mischief and
always late, and one who always wanted to fight, and the rest of
them in between. The children of the Germans were
Australians—and children are children all over the world.
There was Cornelius Lyons who rolled his is like a cock dove and
had a brogue which made the master smile. And there was the
obstinate boy, Johnny B, who seemed insensible to physical pain.
The master called him out one day. "Johnny B, stand out!" Johnny
stood out. "Hold out your hand!" Johnny held out his hand, the
master struck it, Johnny placed it behind his back and held out the
other, the master struck that and Johnny put that hand behind and
held out the first; the master set his teeth, so did
Johnny—and so on for half a dozen strokes. Then suddenly the
master threw down the cane, laid his hand on the boy's shoulder and
spoke gently to him—and Johnny broke down. Looking back, I
don't think it was fair—Johnny could have claimed a foul.
And there was Jim Bullock whose "eddication was finished" at the
Old Bark School. "Oh, yes," he said to me, years later, while
giving me a lift in his dray, "John Tierney finished me
nicely."
Amongst the scholars was a black goanna. He lived in a dead
hollow tree near the school and was under the master's immediate
protection. On summer days he'd lay along a beam over the girls'
seats, and improve his mind a little, and doze a lot. The drone of
the school seemed good for his nerves. They say a black goanna
haunted the tent I was born in, and I remember one in the house on
the flat—I used to see the impression of his toes on the
calico ceiling when he slithered along overhead. It may have been
the same goanna and he might have been looking after me, but I had
always a horror of reptiles.
Sometimes, when the master's back was turned for a minute or so,
one of the boys would cry suddenly: "Girls, the goanna's fallin'."
And then you'd hear the girls squawk. One form of alleged
punishment in the Old Bark School was to make a bad boy go and sit
with the girls. I was sent there once, by mistake. I felt the
punishment, or the injustice of it, keenly; but I don't remember
that I minded the girls. I grew extremely and most painfully shy of
girls later on, but I've quite grown out of that now. In fact, I
rather like sitting with them.
I was slow at arithmetic—it was Father who had the
mathematical head—but I stuck to it. I was, I think, going
into compound fractions when I left school. In '97 when I went to
teach a native school in Maoriland I could scarcely add a column of
figures. I had to practise nights and fake up sums with answers on
the back of the board and bluff for all I was worth; for there was
a Maori girl there, about twenty, as big as I am and further
advanced in arithmetic, and she'd watch me like a cat watches a
mouse until she caught me in a mistake. I was required to give the
average attendance to two points of decimals, and I had to study,
and study hard, before I could do it.
My handwriting was always wretched, stiff and cramped and slow
and painful, and it used to worry me a lot. I changed it many
times, and it was only after I went to England, about three years
ago, that I struck a sort of running round hand which enabled me to
keep within a dozen paragraphs or so of my rate of composition.
The master used to spell anxiety with a "c": i.e.
"anxciety"—and many other words to match. I spelled Friday
with a "y" for many years, was always in doubt as to whether the
"i" or the "e" came first in words like recieve [sic] or believe; I
spelled separate with two "e's" and blare "blair"—and so on,
and so on. Mr Archibald said I used to be a whale at spelling, and
some of my early copy should be interesting reading. A comp. who
used to set my work up on the Boomerang used to complain
that my spelling was demoralising him. It worried me a great deal,
I was very sensitive about it; I'm not now—not a little
bit—I leave it to the comps. Strange to say, my punctuation
was good—that must have "come natural". It's a good plan to
get rid of as many stops as you can.
I was fond of grammar at the Old Bark School, and made rapid
progress in "parsing" or analysis. I don't bother much about
grammar now—it used to worry and cramp me and keep me back
too much when I started to write. My composition was always
good.
Until I was seventeen and went for a few months to a night
school in Sydney, I knew of no monarch of England other than Queen
Victoria—except for a very vague idea of a King William the
Fourth.
I shared the average healthy boy's aversion to school; in fact
it developed into a positive dread, and before I left I had almost
a horror of going to school. Yet I was a "show scholar" or "model
pupil", as the master put it. There were two of us, and I can't
decide now whether we were the makings of noble men or simply
little involuntary and unconscious sneaks, but am rather inclined
to the latter opinion. It seems hard to reconcile the fact that I
hated, or rather dreaded, school, with the fact that I was a model
scholar. Perhaps the last fact accounted for the first. I dreaded
school because I was sensitive, conscientious, and a model scholar,
and I had never yet been punished, and it was a strain to keep up
the reputation. I was always restless, fond of walking, and I hated
confinement. Perhaps that is why, when I started to write, I used
to do most of my work after midnight.
The boys went kangarooing and possum hunting and had their games
and superstitions and a contempt for girls, as boys have all over
the world. Some played the wag and stole fruit, and told lies and
went swimming. I was too conscientious to play truant, and I had a
horror of lying or stealing. I might have been happier had it been
otherwise. But I couldn't resist the swimming. The water-holes in
the creek were full of snags and treacherous, and we were strictly
forbidden to bathe there unless one of the elders was with us.
After a swim we used to rub our faces, necks and hands with dust
lest unwanted cleanliness should betray us.
I was extremely, painfully sensitive, and almost, if not quite,
developed a religious mania at one time (when I was about
fourteen). The mother was very highly strung and had religious
spells. (We went to the other extreme later on in Sydney, during
the free-thought craze of the eighties, and became
free-thinkers—or thought we did.) Father always professed to
be a free-thinker, and he studied the Bible. He was one of the
hardest working, kindest hearted men I ever knew. I have known him,
after a hard day's work, to sit up all night watching a neighbour's
dying child.
I was painfully, unhappily "good", a self-torturer and a
nuisance to my playmates. I remember one day the master, with
woeful want of tact, gave me a note to take home, informing my
people that my brother had played truant from school that day.
Charlie was waiting for me outside the school paddock and begged me
not to take the note home—to save him and tell the master a
fib. He pleaded very hard, but I had to deliver the note. I
suffered a great deal more than he did.
I was strong, as proved in school games, and no coward, as was
also proved, but I wouldn't fight under any provocation, because I
thought it was wrong. Charlie would, on the slightest excuse, and
he often wanted to fight for me and gave me a great deal of anxiety
on that account. Years later, when we were grown to men, Charlie,
who had learned to use his hands, backed me in a fight (girl the
indirect cause, of course) and I lost, after spraining my ankle. He
was very proud of me on account of my pluck, but he bitterly cursed
my lack of science.
I began to be a lonely, unhappy boy, and to be considered a
little mad, or at least idiotic, by some—my relatives
included. My aunts said it was a pity I hadn't been born a
girl.
Father built a new sawn-timber hardwood house on the flat, with
a galvanised iron roof and a brick chimney, which last was the envy
of neighbours who had only slab and clay chimneys.
The mother went to Mudgee for a while, and when she came back
she brought a little stranger and foreigner into the family. We
were tall and dark on Mother's side and generally supposed to have
descended from gipsies. We were hot-headed, impulsive, blindly
generous, and open-hearted and suspicious by turns. Father was
short, nuggety, very fair, with blue eyes; he was domestic,
methodical and practical. The little stranger, one of twins, was
the first and last creamy-skinned blue-eyed baby in our family. She
only stayed a little while—long enough for us to call her
Nettie, short for Henrietta (Granny's name). When the baby fell ill
Mother took her to Mudgee and she died in the room she was born in.
(I was born in a tent, Charlie in a bark hut, Peter in a slab
house, and Nettie and her sister in a brick one.) When Nettie was
dying they sent Mother out of the room, and she sat on a log in the
yard—sat very still, they said, staring up at the stars.
Father was walking fast along the lonely road to Mudgee, but he was
too late. About midnight they called Mother in. The old watchman,
passing just then, cried, "Twelve o'clock and all's well!" I have
often thought how well it was, for there has ever hung a cloud over
our family.
Early in the morning after the funeral, Father took his maul and
wedges and crosscut and went up into the ridges to split rails. I
heard the maul and wedges and the song of the saw until dusk. He
was trying to work it out of him. After tea he walked to and fro,
to and fro in the starlight, with his arms folded and his head
down, but now and again he'd put his hands behind him and take a
few turns looking up at the stars. I pace the room or the yard a
lot nowadays.
When I was nine years old there happened a thing which was to
cloud my whole life, to drive me into myself, and to be, perhaps,
in a great measure responsible for my writing. I remember we
children were playing in the dust one evening and all that night I
had an excruciating ear-ache and was unspeakably sick on my
stomach. Father kept giving me butter and sugar, "to bring it up",
which it eventually did. It was the first and last time I had the
earache. Next day I was noticeably deaf, and remained slightly so
till I was fourteen, when I became as deaf as I am now. Before that
my eyes were bad but my hearing was always very keen. I remember,
one night, when I was in bed, Mother was telling a very pathetic
story to some visitors three rooms away; when she came in she found
me sobbing. I'd heard every word.
3. The Selection and a Sketch Of
Grandfather
I don't know whether Father took up the selection because he had
a liking for farming and believed in the chances or because the
ground was on an old goldfield and he was a digger. He had been a
sailor and had passed in navigation, he had also served in a
shipbuilding yard, and was a good all round carpenter: he was
clever at anything where tools were concerned. I know he had always
a fancy for a vegetable garden and a few fruit trees, but our land
was about the poorest round there, where selectors were shoved back
amongst barren, stony ridges because of old land grants, or because
the good land was needed to carry sheep. Our selection, about three
hundred acres, lay round a little rocky, stony, scrubby, useless
ridge, fronting the main road; the soil of the narrow sidings, that
were not too steep for the plough, was grey and poor, and the
gullies were full of waste heaps of clay from the diggers' holes.
It was hopeless—only a lifetime of incessant bullocking might
have made a farm of the place. I suppose it was the digger's
instinct in Father—for a long time he was always﹃putting
down a shaft﹄about the place in spare times, or thinking about
putting it down. (He had two men on prospecting when he died.)
I'm not going to enter into details of grubbin', clearin',
burnin' off, fencin', ploughin', etc. See "Settling on the Land"
and "A Day on a Selection" in While the Billy Boils; and,
for a description of the poorer class selection, see "Past Carin'"
in Joe Wilson and His Mates. In addition to grubbin', etc.,
we had to reclaim land for ploughing by filling up the diggers'
holes. The shafts were driven underneath, of course, so the whole
of the waste heaps wouldn't go down. We used to "spread" the
lighter dirt—and it didn't improve the poor land; and we
carted the hard lumpy clay away to the boundary in barrows; some of
it we used for making a dam. When I left the Old Bark School, I
used to tail the cattle in the gullies and do a bit of
ring-barkin'. The cattle were a few weedy stunted cows—one of
them barren—and some steers, and were always straying. The
elders were mischievous and demoralised the rest; some of them
could get through, over or under our scraggy two-rail fence. Ditto
the old grey horse—he'd get his fore-quarters over and slide.
Then, when we got new cows one or two of them would be sure to fall
down a digger's hole if we didn't watch sharp. A cow, and sometimes
a horse, would be cropping the grass round the edge of the shaft,
and sometimes, in wet weather, the shaft would fall in, or else the
beast, turning round, would miscalculate and slide down. Then the
cry of "cow in a hole" (it was "man in a hole" once or twice) and
we'd run in all directions and scare up the male population of
Pipeclay; and, provided the beast hadn't fallen head first and
broken its neck or smothered, they'd rig a Spanish windlass and get
it out, little the worse.
It was very scratchy farming as far as I was concerned, but then
I was only a child. I had no heart in it—perhaps I realised
by instinct that the case was hopeless. But Father stuck to it
between building contracts. He used to walk from five to seven
miles to work at first, work twelve hours and walk home again. He'd
insult anyone who offered him the loan of a riding horse—I
never knew a man so obstinately independent as he was in those
days. Then, between jobs, he made a spring cart, wheels and
all—except the iron work. He could make anything in wood.
Then he bought our old grey horse, "Prince"—used to run in
Cobb and Co.'s—I must tell you about Prince some day, and how
he pulled up an hour on the Gulgong road with a heavy spring-cart
load of mails in bad weather, when the coach broke down, but was
never the same horse afterwards. Then, when Father worked in town,
he carted home a load of manure every night and spread it on the
barren ground. And sometimes at night he'd burn off, and dig in the
dam by moonlight. There had been a bullock camp on the level, and
several acres where the old road had been were so hard that even a
bullock plough, which Father hired for the day, couldn't break up
the ground. He broke it later on with charges of blasting powder!
He trenched deep round the house and built frames and planted grape
vines behind, and in front a rose bush and a slip of an ivy plant
that had come from England in the early days. The last time I saw
the place the house was a mass of vines. The mater talked of
christening the farm "Arundel" after Father's birthplace in Norway,
as soon as we got it ship-shape.
I remember the last questions at night would be,﹃Are you quite
sure all the calves are in the pen? Are you quite sure the
slip-rails are pegged?﹄And often at daylight the mater would cry,
"Get up quick, the cows are getting away!" and one of us boys would
turn out and run across the hard-baked sods barefoot, or the frosty
flats in winter—running hard so that the cold and the burrs
wouldn't hurt so much—and head off the cows which had broken
through the fence and were hurrying down the lanes after Spot,
their old wall-eyed ringleader, in the direction of a neighbour's
wheat or lucerne paddock. Prince got very fat one drought and we
couldn't make it out, until one morning a neighbour, getting up
earlier than usual, saw Prince's rump sticking out of his haystack
and hit it hard with a paling. Prince was very much surprised, and
his condition and the mysterious hole in the stack were accounted
for at the same time. I remember, often, on a bitter cold frosty
morning, rooting up a camping cow and squatting with my bare,
perishing feet on the warm spot where she'd been lying.
After we left the Old Bark School we went for a month or so to
the Old Pipeclay School across the ridges. Curtis was the master.
His first idea was to unlearn the Old Bark School scholars all that
Tierney had taught them. I suppose the mater had fallen out with
Tierney, but I used to go to him at night later on and get lessons
in arithmetic and grammar. He'd improved in that branch.
At the Old Pipeclay School I worshipped pretty Lucy W. We were
both going into the fourth class when I left, but she used to go
home in a different direction. My old sweetheart was Mary B the
tomboy of the Old Bark School, but one day we quarrelled and she
said she wouldn't be my sweetheart any more. I think she made up to
Fred Spencer for a while. Fred, by the way, was the Tom Sawyer of
our school. Mary's sister Bertha, a prettier girl, began to look
kindly on me, but I'd had enough of women. Childish recollections
begin to crowd—recollections of child life and
character—but there is no room for them here. It was Curtis,
by the way, who first noticed that I was a solitary child. There
were days, during play hour, when I liked to get away by myself;
and once or twice he tried to draw me out, and asked me whether my
schoolmates had been annoying me. But it wasn't that—I
couldn't explain what it was. Sometimes I'd run home ahead of the
rest, and once or twice Mary came running after me to try to find
out what was the matter, but she soon gave it up. It was while at
this school that my companions first began to say I was
"barmy".
The mother was ambitious. She used to scribble a lot of poetry
and publish some in the local paper. There were nine or ten
daughters in her family, most of them big women and all naturally
intelligent and refined. Almost any one of them might have made a
mark under other conditions. Their lots were cast in the rough
early days, in big bark humpies where all things were rough and
ready and mean and sordid and gipsy-like, and they were brought up
surrounded by the roughest of rough crowds on the goldfields. (My
diggers are idealised, or drawn from a few better class diggers, as
my Bushmen are sketched from better class Bushmen.) Then amongst
those left on the abandoned goldfields, the most unspeakably
dreary, narrow and paltry minded of all communities.
The girls used to try to establish little schools, singing
classes, etc, and humanise the place, but the horizon was
altogether too narrow and hopeless, and, as they grew up, they
became embittered. But they had humour, a keen sense of the
ridiculous, and that saved them to a great extent. Grandfather was
a big, strong man, who came from Kent with his family. Wavy black
hair, worn long, and profile Roman. His people were supposed to
have been gipsies, and he was very gipsy-like in his habits. He had
sight like a blackfellow and was a first class Bushman of the old
school. He was a humourist of the loud-voiced order. When he was
sixty he could handle timber and knock out palings and shingles
with any young man. He had the head of an intellectual man, a
strong man, a leader of men, and he couldn't read or write—a
fact which he hid successfully from many. He liked to camp by
himself in the bush. He"never had no eddication", he'd say,
and he didn't see what his children wanted with it. He drank. At
home he had been known to smash all the crockery and bring home a
string of pint pots and a pile of tin plates and dump them on the
table. He was very mysterious and seldom did things like other men.
For instance, he'd go to Mudgee and buy a string of boots for the
family, but he wouldn't bring them home. No—not he. He'd roar
at one of the girls:﹃D'yer see that shaller digger's hole up there
on the sidin'?﹄"Yes, Father."﹃Then go up there, yer'll find a
piece of bark in the bottom—lift it up and see what yer'll
find.﹄And the girls would find the boots. Again, when they were
all married and had families, he'd visit them in turn, and most
unexpectedly of course, once in years. But he wouldn't come up to
the door and knock. No. In the morning the daughter or one of the
children would look out and see a big man standing at the gate with
his back to the house, or, more likely, leaning on a fence across
the road. Then, "Why, there's father", or "Why, there's
Grandfather", and he'd be brought in. He'd be very clean and have
on a full new suit of tweed, with maybe a dandy pair of shoes and a
little curl at the bottom of his pants—but his old greasy
hat.
"Father, why don't you get another hat?"
"What do I want with another hat? I hain't got two heads, have
I?"
He'd leave as unexpectedly as he came.
He nearly always shouted at the top of his voice, and it was a
big voice.
"Mr Albury, why do you speak so loud?"
Grandfather, roaring: "Because I want people to hear
me!"
I've seen a man roll on the ground and shriek at something
Grandfather said, and heard him, with a face as solemn as a
judge's, tell that man to get up and not be a thundrin' jumpt-up
fool.
Save for "thundrin'" or "jumpt-up" I never heard Grandfather
swear. There's a legend to the effect that one day, in his young
days, he swore so badly at his bullocks that he frightened himself;
but I don't believe that.
I worked with him now and again in the mountains in the
eighties, humping palings and rails out of gullies. He was taking
care of an empty house and camping there. He "had the writin's" (a
letter from the owner, authorising him as caretaker). He had great
faith in "writin's". (See "Uncle Abe", in "Buckolt's Gate",
Children of the Bush.) An ordinary fire wouldn't do
Grandfather, he'd pile on logs till he roasted us to the back of
the room, and sometimes outside altogether. He was a good cook and
very clean in camp; he'd polish up his tinware till he could shave
in it. Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning he'd clean up. The
furniture and things would be chucked out with great noise and
clatter—the furniture was home-made and strong and could
stand it. Then Grandfather would take off his boots, tuck up his
trousers and arm himself with a broom and a mop. My business was to
run to the tank and back as fast as I could with two buckets. We
camped in an outhouse, and when the house was let he was asked to
clean it out for the new tenant. It was a great cleaning—I'll
never forget it. They say the house was damp all summer, but it was
clean. He couldn't do things like an ordinary man. He was fond of
dogs, little mongrel dogs, and he'd talk to them, and they seemed
to understand. But if a strange dog came sneaking round Grandfather
would lay for him. He wouldn't attack that dog in the ordinary way;
he'd heave a chair, or table or something equally handy. I remember
a big hairy thievish dog used to come sneaking round. Grandfather
laid for him. He had just finished making a picket gate and it
stood inside the door. It was dark inside and broad moonlight in
the yard, and when the dog sneaked into the yard he didn't see us.
Suddenly Grandfather jumped up, seized the gate and hove it. It
missed the dog by a hair, struck on one corner and smashed to
smithereens. I never saw that dog again.
He was a great man in Mudgee in the early days. He cleared the
main street and owned blocks of land in town. He lost
them—drink of course. Amongst other things he was an
undertaker. He buried many, and under all sorts of
conditions—some in sheets of bark—and he was in great
demand at burials. He usually had a coffin cut out roughly and
stuck up over the tie-beams of the kitchen to season, and wait. The
family hated this sort of thing. They say he generally had an eye
on the prospective client too, and cut his coffin accordingly.
Jones, the legitimate undertaker, made a palisading for a
child's grave, gave it a coat of paint and stood it outside his
shop to dry. Grandfather, coming along, vaulted into the
palisading, took hold of each side, lifted it, and ran, with Jones
out and after him. Grandfather ran up a blind lane, dropped the
palisading and jumped the fence. Jones took his palisading back in
a dray and nothing would convince him that Grandfather didn't want
to steal it. The old man would suddenly go down on his knees in the
middle of the street and stare hard at a stone till the floating
population gathered round and put its hands on its knees and stared
too. Then he'd get up and go away. And they'd stare harder after
him than they had at the stone.
The last time I saw him in Sydney, he'd bought some tools and a
new carpenter's bag to carry them in. He put the handle of an adze
through the loops of the bag and carried it across his back. Out of
one side stuck an auger and out of the other the blade of a saw. He
walked straight down the middle of George Street, towards Redfern
railway station—the tram wasn't there then—and he
walked fast. It was Saturday evening and the street was pretty
full. Every few yards a passenger, coming in the opposite
direction, would catch sight of the point of the saw or auger and
duck just in time to save an eye or an ear. Heads were bobbing to
right or left all the way. I saw no traces of anger on any of their
faces—just mild, startled surprise. Just such an expression
as a man might wear who has nearly stumbled against a cart coming
out of a lane. An uncle and I walked behind the old man all the way
and enjoyed the show. One would have thought that he was absolutely
unconscious of the mild sensation he was creating, but we knew the
old man better than that.
I don't remember ever hearing Grandfather laugh. Little Jimmy
Howlett (Nowlett in my books) the bullock-driver could throw some
light on the subject. One day he was out looking for a bullock in
the scrub just outside Mudgee, and had sat down to rest and smoke
on a log on the edge of a little clearing about fifty yards from
the road, when he saw Grandfather coming along. The old man seemed
rather more mysterious than usual, and Jimmy watched him—he
thought perhaps he had come to look for some timber. Grandfather
glanced round, very cautiously, like a blackfellow, but he didn't
see Jimmy. Then he started to laugh. He laughed till the tears ran
down his cheeks. He put his hands on his hips and roared till he
doubled up; then, when he recovered, he straightened himself,
composed his face and went back whence he'd come. And thereafter it
worried Jimmy a good deal at times, for he could never find out
what Harry Albury was laughing at that day.
I have moods now, sometimes, when I feel inclined to go out of
the world apiece and laugh. But then I am growing old. Father used
to work with Grandfather as a young man, and there are many
anecdotes. Father got on with him famously and I never met two
characters more opposite in every way. Add to this the fact that
Father was a total abstainer. Father used to say that the one thing
he liked and admired the old man for above all else was that he'd
never harp on a string—he'd say a thing and have done with
it. Father, you must bear in mind, was married when he used to say
this. I never heard the old man say an ill word of anybody. The
worst things I remember of him were: first, he drank—but I
drink too; second, he would seldom sack a man for whom he had no
further use—he'd wait for an excuse to have a row with him,
and the man would leave bursting with indignation, and burning with
a sense of injustice: but that was, in a way, in keeping with the
old man's character; third, he got nearly all his stringy-bark
palings out of mountain ash: but that was due to: (a) the prejudice
of his clients (who could never hope to live as long as that
timber) in favour of stringy-bark, (b) the extreme scarcity of
stringy-bark, (c) the prevalence of mountain ash; fourth, hens used
to come round our camp for what they could pick up, and were
encouraged, and often picked up more than they came for and left
but the head: but then I was fond of poultry too, and the blame, if
any, was on our gipsy ancestry. The old man usually had an old
horse, bony and angular past description, popularly believed to be
as old as himself, and locally known as "Old Albury" too. The old
man fed the old horse well, but no power on earth could ever fatten
him. (I've noticed that bosses who are extra fond of animals are
usually hardest on their men.) I remember seeing the old man
throwing out some corn he kept for the horse to a stray fowl. He
explained that he was fattening that fowl up for Christmas. I asked
if the hen belonged to him, and he said, "No, not exactly," but he
thought it would about Christmas time. He bought a fowl
occasionally, for the sake of appearances and to provide against
accidents.
He had, as I said, the sight of a blackfellow, and would bring
his heavy eyebrows together and peer at something in the distance,
standing and looking for the moment just like a blackfellow and
seeing as far.
I got on well with him and was, I think, the only one in the
family could get him to sing. He had a good voice and I used to
read old songs to him and he'd get them line by line. Like most
illiterate men he remembered nearly all he had ever seen or
heard.
Supposed to be without sentiment, I discovered him to be a dumb
poet, a poet of the trees, "the timber", and all living things
amongst or in them. Supposed to be without affection, I know that
in his old age, when the family was scattered and he alone, he made
a long and useless journey just to have a look at the ruins of the
church he was married in.
Granny was the daughter of an English clergyman; she came out to
Australia as an immigrant and went into domestic service Penrith
way, where she met Grandfather, who looked like a young god then,
and married him for his looks. She went with him over the mountains
and went through forty years of a rougher Bush life than you could
imagine. She was good and well-meaning and old-fashioned—and
helpless. The diggers on Pipeclay in its flush days once proposed
subscribing to send my mother to England to have her voice trained,
but Granny would not hear of it, for she had a horror of any of her
children "becoming public".
4. Loneliness and a Trade
I was eleven or twelve when I first began to talk about being a
writer some day; but I may have cherished the idea earlier. It
exasperated Father, but Mother encouraged. Mother had a copy of
Edgar Allan Poe's poetical works. I often heard her read﹃The
Raven﹄aloud, and the other short poems, and I read them myself
later on, over and over again. Not very healthy reading for a
child, was it?
Home life, I might as well say here, was miserably unhappy, but
it was fate—there was no one to blame. It was the result of
one of those impossible matches so common in Australia. I remember
a child who, after a violent and painful scene, used to slip out in
the dark and crouch down behind the pig-sty and sob as if his heart
would break. And a big black mongrel dog who'd come round with
slobbery sympathy. And the child would put his arms round the dog's
neck and bury his wet white face in the shaggy hair. But that child
had a stubborn spirit and would not kiss the rod.
Spencer had given up his selection to a man who was mining mad,
and taken in exchange a little two-acre freehold, up near the Old
Bark School at the foot of Sapling Gully—a piece of land
which the man had prospected exhaustively and had sunk a good deal
of money in. The tenant on Spencer's old selection was an Irishman
named Page, and there was a feud between him and our family until
we left. It was about a boundary fence, of course, with a stray
bull thrown in. Page "didn't want to be onneighbourly", but "he'd
be aven wud 'em some day". We bought a small secondhand harmonium,
and Page got a barrel-organ next week. Both houses were close to
the fence, and so sure as we started the organ of an evening Page
would grind his hurdy-gurdy, and a digger across the road a
concertina, and Fred Spencer would thump a kerosene tin in the
still moonlight, and there would be music on Pipeclay. Page said
that the hurdy-gurdy would go "rippin" wid him if he only had the
"noats".
One day, after our rooster and Page's rooster had crowed
defiance at each other—each on the top of his own
haystack—for several days, our bird went down, and got on
Page's haystack and tackled the other fowl. We watched the fight
until both birds fell down on the other side of the stack. We dared
not go through the fence, but some half-hour later we heard Page's
familiar "Insoide there—come out!" He had our rooster and was
handling him gently. "Ye're cock beat my cock!" he said,﹃but I
bear no malice—'twas a grand fight. There he is.﹄And he set
him down carefully.
We boys—the Spencers and we—used to annoy Page a
good deal. "I'll tell the masther on ye!" he'd say. We used to like
to run barefoot along the moonlit road and plough up the thick
white dust with boughs until we were enveloped in a dense cloud.
Page had a score or so of turkeys and they roosted along the top
rail of the fence in front of his place; and sometimes, as late as
possible, we'd slip down and brush those turkeys from end to end
with a bough, and they'd gobble, gobble, gobble, all down the line
like a new musical instrument. And Page would come out, sometimes
in his shirt, and then we'd vanish. In my memory my childhood, or
boyhood, if I had any, went out with the gobble of those turkeys.
There was a flicker when I got a horse of my own, and again when I
got a gun, but it went dead out.
Page found our cattle in his wheat one morning, and I met him
taking them to pound. I don't remember what I said to him, but he
gave the cattle to me. He was at feud with all his neighbours,
English, Irish, German, and Father, but the morning we were leaving
the selection for good, he came up to the gate and shouted:
"Insoide there, come out." We came out. "Here's some fruit," he
said.﹃'Tis a hand worrld and it's little we have to be foightin'
for. Shake hands and let bygones be bygones between us.﹄The last
time I heard of Page he was doing pick and shovel work at
Prospect.
'Twas a hard world and it was little we had to be fighting each
other for. There was Harry Spencer; few men worked harder and
longer than he did, unless it was Father. He was a stern father,
was Harry Spencer, but all his children turned out well; and he was
a very kind husband. There was a split between the two families, by
the way—over something a woman said another woman
said—and we were forbidden to play with the Spencer children
and they with us, so we had to meet privately, and if caught both
sides were punished. The mother reckoned that the Spencer children
led us astray. And Mrs Spencer said that Charlie led Fred into
mischief, and neighbours repeated. Well, Harry Spencer strained
himself rolling heavy logs on a clearing contract on a neighbouring
run, and was never quite well afterwards. Then he worked for wages
in a claim in the petered-out Log Paddock, opposite our place. One
morning he had breakfast, kissed his wife and the younger children,
as was his custom when leaving home, and went to work. He sat down
at a water-hole to wash a prospect—a dish of "wash-dirt" or
gold-bearing clay—but had scarcely wetted the clay when he
suddenly exclaimed, "Oh! my heart!" and fell backwards. A few
minutes later Harry O'Brien came running up to our place and said,
"Harry Spencer's just dead!"
I saw them bring him out of the paddock. Four of them carried
him on a sheet of bark with two sticks under it to lift it. They
took out the bottom rail of the slip-rails, but the top rail
jammed, so the bearers stooped through with the bier. Away up the
hot white road Mother was running through the dust like a mad woman
to Mrs Spencer. 'Twas a hard little world and 'twas little we had
to be fighting for.
I went for a few months to a Catholic school in Mudgee. I don't
know why I was sent there; but probably because my mater had become
disgusted with our own churchmen as they were then. I remember one
day, Pat Tovey, the coach driver, who was taking the mails out on a
packhorse because of the bad weather and flooded creeks, gave me a
lift home on the packhorse. He stayed to deliver a bag at a post
office near our place kept by a bigoted Protestant family with whom
our family were at feud.
"What are they sending that boy to a Catholic school for?" asked
the postmistress. "Sure he's bein' educated for a priesht," said
Pat: and a little further on he said, half to himself and half to
me: "Let her put that in her pipe and shmoke it." Then he added
with a chuckle, "It'll be all round the dishtrick be tomorrer
mornin'."
I was given a weedy riding hack and used to ride to school. I
usually milked six or sever cows and had to catch the horse before
riding to school, and was never late that I remember. Some children
had to rise before daylight and milk ten or fifteen cows in the
bitter cold frosty morning before starting for school. I don't
suppose there was ever such collection of young fiends as were in
the Catholic school in Mudgee when I went there One had thrown a
slate at the last master, who broke a blood vessel and died. Severs
masters had resigned, but the present one, Mr Kevan, was a strong
man and kept the young devils well in hand without the assistance
of Father O'Donovan. His successor, z better scholar, a younger and
cleverer man (who nevertheless said things like "Don't do that no
more") had a tough fight but got the school under after using up
two or three cane: a day for a week or so. I got a sharp cut once
by mistake, but somehow I didn't seem to mind. Of course, there
were no girls in this school.
Father O'Donovan was a character and I liked him. He didn't mind
the young men and boys of his flock touching their hats to him, but
he discouraged the habit in old men: "Oh don't bother about that!"
he'd say to a tottering ancient who'd suddenly recollect himself
and take off his hat to the Father. Father O'Donovan would come
into the yard, go softly behind a kneeling boy playing marbles,
stoop, and take that boy by the shoulders. The boy would start to
swear and blaspheme like a shearer in a rough shed, and the Father
would lay him gently on his back and the nipper, still testifying,
would look up into the Father': face. Then he'd stop swearing.
At other times the Father would come into school, make eyes at
the boys behind the master's back, and one or two would laugh and
be called out for punishment. Then the Father, with a face as
solemn as a priest's, would beg them off. One day a boy said,
"Please Sir, Father O'Donovan was makin' eyes at me"—and he
got it hot.
Father O'Donovan attended the Mudgee races, all three days, to
look after the big "bhoys" of his flock, whom he corrected on
occasion with a buggy whip. They say bi always had a horse or two
running, but this didn't prevent him from taking care of the
boys.
The few Protestant pupils were sent out during prayers in the
morning, but woe betide the Catholic boy who threw the Protestant
boys' religion in [their faces], whether he fel into the hands of
the schoolmaster afterwards or Father O'Donovan.﹃I'll have none of
that sort of thing,﹄said Father O'Donovan, with no softness in his
voice. "I want that understood once for all."
Once or twice Mr Kevan came and sat beside me as I sat, lonely
and unhappy, by myself on a stool in the corner of the yard, and
drew me out of myself and talked to me about poetry and Edgar Allan
Poe. He'd heard something of Mother, I suppose.
I was tormented a good deal by the town boys after school hours,
and used to get to the paddock where I'd left my horse, and get off
home as quickly as possible. I was called "Chummy" by some, and by
others "Barmy Harry". Years before there had been another Barmy
Henry in Sydney, a pale, delicate, shy and sensitive boy, carrying
a tray of pastry on his head to customers for his master, a fancy
baker, and mumbling verses to himself. It was his habit of "talkin'
to hisself", as his companions thought he did, that won him the
nickname and the reputation of being mad. Henry Kendall.
I read Dickens. Got him at the School of Arts in Mudgee and read
The Old Curiosity Shop first, I think. I have read Dickens
over and over again and can read him now at any time. Next I read
Marryat—Jacob Faithful and Peter Simple. I paid
a visit to my mother's people at Wallerawang, and, on leaving, one
of my aunts presented me with a volume of Bret Harte's, entitled
Some Folks, and containing "Tennessee's Partner", "Mliss",
etc. I read that book on the journey home and it fascinated me; it
seemed to bring a new light, a new world into my life, and this
with Dickens still fresh. But Dickens stayed by me and Bret Harte
did not. I read Don Quixote before I was fourteen, but that
was an accident—somebody had left the book at our place. I
remember being greatly puzzled and worried about the loss and
recovery of Sancho's ass. It was only the other day I read
somewhere that Cervantes did not read his proofs and that it was
doubtful if he had even read his copy, And oh! of course, we read
Robbery Under Arms when it first appeared in the Sydney
Mail—Browne, by the way, touched an Australian sore when
he described the Marsden family as being, the girls Catholics and
the boys Protestants. We read For the Term of His Natural
Life (as Marcus Clarke wrote it) in the Australian journal. The
introduction was, I think, equal to Dickens's style. The sight of
the book with its mutilated chapters and melodramatic "prologue"
exasperates me even now. And we read Jack Harkaway—I
was going on for thirty before I read Deadwood Dick, and
then I used to read him to put me to sleep. And Mother used to
recite Gordon from the Australian Journal. I liked tailing
the cows amongst the gullies, for it gave me opportunities for
reading—though I was supposed to do some ring-barking. But
when I was about thirteen I went to work with Father.
5. Father
I cannot say much of the English side of my family. They were
supposed to have come of English gipsies and were hop pickers in
Kent, and chicken lifters, for aught I know, and, further back, the
Lord knows what else besides they had or hadn't been. They were a
queer tribe, tall, dark and eccentric. The women most certainly
descended from Eve, but the majority of the females of late
generations had and always held to their own opinions as to the
origin of men. The old man, grandfather, in his later years, would
always rather camp alone in the Bush and split palings and shingles
for tucker and an occasional spree than live in comfort with one of
his married daughters; he had ten and most of them married well.
Grandchildren nine and ten on an average—as it was in his own
days. He was a character, a hard case and a family mystery—he
was too deep even for his own tribe. He went on a spree, few ever
knew where, about once every six months, and never looked better
than after a drinking bout. Maybe I was and am just as eccentric as
he was.
Anyway, I was always restless and a rover and used to think for
years that the roving star was my lucky star.
On the other side I go back further than England, for my father
came from Norway. He was, as I have said, a Norwegian sailor, a
quarter master with a mate's certificate. He had served in a
shipbuilding yard at home; he was a master of navigation. His
father was a schoolmaster, all his brothers sailors, and they were
all lost at sea. He deserted his ship at Melbourne—on a
voyage from New York, or 'Frisco, I forget which—and ran away
to the goldfields in the days of Ballarat and Bendigo. He found
gold and lost it speculating in puddling machines, crushing mills,
and duffers. He drifted into New South Wales with the gold rushes,
came to Old Pipeclay, and got married. He was well educated in his
own language, could understand and appreciate German poetry, knew
French well enough to understand a Frenchman, was a good penman,
and wrote good English. He was clever at all sorts of mechanical
work, and the terror in mathematics of all the school-teachers in
the district in his time. I don't believe that a kinder man in
trouble or a gentler nurse in sickness ever breathed. I've known
him to work hard all day and then sit up all night by a neighbour's
sick child. He was very independent then, and had a strange way of
seeming to drop the acquaintanceship of people he had helped. He
was short and nuggety and fair, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a
short dark-red beard, which turned rapidly grey towards the end (he
died at fifty-four of heart disease). I am tall and dark. He was
said to have been a very natty, or "dapper" little fellow in his
single days, and the best dancer in the district. (He grew very
different as I knew him.) He had an ear for music—I have
none, nor for much else. His camp was a model, they said, his tent
as neat as a cabin, and he had a little vegetable garden in front
fenced in with stakes to keep out the eternal goats that went with
all rushes, in carts and on foot, and haunted the dreary old
thistle and burr infested diggings for years afterwards. I just
remember the site of Father's last digger's camp on the siding on
Pipeclay. Two half buried logs were still there to mark where the
sides of the tent had been.
Grandfather kept a public house—and also had a saw-mill
and bullock teams—on Pipeclay. There was a rough
crowd—Irish of both parties. One, a bully, used to start a
row, ask for five minutes' grace, and then put up his mate, a
big-limbed, hard-muscled softy, to fight for him. One day they were
in the bar and started playing up, while the second eldest Miss
Albury was there. The bully commenced pulling down the boards of a
partition between the bar and the rest of the house—a sort of
loose boards in slots arrangement—to get at some real or
imaginary enemy whom he thought to be behind there, I suppose. At
last Miss Albury called in little Peter Larsen, who happened to be
passing; the bully bluffed to the end, then put up his big mate as
usual. A few minutes later the girl was getting the little
Norwegian sailor a dish of water at the back to wash the blood off
his hands. That's how all the trouble commenced, and it will only
end with my line, I suppose.
I first became dimly aware of Father on Pipeclay, going
somewhere with an axe on his shoulder. It seems as if it was late
afternoon. We passed a place where there was a lot of thistles,
horehound, and such weeds as grow on the sites of old sheep-yards.
The yard must have been there before the diggings broke out. I next
became—less dimly—aware of Father walking away from the
hut on Gulgong with an axe over his shoulder. He was going for
firewood. I was following behind. It was twilight and I distinctly
remember the gleam of his moleskins, which seemed to loom large in
the gathering darkness—probably because I was so small. He
seemed always going somewhere in the evening with an axe over his
shoulder, after work; later on, back at Pipeclay, it was axe and
cross-cut saw—the latter awkward to carry and flapping and
clanging—or a maul and a bag of wedges. I got at the other
end of that crosscut early, I remember (before I remember, it
almost seems), but I do remember a big flinty white box log near
"our house", that we had to cut up for firewood, and to get it out
of the way. My brother was old enough for me to drag at the other
end of the saw before that log ceased from troubling my Saturdays,
holidays and evenings, and haunting my dreams. Father had done a
bit at the other end of Grandfather's saw in his time.
Father had taken up a bit of land at Pipeclay before Gulgong,
and built a slab-and-bark house, and, when Gulgong petered out, he
returned to it and took up more selections—forty-acre blocks
that we called "front", "top", and "back runs"; it was on the base
of barren ridges back amongst which the farmers were shoved because
every yard of the rich, black-soil river flats and red-soil slopes
beyond were old land grants, or squatters' runs, and were needed to
carry cattle and sheep. But I fancy that Father took up this land
mainly because it was on the old goldfield—the fever never
quite dies out of a digger's blood until the day of his death. He
was always prospecting or fossicking round with a pick, shovel, and
gold-dish on Sundays and in spare hours; and, when he died, he had
two men putting down shafts for him on shares and rations. He
worked at building and carpentering in the little farming town of
Mudgee five miles away, and later on, when the new educational act
of 1880 came into force, took contracts to build or repair the
little schools which were dotted all over the Bush. And, between
whiles, he'd work on the "farm", fencing, grubbing, and making a
dam to catch the surface water, for there was no permanent water
there, except in the deepest of the old shafts. The strip of
possible land between the spur and the Government road was so
narrow that every foot seemed precious, and the ground so hard
where the old road had been that a big bullock plough failed to
break it. Father tried blasting powder in it. I've seem him come
home night after night after a hard day's work in town with a
cart-load of stable manure to put on the "poor" grey soil; and
after tea he'd drag or lever logs to burn out stumps, or dig in the
tank by moonlight. ("Settling on the land"—While the Billy
Boils.) Father would tackle a big brute of a dead, iron-bark
stump, that wouldn't burn or split, and was like cast-iron to chop.
He'd dig a big hole round it, in the hardened clay, that wasn't
much softer than the stump, and kneeling in the hole, chop away at
the flinty dead taproot that tapered down from nearly the thickness
of the stump to somewhere nearer the other side of the world, I
think. He had to cut it through to get the stump out—for
there was no tree to give purchase—and afterwards dig
trenches part of a mile to trace the great surface roots (that had
roots going down from them too)—and all the branch roots were
big and tough enough to snap the cheap cast-iron ploughshares we
used in those days. In addition we had to reclaim ground from the
old diggings—fill the shafts with the worst of the
waste-heaps, "spread" the stuff that came from near the surface,
and cart the rest away to the dam or the edge of the selection: not
much more than half would go back into the holes, because it had
come from the "drives" underneath. Part of my childhood was used to
shepherd the cows to keep them on the selection and the new ones
out of the holes—they mostly died of "ploorer" afterwards. It
was miserable, wretched, hopeless "farming", like a great deal of
the scratching called farming in the dusty stumpy patches amongst
the scrubby ridges down there. Home-life was unspeakably wretched.
There seemed ever a curse over Grandfather's tribe and all it came
in contact with. And perhaps an old boomeranging curse that came
down the generations from a gipsy girl and a careless white scamp,
for all I know. And in our case the curse from a bad match which
was ever too common in the Bush. I remember, as a child, slipping
round in the dark behind the pigsty, or anywhere, to cry my heart
out, and old Pedro, the dog, would come round with sympathetic nose
and tail, and I'd put my arms round his neck and bury my face in
his rough hair, and have my cry out.
Yes, Pipeclay was a miserable little hell to me to the bitter
end, and a trip to Granny's at Wallerawang was the only glimpse of
heaven my childhood ever knew. There was the railway line there,
and water, and something more like God's country and scenery; and
happy, sympathetic children's society. But such a trip left me
worse and more hopelessly in my own little hell afterwards.
I was sent to Sydney when I was between thirteen and fourteen to
see if I could get anything done to my hearing. The first
impressions of the old coach road, the railway journey, and first
living in brick and two-storey houses have been written elsewhere:
"The House that was Never Built" in the London-published
Children of the Bush, and in other stories and sketches. I
stayed with my grandpeople at Granville, who had shifted down from
Wallerawang, and I remember some of Granny's boarders, workmen at
Clyde, expressing astonishment at the quiet way in which I took
Sydney, my first trip on the harbour, and my first visit to the
theatre; but I knew Sydney from childish recollections,
descriptions, and pictures, and had got some idea of acting and
scenery from a performance of The Pirates of Penzance by
Charles Turner's company, I think, in the dilapidated old
weatherboard theatre on Gulgong. The first play I saw in Sydney was
old Romany Rye, and I always went to see it in after years
while George Rignold's company played it. I say "see" because I
never heard a play throughout and had to enquire
beforehand—or after—and read the notices, or guess the
plot and dialogue.
The boarders were a jolly lot, and one, Tom Punt, was the
leading spirit. He used to gather the others round a fire outside
of nights, and preside. He'd lead off in the perfect snuffle and
whine, with "I know a boarding house—Not far
away—etc."—or﹃I wish I had a few more bricks—To
build my chimney higher—﹄and the rest of it, and get the
choir in full swing, to Granny's great disgust. It was scandalous.
He was always in mischief, or skylarking, when he wasn't working or
sleeping. He used to hide when Father I'D passed, I don't know why,
and seemed afraid of Grandfather—probably because he
recognised, by some strange instinct of the tribe, a veteran devil
of his own sort and a greater one than himself. Now, though
Grandfather could still earn good money amongst the timber on the
mountains, and was no man for home, it pleased him to buy an old
horse and cart and go into the vegetable hawking line, to the
breathless scandal of Granny and the girls and the unspeakable
disgust of his youngest son. He used to start some time in the
night and go to Sydney, Paddy's Market, once or twice a week for
his "truck". One week he brought home several loads of pumpkins
from somewhere close at hand in the scrub, but the source a mystery
of course—he never went out nor returned twice in the same
direction—and nowhere would suit him to stack those pumpkins
save on the front verandah. He stacked them carefully in three or
four piles, with the first rows of the square bases at the edge of
the verandah and the apexes against the wall between the windows
and doors, exactly like half pyramids cut by the wall. Grandfather
finished on Saturday afternoon, while we were in Sydney, and he
said it improved the look of the place—an oblong weatherboard
house—and it certainly didn't add to its ugliness. Nothing
can to that truly Australian style of architecture. He said the
pumpkins would attract healthy, hard-working boarders. Well, he
finished about dark, and was resting from his labours, with a pipe,
when Torn Punt, skylarking round the house with one of the other
boarders, stumbled on the first rows of pumpkins at the end of the
verandah, and—Bump-bump-bump! Thump-thump-thump!
Thump-bump-thump and bump-thump-bump!—You'd have thought the
pumpkins would never stop. Pumpkins from the first pile started the
second and so on to the end of the verandah. Tom was hiding in the
scrub; there were sounds of strong men trying not to laugh, and
over it all Grandfather's voice enquiring for the thunderin'
jumpt-up jackass who started his pumpkins. The incident filled my
uncle and me so full of laughter that we had to go into the scrub
too, to avoid appearing ridiculous—where smothered guffaws
from close at hand didn't help us much. The thing kept us coughing
in bed till after midnight, and when the bad colds eased a little a
reference, from the back room, to thunderin' jumpt-up idiots, would
set the whole house coughing again. But my boy-uncle and I saw Torn
Punt's wicked foolery in a right and proper and religious light
very early next morning, which was a frosty one, when we turned out
and set to work to help Grandfather re-stack those pumpkins before
breakfast.
I went to Dr Stanish, in Wynyard Square, on his pauper days, and
he spoke to me and treated me like one, and did me no
good—though, fortunately, no harm.
I got some house painting to do from Richie, the agricultural
implement maker at Granville, at thirty shillings a week. Trade was
booming then, and anyone who knew one end of a brush from another
seemed sure of work. The slump came in the latter end of the
eighties.
I took my first gun back to the Bush from Granville—a
single, twist barrel, muzzle-loading shotgun, to kill at fifty
yards, for twelve and six. I sold it afterwards to an old
schoolmate for five shillings who took it out of twist (and me out
of winding) with a piece of emery paper and found it a very
serviceable old American army rifle for kangaroos if he aimed high
enough.
I also had my first portrait taken, a "gem" of the
while-you-wait variety. Here it is:
(Portrait if I can get it.)
Just before I went home Granny shifted into a larger cottage
close by, and Grandfather took the thing on his hands and impressed
us all one Saturday afternoon. It was a great shifting and couldn't
have been done quicker if there'd have been a fire.
Back to Pipeclay in the height of the worst drought the district
had ever suffered. Blazing heat that made Granite Ridge and the
Peak seem molten masses turned out on the scrub. Blue-grey ragged
bush and the ashes of a soil. We drove the few cows to the creek
for water twice a day, through private property, and there was
always trouble about alleged loitering and the slip-rails. The cows
would lie in the shade for the rest of the day, and lived on the
water, some wheaten chaff we had collected, and the native
appletree boughs we lopped down in the "cool of the evening".
Then—on the strength of the straw and wheaten chaff, I
suppose—I was sent some miles to bring a walleyed steer and a
barren heifer that were going for a gift to whosoever would come
and fetch them. And they brought "the ploorer" amongst our cows.
Then I used to bleed them by cutting their tails and ears in the
sickening heat—and was often sick over the job—and
inoculate them with a big needle and Berlin-wool dipped in calf
lymph, and rouse them up and feed them, at the risk of my life,
with slices of young pumpkin from a crop that had failed in
Chinaman's garden (even Chinamen failed) and about half the cows,
including the best milkers, died. At their last gasp they would
often stagger up and charge.
Father got the contract to build the new school at Canadian Lead
("Th' Canadian" of the golden days), near Home Rule, between Mudgee
and Gulgong, and I went there to work with him when I was about
fourteen. It was "facing" and "shooting" stringy-bark flooring
boards, rough from the mill, with saw-marks an eighth of an inch
deep on the best sides of some of them. (No ready-faced tongued and
grooved soft wood for us then.) I had to sharpen the smoothing
plane every board or so; and I was always ready for Father's﹃Put
the billy on, Sonny,﹄or, "Ah well!—knock off, Sonny." And on
that job I learned to handle a paint brush. I picked up things
rapidly and the greatest praise was for Father to say,﹃Well. I
didn't know it was in you.﹄A favourite expression of his was,
"Take notice", no matter if it was only a bullocky making a bullock
yoke in camp. Father reckoned the "natives", as the Australian-born
whites were always called, the best he had seen at rough and ready
carpentry and makeshifts—and he had worked on old sailing
ships. But the life! The stifling heat in summer till part of the
building was up, then a rough bunk; and work from sunrise till
dark, and the billy and the frying-pan—steak and chops, and
bacon—bacon, and steak and chops—potatoes sometimes for
dinner, milkless tea. Except on Sunday when we found time to wash
our shirts and socks and cook a bit. And the terrible dreariness
and weariness and loneliness of it all, for Father grew more silent
and given to brooding over his pipe at night. (He never drank,
though I've seen him so worried and upset that he couldn't
smoke.) But the loneliness, even in company, that led in the end to
extreme sensitiveness and shyness. Even home was a relief. And then
the craving for love, affection, even consideration from a quarter
where there was none, the sympathy, love, even worship, wasted in a
quarter where there was none. The strange child (for I was little
more) who had been misunderstood, mocked, and tormented at school
the few months he went there until the time was a very hell he
seldom cared to look back to—until he'd say, while yet a
child himself, that he "thought boys were very brutal and
heartless"; whereat his ignorant elders would consider him to be,
if not as mad as his schoolmates said he was, at least very "queer"
and idiotic.
I worked about with Father on various jobs—sometimes at
schools where I'd be always glad when the boys—many of them
older than I—were safe in school, or gone home. They
respected me now as something of a workman, I suppose, but I seemed
strange and apart and was shy of them and avoided them on every
possible occasion. And, remember, my deafness was but newly come
upon me.
I remember looking ahead half hopefully for a change in the
scenery as I approached the site of each new job; but—and it
seemed fate—there was never a change—each hole in the
scrub we worked in seemed wretcheder than the last.
And speaking of scenery, I once went, on a memorable occasion,
to witness an alleged performance called Dick Turpin and Tom
King, given by, and in aid of, an "amateur dramatic society" in
the School of Arts, Mudgee; a noble pile with "an upstairs in it"
in our Bush childhood days, which boasted—on every possible
occasion—one piece of scenery, about the size of a large
school map—or a little larger—and representing a small
lake with mountains. This was hung out on every possible
occasion—in almost every act that wasn't supposed to be
inside a house and always referred to by the hero (the local poet),
either in soliloquy and with windmill business as﹃What a
magnificent scene! ... Here, I, in the midst of lonely
grandeur—﹄etc.; or, in a love scene, with one arm engaged
and the other working,﹃Here at last, my darling—you and I
alone with nature in all her soul-inspiring—﹄and the rest of
it. But the first sight of that scene (it was my first "play") took
my breath away and roused my emotions.
Again, while working with Father on Gulgong, he took me to see
Charles Turner's company give The Pirates of Penzance. Well,
you know how much scenery that opera needed—and they
travelled by coach—not Cobb and Co.'s either on that road,
for the diggings were done. There was a lot of knocking before the
curtain went up, but when it did I gasped, and though generally far
too shy and sensitive to express my emotions, especially to Father,
who was practical, I said,﹃Father! Father!—look at the
scenery!﹄Someone laughed and it covered me with confusion and
almost spoilt my enjoyment of the performance.
I wonder now how the incident affected Father, who had seen some
of the grandest scenes in the old world and the new, and some of
the best-staged plays of his day. And did he think of the dapper
little sailor ashore for a run in European ports, in New York,
'Frisco, and the Lord knows where else.
Then the break-up of the drought and several good seasons. But
we had rust in the wheat one season and "smut" the next: I remember
we washed the wheat in tubs, skimming off the smut as it rose to
the surface of the water, and we dried the grain on borrowed
tarpaulins. I put in the last crop, or most of it. I had an old
carthorse and light pot-bellied mare, with a stunted colt and filly
as reserves. I had a good seat and it was a district of riders, but
I never had a horse you could call a horse to ride—it was
misery down to the old patched borrowed saddle. I was lucky to get
both "plough-horses" started at once. Usually the heavier horse
stumbled forward first and jerked the lighter one back onto the
gear; then, as often as not, something would break and I'd fix it
up with wire and clothesline and try for another start. When both
horses got off level they'd go at a sort of run, like two small
boys with a tub of water, till one gave in. One day a clothesline
rein broke, or came loose, and they went into the scrub and in and
out amongst the stumps and saplings. The old plough-mark may be
there yet: it looked like a piece of fancy steering by a very
drunken ploughman.
The general result was plough-marks in the dust—I cannot
call them furrows—but the crop grew that year. Reaping hooks
were the fashion, but strippers were coming in—I don't
remember the cradle.
The "break-up-of-the-drought" is as aggressively, resentfully,
weirdly melancholy as anything else in the Bush—or in the
world I think: as if it knew it wouldn't last and was useless. The
dark grey blanket over all the world, apparently; the dark, dismal,
dripping, rotting, scrubby gullies; the blue-grey bush flats, the
dead, ring-barked white trees standing naked and ghastly, and the
dark ragged boughs about them, and on the ridges, windswept in an
agony of hopelessness and melancholy. A rainy day in England or New
Zealand is nothing to it; an English country white fog is a bright
and cheerful thing and London "pea-soup" comforting compared to
rain in the Bush.
Then came sunny days, and waving grass, and produce went down to
nothing in the market; eggs weren't worth carrying into town, and
we melted down the last lot of butter.
Then we sold everything which went well—except the farm,
which didn't go at all, but was let to a tenant for a nominal
rental and only sold in recent years.
I went to Rylstone to work with Father on small building
contracts—the rest of the family went to Sydney, and the
railway was going on to Mudgee—to see what I could do.
Then the tent, the temporary galvanised iron shed to work under,
the square boxes—of stone now—of four rooms and a
passage with the corrugated iron roof, and days often so hot that
you couldn't handle the snips if you left them on the roof in the
sun: hot enough on the roads to raise blisters through your boots.
And the smell of white lead and oil.
And the bag bunk, and the billy and frying-pan, and the blucher
boots and cheap new stinking "moleskin" trousers for Sunday: and
the loneliness and hopelessness until Father had only enough work
to keep himself going and I was wanted in Sydney.
When work became slack at Kerridge's I went to Mount Victoria
and worked with Father for a while, who built most of the
town—save the few houses that were there in the old coaching
days. Tent and hut and bunk and frying-pan and billy again. Poor
Father had become closer and more "cantankerous"—though
seldom so with me, and altogether careless of comfort and personal
appearance. Steak, potatoes and bread and treacle. As far back as
Canadian he had taken to working by candlelight and on Sunday when
he could do it quietly, but now he had men working for him. I was
told that he had an idea of going back to Norway before he died and
taking at least his youngest son with him, leaving the rest
provided for as well he could.
But now, in 'eighty-six, the dreaded age of twenty-one seemed
rushing on me, all unprepared and unarmed to meet it and what was
beyond. My deafness worried me more and more, so at last I managed
to go to Melbourne to go to the eye and ear hospital there. And I
managed to go saloon too, in little old Wendouree that left
her weary rusty bones on the Oyster Bank years ago. It was
glorious. We were a happy little party from the skipper down, and
there was a nice natural girl who drew me out of myself a bit, and
banished my shyness. The steward's surprising "Tea or coffee, Sir?"
helped the good work and made an impression that I never forgot. I
must have looked Bushy enough with my carpet bag and a few washed
and mended clothes. I had a slop suit bought at a store on the
mountains, and the cloth was like coarse corduroy dyed blue and the
pants too bulky and short. I had a piece taken out of them
somewhere, in Melbourne, and put onto the bottoms. I didn't know
what to do with my hat, half the time, and used a knife for fish
then and for years afterwards. But I never got seasick, either then
or since.
I went to stay at Mrs Kelly's in West Melbourne, to whom I had a
letter of recommendation from a young woman who boarded at our
place in Sydney. I had about a week's board money left after I had
done with the four-wheeler; it was my first experience with a
cabman and it left me utterly demoralised, alone in a strange city
at the door of my first boarding house. The rest was more or less a
blank until I found myself in bed next morning at Mrs Kelly's.
Mrs Kelly kept a dingy little boarding house for superior
tradesmen (mechanics) and inferior clerks and shopkeeper's
assistants, with a precarious "traveller" in difficulties
sandwiched in at times, a gentleman with a business in the city,
and a young lady in a dress-makery—both permanent—and
an occasional windfall. It was in a shabby dusty street of
two-storeyed "terraces", the house one room and a passage wide and
two deep, with a kitchen behind where Mrs Kelly was supposed to
sleep—if she slept at all—and a room over it sacred to
the lady lodgers. Mrs Kelly was a little elderly Irish woman, with
one rusty, black best dress and shawl, a bonnet like an old cobweb
in a corner, a pair of cloth "larstens", and a face like a small
apple that had been left for a long time in the sunny window of a
little lolly shop that was to let but never seemed to go. A seamed
and smoked little old Judy doll, and she kept her boarding house
very genteel to the bitter end.
The head boarder was a stout gentleman in a rusty walking coat
with a mysterious business in town. He was a sort of combination of
country newspaper proprietor, schoolmaster, and storekeeper, with
the hoggish throat of a Yankee lecturer or quack medicine seller
and showman, and he had the balcony room to himself. He was manager
in the storeroom of a modest ironmongery, over the entire clerical
staff—himself—and the lumper or storeman and the
vanman.
Next was a stout lady, fair, fat and forty and decidedly
haughty, a schoolmaster's wife or something, down on a holiday or
something, whom they called "the Queen", and who used to sit on the
paper at breakfast, and walk out of the room whenever a gentleman's
clothes or laundry was mentioned. She monopolised the bathroom for
an hour or so every Sunday morning, when the "gentlemen" wanted to
use it. There was a rumour that she never had a bath at all in
chilly weather, only made a splash, and wetted her hair so that she
might have an excuse to sit in the sun in a dressing gown at the
back window and dry it in public and for the rest that she only
held the bathroom to aggravate her enemies, with whom were included
all in the house save poor Mrs Kelly—or else that she drank
and smoked in there. At last, to get out of that (and to get her
out of this) two choice spirits put cayenne pepper on a piece of
wadding one Sunday morning, and lighted it softly and slipped it
under the bathroom door.
Next there was the Queen's archenemy, Mr Heckler,
canvasser—or "commercial traveller", as Mrs Kelly put it, who
was always behind with her—who was doing nothing just then
but trying his hand at everything and anything that looked hopeless
enough and didn't require capital; he had a decent extra pair of
pants and boots, a cheerful sanguine disposition, and a solid
English portmanteau he wanted to sell for thirty shillings and
advertised whenever he had one to spare. Both boots and pants went
in advertising and cigarette tobacco before he sold that
portmanteau. He pawned them.
There was a careless, easy-going young fellow named Tom Punt,
who worked on the railway, and he, Heckler and I were room-mates in
the room behind the ironmongery gentleman's. Heckler was keen on
advertisements that offered him a means of making a livelihood in
his spare time for nothing, and untiring in his hunting up of
advertisers who had certainties or taught everything in three
lessons of an hour each—and squeezing their intellects dry.
In plain words, pumping them for all they were worth. And, from his
advertisement reading and answering he got an idea, one of many to
make his fortune. I was too young and green and unfinancial, so he
took Punt into his confidence, convinced him, and took him into
partnership, putting his name first in the firm for euphony. They
swore me to secrecy and Punt bought and brought home some packets
of hops and other things, according to Heckler's directions. Then
they started to make something that would look and taste like
Warner's Safe Cure. Bob—that was Heckler—argued and
proved that Warner and many other great men rose from such small
beginnings, till they, Punt and Heckler, saw world-spreading
advertisements, posters, "branches", and fortunes in the future.
They worked surreptitiously, and with closed door, and long after
the shabby, genteel establishment was supposed to have retired to
rest—for Heckler was jealous of guarding his secret, and also
sensitive on Mrs Kelly's account. He surrounded the business with
such an atmosphere of mystery that even the Queen was caught
peeping and listening and hinting darkly to Mrs Kelly. They brewed
the stuff in a saucepan, kept it in bulk in the water jug, cooled
it in the wash basin, and stored it in bottles, until they broke
the jug—and something else—and the bottles began to go
off in the small hours like a desperately resisted burglar arrest.
Then Mrs Kelly interfered. She said it wasn't genteel and Mr
Walker—the ironmonger—might object. And who was going
to pay her for the bedroom things? Enthusiasm waned—at least
as far as Tom was concerned, which was everything; he had a girl to
take to amusements who couldn't wait for fortunes; so, in the end,
Punt and Heckler's Only Cure went down the sink by night.
There was a decent young fellow from the country who was serving
his time to the coach-building, and nearly out of it, and whose
father paid his board. And last—she should have been
first—there was a Miss Smith who worked in the dressmakery,
and who, being rather left on her own hands, took me on, and tried
to teach me how to walk with a woman, without getting in her way or
my own, and to lift my hat to her friends when we met them, and see
her chum into a bus when they parted on Saturday night, and other
useful things. But I avoided fish in public for years.
I went to the Eye and Ear Hospital, then under Dr Grey, for a
while, but they did little or no good. They said it was chronic
catarrh or something and used to put an instrument shaped like a
gas-blower's pipe up my nose, and turn it round inside my head with
the point towards my ear and blow into it with an india-rubber
bulb. I remember the students asking me which instruments the
Doctors used and I'd show them.
But, whether it was the Eye and Ear Hospital, the change, the
healthier and happier life, I went to the Theatre one night and
heard the play better than any I'd ever been to. But then I got
close, there was standing room only, and I edged down to the end of
the first row of stalls. It was The Silver King, with
Titheradge the King of Silver Kings, Maggie Knight, poor Phil Day,
Sass (or Williamson) the "Spider", Olly Deering, Combs' friend,
"Mis-s-ter Hen-ery Kaw-w-kitt".
I got work at a railway truck factory close at hand and then at
the tramway car and omnibus works way out miles beyond the
Exhibition Buildings. I got thirty shillings there, or maybe
thirty-five; I have no recollection of the place, except of a
would-be bully I put down and a mighty buck nigger night watchman
with awful rolling eyes, a dark lantern, a step like a cat's and a
sudden guffaw like a graveyard eruption which, coming unexpectedly
and out of place, might have scared anybody out of his wits. The
sudden apparition would have been enough for any burglar, I
reckon.
I had to get up very early again, but Mrs Kelly was always up
before me with a "bit-o'-breakfast" ready. When I worked nearer
home she always asked in the hearing of the others:﹃Ar-re ye goin'
to beesnis this mornin', Mr Lawson?﹄and﹃Will ye take yere loonch
wid ye to beesnis this mornin', Mr Lawson?﹄I was slinging sludge
on railway trucks then, and doing some house-painting and
kalsomining for the boss between whiles. "Sludge" was the contents
of all the paint pots, emptied and scraped out into a drum, "boxed"
and strained through coarse scrim.
She had an old basket perambulator, with a list to port, that
went in circles if let go, like a lost bushman or a man in the
dark, and she used to wheel it to the market on Saturday night for
supplies.
"It belonged to me daughter, Mr Lawson—Her little boy, me
grandson that died of diptheery. Dead an' gone—dead an' gone.
An' miny's the time I've wheeled thim in it."
"So you had children, Mrs Kelly?"
"Yes, Yes—long years agone—long years agone."
"Dead, Mrs Kelly?"
"Yes, save wan, an' grandchildren; father an' grandfather. An'
the old perambulator reminds me of him; it goes just like him o'
Saturday nights if he wasn't steered, especially whin it's
loaded—an' it steered about the same. But—God bless
you, an' God rest him—barrin' that I had no more trouble with
him that I do wid the ould perambulator."
I used often t? go with Mrs Kelly to market on Saturday, in
company with Miss Smith and the old perambulator, and wheel it
home.
But I still "longed to rise" even when I was getting thirty or
thirty-five shillings a week at the tramway and omnibus
works—and I did rise, and this is how it came about:
I had long had an idea of learning to draw and sketch and being
an artist, and I used to practise a bit now. I remember trying to
make an enlarged drawing of a portrait of a gentleman Miss Smith
said she was engaged to at one time, and who died, or went away, I
forget which. Perhaps he went away and died, for he wasn't expected
back. I used to say that I'd practise, and study, and go on and on,
till I got paid for my work, and some day I'd go to Italy and
Paris, and study there, and be a great artist.
Now Bob Heckler, who still kept his eye out for likely
advertisements, was greatly interested—he was my artistic
adviser and critic, ready made and self elected, as most of my
critics are to this day—in an advertisement offering any
person with an artistic eye a certain and immediate opportunity of
adding to their income by a few hours' easy work of an evening.
This was just the thing Bob wanted, for he was an art critic now
with no income at all, and all day to add to it. He wanted some
evenings off. So he went out after dinner and returned at tea-time
greatly excited. It seemed that he had made my fortune and his too,
for I was going to do the work and he to canvass—we were
going to take the business off the advertiser's hands altogether
just as soon as we had got the full strength of it. So I had to go
with him after tea.
It was a little weatherboard hutch in a mean street behind
Collingwood, and a worried canvasser—with a baby under his
arm, held just as he might hold a loose and awkward portfolio while
getting into a tram—opened the door. He was tidy, in a washed
tweed suit, and had the mechanic's lines across his forehead. He
said "Take the child!" to a draggled, anxious woman—his poor,
stale and unprofitable wife—and she took it and shooed a
warren of other clamorous little canvassers out into the kitchen.
Then he got two chairs and told us what he wanted. He was
travelling for a firm of photographers, and their artist, who was
an invalid, wanted someone to help touch up the enlargements. He
gave me some, to try my hand on the coat lapels and edges, buttons,
buttonholes, trouser creases and seams, etc. with a camel-hair
brush and India ink.
My work was a dead failure—the artist had to wash it all
off, in fact. But it turned out that the photographer was a
gentleman's son, at Windsor, a sort of amateur photographer and
mechanic, the artist, his friend, a cripple, also a gentleman, and
a widow's son; and they had an idea of starting a business. The
gentleman's son's father advanced some money. They made their own
frames, and, knowing I was a carpenter and painter, they took me on
at thirty shillings a week and rented a little empty produce store
near the railway station, and I fitted it up. I was a natural born
carpenter and should have stuck to it. I was always great at
makeshifts and inventing ways and means on the spur of the moment
and could see a way to do a thing while a mechanic with practical
and technical training might be getting out the mechanical drawing
implements. I might have made a first-class military engineer,
provided I was never superintended.
Well, I made the counter and darkroom, fitted the troughs, made
trays or dishes with kauri sides and ends and glass bottoms, and
even a camera for enlargements—sort of sliding or telescopic
box arrangement of cedar and brass. And I painted, stained, and
varnished the shop. But though I had an eye for invention, at fine
work I never had the hand. I never could cut the mitres of the
frames so neatly as the canvasser could. For the same reason I
never could learn lining, fine decorating or signwriting in my
trade. I think the mechanical genius helps and develops the
poetical one, but the latter most certainly interferes with the
former.
By the way there's a dinner wagon of my make in Harpenden,
Hertfordshire, England, also a new kind of wardrobe, a hat-rack,
and other things, polished, stained and varnished, and not a nail
in 'em, and likely to last longer than any of my other works.
I batched on the business premises at Windsor and we had a big
vermilion sign with the firm's name in white letters. But N.S.F.
loomed larger in the end, and I took twenty-five shillings, then a
pound, and then fifteen. I did odd jobs round the gentleman's
house, to help things along, but the children, little fairies, got
awfully interested and addressed me as "man", and it pained
me—though twenty-one was three years off yet—so I gave
it best and came back to Sydney steerage to try to rise in
something else.
But I don't want you to hold Bob Heckler too cheaply. Men like
him have struck roads to fortune over and over and over again.
6. Sydney
I don't want to linger long over this chapter. We came to Sydney
and I went to work at Hudson Brothers, railway carriage works, at
Clyde, near Granville, amongst a rough crowd. I must have worked
hard and well, for I got twenty-five shillings a week to start with
and thirty a few months later. I was seventeen then. We lived in
Phillip Street and I had an alarm clock on a tray or a sheet of tin
to wake me, for I had been very deaf since I was fourteen. That
alarm clock haunted me for years afterwards. I wrote it up in
"Arvie Aspinall's Alarm Clock" in While the Billy Boils, and
mentioned it lately in "The Last Review" (When I was King).
Sometimes I'd wake with a start, thinking it had gone and I had not
heard it; and often I'd wake on Sunday or a holiday morning
thinking it was too good to be true. That clock was the terror of
my late boyhood—if I can be said to have had any boyhood at
all. I had to get up at five o'clock to catch the workman's train
from Redfern at six. I remember arriving on the platform one
morning at five, having set the alarm wrong—it had woke me at
four. There were times when I would have given my soul for another
hour's sleep. I used to make bread and milk over a little spirit
lamp before leaving home, but sometimes I'd be so weak and worn out
with overnight study and want of rest that I'd go out in the yard
and be ill before starting for Redfern. I walked through Hyde Park,
Elizabeth Street, and Belmore Park to the railway station, and it
was then that the faces in the street first began to haunt me. The
faces, and the wretched rag-covered forms on the benches, and under
them, and on the grass. The loafers and the unemployed used to
sleep under the verandahs round the old central markets, and under
the eaves of the sheds on Circular Quay on wet nights. (See
"'Dossing Out' and 'Camping'" in While the Billy Boils.) But
then if a deaf, uneducated Bush boy of seventeen, who had never
learned a trade, could earn thirty shillings a week in
Sydney—
I remember, one morning, seeing a horrible old bundle of rags
and bones, that had been a woman, struggle up from the wet grass
and, staggering, try to drink from an empty bottle. I don't know
why she sticks in my memory picture.
I was going to a night-school, trying for the matriculation
examination, and used to study in the train when I could keep
awake. There was a nasty guard who always woke me about Homebush to
look at my workman's ticket. I took breakfast and "lunch" with
me—bread and meat or bread and butter—or whatever I
could find in the safe at home. The hardest part of the work was
the "rubbing down". We used to lead colour the carriages first and
then put on many coats of rough quick-drying filling, which, when
it was hard enough, we used to rub down to a surface. But I found
it harder in private carriage shops, later on, where the old
varnish was hard as flint, and had to be soaked with water and soda
for days. You see, if you don't rub through the old cracks they
will come through the new colour and varnish after a while. On cold
winter mornings at Clyde I used to get warm water from one of the
pipes. I remember the blood coming from my finger ends and
trickling over the pumice stone. Then I used rag or an old glove. I
was very willing, and so was Bob H——, a boy of my own
age. The boss—a sub-contractor—used to set us rubbing
down two carriage doors (off their hinges) and urge us to
race—strive to rouse our sporting instincts and keep up our
enthusiasm. But Bob and I came to an arrangement after a while,
when the boss got too enthusiastic.
The hands were mostly recruited from Birmingham and the North
Country, and from Woolloomooloo. I was bushy, shy, different from
other boys (and therefore "ratty") and suspected of being of the
Sunday school sort, and therefore I was tormented by Hudson
Brothers' larrikins; but, considering that, though I was extremely
sensitive, I was not tortured to an unendurable extent, they could
not have been such a bad push after all. Selfish parents say,﹃They
are more to be pitied than you.﹄I've seen the poor, pale, delicate
victim and butt of brutal ignorance in many places since then. I
always know him. I saw him last, in coarse clothes and heavy
hobnailed boots, in a hopeless English farm-labourers' village. And
his face, figure, voice and manner told plainly of a gentleman
blackguard and silly village girl. I wondered how on earth they
were going to make one of themselves of him, or drive the natural
refinement out of him without killing him.
I usually got home about a quarter or half-past six, according
to the workman's train, and went to a night school in Phillip
Street about seven, where I first made acquaintance with English
history: William the First, ten-sixty-six, William the Second,
ten-eightyseven, and so on. I went there three evenings a week for
a couple of quarters, and on other nights to the School of Arts
with an idea of learning Latin and drawing. I had tried the fiddle
in the Bush, before I became too deaf. Someone said that Latin
would improve my English. I told that to a snuffy old broken-down
professor, when he asked me why I wanted to learn Latin, and he
cackled a short, dusty, broken-down old cackle—I don't know
why. There were one or two like me there, and one or two chemists'
apprentices.
I remember, one morning in the workshop, after having been
tormented more than usual on the platform and in the train the
evening before, I said I would rise above them all yet; and my work
mate, who was not a bad fellow, advised me not to let them hear me
talking like that, or they'd chyack me worse than ever. They
believed I was half ratty already, he said. About this time a boy
in a workshop in Darling Harbour, tormented and ill-used to
madness, struck another with a batten and killed him. This made a
fiercely indignant impression on my mind, as also did the story in
court on the minds of the Judge and jury, it would appear, for they
acquitted him. "Arvie Aspinall," "Bill" in the "Visit of
Condolence", "Two Boys at Grinder Brothers", and "Jones's Alley"
(inWhile the Billy Boils) all came from my Hudson Brothers'
days, but Hudson Brothers were not Grinders. If they had been they
mightn't have failed. Their work was Australian. They imported the
best mechanics they could get, treated and paid them well, went in
for agricultural implement making, and were open to encourage
"ideas". Their work for Australia deserves to be looked up a bit
and credited to them.
My tormented days ended later, in another shop, when I took a
tormentor by the throat and his nose bled. He arranged to meet me
outside after knock off, but had to hurry home. I didn't know my
physical strength.
I always had the longing for something better—something
higher—something different anyhow—but always felt more
or less the hollow hopelessness of attempting to rise higher; so I
neglected no opportunity of learning my trade. I was painfully shy
and extremely sensitive, sensitive about my deafness, my lack of
education, my surroundings, my clothes, slimness and paleness, my
"h's", handwriting, grammar, pronunciation (made worse by
deafness)—everything almost. I was terribly shy of strange
girls, and if a girl I knew took any notice of me I would reckon
that she was only either pitying me or laughing at me. I am shy of
women now, but in another way.
I remember having an idea, born of the notion that a change
comes every seven years, that I would recover my hearing when I was
twenty-one. I got first noticeably deaf at nine and as deaf as I am
now when I was fourteen. And I used to swear, secretly, that if I
did not get cured I would not live after twenty-one. And mind, I
had none of the suspicious notions generally attributed to the
deaf, and I never looked deaf; nor do I ever remember being
annoyed or taken advantage of on that account, except perhaps by
friends and relatives. But if they did they fell into the habit
naturally, and perhaps unconsciously, and were in every way
excusable.
I went up to the University matriculation examination twice, and
failed. I don't remember being at all shy or sensitive on those
occasions. On the last occasion I had a good sound patch in my
trousers, and a pair of Father's boots on. All the other boys were
well dressed, but I supposed they were more to be pitied than I
was. I wished I'd had Father's head too, for his was a mathematical
one. I couldn't hear the dictation, so I was taken into another
room by an old man without teeth who dictated in Irish. I failed in
everything save English history and English composition.
But that's a bit ahead. I seldom went out, Sundays or holidays,
but either worked or studied. Later on I took to taking long walks
at night and by lonely ways. Every penny of my wages, save ticket
fares, went to help others. I paid for the night-schooling and
bought my clothes with overtime money; and I washed and mended my
own clothes. There was no starching for me in those days. And there
was a dark cloud and plenty of trouble. I remember, in darkest
days, when all days were dark, being sometimes undecided between
home or work and the harbour. And later on, during a brief
unemployed period, I saw the American Consul, and haunted the
wharves in hopes of getting a ship to America or somewhere.
I was never afraid of physical work, never lazy—I never
had the patience to loaf, and my mates often grumbled because they
said I was working myself and them out of a job. I was a very quick
brush-hand. But I thought what a glorious thing it would be to be
able to give even a quarter of my time to study. Of course, I had
the ridiculously exaggerated idea of the value of education and of
my own ignorance. And it seemed getting too late fast, if, indeed,
it were not too late already. I used to seek comfort in stories of
self-taught men (my first school prize was entitled Self-taught
Men) and instances of men who had risen after certain ages. It
was a curious sort of self-deception, if it could be called
self-deception. I was exquisitely self-conscious—it was a
sort of insane analytical gymnastics most of the time. It was
torture through the invulnerable ignorance and mad, unreasoning,
and absolutely unnecessary selfishness of others, and self-torture
with it all. And one thing my body craved for and my soul longed
for was another hour's sleep in the morning. Often I lay, dead
tired and resting, and afraid to go to sleep lest it wouldn't seem
half a moment before the harsh and grating alarm sounded. I went to
work with a dry unrested feeling and weak and sick in the stomach
from sheer weariness and worry.
But the faces in the street were passing all the time. The worn
faces and gaunt figures in the poor pitiful clothing. Meeting me
and passing, and catching up and passing, and seeming to turn
momentarily, hopelessly, fearfully, resentfully, appealingly, as
though looking to me for help or sympathy—or
guidance—for something—I didn't know what. And my face
was one of them and not the least pale and pinched nor my figure
the least gaunt or meanly clad.
I used to meet the same back-wash and eddy of the stream of
life—the same debris of a people—mornings, and evenings
when the workman's train ran to time. I remember one girl, or
woman, another that sticks in a memory picture, but she seems in
her right place. Elder, or only grown-up sister; anything between
twenty and forty; unlovely, ungraceful—ugly and hard;
sexually starved, or starved for love no doubt on account of her
ugliness, resentful and ill-tempered; slaving to keep the home
together; lot of younger children; mother washing, serving, or
cleaning office, useless grown-up brother or two perhaps. Father
unemployed, drinking or dead. And they loyal to his drunken memory.
She belonged to a mean little circle of Brethren and Sisters (round
a dear minister) no doubt, who made mean, unscrupulous and
snuffling use of her few spare hours. You'll see her face over and
over again in the little Salvation Army street gatherings at night
in all weathers. Those were sweating times and days of long hours
in factories for girls. I used to meet her in Elizabeth Street
every evening about twenty past six. She carried an old fibre bag
like workmen carried their dinners in. She looked at nothing but
went straight on, and there was nothing but dogged endurance in
every jerky, wooden movement of her most ungraceful walk. I used to
meet her in the mornings too, sometimes, when I happened to miss
the first train. I supposed she had an alarm clock too. But perhaps
"mother" had long been in the habit of getting up earlier than she
did. I saw her sometimes in Paddy's Market on Saturday nights with
a big basket and a brat or two—younger brothers and
sisters—and a woman who might have been her twin sister in
birth and circumstances, but was probably her mother.
Then I missed her. Maybe she went home ill one night and grew
worse before morning—feverish and then delirious; and mother
took the alarm clock away in case she might drop asleep; and it
never woke her any more in this world. Or—here's another
picture. I used to haunt Paddy's Market—about the only place
I went to on Saturday night. One Saturday night I saw a woman like
that girl might have been ten or fifteen years older—if
indeed she could have aged visibly any more. The haggard draggled
woman had Sunday's supplies on one arm and a baby on the other.
Cheap little workman's boarding house, no doubt, with a young clerk
or draper or grocer out of work. Three or four children trailing.
One tugging at her draggle-tailed skirt (which was high in front
and long behind like a duckling's damp muddy tail, and seemed to
keep her up, like a duckling too) and the child kept asking for
something with unreasoning, maddening, childish reiteration. The
loads slip, first the living and then the dead, and something falls
from the pile on the basket. Then, goaded by cruel, merciless,
unrelenting circumstances, she turns on the toddler at her skirt
and says:
"Be quiet! blast yer!—Where am I to get hokey-pokey money
from?"
God help her! and where was she to get hokey-pokey money
from?
A brighter incident came along on the way home, and from amongst
my own poor people too. I saw a woman sitting on a ledge, outside a
theatre, with papers, and a sleeping baby in an old shawl on a coat
like something on a shelf. But she was of the fresh cheerful sort,
though she looked poor and tired enough. I was moving towards her
to buy a paper when a bright little fellow ran between. "Paper,
sir! News, sir!", and seeing me hesitate, he said brightly,
briskly and most cheerfully: "It's alright mister! It's all the
same!—She's my mother."
"His mother's mate."
7. Untitled
I worked at Hudson Bros.' branch workshops at Wickham,
Newcastle, where I haunted the School of Arts, still with an idea
of learning before it was too late. I felt that I must take up some
branch of study or other, and it seemed getting too late fast. I
fretted, chafed, and nearly worried my soul-case out about "wasted
time". Shyness, deafness in a measure, and the cruel early life and
"training" had almost made me a hypocrite. And extreme
sensitiveness, together with a false sense of physical weakness,
led me or forced me to pander to the vanity of ignorant bosses when
I could. This last foreman especially, who was a cur of the poodle
species, a little man, with a tremendous opinion of his "position",
a set speech for every new hand containing cant about his
employers, and very big feet that went straight ahead, or turned
clumsily at right angles into pubs on Saturday nights. He had never
been anything but a brush-hand, and had never bossed a man—or
even a crawler—before.
I was very green and very soft, and, because of the deafness,
years behind my real age in worldly matters. Also my spirit and
moral courage, if any had survived my childhood, had been bullied
and ground out of me. This foreman half hurried, half bluffed me
into boarding and lodging at his weatherboard humpy, where his
missus always managed to get a skimpy, half-cooked breakfast on the
table a few minutes before the workshop bell went. His name was, of
course, a name which is commonly supposed to be the commonest in
the English language, and he looked it, right to his boots, which
of course were "larstins".
There was another hand boarding with him, and we both must have
been cowards (or perhaps it was because the other was an
indifferent brush-hand) for we hung out until the bitter end. I
sent home every penny I had, but was soon wanted at home, or my
board money perhaps, for I came back to Sydney and worked at the
Redfern branch shops, where, if I had not been so soft and willing,
I might have worked all along and had my extra hour's sleep every
morning. Nothing happened in those shops except I helped paint some
beams one morning which I found belonged to the Mount Rennie
gallows.
I still longed for something better and never rested but worked
things until I got into the office on trial as a clerk. My tribe
wanted a gentleman, or the appearance of a gentleman, in the
family, but they wanted every penny I could earn also. Something of
the cad must have been instilled into my alleged being at this
time, but if so, I was soon cured. I couldn't write a simple
business letter, I wasn't worth five shillings a week in the
office, and so was sent into the timber yards to learn measuring up
under a nasty jealous brute with a liver and a son he wanted there.
I found that in practice I couldn't measure timber in separate
pieces and slowly, with a slate, so I was set to work lumping it.
My father could measure up a truck load of different sizes before
men who were trained and paid to do it were done scratching their
heads and staring at the stuff. Then they'd stare at him.
I appealed to the powers for another trial in the office, but it
was no use, so I resigned. Mr Dean (of Clarke & Dean, the
carriage painting contractors) wanted me to go back to Newcastle
with him that night, but I wouldn't—for pride or something.
Strange that I should get homesick in those days. The cure came
very slowly. If Clarke or Dean ever read this book I want them to
know that I have kindly recollections of them. Especially of Mr
Clarke, who was my immediate boss. Dean was at Redfern mostly.
It was on the first trip to Newcastle with Mr Dean that I got my
first breath of the ocean, and, as the steamer rose to the swell
outside the heads I drew a breath as deep as the sea itself.
8. Untitled
I worked about in various private shops and did a bit of
house-painting too. I knew what it was, when I was out of work for
a few days in winter, to turn out shivering and be down at the
Herald office at four o'clock on bitter mornings, and be one
of the haggard group striking matches and running them down the
wanted columns on the damp sheets posted outside. I knew what it
was to tramp long distances and be one of a hopeless crowd of
applicants. I knew what it was to drift about the streets in shabby
and patched clothes and feel furtive and criminal-like. I knew all
that before I wrote "Faces in the Street"—before I was
twenty. I knew what it was to go home to a cold, resentful, gloomy
and unbelieving welcome, and blind unreasoning reproaches at the
very least. And, above and beyond other unemployed, I knew what it
was to know, later on, that all this was selfishly, brutally
unnecessary. That all those weary and unspeakably dark and dreary
years of trouble, toil, of longing for the world, and fearful,
exquisite shyness of the world, of humiliation and heartbreak were
absolutely wasted, and the resultant years barren of good effects,
reward, and even consideration, but pregnant with fierce hatred,
lies, and slander and all the paltry petty annoyances born of a
haunting consciousness in the minds (or hearts if they had any) of
others—of a great wrong done.
I got on with old Mr Kerridge, carrier builder of Castlereagh
Street, and worked for him for about two years. It was a blessed
relief, even in those dark days of little relief for me, for I had
been working for a man in the same street whose name was remembered
and hated by many, and whose name and language had best be filled
in by a Blank here. Does anybody remember the second pilot that
Mark Twain worked under in Life on the Mississippi (not the
"Mississippi Pilot")? Well, that was the man—or his own son.
Blank had the horse face and a skin disease in addition. I remember
one of his employees, a trimmer, who rose in the labour movement
afterwards, who used to go home ill to his young wife and family
because of that Blank brute. He seemed to hate me
especially—because of my clean skin and effeminate appearance
probably. He used to call me a "B——y woman!"﹃Come out
from under that carriage and let me see what yer doin', yer
b——y old woman!﹄etc. He used to sack me every other
day, but the first evening or two he sent his little girl after me
to tell me I could come in the morning: so I got used to it and
would take no notice of his lurid sacks—work was cruelly
scarce. He kept me on until one morning there was nothing left to
do except clean up and sweep out the shop.
He told me to do that and then go home and go to bed for a
—— —— —— ! woman, and come and
see him in a week or two if I could get no one else to take me
on.
Old Mr Kerridge was the opposite; he was an old gentleman. He
was a little old gentleman with snow white hair and a white frill
beard and was always in a hurry—an old-fashioned, bird-like,
pecking and jerky hurry. It was as if he'd wound up, like a busy
mechanical toy, all the first half of his life, and would never
live long enough to run down. And when he brushed up and put on a
very tall hat to go out on business, he looked like something
rather special, but soberly respectable, albeit a trifle dusty and
rusty in colour and springs, that had been turned out of Dickens's
workshop, and had stood overlong in the show-room.
But he stuck to the shop too much when he should have been out
looking for business. He had men who had been with him for from
twenty-five to thirty years, and they said so too. He couldn't get
out of the habit of working with his men, whether it inconvenienced
them or not, but was always particularly careful to uphold the
prestige and the alleged dignity of his foremen—whom he
always addressed as foreman, and referred to as the
foreman—though he had three grown sons in the shop. Every
Saturday morning he'd have his two big retriever dogs in and lather
them and hose them and rub them down and dry them, just as if he
was washing down two buggies against time. But he was out of date
and the business went down—not for lack of honest work. I had
a reference from him which said I was a steady, trustworthy,
hard-working young man, and had worked for him for two years. He
told me that I was never afraid of work. He must have been gone for
years now. I remember him brushed up and tall-hatted to go to court
on a civil case, and I cannot conceive his having gone to the
highest court any other way if he had time. Vale!
old-fashioned tradesman and gentleman.
My mother started to publish The Dawn, in Phillip Street,
then The Young Idea and Young Australia, which last
was sacrificed in later years and is alive now I believe. Later on
I edited and helped print, wrap and post a paper called The
Republican, with William Keep, one time Tommy Walker's manager,
and a sort of adopted brother of mine—but that was later
on.
It was mostly house-painting now, and odd jobs about.
One wet night I was coming home through Hyde Park from working
late on a job at Paddington. Rain and wind and swept boughs and
sickly gaslights on the wet asphalt; and poles and scaffolding
about in preparation for the Jubilee celebrations. I had sent a
couple of attempts on the subject to the Bulletin, and had
got encouragement in Answers to Correspondents. And now the idea of
"Sons of the South" or "Song of the Republic" came. I wrote it and
screwed up courage to go down to the Bulletin after hours,
intending to drop the thing into the letter box, but just as I was
about to do so, or rather making up my mind as to whether I'd shove
it in or take it home, and have another look at the spelling and
the dictionary, the door opened suddenly and a haggard woman stood
there. And I shoved the thing into her hand and got away round the
corner, feeling something like a person who had been nearly caught
on the premises under suspicious circumstances and was not safe yet
by any means.
I watched the Answers to Correspondents column as hundreds have
watched it since—they'll understand. Here is the reply:
"H.A.L.: Will publish your 'Sons of the South'. You have in you
good grit."
I hadn't the courage to go near the Bulletin office
again, but used to lie awake at night and get up very early and
slip down to the nearest newsagent's on Thursday mornings, to have
a peep at the Bulletin, in fear and trembling and half
furtively as if the newsagent—another hard-life woman, by the
way—named Mrs Furlong, would guess my secret. At last, sick
with disappointment, I went to the office and saw Mr Archibald, who
seemed surprised, encouraged me a lot and told me that they were
holding the "Song of a Republic" over for a special
occasion—Eight Hours Day.
It has never been printed in any of my books, so I give it here:
not because of any literary merit, but because it was my first song
and sincere—written by a Bush boy who was a skinny city
work-boy in patched pants and blucher boots, struggling on the edge
of the unemployed gulf—and written twenty years ago in
Australia in high toady days.
A Song of the Republic
Sons of the South, awake! arise!
Sons of the South, and do.
Banish from under your bonny skies
Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies.
Making a hell in a Paradise
That belongs to your sons and you.
Sons of the South, make choice between
(Sons of the South, choose true),
The Land of Morn and the Land of E'en,
The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green,
The Land that belongs to the lord and the Queen,
And the Land that belongs to you.
Sons of the South, your time will come—
Sons of the South, 'tis near—
The "Signs of the Times", in their language dumb,
Foretell it, and ominous whispers hum
Like sullen sounds of a distant drum,
In the ominous atmosphere.
Sons of the South, aroused at last!
Sons of the South are few!
But your ranks grow longer and deeper fast,
And ye shall swell to an army vast,
And free from the wrongs of the North and Past
The land that belongs to you.
Then I wrote "The Wreck of the Derry Castle"—strange theme
for a Bush boy; and on another rainy night, from a dark dreary
gully behind our camp at Mount Victoria where I had gone to paint
for Father—I got the idea of the lines to "Golden Gully" at
Pipeclay. It was published in the Christmas Bulletin, 1887.
It has never been reprinted, and, as it might be useful to show how
I had brought the atmosphere of weird melancholy from the heart of
the Bush, I print it here:
Golden Gully
No one lives in Golden Gully, for its golden days are o'er,
And its clay shall never sully blucher-boots of diggers more,
For the diggers long have vanished—nought but broken shafts remain,
And the bush, by diggers banished, fast reclaims its own again.
Now, when dying Daylight slowly draws her fingers from the "Peak",
The Weird Empress Melancholy rises from the reedy creek—
In the gap above the gully, while the dismal curlews scream
Loud to welcome her as ruler of the dreary night supreme—
Takes her throne, and by her presence fills the strange, uncertain air
With a ghostly phosphorescence of the horrors hidden there.
None would think, by camp-fire blazy, lighting fitfully the scene,
In the seasons that are hazy, how in seasons gone between,
Diggers yarned or joined in jolly ballads of the field and foam,
Or grew sad and melancholy over songs like "Home, Sweet Home"—
Songs of other times, demanding sullen tears that would not start,
Every digger understanding what was in his comrade's heart.
It may seem to you a riddle how a poet's fancies roam,
But methinks I hear a fiddle softly playing "Home, Sweet Home"
'Mid the trees, while meditative diggers round the camp-fire stand.
(Those were days before Australians learned to love their native land.)
Now the dismal curlew screeches round the shafts when night winds sough;
Startling murmurs, broken speeches, shake each twisted, tangled bough,
And whene'er the night comes dreary, darkened by the falling rain,
Voices, loud and dread and eerie, come again and come again—
Come like troubled souls forbidden rest until their tales are told—
Tales of deeds of darkness hidden in the whirl of days of gold—
Come like troubled spirits telling tales of dire and dread mishaps,
Kissing, falling, rising, swelling, dying in the dismal gaps.
When the coming daylight slowly lays her fingers on the "Peak"
Then the Empress Melancholy hurries off to swamps that reek.
But the scene is never cheery, be it sunshine, be it rain,
For the Gully keeps its dreary look till darkness comes again.
As you stand beside the broken shafts, where grass is growing thick,
You can almost hear a spoken word, or hear a thudding pick;
And your very soul seems sinking, foetid grows the morning air,
For you cannot help believing that there's something buried there.
There's a ring amid the saplings by a travelling circus worn,
That amused the noisy diggers e'er the rising race was born;
There's a road where scrub encroaches that was once the main highway,
Over which two rival coaches dashed in glory twice a day;
Gone—all gone from Golden Gully, for its golden days are o'er,
And its clay shall never sully wheels of crowded coaches more.
I wrote "The Watch on the Kerb"—lines to a street
girl—and one or two other attempts which I have forgotten;
and then—about then—I wrote what I always considered my
first song, and superior to "Faces in the Street"; it certainly was
more lyrical. I can't remember writing it or where I got the idea
from; it must have been composed quickly, and perhaps half
unconsciously, as was "Faces in the Street". And as was everything
of a popular kind ever written that was worth reading; in spite of
Byron's clever and catchy bluffing saying that he wished he had the
art of easy reading, which would be easy writing. Hard writing
makes hard reading. Is Don Juan easy reading? It's like a
dray coming down a long gully by a rough track where the only easy
places are the bogs.
The song I speak of was published in the Bulletin as the
"Song of the Outcasts", and went through the United States as "The
Army of the Rear". And that was newly twenty years ago. I print it
here in a book for the first time, to show I was in deadly earnest,
anyway.
Army of the Rear
I listened through the music and the sounds of revelry,
And all the hollow noises of that year of Jubilee;
I heard beyond the music and beyond the loyal cheer,
The steady tramp of thousands that were marching in the rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
They seem to shake the air,
Those never-ceasing footsteps of the outcasts in the rear.
I heard defiance ringing from the men of rags and dirt,
I heard wan woman singing that sad 'Song of the Shirt,'
And o'er the sounds of menace and moaning low and drear,
I heard the steady tramping of their feet along the rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
Vibrating in the air—
They're swelling fast, those footsteps of the Army of the Rear!
I hate the wrongs I read about, I hate the wrongs I see!
The tramping of that army sounds as music unto me!
A music that is terrible, that frights the anxious ear,
Is beaten from the weary feet that tramp along the rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
In dogged, grim despair—
They have a goal, those footsteps of the Army of the Rear!
I looked upon the nobles, with their lineage so old;
I looked upon their mansions, on their acres and their gold,
I saw their women radiant in jewelled robes appear,
And then I joined the army of the outcasts in the rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
We'll show what Want can dare,
My brothers and my sisters of the Army of the Rear!
I looked upon the mass of poor, in filthy alleys pent;
And on the rich men's Edens, that are built on grinding rent;
I looked o'er London's miles of slums—I saw the horrors here,
And swore to die a soldier of the Army of the Rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
I've sworn to do and dare,
I've sworn to die a soldier of the Army of the Rear!
'They're brutes,' so say the wealthy, 'and by steel must be dismayed'—
Be brutes among us, nobles, they are brutes that ye have made;
We want what God hath given us, we want our portion here,
And that is why we're marching—and we'll march beyond the rear!
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
Awake and have a care,
Ye proud and haughty spurners of the wretches in the rear.
We'll nurse our wrongs to strengthen us, our hate that it may grow,
For, outcast from society, society's our foe.
Beware! who grind out human flesh, for human life is dear!
There's menace in the marching of the Army of the Rear.
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
There's danger in despair,
There's danger in the marching of the Army of the Rear!
The wealthy care not for our wants, nor for the pangs we feel;
Our hands have clutched in vain for bread, and now they clutch for steel!
Come, men of rags and hunger, come! There's work for heroes here!
There's room still in the vanguard of the Army of the Rear!
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
O men of want and care!
There's glory in the vanguard of the Army of the Rear!
I would like to say here, while I think of it—out of
place, and before I forget—that there are a great many old
rhymes of mine, printed, but lost or forgotten, which may turn up
where I am not likely to. I burnt my scrap books and old MSS. in
London (in the yard of the house where Micawber and David
Copperfield lived, by the way) to get rid of the worry of them; and
I'm sorry for it now, for much was political and had an historical
value, if nothing else. Much of the stuff contained truer history
than Australia is ever likely to see. This can be taken as an
advertisement for copies of my old songs, not in the books, which
will be gratefully received. They were published over the names of
Joe Swallow, and Cervus Wright, and Henry Lawson in the old
Truth, Boomerang, Town and Country Journal,
Echo, etc.
Another rainy night on Petersham platform. I don't remember what
I was doing there unless I had been out late to see about a job.
The sickly gaslamps again, the wet shining asphalt, the posters on
the mean brick walls close at hand, the light glistening on the
enamelled iron notice saying "Second Class Wait Here", and I alone
and tired as usual and cold with a shoddy overcoat coarse as
sacking and warm as a refrigerator. But it was here I struck the
keynote, or the key-line, of "Faces in the Street."
It all seems very tame now. I thought that, when I came to
writing about having my first verses accepted and seeing them in
print, I would rise to the occasion without effort, but I haven't.
I can't even remember the emotions that such things gave rise to. I
only remember that I didn't worry any more about my surroundings,
and "rising", and the School of Arts, after "Faces in the Street".
I just went on painting and helping with the Republican. It
all seems very tame now, but I couldn't have felt tame then, nor
could the flood of emotions have been so, that swelled for years
and, pent beyond the poor tortured soul's endurance, broke bounds
in a burst of red republicanism—found vent in "Song of the
Outcasts", "Faces in the Street", and other songs of freedom.
9. "The Republican"
The life of the Republican ("Cambaroora Star" in When
the World Was Wide) was a tragical farce now I come to look
back at it. We got hold of a little old printing press that had
been over the mountains in the early days—and Keep had been a
draper in London. He was a weed then, but with the vitality, energy
and blind self-confidence of a dozen fat men. He's getting stout
and young now at forty-five. We had to turn the press by hand and
it ran like a dray most of the time; we had to feed and fly by
hand, too—when the press was going. The bed was uneven and
worm-eaten and the types old and new, so there was always a great
deal of digging out and pasting on round the cylinder. I could
never tell when the machine was likely to go wrong, or shy, or why
it went right at times at all. Keep had an inventive mind. We got
some old roller moulds with the press and once he invented some new
roller composition, out of treacle and stuff I think and in hot
weather those rollers would bring the flies and pick up loose type.
The paper was illustrated, mind, with portraits, that came out
black or blank or half and half, or smudged according to Keep's
cheerful digging or pasting on the cylinder. But he'd get 'em right
in time or at least recognisable as being intended to represent
portraits. Then the letterpress would begin to disappear here and
there, and there would be more pasting. Then there'd be a breakdown
or smash-up somewhere and Keep would go round briskly and
cheerfully in front of the machine, behind it and under it, and
squeeze between it and the wall, with a couple of spanners and a
screw-wrench for odd nuts and screw up a nut here and loosen one
there, and try her again, until at last, by some accident, or
wonderful combination of accidents incomprehensible to me, he'd get
her going all right. Then we'd wire in as if afraid of our lives to
give her time to think about playing up again. I've known that
press to print from two to three hundred sheets (it was one side
only) without a breakdown or smash-up. Then, towards the end, Keep
would get excited, and, if it were a hot night, peel to his pants
and shirt and rustle up every damaged or soiled sheet of paper from
the floor and put it through. I believe if such a contingency had
arisen to make it seem necessary, he would have put his shirt and
pants through too, rather than disappoint two of our subscribers.
The subscribers were few enough in number but most enthusiastic,
and Rasmussen's ad. was our mainstay. Keep used to buy damaged lots
of paper, of different colours and size, from fires and old stock,
and he'd cut the larger sheets to size with a carving knife. We
used to soak the paper in a tub of water the night before going to
press.
The night after we'd fold, wrap (there wasn't much folding) and
carry the papers to the post in the early hours in a clothes
basket; and, before daylight we'd have a public breakfast at the
old coffee stall outside the Herald office where Keep would
argue politics and freethought and other things with cabmen and
others. Occasionally a fresh policeman would bail us up and enquire
about the basket. Little incidents like this cheered Keep and made
him happy, and if that policeman would wait he'd try to bring him
to his way of thinking.
When things were tight Keep would get a billet as clerk or
something and put his wages into the Republican and the
other two little ventures. He would tackle anything, and generally
succeeded—went on the platform once, for the first time in
his life, and at five minutes' notice, and gave a lecture, when he
was managing for Tommy Walker and Walker fell ill.
When things looked up, we'd hire a labouring man to turn the
press.
We shifted that old machine about a good deal, on account of the
rent and because of other circumstances, and Keep always took it to
pieces and put it together again as carefully as he would have
taken a baby to pieces and put it together again—had that
been possible, without spoiling the baby, and had Keep been called
upon to do it.
We had an office in the top of a building in George Street once;
a long narrow room with a window back and front, and got a small,
pedal handbill press, a cutter and a small wirer, and then Keep was
happy. As we got on he bought a net hammock and slung it there and
slept in the office—to be on the spot all the time I suppose.
Perhaps he dreamed of special editions.
Well, one Sunday morning he'd cleaned up and set fire to a lot
of waste paper in the fireplace, and was pottering happily and
lovingly round the old press with a screw-wrench, getting ready for
the monthly fray, when he should be again in holts with her, when
there was a crash below and a tremendous clattering and bumping on
the stairs, and Keep got to the front window quick, thinking that
part of the building was collapsing. Then the door burst open and
several big helmeted firemen burst in, and Keep, looking out
dazedly, saw two fire engines in the street, and more coming, and
the opposite side was lined with stupid upturned faces and gaping
mouths. He had left both windows open, and the wind had blown the
smoke from the waste paper through the front one.
I came in a little later, when things had cooled down a bit, and
Keep said, with a sickly sort of smile, that I always missed all
the fun. But he soon recovered, and, on one of the firemen
returning—for the address, or something they had forgotten in
their indignation—Keep cornered him, got him vacantly
interested in the machinery, then the paper, and actually got, by
easy stages, to talking Progress and Poverty and Henry George with
him.
We rechristened the Republican the Nationaliser against my
convictions, and eventually dropped it just as it was getting a
little lighter to our shoulders.
Keep is a great breeder of Persian cats now, and goes to Church
on Sunday.
10. Father's Death
I was on a scaffold, kalsomining or painting a ceiling at the
Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institution, Sydney, on New Year's Eve,
eighteen-eighty-five when my brother brought a telegram from Mount
Victoria to say that my father had died that morning. He had just
completed a row of cottages called the Sanitorium, and was working
at his old friend Mr Rienits' school—"The School", Mount
Victoria. He had several men working for him, but still worked and
lived as hard as ever. He was camping in a room of one of the new
cottages, and the night before his death he had two or three young
fellows up to see him who used to discuss Henry George's
Progress and Poverty and other democratic subjects with him,
and always got onto mathematics. But my first story, "His Father's
Mate", had just been published in the Christmas Bulletin and
Father was full of this. About the first thing he would ask, they
told me, when a newcomer dropped in, was﹃Have you seen my son
Henry's story in the Sydney Bulletin?﹄"And he said it in a
voice for all the world to hear," said an old mate of mine,﹃though
he was a quiet man.﹄One, a Bob Evans, a bit of an artist, traced
Father's shadow in profile on the wall that evening, and I
transferred it afterwards on oiled paper.
Next morning, they told me, he went down to work at the school
building as usual, and though he complained of "feeling
queer"—"quare", poor Father would say, putting his hand to
his side—he returned to the cottages for a keg or small drum
of white lead, instead of letting one of the men go for it. He
carried that down, and, feeling "very queer", started for home
again. One of his men, a Swede—he mostly had a Swede or
Norwegian with him at that time—either went back to the
cottages with him or was working there. About half way Father must
have felt worse, for he began to run. When he reached the new
cottages he told Fred Olsen, the Swede, that he didn't think this
could last long and that he had better go for the doctor; so Fred
ran for Dr Morgan, who said he would come as soon as he was dressed
and had a cup of tea. Then Father told Fred to run for his friend,
Constable Brassington—old Lucknow man retired years
ago—he had something to tell him. The Constable came at once,
but got there too late. Father was sitting dead on his bunk, beside
his table, leaning back against the wall. He had got a mustard
plaster on his chest under his flannel and still had his hands
pressed to it.
The doctor told me it was heart disease, and an old thing. I
reached Mount Victoria by the midnight train when bonfires were
blazing and rockets going up. Some said it was the only time they
had ever seen him rest.
I painted the cottages where Father had left the painting
unfinished, did one or two other jobs on the Mount, and, there
being no work there, and things in Sydney being very bad, I went
steerage to Western Australia and struck Albany while the new town
was being built, and shortly after responsible government had been
granted. There were three master painters there and no
hands—except a stranded sailor or two.
THE END
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